Nah, they'll just track which clicks are coming from that domain and then turn off the AdSense account(s) associated with it. That shouldn't be too hard to do.
Sales tax data doesn't just change based on state, though. It changes based on state, county, city, sometimes even school district. So to calculate the sales tax owed on a given purchase you'd have to have a table that correlates tax information down to the zip code level, and make sure you know which taxing authority gets its share of the tax. This is not a huge problem, it could be handled by two tables.
(This is pseudocode and should not be used in a production environment without extensive modifications and testing.)
CREATE TABLE tax_authority (
id int auto_increment,
zip_id int {foreign key to zipcode table},
name varchar(1024),
address varchar(1024),
address2 varchar(1024),
city varchar(1024),
state varchar(1024),
zip_code int {foreign key to zipcode table},
rate float(9,5)
)
CREATE TABLE zipcode(
id int auto_increment,
zipcode char(5),
plus4 char(4)
)
Then to get the tax rate, you just join the two tables on the zipcode that's being shipped to and do a sum of all of the rates. At the end of the month, you do another join with the table that tracks completed orders to get how much tax needs to be paid to each authority.
The only problem with this is getting the data in the first place. So far as I know, there's not a central repository of tax information for all of the states, cities, and counties. But it seems like it would be relatively easy to create one and manage it, then charge a relatively low subscription price to maintain it. What would be best would be to charge that subscription price to the municipalities involved, since they're directly benefiting from it, and make the data freely available to any merchant who needs it.
Yes, you're right. We should just go ahead and stop trying to invent things, perhaps even close down the patent office. Surely everything that can be invented already has been.
This seems ripe for arbitrage. Why wouldn't someone just buy a metric (of course!) shitton of licenses in the US, then sell them in the EU at less than the minimum-advertised price (MAP), but still greater than the price they bought them for? It's not like Microsoft could stop you even if they wanted to.
Oh wait, that's right, the EU has decided that MS can't sell the exact same product in the EU as in the US. So now there's no way for someone to pull the kinds of shenanigans I'm describing. Once again, a government bureaucrat does an excellent job of protecting a corporation's interests and screwing over the consumer. Yeah bureaucracy!
Ah yes, the Broken Window fallacy. Here's a hint why this is bad: you're forcing people to spend money to, in effect, tread water, instead of letting them invest in something that will expand their business.
Here's an example: a baker finds his business doing well, with people lining up around the block to buy his signature muffins. So he wants to buy another oven to produce more muffins, and hire two more counter staff to handle the customers. Then cap and trade gets passed, forcing him instead to buy a replacement oven for the one he already has, plus get new windows and air conditioning, not to mention all the similar upgrades in his own home. This consumes the money he would've spend on that new oven and new employees, leaving him in the same position as before. So how exactly has this helped him or the economy?
I stand corrected. Guess I was thinking of the good ol' days when SourceForge and Slashdot were both owned by VA Linux or Andover. But the point still stands, kdawson should've mentioned something about the corporate relationship, no matter how tenuous.
kdawson should've included the disclosure that SourceForge, one of Slashdot's sister companies, is a sponsor of SORBS. There's an ad on the right side of the SORBS main page touting this fact, so it's not like it should've been difficult for him to find to point out in the summary.
Yes, it was. Without it, those of us who used to have to deal with "Matthew's" temper tantrums when our mail servers ended up on his blocklist would have been confused as to his wife or sister was now shutting things down. kdawson's comment explained the issue simply and directly, but without trampling on Sullivan's privacy too greatly.
Why, so that kids in Afghanistan can use Twitter, of course!
(Can't believe I'm the first to mention this. Has Jon Katz really been scrubbed from the collective-Slashdot memory?)
Someone sends a random, out-of-the-blue email saying "hey we hax0red your code, lol" and you expect the recipient to pop tall and check out their site immediately? Are you serious?
And what contact information was needed? Obviously Milw0rm talked with someone at the company, so they already had contact information. Could it be that Milw0rm was talking to a customer service agent who didn't appreciate the severity of the problem because, gee, I dunno, Milw0rm didn't bother to track down contact information for the right person(s)?
Assuming milw0rm did contact the correct person/people at LXLabs
That's a huge assumption and not one I'm willing to make. However, I am willing to state, without reservation, that Milw0rm are a bunch of asshats who deserve to be sued into oblivion over their callous disregard for the safety of the customers using this software.
That's really the worst part of all of this. Most of the people hurt by this had no control over the software getting fixed, had no idea there was a problem until it was too late to do anything about it, and were completely innocent of any mistakes. And yet Milw0rm doesn't care one fig about those people and just releases code that sends their lives and businesses into a tailspin. How do you defend that kind of behavior and call yourself a professional?
But once you've informed the supplier, and allowed enough time for a fix to be created, tested, rolled into a patch, QAed, released to clients and tested+installed by clients, what other alternative is there?
You're assuming the bolded part is true. Reading through the information on Milw0rm's own site, it appears they had an email exchange with someone at LXLabs for two weeks, then decided on their own to release the information. Two weeks is not nearly enough time to even decide if something like this is worth looking at, let alone find a fix, develop it, test it, implement it, and push it to all clients.
I hope the guys at Milw0rm get sued into oblivion over this. Their actions were completely irresponsible and directly led to millions of dollars of damage, potentially billions of dollars of damage (over 100,000 accounts were destroyed, assuming those accounts spent on $10 per month on hosting that's millions of dollars in damage to the hosting provider alone). VAServ is based in the UK and LXLabs is based in India; I have no idea what the laws are like in those countries, but let's hope Milw0rm faces criminal charges there over this.
Security research is an important field and requires a certain level of trust, accountability, and responsibility for it to function properly. By releasing this information publicly without sufficient notice, Milw0rm breached those traits and deserves to suffer the consequences for doing so.
What do you think the Pope is? Although to be fair, he's more than a CEO, he's a head of state (Vatican City). And many, if not all, non-denominational churches in the US are organized as a business (specifically, a non-profit business), typically with boards of directors and everything. So it's really not that uncommon for a church to have a CEO, even if they don't call him that.
This will only cause them to start using something like Tor or any other method of obscuring their IP. I don't see how an IP ban will be that effective.
Wikipedia has to do something, and at least will make it more difficult for the CoS to edit pages. The next step could be either banning usernames, or going the legal route and getting an injunction. Heck, maybe they can even use the DMCA (one of the CoS' favorite laws) to go after the church leadership for unauthorized access of their servers. Now wouldn't that be ironic!
Please, Mr. Darcy was a gentleman and would never stoop to dirtying his hands with a "job". Otherwise, what's the point of owning land and waiting for your titled Aunt to die and make you a Lord?
Now pardon me as I go fondle my wife's breasts to banish the ghey that's creeping out of this thread.;)
Changes nothing, that's already the situation they are in.
So you propose they spend millions of dollars to remain in the same position? How is that a winning argument?
I'd much rather see things like Hulu or more OnDemand selections on cable. Casual users aren't going to be able to copy those things, so the content producers and distributors are happy. And if they're easily available, most people will happily put up with fewer commercials than broadcast TV and consider themselves to have come out ahead.
I agree that DRM is a dead end, it's just going to alienate people. But streaming and OnDemand technology is a win for consumers and business interests alike. I'd like to see more of it rather than less.
My wife and I recently saw an episode of 30 Rock and thought it was hysterical. So we decided to watch the entire series from start to finish. First, we checked Hulu, and they only had a few recent episodes. We were impatient and weren't willing to wait for months and months, though days or weeks were fine.
First, we checked if torrents were available. They were, up to the mid-point of Season 3. But torrents can be a pain, and we'd rather watch on our 42" TV in the media room than a 17" monitor in the office. So we added the first two seasons on DVD to our Blockbuster queue and watched them that way. It was easy and worked well.
But we hit a problem: we were behind on season 3! Rather than wait months and months for the next DVD to come out, we downloaded the torrents for the first 17 episodes, got caught up to where our DVR had started recording, then switched to watching on the DVR. Next season, we'll watch them as they show (at least, within a day or so).
The point of all this is, if it hadn't been for those torrents, we probably never would've watched the series at all. We would've lost interest in it long before the DVDs for this season came out. So yeah, NBC lost some money by us getting caught up the way we did. But now that we are caught up, they've gained another viewing household for their show. In the long run, I think they came out ahead.
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, if a studio goes to the expense of setting up the kind of store you're suggesting, how can they be sure that people will keep coming back and paying for that content? Why wouldn't one person buy it, then immediately put it in online in a torrent for everyone else to get for free? DRM and streaming attempt to prevent this activity from happening.
I'm not saying your idea is without merit. I'm just curious how you envision overcoming those objections.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, they'll just track which clicks are coming from that domain and then turn off the AdSense account(s) associated with it. That shouldn't be too hard to do.
Sales tax data doesn't just change based on state, though. It changes based on state, county, city, sometimes even school district. So to calculate the sales tax owed on a given purchase you'd have to have a table that correlates tax information down to the zip code level, and make sure you know which taxing authority gets its share of the tax. This is not a huge problem, it could be handled by two tables.
(This is pseudocode and should not be used in a production environment without extensive modifications and testing.)
CREATE TABLE tax_authority (
id int auto_increment,
zip_id int {foreign key to zipcode table},
name varchar(1024),
address varchar(1024),
address2 varchar(1024),
city varchar(1024),
state varchar(1024),
zip_code int {foreign key to zipcode table},
rate float(9,5)
)
CREATE TABLE zipcode(
id int auto_increment,
zipcode char(5),
plus4 char(4)
)
Then to get the tax rate, you just join the two tables on the zipcode that's being shipped to and do a sum of all of the rates. At the end of the month, you do another join with the table that tracks completed orders to get how much tax needs to be paid to each authority.
The only problem with this is getting the data in the first place. So far as I know, there's not a central repository of tax information for all of the states, cities, and counties. But it seems like it would be relatively easy to create one and manage it, then charge a relatively low subscription price to maintain it. What would be best would be to charge that subscription price to the municipalities involved, since they're directly benefiting from it, and make the data freely available to any merchant who needs it.
Yes, you're right. We should just go ahead and stop trying to invent things, perhaps even close down the patent office. Surely everything that can be invented already has been.
This seems ripe for arbitrage. Why wouldn't someone just buy a metric (of course!) shitton of licenses in the US, then sell them in the EU at less than the minimum-advertised price (MAP), but still greater than the price they bought them for? It's not like Microsoft could stop you even if they wanted to.
Oh wait, that's right, the EU has decided that MS can't sell the exact same product in the EU as in the US. So now there's no way for someone to pull the kinds of shenanigans I'm describing. Once again, a government bureaucrat does an excellent job of protecting a corporation's interests and screwing over the consumer. Yeah bureaucracy!
Two of the most powerful entities in the world are humbled by Twitter. Be afraid, be very, very afraid.
Ah yes, the Broken Window fallacy. Here's a hint why this is bad: you're forcing people to spend money to, in effect, tread water, instead of letting them invest in something that will expand their business.
Here's an example: a baker finds his business doing well, with people lining up around the block to buy his signature muffins. So he wants to buy another oven to produce more muffins, and hire two more counter staff to handle the customers. Then cap and trade gets passed, forcing him instead to buy a replacement oven for the one he already has, plus get new windows and air conditioning, not to mention all the similar upgrades in his own home. This consumes the money he would've spend on that new oven and new employees, leaving him in the same position as before. So how exactly has this helped him or the economy?
I stand corrected. Guess I was thinking of the good ol' days when SourceForge and Slashdot were both owned by VA Linux or Andover. But the point still stands, kdawson should've mentioned something about the corporate relationship, no matter how tenuous.
kdawson should've included the disclosure that SourceForge, one of Slashdot's sister companies, is a sponsor of SORBS. There's an ad on the right side of the SORBS main page touting this fact, so it's not like it should've been difficult for him to find to point out in the summary.
Yes, it was. Without it, those of us who used to have to deal with "Matthew's" temper tantrums when our mail servers ended up on his blocklist would have been confused as to his wife or sister was now shutting things down. kdawson's comment explained the issue simply and directly, but without trampling on Sullivan's privacy too greatly.
That applies to trademarks, not copyrights. Those are two very different things and we're only talking about the latter.
Why, so that kids in Afghanistan can use Twitter, of course! (Can't believe I'm the first to mention this. Has Jon Katz really been scrubbed from the collective-Slashdot memory?)
Assuming milw0rm did contact the correct person/people at LXLabs
That's a huge assumption and not one I'm willing to make. However, I am willing to state, without reservation, that Milw0rm are a bunch of asshats who deserve to be sued into oblivion over their callous disregard for the safety of the customers using this software. That's really the worst part of all of this. Most of the people hurt by this had no control over the software getting fixed, had no idea there was a problem until it was too late to do anything about it, and were completely innocent of any mistakes. And yet Milw0rm doesn't care one fig about those people and just releases code that sends their lives and businesses into a tailspin. How do you defend that kind of behavior and call yourself a professional?
But once you've informed the supplier, and allowed enough time for a fix to be created, tested, rolled into a patch, QAed, released to clients and tested+installed by clients, what other alternative is there?
You're assuming the bolded part is true. Reading through the information on Milw0rm's own site, it appears they had an email exchange with someone at LXLabs for two weeks, then decided on their own to release the information. Two weeks is not nearly enough time to even decide if something like this is worth looking at, let alone find a fix, develop it, test it, implement it, and push it to all clients. I hope the guys at Milw0rm get sued into oblivion over this. Their actions were completely irresponsible and directly led to millions of dollars of damage, potentially billions of dollars of damage (over 100,000 accounts were destroyed, assuming those accounts spent on $10 per month on hosting that's millions of dollars in damage to the hosting provider alone). VAServ is based in the UK and LXLabs is based in India; I have no idea what the laws are like in those countries, but let's hope Milw0rm faces criminal charges there over this. Security research is an important field and requires a certain level of trust, accountability, and responsibility for it to function properly. By releasing this information publicly without sufficient notice, Milw0rm breached those traits and deserves to suffer the consequences for doing so.
How old will you be when you finally sign up for a Slashdot account?
Unfortunately, the words that only cost $5 when our parents were young now cost $20. Inflation sucks.
What do you think the Pope is? Although to be fair, he's more than a CEO, he's a head of state (Vatican City). And many, if not all, non-denominational churches in the US are organized as a business (specifically, a non-profit business), typically with boards of directors and everything. So it's really not that uncommon for a church to have a CEO, even if they don't call him that.
the wars between the Cybernetics and the Bio-Engineered would be fierce.
And highly entertaining to the spectators!
This will only cause them to start using something like Tor or any other method of obscuring their IP. I don't see how an IP ban will be that effective.
Wikipedia has to do something, and at least will make it more difficult for the CoS to edit pages. The next step could be either banning usernames, or going the legal route and getting an injunction. Heck, maybe they can even use the DMCA (one of the CoS' favorite laws) to go after the church leadership for unauthorized access of their servers. Now wouldn't that be ironic!
Please, Mr. Darcy was a gentleman and would never stoop to dirtying his hands with a "job". Otherwise, what's the point of owning land and waiting for your titled Aunt to die and make you a Lord?
;)
Now pardon me as I go fondle my wife's breasts to banish the ghey that's creeping out of this thread.
Changes nothing, that's already the situation they are in.
So you propose they spend millions of dollars to remain in the same position? How is that a winning argument? I'd much rather see things like Hulu or more OnDemand selections on cable. Casual users aren't going to be able to copy those things, so the content producers and distributors are happy. And if they're easily available, most people will happily put up with fewer commercials than broadcast TV and consider themselves to have come out ahead. I agree that DRM is a dead end, it's just going to alienate people. But streaming and OnDemand technology is a win for consumers and business interests alike. I'd like to see more of it rather than less.
Yes, you're right. The abuses at Abu Ghraib call out for some international body to control DNS. That'll solve everything.
Or just use one Baneblade and *bam!* you have half the number of figs you did before.
First, we checked if torrents were available. They were, up to the mid-point of Season 3. But torrents can be a pain, and we'd rather watch on our 42" TV in the media room than a 17" monitor in the office. So we added the first two seasons on DVD to our Blockbuster queue and watched them that way. It was easy and worked well.
But we hit a problem: we were behind on season 3! Rather than wait months and months for the next DVD to come out, we downloaded the torrents for the first 17 episodes, got caught up to where our DVR had started recording, then switched to watching on the DVR. Next season, we'll watch them as they show (at least, within a day or so).
The point of all this is, if it hadn't been for those torrents, we probably never would've watched the series at all. We would've lost interest in it long before the DVDs for this season came out. So yeah, NBC lost some money by us getting caught up the way we did. But now that we are caught up, they've gained another viewing household for their show. In the long run, I think they came out ahead.
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, if a studio goes to the expense of setting up the kind of store you're suggesting, how can they be sure that people will keep coming back and paying for that content? Why wouldn't one person buy it, then immediately put it in online in a torrent for everyone else to get for free? DRM and streaming attempt to prevent this activity from happening.
I'm not saying your idea is without merit. I'm just curious how you envision overcoming those objections.
Should we encourage people to starve to feed the Hummer?
That depends on which people and who's Hummer, doesn't it?