So close. Instead of blocking the IP, tarpit it! Force the attacker to s l o w . d o w n while keeping the rest of the network moving right along while emailing the admin about it.
It is no more possible to have 'a little regulation' than to be 'a little pregnant'. Throughout the history of industrialized society, the same pattern has been repeated over and over with a new technology:
None of the existing agencies seems to have jurisdiction over the peculiar characteristics of the technology, so a thousand flowers bloom. Some work; others don't. The pioneers know this. They expect it.
The technology becomes sufficiently stable and productive, relative to existing alternatives, as to become important to the smooth flow of commerce. The 'civilized' people move into the former frontier territory, and expect services to be delivered on demand. They don't know nor care about the work done by the pioneers to get it to work as well as it does.
At a certain point, when the political climate is right, the Do-Gooders move in. They declare that the industry is rife with problems that only the government can solve. They seize upon some event (such as a multi-state/province blackout that can be plausibly traced to a computer worm) and demand a law to empower a new bureaucracy to oversee this wild, untamed industry.
Sooner or later, the law passes, and the Do-Gooders move on to the next Great Crusade. Meanwhile, the President has to appoint people to run the agency that regulates the industry.
Now, who knows anything about the industry.... YES! That's right. The people who
work in that industry (for companies that donated to my campaign).
The agency is now part of a revolving door system, where people put in a stint working for one of the major companies in the industry, then go to work for the agency that regulates them, then possibly back to private industry...
Regulating the software business per se would lead to a Federal Software Commission dominated by ex-MS employees, who would write regulations favorable to their former employer -- not even out of corruption but because they express the corporate culture inculcated into them. Mark my words: The day is coming when it will be as illegal to write computer software without a license from the government as it is to practice medicine, law, plumbing or cosmetology without one. Have you noticed that the more laws there are to regulate an industry, the more expensive it is to be a customer thereof? And if you think closed-source is bad, just you wait until the entire profession is reserved for those who take their apprenticeships with other members of the Guild.
Far better to fight laws like UCITA, DMCA, software patents, etc. that attempt to deprive software customers of the few rights they already have, than to try to push for empowering the government to screw customers even more.
Obviously, the free market isn't going to regulate itself when the consumer and even the government has decided that this is normal and that they will just 'put up with it'.
The free market has been forbidden to regulate itself. The customer has been forced to accept shrink-wrap licenses that deprive them, potential competitors, and independent consumer advocates, of the rights that would allow the free market to function correctly (by reverse-engineering to provide competing products, and benchmarking to judge performance and reliability). These licenses are already in violation of the fundamental principles of contract law.
We need to use the laws already on the books - how about a class action suit against a software company that puts out a shrink-wrap license that is fraudulent in the 48 states that haven't yet adopted UCITA (because it tells the customer that they must either accept its terms or return the software unopened for a refund, when no such license terms asserted after the sale can possibly be valid)? That would force the
Sharman, there's no need to feel down
I said, Sharman, pick yourself off the ground I said, Sharman, cause your code gets around There's no need... to... be... unhappy
Sharman, there's a law you can use I said, Sharman, to confound and confuse You can try it, and I'm sure you will find They will take... it... down... in no time
* * * * *
It's fun invoking the D.M.C.A. It's fun invoking the D.M.C.A.
It has every thing that Sharman could insist You just send out 'cease and desist'
It's fun invoking the D.M.C.A. It's fun invoking the D.M.C.A.
You can make any claim and respect it they will they'll suppress whatever you feel
(Stopping after one verse and hoping that's within the limts of 'fair use' as defined this week.)
In Greek, of course, chi and rho form the first two letters of "Christos", or Christ.
Makes you wonder what that "XP" in Windows XP . . . really stands for.
Matthew 24:24 [KJV]: For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
There you have it. Windows XP is { an | the } Antichrist.
The real value of Linux is it allows an I.T. staff to get a job done in an organization.
If you have an IT staff that understands it. From the article:
"There were a lot of costs I didn't expect-- hidden migration costs," says Cedars-Sinai's Duncan. During the migration from NT to Linux, his staff insisted that because
they had been running RAID disk mirroring and striping on NT they should buy SCSI RAID controllers for the Linux servers. "It was like $1,000 per box extra that I hadn't planned on."
There are only two possiblilties here:
They were running hardware RAID on NT, then this is a wash, and not planning on it just indicates that Duncan didn't budget correctly.
They were doing it in software on NT but insisted on hardware for Linux. That would indicate they didn't understand how to to software RAID on Linux.
Either way, there are no 'hidden' costs here, except in the sense that things are 'hidden' from an ostritch when its head is in the sand.
The page widening trolls had nothing to do with spaces, they exploited a browser's (broken) line-wrap logic by prefixing every word with a dot.
But if you insert a space, between two non-whitespace characters, then you turn one word into two, and unless the second word happens to begin with a dot, (The trick would be to force the breakpoint to the left if the following character is a dot) the page-widening troll is foiled. With a little fine-tuning of the regexp, it should be possible to get something that works, and can't be circumvented. I suspect that's exactly what's been done here, as I no longer see that particular troll technique.
(The space added to the URL you pasted in is added to every long word at the 50-character mark, to make sure idiots can't break your browser rendering by typing very long words into their comments.)
I think Taco owes me an apology. I suggested something QUITE similar
as a first cut at it, I said to try this Perl fragment as an example of the logic needed to take care of 'page-widening' trolls:
s/(\S{80})/\$1/g;
OK I used 80 instead of 50 as the magic number, and I know that would break really long URLS, (not as many as 50 though) but so many people block links from Slashdot anyway that you probably have to fiddle with the Address field just to get around that...
in email over a year ago, and his response was to call me an ass
I guess I don't have to worry about moderating ever again...
I think that having a range of salaries is a great idea. I just don't think they need to go up over about $1 million, somewhere in there. I don't see any good reason for people to make more than that, particularly the people who do.
(Hm. Last go-round you were talking about the 500K range, now you're up to an even million, give or take...)
So a person who earns "about $1 million, somewhere in there", has no incentive to do a better job. A highly-skilled surgeon would earn that million early in the year and just take the remainder off? Exactly how is it good for patients to suffer for lack of his skills, just because you don't "see any good reason" for them to keep working and earn more money than you (or I, frankly) would know what to do with?
In the long term, it would be even worse. Why would someone go into debt to fund the years of school necessary to acquire these exemplary skills? When an arbitrary ceiling is placed on the rewards for investing, less people will be willing to invest.
An obvious solution is (through whatever means; I'm talking theoretically here) to reduce the salaries of those with the insanely huge ones, and use that money to pay the taxes & other stuff.
Well, that's the whole problem. The obvious solution to some people having more than others is to 'somehow' get some from the ones with more and give it to the ones with less so we'll all be (more) equal. But every 'somehow' that you can plug into the statement either fails to adequately redistribute wealth, or short-curcuits incentives. leaving less wealth to redistribute, and quite often involves threatening people with imprisonment or worse. I'm not willing to send Men With Badges and Guns to go after someone just because they make significantly more money than I do.
But I do see your point about taxing transactions. I just think it's not the whole story. (also, I think that how it should work is if a tax is raised on a business, they should first consider cutting the highest salaries, like the ones above $500,000. I realize not all businesses have such high salaries; small businesses probably would have to pass costs on to the consumer).
In your perfect world, there wouldn't be any 'highest salaries'. because that's 'unfair'. The reason why some people make huge salaries is that they've persuaded those who pay them that they're worth it. Do you pay the same for an order of fries at McDonalds as you do for a prescription drug? No. Why? Because the drug is worth more to you. As long as some things are worth more to some people than other things are, the prices for those things will reflect those individual judgements. And a person who is perceived to possess skills that are more highly-valued by those who wish to purchase their services will get paid more. Trying to 'correct' the 'inequity' fails:
Suppose a law is passed that requires evil money-grubbing landlords to rebate 10% of the monthly rent back to their tenants. You don't have to have much imagination to figure out what would happen - new leases would go up by 11.11...% (or even more, since the landlords would have reason to fear the rate going up even more before the lease expired) and the net result would be nothing or even a net increase in rent paid.
That's a simple enough example for anyone to see that you can't control the prices people will pay for things by pretending to force one party to pay the other. The same logic works for less-obvious forced 'payments' - if a law requires my employer to give me a certain kind of health insurance coverage, the additional premium is coming out of my pay one way or another - the net effect is to force me to buy something I didn't want to buy. (If I'd wanted to buy it, I'd already have bought it.)
But it makes people feel good about doing something to help the poor downtrodden, never mind that it's actually hurting them.
While it can be argued that when you tax a company, those expenses get passed along to everyong surrounding the company, the fact remains that the tax is only on that company.
Nope. The tax is on the activity of earning 'income', as currently defined by law.
You seem to meander about and finally 'get' it here:
Now, I do pay all my own FICA, so I have a comment on this one. Employers see things two ways. They know they have the $60K in the budget to spend on somebody. They do the FICA and assorted calcs and hire someone at an official $45K or whatever. The fact that they have 60K available lets them make the hire, but don't beleive that they would pay that employee 60K if the taxes weren't there . . . I may be naive, or inexperianced, but from what I've seen moving between consultant work and salary work, FICA is a non-issue as to what I take home
You seem to have come to the same conclusion as I have, which is that when you have to write the check, you'll negotiate that into your pay, but when they do, they'll keep it and send it to the government instead; either way you take home the same amount. The exception to this seems to be someone new to contract work who doesn't understand they have to write the check, who gets screwed until he figures it out. And that's exactly my point - most people have not figured it out.
Despite the intentions of progressive taxation to make Someone Else pay, it's taxing (those engaged in) an activity, the process of negotiating how much everyone gets out of that activity will adjust to reflect who has to write the check. All the people involved in the taxed activity will be poorer for it, but the some people be deluded into thinking Someone Else is paying it, just because they write the check.
And I realize that many businesses don't actually pay taxes. That's not a reason to not raise taxes on the wealthy; on the contrary, it's a reason to enforce tax laws to make sure that they do pay every penny of what they're supposed to.
You don't realize it the way I'm saying it. When you tax income or sales, you are not taxing any one person involved in the transaction; you're taxing everyone involved.
I don't mean that some businesses don't write checks to the IRS. I mean that even if you get your way, and every business does write a check, just as big a check as you want them to write, the businesss aren't really the ones paying it - they collect the taxes from their customers, employees, suppliers, stockholders... Some of those people are 'rich', but an awful lot of them aren't. What's worse is that the businesses that do the best job of serving their customers are the ones who get to write the biggest checks, so the people who do business with them get to pay the most taxes.
But the rhetoric of 'progressive' taxation allows you to feel good about sticking it to the rich, which makes it OK. Just like in this case, and the 'intangibles' case I mentioned before, there is always a perceived inequity in the system (to a significant extent because it's difficult to quantify who's really paying the taxes, as opposed to writing the check), and the solution is always to raise taxes on the 'undertaxed', never to reduce taxes on the overtaxed.
For example, do you believe that your employer pays half your FICA, and you only pay the other half? I sure don't. I know that it doesn't matter to my company whether the money they pay for my work goes to me or the government, because either way it's the cost of my work. They may show on paper that I get some of it, then deduct FICA, then they write the check for that, along with 'their half', and my Fed and state withholding, which is all part of muddying the waters about who pays what. But they know, and I know, that the transaction of me working for them has been taxed; who writes the check isn't really important, because it's money taken somewhere between them having it and me receiving goods or services for it (where the government snatches off another round of taxes for the sale and all the people who profit from it).
This is why I'm against sales taxes, because you end up being taxed for earning the money AND spending it. In fact, if I were in charge I would consolodate all taxes into the income / payroll tax (in a progressive way, of course)
<sigh/>
You missed the bit about how businesses don't really pay taxes, but just collect them from their customers. All of the schemes that purport to be 'progressive'
This is another populist codeword, which translates to 'tax someone else more than me'
lose sight of the fact that whether you're taxing sales or income, you're really taxing the transactions that generate the sales or income. So, when you try to nail Sam Walton's kids with a higher tax rate, you're also hitting the poor folks that shop at Wal-Mart, Earlene the cashier, and Elmer the greeter at the front door.
The problem with tax schemes that force Someone Else to write the check is that too many people believe they aren't paying the taxes.
Huh? I must have missed something. You mean they don't collect sales tax on hubs, switches, routers, Cat 5 cable & sundries? You mean that the people who install that stuff don't pay income tax? Where the WAN is traversing copper owned by the telcos, is it exempt from the special taxes they're already paying?
This reminds me of the bizarre logic that was used by advocates of the 'Intangibles' tax we collect here in KS. They said that if you invested your money in farm land
Gotta include the farmers if you want something passed in the Land of Ahs
you'd pay property taxes on it, but if you just put it in the bank and 'clipped coupons'
That's populist code for the idle rich, who don't do 'honest work', which is apparently defined as something that gets you smelling like the cattle that outnumber the humans in this state, never you mind that without investors, there aren't any new jobs created for people to honestly, or even 'dishonestly' work (by using their brains instead of their muscles)
you don't pay them, so it's only fair to tax intangibles too.
This reasoning completely ignores the fact that the capital that your investment goes to is already subject to property tax, and taxing intanbibles qua intangibles is double taxation, just as taxing computer networks is as well.
Before anyone clicks on the Reply to This link to pipe up that it's double taxation on the telcos too... yes, it is. It's an extra tax they pay in exchange for having a government-mandated monopoly. They pass that tax along to their captive customer base, which is oblivious to the fact that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.
configured the systems so that all of the users did log in as root.
I work tech support for a software company that formerly handled distribution and support through a network of VARs, which we have since acquired. Some of them decided that the best way to resolve permission problems under Unix
(the overwhelming majority of our sites use an OS by an infamous three-letter company that's sued another three-letter company and told them they can't sell their own, allegedly 'derivative' three-letter *IX product, which in turn is used by our largest customers, but I shan't name names.)
is to edit/etc/passwd so that every user is user 0.
So, even though the standard Unix security model offers more protection than the Windows 3.x/9x lineage, you can still pull an XP Home (where by default every user is an Administrator) if you work at it.
It depends on how hard it is to change the bulb
on
Light Bulb Replacements
·
· Score: 3, Informative
So how much time are you spending changing light bulbs per year?
For most home users, there's no more reason to buy LED lighting than there is to buy the existing super-duper light bulbs that promise to use less power and burn out less often. That having been said, if the light is in a place that makes changing it inconvenient (the home of a senior citien who literally risks death as a result of complications of a broken leg to climb on a ladder to change the bulb) and/or the cost of having the bulb go out is high, it makes excellent sense. I've got a couple of fixtures that take two bulbs, and when one of them burns out I replace both at once just because it's such a pain in the butt to get the darned thing open (and then use the used bulb in a fixture where it's easy to change bulbs)
The railroad industry is already replacing crossing light bulbs with arrays of LEDs. The typical application divides the round shape into 4 'pizza slice' quarters that are separate panels. The redundancy is such that even if one of them goes out completely, the other 3 are still working. Also, if one of the panels experiences substantial individual LED failures, it can be swapped out, leaving the others in place. As the article alludes, local governments are beginning to apply the same reasoning to traffic lights as well. In an application where the cost of the bulb pales in comparison to the labor to replace it, and the legal exposure should it fail, this one's a no-brainer.
Wyandotte County, KS, which used to be considered a 'machine' county before we voted in some people to clean things up.
I really like the system. My question is how can you make sure each person only scans one card?
Well, when you go to the table with the book for your precinct, they give you ONE ballot and mark you off the list. With observers from two parties (theoretically more, but minor parties don't have poll workers to go 'round) watching. You can only scan the ballot once, because the scanner 'eats' it (into a locked box) when you scan it.
Also, is there a way to change your ballot after it's marked?
You have to take it back and tell them you screwed up. They mark the ballot 'spoiled' and issue you a new one. They have to keep track of the total number of ballots that were originally printed, marked spoiled, inserted into the machine, and left over. All this is auditable.
what happens when i use teh sharpe to make an oval on the glass in scanner
It's not a flatbed scanner. You push the first inch of the ballot out of the cardboard shield, then feed that end into the slot. The scanner grabs your ballot and pulls it in.
We changed our voting a few years back from the old mechanical lever system to one where you get a sheet of paper and a Sharpie to fill in the oval for the candidates/issues. Then you walk over to the scanner (with your ballot inside a cardboard sleeve to keep people from seeing it) and feed it through yourself. This arrangement has several advantages over the old one:
More people can fill out their ballots at once. Instead of being limited to the number of machines for your precinct (we have consolidated 4 precincts into a single location now) you are only limited by the number of lightweight, cheap carrels that shield your ballot from prying eyes. (If those are all full, and you want to fill it out in the open, that doesn't disqualify your vote.)
Absentee voters can recieve a ballot exactly like the one they would vote on normally (since no special equipment is required to do the voting) which can be held until election day and counted with the rest.
When the polls close at 7PM, the scanner can dial up and transmit all the totals instantly, and we have an accurate count within minutes.
If something goes wrong with the scanner, we can insert our paper ballots into a locked ballot box, which can then be opened for scanning (along with the ones that already went through the scanner into a lockbox) when the scanner is repaired or replaced, or the entire box taken downtown to be scanned there.
All the ballots can be taken down to the courthouse and run through several different scanners to confirm they all give the same totals.
Who is this 'Chad'? If a hand recount is ordered, we have solid pieces of paper and don't have the spectacle of judges holding them up to the light to try to devine the voters' intent. White paper. Red oval. Black marker. Not much room for argument there.
We can run random audits of just one or two polling places, and even limit it to just one question on the ballot - do a hand count and see if the numbers agree with the ones sent from that scanner. Since the software authors can't possibly know which one would be audited, they wouldn't be able to cheat even if they wanted to.
So, who wants to make book on whether or not she cracks it?
Define 'crack':
Brit Williams . . . put the odds of corrupting the software
undetected at 1 billion to one.
If she isn't detected, then how do we know she cracked it? Does she have to make the number of votes for each candidate end in 1,337 to prove she cracked it? No, that would be detected
Free software is not really free if you do not have the freedom to use it the way you want without reprimand.
You want the freedom to use the software, but you don't want RMS to have the freedom to tell you why he doesn't think it's such a good idea to use other software that doesn't meet his standards?
Free software is free as long as you don't get cease-n-desist letters from lawyers, or judges buying SCO Shakedown legal theories that say that you suddenly have to pay for a license on their intellectual property.
RMS's standards are stricter than mine by a long shot, but I respect his right to have those standards, and the freedom to express what those standards are. In a way, it's his uncompromising adherence to his standards that allows the rest of us the freedom to compromise ours if we choose to.
I buy 100 shares of FOO at $1. . . .
FOO doubles in value. My net assets is suddenly up by $100, and there is no corresponding decrease anywhere else. What is the correct method of handling this? Something is wrong here, because in GnuCash, it causes the sums of all balances to become non-zero.
Well, there's the problem. As long as you don't sell those 100 shares of FOO (or do something roughly equivalent) you have not 'realized' your gain. On your books, you still show the value of the 100 shares at $100. And that means you don't have to pay taxes on the profit, because you haven't made any profit yet.
I have had to explain this logic to The Bride of Monster when it comes to playing slot machines at the casinos across the state line. She'll tell me that she 'won' some amount of money, but when I do the math:
Net Winnings = Ending_Cash - Starting_Cash
(where Starting_Cash includes any check she wrote at the cashier's cage or ATM transactions)
If she 'won' a hundred dollars, then lost it all back to the casino, in her mind somehow all that counted was the hundred she won. Your hundred dollar profit on FOO stock is no more real than her hundred dollars' credits on the slot machine (or gaming tokens in the plastic bucket) until you cash out of your respective games and 'realize' (literally 'make real') that profit or loss.
ObDisclaimer: IANACPA (But I've worked with enough of them for this much to have rubbed off.)
Slashdot Mirror
s l o w . d o w n
while keeping the rest of the network moving right along while emailing the admin about it.
It is no more possible to have 'a little regulation' than to be 'a little pregnant'. Throughout the history of industrialized society, the same pattern has been repeated over and over with a new technology:
Regulating the software business per se would lead to a Federal Software Commission dominated by ex-MS employees, who would write regulations favorable to their former employer -- not even out of corruption but because they express the corporate culture inculcated into them. Mark my words: The day is coming when it will be as illegal to write computer software without a license from the government as it is to practice medicine, law, plumbing or cosmetology without one. Have you noticed that the more laws there are to regulate an industry, the more expensive it is to be a customer thereof? And if you think closed-source is bad, just you wait until the entire profession is reserved for those who take their apprenticeships with other members of the Guild.
Far better to fight laws like UCITA, DMCA, software patents, etc. that attempt to deprive software customers of the few rights they already have, than to try to push for empowering the government to screw customers even more.
The free market has been forbidden to regulate itself. The customer has been forced to accept shrink-wrap licenses that deprive them, potential competitors, and independent consumer advocates, of the rights that would allow the free market to function correctly (by reverse-engineering to provide competing products, and benchmarking to judge performance and reliability). These licenses are already in violation of the fundamental principles of contract law.
We need to use the laws already on the books - how about a class action suit against a software company that puts out a shrink-wrap license that is fraudulent in the 48 states that haven't yet adopted UCITA (because it tells the customer that they must either accept its terms or return the software unopened for a refund, when no such license terms asserted after the sale can possibly be valid)? That would force the
(Stopping after one verse and hoping that's within the limts of 'fair use' as defined this week.)
-
They were running hardware RAID on NT, then this is a wash, and not planning on it just indicates that Duncan didn't budget correctly.
- They were doing it in software on NT but insisted on hardware for Linux. That would indicate they didn't understand how to to software RAID on Linux.
Either way, there are no 'hidden' costs here, except in the sense that things are 'hidden' from an ostritch when its head is in the sand.I guess I don't have to worry about moderating ever again...
In the long term, it would be even worse. Why would someone go into debt to fund the years of school necessary to acquire these exemplary skills? When an arbitrary ceiling is placed on the rewards for investing, less people will be willing to invest.
Well, that's the whole problem. The obvious solution to some people having more than others is to 'somehow' get some from the ones with more and give it to the ones with less so we'll all be (more) equal. But every 'somehow' that you can plug into the statement either fails to adequately redistribute wealth, or short-curcuits incentives. leaving less wealth to redistribute, and quite often involves threatening people with imprisonment or worse. I'm not willing to send Men With Badges and Guns to go after someone just because they make significantly more money than I do.But it makes people feel good about doing something to help the poor downtrodden, never mind that it's actually hurting them.
Despite the intentions of progressive taxation to make Someone Else pay, it's taxing (those engaged in) an activity, the process of negotiating how much everyone gets out of that activity will adjust to reflect who has to write the check. All the people involved in the taxed activity will be poorer for it, but the some people be deluded into thinking Someone Else is paying it, just because they write the check.
. . . our daily DUPE. Nothing new to see here. Move along
I don't mean that some businesses don't write checks to the IRS. I mean that even if you get your way, and every business does write a check, just as big a check as you want them to write, the businesss aren't really the ones paying it - they collect the taxes from their customers, employees, suppliers, stockholders... Some of those people are 'rich', but an awful lot of them aren't. What's worse is that the businesses that do the best job of serving their customers are the ones who get to write the biggest checks, so the people who do business with them get to pay the most taxes.
But the rhetoric of 'progressive' taxation allows you to feel good about sticking it to the rich, which makes it OK. Just like in this case, and the 'intangibles' case I mentioned before, there is always a perceived inequity in the system (to a significant extent because it's difficult to quantify who's really paying the taxes, as opposed to writing the check), and the solution is always to raise taxes on the 'undertaxed', never to reduce taxes on the overtaxed.
For example, do you believe that your employer pays half your FICA, and you only pay the other half? I sure don't. I know that it doesn't matter to my company whether the money they pay for my work goes to me or the government, because either way it's the cost of my work. They may show on paper that I get some of it, then deduct FICA, then they write the check for that, along with 'their half', and my Fed and state withholding, which is all part of muddying the waters about who pays what. But they know, and I know, that the transaction of me working for them has been taxed; who writes the check isn't really important, because it's money taken somewhere between them having it and me receiving goods or services for it (where the government snatches off another round of taxes for the sale and all the people who profit from it).
You missed the bit about how businesses don't really pay taxes, but just collect them from their customers. All of the schemes that purport to be 'progressive' lose sight of the fact that whether you're taxing sales or income, you're really taxing the transactions that generate the sales or income. So, when you try to nail Sam Walton's kids with a higher tax rate, you're also hitting the poor folks that shop at Wal-Mart, Earlene the cashier, and Elmer the greeter at the front door.
The problem with tax schemes that force Someone Else to write the check is that too many people believe they aren't paying the taxes.
This reminds me of the bizarre logic that was used by advocates of the 'Intangibles' tax we collect here in KS. They said that if you invested your money in farm land
you'd pay property taxes on it, but if you just put it in the bank and 'clipped coupons' you don't pay them, so it's only fair to tax intangibles too.This reasoning completely ignores the fact that the capital that your investment goes to is already subject to property tax, and taxing intanbibles qua intangibles is double taxation, just as taxing computer networks is as well.
Before anyone clicks on the Reply to This link to pipe up that it's double taxation on the telcos too... yes, it is. It's an extra tax they pay in exchange for having a government-mandated monopoly. They pass that tax along to their captive customer base, which is oblivious to the fact that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.
So, even though the standard Unix security model offers more protection than the Windows 3.x/9x lineage, you can still pull an XP Home (where by default every user is an Administrator) if you work at it.
The railroad industry is already replacing crossing light bulbs with arrays of LEDs. The typical application divides the round shape into 4 'pizza slice' quarters that are separate panels. The redundancy is such that even if one of them goes out completely, the other 3 are still working. Also, if one of the panels experiences substantial individual LED failures, it can be swapped out, leaving the others in place. As the article alludes, local governments are beginning to apply the same reasoning to traffic lights as well. In an application where the cost of the bulb pales in comparison to the labor to replace it, and the legal exposure should it fail, this one's a no-brainer.
"Heisenberg may have slept here"
BTW, She does not have a T in her name. (Garner)
Free software is free as long as you don't get cease-n-desist letters from lawyers, or judges buying SCO Shakedown legal theories that say that you suddenly have to pay for a license on their intellectual property.
RMS's standards are stricter than mine by a long shot, but I respect his right to have those standards, and the freedom to express what those standards are. In a way, it's his uncompromising adherence to his standards that allows the rest of us the freedom to compromise ours if we choose to.
I have had to explain this logic to The Bride of Monster when it comes to playing slot machines at the casinos across the state line. She'll tell me that she 'won' some amount of money, but when I do the math:
If she 'won' a hundred dollars, then lost it all back to the casino, in her mind somehow all that counted was the hundred she won. Your hundred dollar profit on FOO stock is no more real than her hundred dollars' credits on the slot machine (or gaming tokens in the plastic bucket) until you cash out of your respective games and 'realize' (literally 'make real') that profit or loss.ObDisclaimer: IANACPA (But I've worked with enough of them for this much to have rubbed off.)