You get it, without doing anything to earn it, and you think it is unfair to tax you?
Yes. It's not a commercial transaction or even income, it's an in-family gift.
When you get the money, you have received income.
So if you are so intent on double-taxation, can we at least agree that the money should be taxed as income rather than some special-case estate tax scenario that has tax rates that apparently go/went as high as 55%? I'm still not happy with a gift being considered income (I didn't earn it, I was GIVEN the money), but there at least shouldn't be any special penalty for receiving a gift above and beyond the normal income tax rates.
And I'll go one step further. I'd be willing to accept gift/estate taxes for money that goes to someone besides children. But parents should be fully entitled to give some or all of their money to their children with no government meddling. Period.
Hey, I'm sure your parents made some great contribution to the economy/society/whatever when they made their bucks, but sorry, your descendents should still be expected to make their own contributions.
My dear sir, it's a free country. I'm all for the work ethic, but if I have a million dollars in the bank and I've calculated that that's all I need for the rest of my life then you have absolutely no right to expect me to make any contribution whatsoever--beyond stimulating the economy by spending my money. Kudos to those that have millions of dollars and keep on working (even though they are labeled "Greedy" by some), but I can definitely understand and would never criticize someone that decided they've made enough money and want to enjoy what they have rather than trying to get more.
No, they'd just hide their sales instead.
You mean like the way businesses hide their sales to avoid state sales tax? Sales tax seems to be working just fine and I'll bet there's a lot less sales tax evasion than there is income tax evasion.
And I'm not saying there isn't sales tax evasion, but it's a lot easier to keep WalMart, Albertsons, and Cool Joe Honda collecting sales taxes reliably than to try to keep track of the income of hundreds of millions of people. Mostly because businesses just pass the sales tax on to the customer, they don't pay it out of their own pocket. It's a lot easier to expect someone or a company to be honest when they're passing the buck rather than having to dig it out of their own pocket.
Sure, you're not going to tax the SALE of drugs or illegal goods. But the money that someone earns from that is eventually going to be spent predominantly on legal goods via legal channels where it will be subject to taxe
They don't report sales either, and I expect under your suystem that 'black market' segment would explode.
It probably depends on the product in question. Presumably businesses would always charge sales tax, but if a business buys something for resale then they would be able to deduct that from their taxes--so only the end-user pays the tax. In a black market the goods have to come from SOMEWHERE, and the last transaction in the line is going to get taxed and the black market seller isn't going to be able to deduct what they paid in taxes.
If you're talking about black markets that are supplied with stolen goods, well, you just spend the money that used to be spent on the IRS on law enforcement. It's not even clear that this would be a huge problem. Mexico has occasional problems [not widespread, though, even in Mexico!] with highway robbery where entire trucks are stolen with all their goods looted and sold on the black market, but I think this would be a heck of a lot less successful in the U.S. with better law enforcement, better intelligence, effective GPS tracking of trucks, etc.
Anyway, it's not a perfect system, but it's better than an income tax system that punishes success and thriftiness, encourages income tax evasion, and creates absurd paradoxes where half of my parents' money will be confiscated by the state rather than going to me and my children. You can talk about work ethic all you want, but if my parents have money left over when they pass away my children and I have a lot more claim to it than the state.
Sure, your heirs have to pay taxes on the money they inherit
But why? If my parents already paid taxes on that income why should I have to pay taxes on it? The government already got "their cut." My parents earned it, paid taxes on it, and never spent it. Now they left it to me. Taxes were already paid by my parents, no additional taxes are necessary or fair!
Republicans and others opposed to taxes whether they make sense or not clearly have trouble grasping this "seperate legal entities" concept.
It's not a matter of not grasping the "separate legal entities" concept. It's a problem that some people have with a "fairness" concept.
If my parents earn 50 million dollars they pay, what, about 15 million in taxes, leaving 35 million. Of that let's say they only get around to spending 10 million in their lifetime, leaving 25 million to me when they pass away. That money has already been taxed. To tax it again is not only unfair to me (since I'm paying taxes on money my parents already paid taxes on), but unfair to my parents (because they paid 15 million in taxes even though they only spent 10 million in their lives. That's a 60% effective tax rate!).
If they want to go that way, get rid of income tax and go to a national VAT/sales tax *INSTEAD* (not in addition to!). That way my parents would have been taxed on the 10 million they spent and I'll be taxed on the 25 million they leave me (assuming I spend it all). But to tax income right away even though the person may not use the money in their lifetime AND then to go one step further and tax me on it is just plain ludicrous.
Hence their innacurate charachterisations of the "death tax" (it's an inheritance tax)
Call it what you will, it's bogus. Income tax is a questionable form of revenue, but multiple income tax is unfair. Forget "legal entities." If rich person #1 has a ton of money and already pays income tax at the highest tax bracket, if that person gives money to person #2 (be it as inheritance or just a gift in life), why should it be taxed again? The government already taxed it, probably at the highest tax bracket. Now person #2 has to pay a tax just because the already-taxed-income was given to someone else?
Forget legal entities for a moment and just recognize that that's just plain unfair. It's a distribution of money for which taxes have already been paid.
Dividends are taxed once, corporate profits are taxed once, they are income for different legal entities
Yes, and that's bogus too. Let me state I don't have any shares of any company, but taxing corporate profits is bogus. A corporation is a fictitious entity that lets a group of people come together to perform a common goal and hopefully make money. The employees earn salaries (which are taxed) and the shareholders receive dividends (which are taxed as income). Why should there be a dividend tax?
Corporate profits should be taxed based on after-dividend-paid income. I.e. earnings - expenses - investments - dividends = taxable income. That encourages dividends to be paid (which shareholders pay income tax on) and/or investment.
I have no problem with multi-billion-dollar-company-X paying no income tax. They shouldn't. Their employees and their shareholders ALREADY ARE.
If you don't like it, you are free to form a partnership instead of a corporation. That's what they're for.
One of the advantages to a partnership is you avoid double taxation. But you can't have shareholders. You can't say "Don't like corporate taxes? Setup a partnership." Yeah, that works if it's relatively small but it isn't a viable alternative for a public company which, by definition, has shareholders.
Current tax policy in the U.S. basically amounts to "tax money every time it moves" rather than taxing money when it's fair or logical to tax it. The best solution is to implement a nationwide SALES tax and eliminate the income tax. The IRS could lar
As well as the famous "skyquakes" heard over Los Angeles since the early 1990s, found to be heading for the secret Groom Lake installation in the Nevada desert
Heading for Area 51! Alien technology! Get out the tinfoil hats!
I've never used eBay in my life. I've never even visited the site to see what it looks like. I find it amazing what some people will go for. And with the unholy union that is eBay/PayPal I just don't see any reason to visit either.
Don't like them giving away your personal information? Don't visit the site! Life worked for eons before eBay, I find it hard to believe people really need to visit such a site.
There's also a little known service known as Hotmail.
Which they bought, didn't create.
Oh...and MS Passport
Which createad a lot of negative press but, to date, I'm not sure I've found a website that actually uses it, other than Hotmail (?). Certainly not for making payments.
MSN perhaps
You mean the second-rate ISP? I know someone in Denver who got it when they moved out of DSL range. Had so many problems he cancelled it and got a local ISP and it worked great. Cable is now available in his area so now he uses that. But the only experience I've heard with MSN was quite negative.
IIS
Sure, it exists, but most servers use Apache and Linux, not IIS and Microsoft. And IIS was definitely catch-up to Apache.
seems to me like he 'gets' the internet.
Well, yeah, in 2003 just about everyone "gets" the Internet. Buy an existing free email service to compete with Yahoo, try to monopolize online payments, launch an ISP to compete with AOL, and launch a webserver to compete against Apache. Sounds very reactionary. Shows he understands how to play catch-up and recognize a threat once it exists. There isn't much evidence that he's any good at anticipating threats before they materialize... although I guess with Palladium he's trying to address it all in one blow.:)
For example, Mr. Juarez, the Microsoft executive, said that if the company created a more secure side to its operating system software, customers might draw the conclusion that its current software is not as safe to use.
"They might be saying they are only going to sue IBM, but when they win, they will go after everyone else" and M$ is going to support SCO in their effort, because M$ has a lot to gain by ruining their competition.
You are making the big assumption SCO will win. That's hardly a given, let alone probable.
Ok, here is a Catch-22, hardware companies will never release their documentation for OSS programmers to write a proper driver because of trade secrets
That's an assumption on your part. Hardware companies make money by selling (drum roll) HARDWARE. There is usually little or no money to be made in driver development other than enabling more people to use--and thus buy--their hardware.
There may be some "old school" hardware companies that think the software somehow gives away trade secrets, but the real trade secrets of a hardware company are in the hardware, not the software.
The Problem is there will never be an overwhelming number of people using Linux until the Hardware & software "Namely M$ Office*" that they can use in Windows will be availiable for linux, and that will never happen until...
... Until more people learn about Win4Lin. I'm running all my Windows applications under Linux right now. Win4Lin is what let me migrate to Linux now without having to go cold-turkey on my existing Windows applications.
I think if more companies knew about Win4Lin they'd migrate sooner rather than later. A single outlay to get the Win4Lin license ($99) and you won't have to pay anymore Windows licenses. Just stick with what you have and upgrade to new Linux versions at your leisure.
I know that corporations have to please the stock holders, and the stock holders go after which can make the most money, and until it reaches 10-30% of the market "Which I Seriously Doubt will ever happen, because of that Catch-22" the Corporation Has to listen to everything Microsoft dictates
You forget the other side of the equation. While companies may currently have little motivation to support Linux, thousands of other companies that also have to answer to their stockholders are looking at and switching to Linux in an effort to reduce costs and increase returns to the shareholders. As you will see over the next couple of years, thousands of companies trying to save money by switching to Linux will be a much more powerful force than Microsoft can contain.
wait until Palladium & Longhorn is released.
So what? If Microsoft can write an OS that works under Palladium so can Linux. It's that simple.
OSS and Linux have become too large for Microsoft and Intel to just decide they're going to do Palladium. Entire governments will refuse the new technology now that they're on Linux. Even many American companies, such as IBM, will probably not support something that undercuts their support of Linux.
You also assume consumers will just accept Palladium. They might. But there's also a big chance that word of mouth will get around and common users will find out that they can't download MP3s and burn them like they're used to doing. So sales of Palladium systems will be less than spectacular, I bet.
Believe me, there's more to the economic puzzle than Microsoft dictating how it will be. Linux and OSS have lead to organizations that will not accept Microsoft-only hardware. Common users downloading and burning music has lead to users who will probably be less inclined to buy new hardware that lets them do less.
All in all, Microsoft's power is much reduced thant what it was, say, 5 or 6 years ago.
Nice conspiracy mumbo-jumbo and "sky is falling" prediction, but you give too much credit to the monopolist and not enough to the free market which is already moving to Linux in increasing numbers.
Hardware will be supported in Linux by OSS programmers until there are enough people using Linux that hardware companies would be insane to ignore the percentage of the market they are ignoring by not supporting it.
I think you have too much technology experience and not enough real-world economic and business experience. Companies go along with Microsoft because it makes business sense to do so. When 10, 20, or 30% of the market is using Linux it no longer makes sense to blindly accept everything Microsoft dictates.
Maybe in a few years, the ONLY support will be for Windows. Remember, it's a Dog-Eat-Dog World where only the Fittest will survive, And Linux, BSD, Mac OX X, and any other Non MS OS is Dead or Dying.
That's how it has been for years, mostly. But if you haven't noticed more and more people, companies, and governments are using Linux lately. There is no indication this trend will stop. Hardware companies might be able to ignore Linux for another year or two, but beyond that they do so at their peril.
Don't worry--more, not fewer, companies will be supporting Linux in the future.
Probably was a Winmodem. No other modem should take an hour to resolve, but Winmodems can be a pain.
Happily, I had an HP XP laptop. After being annoyed at buying faster hardware that actually ran slower (because the old slow hardware was on 98SE and the new fast hardware was on XP, it actually ran slower) and after having the internal Winmodem completely stop working despite several attempts to update the Winmodem driver both from HP and Microsoft I decided to make the jump to Linux. I did so quite painlessly. And, ironically, I was able to make the Winmodem work under Linux--something that multiple updates under XP were incapable of accomplishing.
Trust me, a year or so from now, bayesian filtering will no longer be effective.
No, I don't think I'll trust you on that...:)
I have already seen the effectiveness of Popfile drop from 99% to 95% in the last 3 months.
That's very strange, but based on what you said below it seems that that's due to a limitation of Popfile as opposed to Bayesian itself. I've seen my Bayesian effectiveness INCREASE in the last 3 months.
Now spammers are including several paragraphs of unrelated (ie, un-spammy) text at the end of their message
There is a common misconception--both among spammers and anti-spammers--that doing the above will get your messages through. In some rare cases it might, but you have to remember that a good Bayesian filter is only going to pay attention to the most spammy and least spammy words. Just entering a useless, non-spammy paragraph is not enough. Unless that non-spammy paragraph happens to contain quite a few words that are downright NON-SPAM in my corpus all that verbage isn't going to do squat to lower the overall spam score of the message.
Basically, you need to know that my email typically talks about microcontrollers, I have a friend named Nathan, or my mom is named Angie. Just flooding me with words that don't appear in spam will do nothing unless you flood me with words that are extremely non-spammy in my particular corpus. And it's unlikely some random paragraph will manage to do that.
So now Popfile will have to have a MIME decoder?
You mean it doesn't now? This is what causes me to think that this is a limitation of Popfile more than a limitation of Bayesian and, perhaps, is why my Bayesian effectiveness is climbing and yours is falling.
And then they'll send their SPAM in GIFs.
At which point the fact that a message contains just an IMG is going to receive a high spam score. No-one says Bayesian can just score words. You can create a token that means "Message only contains an IMG" or something like that. Bayesian doesn't mean we're done developing--it just means that the logical work is done. Now all we need to do is keep our eyes out for new "characteristics" of spam that can be detected and considered to be a "token."
So then Popfile will have to use some kind of text-to-graphic weighting factor (note: no longer pure Bayesian/Naive filtering...)
Very doubtful for the reason mentioned above. You look at characteristics of the mail. And if you find that the message is basically just an IMG, that's a major strike against it. I severely doubt that you have to OCR the image unless your real email is also sent to you as images instead of text.
And then they'll start attaching a megabyte of unrelated text to the SPAM.
Again, just adding "innocent" text is not enough to get past Bayesian. You have to have the RIGHT innocent text, and that's different for each person. And, again, if they start adding megabytes of useless text you add a characteristic for "Text of message is over 100k". Suddenly Bayesian will realize that 99% of those messages are spam...
And note that the countermeasures will have increased the size of the average spam from 3-5K to a megabyte plus. Great for bandwidth.
I doubt that will be the case for the reasons mentioned above. Spammers are adding useless paragraphs now because they don't understand Bayesian.
Again, you just need to remember that 1) Bayesian isn't fooled just by adding paragraphs or megabytes of meaningless text. 2) Bayesian doesn't mean we never have to think about spam. It just means the hard work of deciding whether or not a message is spam is done. Now all we need to do is keep our eyes open for new "identifying characteristics" that often appear in spam. The rest falls into place automatically.
I don't know how Mozilla works, but any Bayesian filter worth its salt will analyze the raw content of the mail and consider HTML as such. I.e., a message which is pretty much just an IMG will have an HTML IMG tag. That should be a Bayesian "word" (token) right there. As more spammers do that the presence of an HTML IMG tag is going to score higher and higher as spam.
So far I haven't seen any techniques used by spammers that will successfully get around Bayesian. If they think they find something and lots of spammers start doing it then that itself will become a red flag that will be noticed by Bayesian.
They want to sue the distributors, so the recipients will buy more CDs.
But will they? Sure, you might download a few songs on a whim because it sounded kind of cool and you might grow tired of it later the same afternoon. But if you couldn't have downloaded the song would you really have bought the $20 CD on a whim?
It's really too late, I think. For better or for worse, 57 million Americans are used to free music and they're going to get their fix. They might trade MP3s with their friends, private sharing networks might become the norm, or perhaps private networks will have the ability to hook to other private networks such that your machine is never connecting to an unknown computer. I.e., if you can't find what you want on your private network you might have a designated "gateway" system that connects to the gateway of another private network but which is known to the person running the gateway--the file is then transferred from the source to the foreign gateway, to your local gateway, and then to you. This has the potential of being as effective as current P2P but with the advantage that you are never connecting to anyone outside of your private network; and your private network gateway is only connecting to the gateway of another private network once the gateway admin decides to trust the other gateway admin.
Just thinking out loud here, but there's so many ways for P2P to evolve that will make even these kind of lawsuits pointless. Right now P2P happens in broad daylight which means they have two options: 1) Embrace it in some form. 2) Sue the users into oblivion. If they choose #2, which they apparently have, they'll just force the technology to evolve so it's not happening in broad daylight. People will still get their MP3 fix but now the RIAA won't have any visible target. Anyone that tries to fight technology is going to lose.
end everyone knows that pr0n is one of the few web business turning a profit.
Are they? I had heard that that was urban legend, that actually it was very hard for pr0n sites to make money because there are so many of them competing for eyes and the fact that they are bandwidth-intensive.
But hey, if they're making money, go for it--as long as they don't spam me about their websites which is what really pisses me off.
Instead of trying to shut down P2P, which is perfectly legitimate, they are now trying to prosecute people that are actually violating their copyrights. Sounds pretty intelligent to me.
Yep, we've been complaining about them shutting down Napster and P2P networks--and rightly so. But if someone is making copyrighted material available and *if* that's not covered by fair use, then the RIAA is currently targetting the right party: the person guilty of the action.
Of course, one has to question the logic of "We're going to sue them so that they'll buy our CDs." Threatening people to become your customers is a shady business practice and one that I doubt will work.
I still think they're stupid trying to salvage a failed business model with lawsuits, but at lesat now they're going after the right people.
I think dictionary attacks are a myth or targeted against big organizations. I run a relatively small mail system (50 users) and I've never seen a dictionary attack in action.
They're not a myth. I run a mail server roughly the same size as yours and I've seen quite a few dictionary attacks. I had one a year ago that had been going for 4 days straight before I realized it and blacklisted that IP address.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. It's not a commercial transaction or even income, it's an in-family gift.
When you get the money, you have received income.
So if you are so intent on double-taxation, can we at least agree that the money should be taxed as income rather than some special-case estate tax scenario that has tax rates that apparently go/went as high as 55%? I'm still not happy with a gift being considered income (I didn't earn it, I was GIVEN the money), but there at least shouldn't be any special penalty for receiving a gift above and beyond the normal income tax rates.
And I'll go one step further. I'd be willing to accept gift/estate taxes for money that goes to someone besides children. But parents should be fully entitled to give some or all of their money to their children with no government meddling. Period.
Hey, I'm sure your parents made some great contribution to the economy/society/whatever when they made their bucks, but sorry, your descendents should still be expected to make their own contributions.
My dear sir, it's a free country. I'm all for the work ethic, but if I have a million dollars in the bank and I've calculated that that's all I need for the rest of my life then you have absolutely no right to expect me to make any contribution whatsoever--beyond stimulating the economy by spending my money. Kudos to those that have millions of dollars and keep on working (even though they are labeled "Greedy" by some), but I can definitely understand and would never criticize someone that decided they've made enough money and want to enjoy what they have rather than trying to get more.
No, they'd just hide their sales instead.
You mean like the way businesses hide their sales to avoid state sales tax? Sales tax seems to be working just fine and I'll bet there's a lot less sales tax evasion than there is income tax evasion.
And I'm not saying there isn't sales tax evasion, but it's a lot easier to keep WalMart, Albertsons, and Cool Joe Honda collecting sales taxes reliably than to try to keep track of the income of hundreds of millions of people. Mostly because businesses just pass the sales tax on to the customer, they don't pay it out of their own pocket. It's a lot easier to expect someone or a company to be honest when they're passing the buck rather than having to dig it out of their own pocket.
Sure, you're not going to tax the SALE of drugs or illegal goods. But the money that someone earns from that is eventually going to be spent predominantly on legal goods via legal channels where it will be subject to taxe
They don't report sales either, and I expect under your suystem that 'black market' segment would explode.
It probably depends on the product in question. Presumably businesses would always charge sales tax, but if a business buys something for resale then they would be able to deduct that from their taxes--so only the end-user pays the tax. In a black market the goods have to come from SOMEWHERE, and the last transaction in the line is going to get taxed and the black market seller isn't going to be able to deduct what they paid in taxes.
If you're talking about black markets that are supplied with stolen goods, well, you just spend the money that used to be spent on the IRS on law enforcement. It's not even clear that this would be a huge problem. Mexico has occasional problems [not widespread, though, even in Mexico!] with highway robbery where entire trucks are stolen with all their goods looted and sold on the black market, but I think this would be a heck of a lot less successful in the U.S. with better law enforcement, better intelligence, effective GPS tracking of trucks, etc.
Anyway, it's not a perfect system, but it's better than an income tax system that punishes success and thriftiness, encourages income tax evasion, and creates absurd paradoxes where half of my parents' money will be confiscated by the state rather than going to me and my children. You can talk about work ethic all you want, but if my parents have money left over when they pass away my children and I have a lot more claim to it than the state.
You mean Hotmail addresses aren't disposable? I've never had a permanent one! :)
Actually, if they fly over me naked it will remain hilarious.
But why? If my parents already paid taxes on that income why should I have to pay taxes on it? The government already got "their cut." My parents earned it, paid taxes on it, and never spent it. Now they left it to me. Taxes were already paid by my parents, no additional taxes are necessary or fair!
Republicans and others opposed to taxes whether they make sense or not clearly have trouble grasping this "seperate legal entities" concept.
It's not a matter of not grasping the "separate legal entities" concept. It's a problem that some people have with a "fairness" concept.
If my parents earn 50 million dollars they pay, what, about 15 million in taxes, leaving 35 million. Of that let's say they only get around to spending 10 million in their lifetime, leaving 25 million to me when they pass away. That money has already been taxed. To tax it again is not only unfair to me (since I'm paying taxes on money my parents already paid taxes on), but unfair to my parents (because they paid 15 million in taxes even though they only spent 10 million in their lives. That's a 60% effective tax rate!).
If they want to go that way, get rid of income tax and go to a national VAT/sales tax *INSTEAD* (not in addition to!). That way my parents would have been taxed on the 10 million they spent and I'll be taxed on the 25 million they leave me (assuming I spend it all). But to tax income right away even though the person may not use the money in their lifetime AND then to go one step further and tax me on it is just plain ludicrous.
Hence their innacurate charachterisations of the "death tax" (it's an inheritance tax)
Call it what you will, it's bogus. Income tax is a questionable form of revenue, but multiple income tax is unfair. Forget "legal entities." If rich person #1 has a ton of money and already pays income tax at the highest tax bracket, if that person gives money to person #2 (be it as inheritance or just a gift in life), why should it be taxed again? The government already taxed it, probably at the highest tax bracket. Now person #2 has to pay a tax just because the already-taxed-income was given to someone else?
Forget legal entities for a moment and just recognize that that's just plain unfair. It's a distribution of money for which taxes have already been paid.
Dividends are taxed once, corporate profits are taxed once, they are income for different legal entities
Yes, and that's bogus too. Let me state I don't have any shares of any company, but taxing corporate profits is bogus. A corporation is a fictitious entity that lets a group of people come together to perform a common goal and hopefully make money. The employees earn salaries (which are taxed) and the shareholders receive dividends (which are taxed as income). Why should there be a dividend tax?
Corporate profits should be taxed based on after-dividend-paid income. I.e. earnings - expenses - investments - dividends = taxable income. That encourages dividends to be paid (which shareholders pay income tax on) and/or investment.
I have no problem with multi-billion-dollar-company-X paying no income tax. They shouldn't. Their employees and their shareholders ALREADY ARE.
If you don't like it, you are free to form a partnership instead of a corporation. That's what they're for.
One of the advantages to a partnership is you avoid double taxation. But you can't have shareholders. You can't say "Don't like corporate taxes? Setup a partnership." Yeah, that works if it's relatively small but it isn't a viable alternative for a public company which, by definition, has shareholders.
Current tax policy in the U.S. basically amounts to "tax money every time it moves" rather than taxing money when it's fair or logical to tax it. The best solution is to implement a nationwide SALES tax and eliminate the income tax. The IRS could lar
Heading for Area 51! Alien technology! Get out the tinfoil hats!
Right! We should just BRIBE the entire world to do what we want them to.
The least sophisticated way of relating to other people is killing them.
Sometimes it's the easiest and most efficient, though. :)
Don't like them giving away your personal information? Don't visit the site! Life worked for eons before eBay, I find it hard to believe people really need to visit such a site.
Good question... Go ask the Democrats. :)
Which they bought, didn't create.
Oh...and MS Passport
Which createad a lot of negative press but, to date, I'm not sure I've found a website that actually uses it, other than Hotmail (?). Certainly not for making payments.
MSN perhaps
You mean the second-rate ISP? I know someone in Denver who got it when they moved out of DSL range. Had so many problems he cancelled it and got a local ISP and it worked great. Cable is now available in his area so now he uses that. But the only experience I've heard with MSN was quite negative.
IIS
Sure, it exists, but most servers use Apache and Linux, not IIS and Microsoft. And IIS was definitely catch-up to Apache.
seems to me like he 'gets' the internet.
Well, yeah, in 2003 just about everyone "gets" the Internet. Buy an existing free email service to compete with Yahoo, try to monopolize online payments, launch an ISP to compete with AOL, and launch a webserver to compete against Apache. Sounds very reactionary. Shows he understands how to play catch-up and recognize a threat once it exists. There isn't much evidence that he's any good at anticipating threats before they materialize... although I guess with Palladium he's trying to address it all in one blow. :)
- For example, Mr. Juarez, the Microsoft executive, said that if the company created a more secure side to its operating system software, customers might draw the conclusion that its current software is not as safe to use.
NO!! Y'think?Yeah, previous art: Congress.
You are making the big assumption SCO will win. That's hardly a given, let alone probable.
Ok, here is a Catch-22, hardware companies will never release their documentation for OSS programmers to write a proper driver because of trade secrets
That's an assumption on your part. Hardware companies make money by selling (drum roll) HARDWARE. There is usually little or no money to be made in driver development other than enabling more people to use--and thus buy--their hardware.
There may be some "old school" hardware companies that think the software somehow gives away trade secrets, but the real trade secrets of a hardware company are in the hardware, not the software.
The Problem is there will never be an overwhelming number of people using Linux until the Hardware & software "Namely M$ Office*" that they can use in Windows will be availiable for linux, and that will never happen until...
I think if more companies knew about Win4Lin they'd migrate sooner rather than later. A single outlay to get the Win4Lin license ($99) and you won't have to pay anymore Windows licenses. Just stick with what you have and upgrade to new Linux versions at your leisure.
I know that corporations have to please the stock holders, and the stock holders go after which can make the most money, and until it reaches 10-30% of the market "Which I Seriously Doubt will ever happen, because of that Catch-22" the Corporation Has to listen to everything Microsoft dictates
You forget the other side of the equation. While companies may currently have little motivation to support Linux, thousands of other companies that also have to answer to their stockholders are looking at and switching to Linux in an effort to reduce costs and increase returns to the shareholders. As you will see over the next couple of years, thousands of companies trying to save money by switching to Linux will be a much more powerful force than Microsoft can contain.
wait until Palladium & Longhorn is released.
So what? If Microsoft can write an OS that works under Palladium so can Linux. It's that simple.
OSS and Linux have become too large for Microsoft and Intel to just decide they're going to do Palladium. Entire governments will refuse the new technology now that they're on Linux. Even many American companies, such as IBM, will probably not support something that undercuts their support of Linux.
You also assume consumers will just accept Palladium. They might. But there's also a big chance that word of mouth will get around and common users will find out that they can't download MP3s and burn them like they're used to doing. So sales of Palladium systems will be less than spectacular, I bet.
Believe me, there's more to the economic puzzle than Microsoft dictating how it will be. Linux and OSS have lead to organizations that will not accept Microsoft-only hardware. Common users downloading and burning music has lead to users who will probably be less inclined to buy new hardware that lets them do less.
All in all, Microsoft's power is much reduced thant what it was, say, 5 or 6 years ago.
Hardware will be supported in Linux by OSS programmers until there are enough people using Linux that hardware companies would be insane to ignore the percentage of the market they are ignoring by not supporting it.
I think you have too much technology experience and not enough real-world economic and business experience. Companies go along with Microsoft because it makes business sense to do so. When 10, 20, or 30% of the market is using Linux it no longer makes sense to blindly accept everything Microsoft dictates.
Don't worry, the sky is not falling.
That's how it has been for years, mostly. But if you haven't noticed more and more people, companies, and governments are using Linux lately. There is no indication this trend will stop. Hardware companies might be able to ignore Linux for another year or two, but beyond that they do so at their peril.
Don't worry--more, not fewer, companies will be supporting Linux in the future.
Happily, I had an HP XP laptop. After being annoyed at buying faster hardware that actually ran slower (because the old slow hardware was on 98SE and the new fast hardware was on XP, it actually ran slower) and after having the internal Winmodem completely stop working despite several attempts to update the Winmodem driver both from HP and Microsoft I decided to make the jump to Linux. I did so quite painlessly. And, ironically, I was able to make the Winmodem work under Linux--something that multiple updates under XP were incapable of accomplishing.
No, I don't think I'll trust you on that... :)
I have already seen the effectiveness of Popfile drop from 99% to 95% in the last 3 months.
That's very strange, but based on what you said below it seems that that's due to a limitation of Popfile as opposed to Bayesian itself. I've seen my Bayesian effectiveness INCREASE in the last 3 months.
Now spammers are including several paragraphs of unrelated (ie, un-spammy) text at the end of their message
There is a common misconception--both among spammers and anti-spammers--that doing the above will get your messages through. In some rare cases it might, but you have to remember that a good Bayesian filter is only going to pay attention to the most spammy and least spammy words. Just entering a useless, non-spammy paragraph is not enough. Unless that non-spammy paragraph happens to contain quite a few words that are downright NON-SPAM in my corpus all that verbage isn't going to do squat to lower the overall spam score of the message.
Basically, you need to know that my email typically talks about microcontrollers, I have a friend named Nathan, or my mom is named Angie. Just flooding me with words that don't appear in spam will do nothing unless you flood me with words that are extremely non-spammy in my particular corpus. And it's unlikely some random paragraph will manage to do that.
So now Popfile will have to have a MIME decoder?
You mean it doesn't now? This is what causes me to think that this is a limitation of Popfile more than a limitation of Bayesian and, perhaps, is why my Bayesian effectiveness is climbing and yours is falling.
And then they'll send their SPAM in GIFs.
At which point the fact that a message contains just an IMG is going to receive a high spam score. No-one says Bayesian can just score words. You can create a token that means "Message only contains an IMG" or something like that. Bayesian doesn't mean we're done developing--it just means that the logical work is done. Now all we need to do is keep our eyes out for new "characteristics" of spam that can be detected and considered to be a "token."
So then Popfile will have to use some kind of text-to-graphic weighting factor (note: no longer pure Bayesian/Naive filtering...)
Very doubtful for the reason mentioned above. You look at characteristics of the mail. And if you find that the message is basically just an IMG, that's a major strike against it. I severely doubt that you have to OCR the image unless your real email is also sent to you as images instead of text.
And then they'll start attaching a megabyte of unrelated text to the SPAM.
Again, just adding "innocent" text is not enough to get past Bayesian. You have to have the RIGHT innocent text, and that's different for each person. And, again, if they start adding megabytes of useless text you add a characteristic for "Text of message is over 100k". Suddenly Bayesian will realize that 99% of those messages are spam...
And note that the countermeasures will have increased the size of the average spam from 3-5K to a megabyte plus. Great for bandwidth.
I doubt that will be the case for the reasons mentioned above. Spammers are adding useless paragraphs now because they don't understand Bayesian.
Again, you just need to remember that 1) Bayesian isn't fooled just by adding paragraphs or megabytes of meaningless text. 2) Bayesian doesn't mean we never have to think about spam. It just means the hard work of deciding whether or not a message is spam is done. Now all we need to do is keep our eyes open for new "identifying characteristics" that often appear in spam. The rest falls into place automatically.
So far I haven't seen any techniques used by spammers that will successfully get around Bayesian. If they think they find something and lots of spammers start doing it then that itself will become a red flag that will be noticed by Bayesian.
But will they? Sure, you might download a few songs on a whim because it sounded kind of cool and you might grow tired of it later the same afternoon. But if you couldn't have downloaded the song would you really have bought the $20 CD on a whim?
It's really too late, I think. For better or for worse, 57 million Americans are used to free music and they're going to get their fix. They might trade MP3s with their friends, private sharing networks might become the norm, or perhaps private networks will have the ability to hook to other private networks such that your machine is never connecting to an unknown computer. I.e., if you can't find what you want on your private network you might have a designated "gateway" system that connects to the gateway of another private network but which is known to the person running the gateway--the file is then transferred from the source to the foreign gateway, to your local gateway, and then to you. This has the potential of being as effective as current P2P but with the advantage that you are never connecting to anyone outside of your private network; and your private network gateway is only connecting to the gateway of another private network once the gateway admin decides to trust the other gateway admin.
Just thinking out loud here, but there's so many ways for P2P to evolve that will make even these kind of lawsuits pointless. Right now P2P happens in broad daylight which means they have two options: 1) Embrace it in some form. 2) Sue the users into oblivion. If they choose #2, which they apparently have, they'll just force the technology to evolve so it's not happening in broad daylight. People will still get their MP3 fix but now the RIAA won't have any visible target. Anyone that tries to fight technology is going to lose.
Isn't technology fun? :)
Are they? I had heard that that was urban legend, that actually it was very hard for pr0n sites to make money because there are so many of them competing for eyes and the fact that they are bandwidth-intensive.
But hey, if they're making money, go for it--as long as they don't spam me about their websites which is what really pisses me off.
Yep, we've been complaining about them shutting down Napster and P2P networks--and rightly so. But if someone is making copyrighted material available and *if* that's not covered by fair use, then the RIAA is currently targetting the right party: the person guilty of the action.
Of course, one has to question the logic of "We're going to sue them so that they'll buy our CDs." Threatening people to become your customers is a shady business practice and one that I doubt will work.
I still think they're stupid trying to salvage a failed business model with lawsuits, but at lesat now they're going after the right people.
They're not a myth. I run a mail server roughly the same size as yours and I've seen quite a few dictionary attacks. I had one a year ago that had been going for 4 days straight before I realized it and blacklisted that IP address.