I've seen this handled in a draconian sort of way in the past - take his stuff and send him home now, pay his salary for the rest of the two weeks.
It's not always the best way to handle it, especially when dealing with a C$_O, but it would get the job done.
It would probably sink the company.
The reason you have someone escorted out is because you believe they may cause some sort of damage.
If he wanted to do any damage, he would have done the dirty work in the period between deciding to leave, and telling everyone else that he was leaving.
At this point, the most damaging thing he could do is leave the building and not share any of the business-critical information inside his head about how the IT infrastructure works. Why would you want to force him to do that? You'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
OK, forget about him signing it. Just hand him the piece of paper that says if you hack our systems, we'll send you to jail and we have the will to do it. If you give away our secrets, we'll nail your ass to the wall.
Lots of people here are saying that you should kiss this guy's ass. I see no such need to do that. Tell him exactly what you will do to him if he screws you. Make him think twice about it.
Dumbest thing I ever heard.
Fact is, this company needs a lot more from the person who's leaving than he needs from them.
That's exactly the situation in which you kiss someone's ass.
Consider the possibilities: Either he has good intentions, or he has bad intentions. Now, hypothetically, the company he's leaving shakes this impotent piece of threat-paper at him.
If he had bad intentions, then any illegal acts were already illegal, and he could fairly assume he'd get in trouble if caught. However, now his bad intentions are magnified since he has been pissed off by clumsly handling by inept management. If he had the means to get away with something before, he still does now. The company has not gained any recourse or information source to help them punish or detect this.
If he had good intentions, then he was potentially very useful - he would know which cable to wiggle next time the network went down, etc., and would in all likelihood have provided that information for free. Now, however, if they get it from him at all, they're going to have to pay for it.
Actually, the DMCA is the result of the US Legislative branch adopting support for the WIPO Copyright Treaties Implementation Act (WIPO being the World Intellectual Property Organization). The DMCA was drafted as a direct result of the Treaty that the US signed (the treatiy being the WIPO Copyright Treaties Implementation Act).
The Diplomatic Conference held by WIPO, which drafted the treaty, saw attendance from over 150 countries that agreed on changes to be made to protect IP.
You get the Spin Doctor of the Week award. Put it on your mantelpiece.
WIPO was a backdoor for US content producer cartels to push through legislation that wasn't flying in Congress on its own.
The conference was dominated by legal experts hired by Disney et al, who blindsided junior trade reps stuck in a backwater assignment into going along with extremely vague language.
This language was then used as a justification to ramrod the initially-desired legislation through the US Congress, which had to pass it in order to adhere to the treaty.
Music from the Apple Music store can only be played on Apple computers, on Apple's MP3 software and on Apple's handheld device. The files have your name embedded in them and won't play if you want to let a friend listen to a copy. If your hard drive dies, you can't re-download it. How much more DRM-friendly can you get?
You conveniently left out the most important part:
You can freely burn the songs onto a standard CD and then listen to them anywhere and in any manner you choose.
THAT's the different between Apple DRM and MS DRM. Apple did what they had to in order to make the deal with the record companies: put some barriers in the way of egregious out-and-out mass piracy. Microsoft, on the other hand, is going above and beyond the call of duty: They're workng overtime with hardware vendors to ensure that in the future nobody, including independent content creators themselves, will be able to generate, distribute, or play any media without express permission from the distribution cartels.
The only problem with your posting is that everything you said is wrong.
quite...can ethernet be sniffed? yes, if you are on the same segment...someone installs a switch and your screwed
Starting here. Sniff attacks against switches are well-documented. Start by overloading the MAC table with a flurry of false ARPs.
Can you sniff ethernet with an anetnna? no. There is no frequency carrier on the signals, without a carrier...there is no way for the signal to be carried to the antenna.
You're simply incorrect. Electricity moving through a wire induces magnetic energy that can be measured from outside that wire. That's just how it works. Fiber optic cables, on the other hand, are pretty much immune to non-contact monitoring.
The absence of a carrier means you won't be able to use your crystal set to pick up the signal, but it doesn't mean there isn't any EM radiation.
End to end encryption only works on the actual data packets, the headers are still there, and wi-fi is transmitting over the air, to anyone who can recive the packets, its like being on one hudge hub. So you can sniff anyone on the wi-fi segment, and even spoof them. This is the entire idea behind "war drives"
This more or less parses as English, but it makes absolutely no sense at all.
PPPoE is a protocol that allowes to adsl modems to connect..then strip the ppp stuff from the frame and route the ethernet packet..this requires physical connectivity, and thus cant be used over wi-fi.
Now you've returned from incoherence to being just plain wrong again.
1) 802.11 emulates ethernet.
2) PPPoE runs across 802.11
3) As proof, the message I'm posting right now is coming to you from my laptop, connected via PPPoE using an 802.11b card and bridge to my DSL modem.
I'm wondering who will be willing to stand next to a payphone, attnetion focused on a laptop, in the middle of a major city. It seems like an open invitation for muggers.
Presumably people who, unlike you, don't live on dirt farms, driving pickup trucks and having sex with livestock.
Have you been to a "major city" recently? Or indeed ever?
Here in Washington DC (ooh, scaaaaaaary) I see people with laptops sitting out everywhere, including parks in all sorts of neighborhoods. When I'm in New York they're likewise ubiquitous. I've even seen people typing away in subway stations.
The article says its an extension of their DSL service, in other words these people are already paying them. There would most likely be some sort of authentication.
In that case, they could just require you to authenticate under PPPoE, which is what their east coast DSL customers all use anyway (except for those lucky few who haven't been de-grandfathered yet).
I have no idea whether Windows currently includes PPPoE support without requiring crappy add-on software, but for Mac and Linux users it's fairly painless these days.
But, in all seriousness. What settings/configuration am I missing by using IIS instead of Apache? I'm not asking "why is Apache better to set up" but "What can Apache do that IIS is missing".
That's great. Good luck trying to scale that to a 20,000+ user environment with a support structure cost less than or equal to Windows. If you can, good for you. Because not a single large environment has been able to do it yet.
You're saying that nobody's ever installed rdist? I think what's actually happening here is that you're not as familiar with the available Linux tools as you are with the available Microsoft brochures.
The post above you complained about the steps required to eject a CD under Linux. Well, Mac's claim to be intuitive, but what the hell is intuitive about dragging the CD icon to the trash when you want to eject it? What does throw away have to do with eject? In Windows, I right click and select (gasp) EJECT. That's a hell of a lot more understandable than dragging it to the trash.
Grab the USB mouse off your Windows machine, plug it into the Mac, right-click on the CD icon, and choose "eject". It's not hard, even for someone dumb enough to prefer the Windows UI.
Or hit command-E ('e' for Eject, get it?). Or click "eject" in the menu at the top of the window where you see the CD icon. Or choose "eject" from the File menu. Or control-click the icon and choose "eject" from the popup menu.
Other than my network settings, the only things I ever touch on my webservers is the Internet Services Manager. If you can figure out how to use the MMC, and right-click, you can find all of the settings you need right there.
No you can't. Though, contrary to the poster you responded to, I wouldn't say it's because they are hidden elsewhere. I'd say it's just because IIS is about as configurable as a light bulb.
Apache provides an amazingly rich set of options allowing all sorts of wonderful things that IIS (at least as of 5; that's the last time I seriously used it) simply can't do (except maybe very slowly through ASP).
I'd like to see vonage dump the cisco voice ip routers and let us use phones like this on our exisiting wifi setup.
Why dump the ATA-186s? They work wll for 99% of people, and in the short term almost nobody wants to go out and buy a Wifip phone.
But there's no reason they can't allow both. In fact, you can use the tech note on Cisco's site to reset the admin password on your ATA-186, grab the settings, and plug them into your new device. No skin off Vonage's nose, so I imagine they wouldn't care unless your device made trouble.
Re:A (hopefully) unbiased opinion on Perl v. Pytho
on
Python in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 1
The UNIX install process uses the usual autoconf process. On Linux, for example, all you have to do is:
% wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.2.2/Python-2.2. 2.tgz
% gunzip Python-2.2.2.tgz
% tar -xf Python-2.2.2.tar
% cd Python-2.2.2
%./configure
% make install
Sounds delightful. My abortive experiences were back in Python 1.5 days, and I was unable to get it to run on Linux or FreeBSD. I had problems with missing libraries (both system libraries and internal Python libraries) and other random make errors. Finally I installed RedHat on a new machine and used the RPMs, which worked (though later failed to work on another machine that was not a fresh install).
Installing v2 from RPM this time around was easy.
Re:A (hopefully) unbiased opinion on Perl v. Pytho
on
Python in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
But the problem is that Python suffers from a lot of Perl's problems and adds a few of its own
The biggest problem with Python, IMHO, is the online documentation. It's the worst I've ever seen, so abstract that it's of no use to anyone except maybe as a reference for someone who wants to write real documentation.
I can only assume that like Python itself, the documentation is the result of an author who wanted to do things "the best" way, without being willing to look outside his own head to determine what that might be. For the language itself, the result was okay - if slightly annoying at times. For the documentation, it's unacceptable. New and different languages can be learned. But with indecipherable and oddly-organized documentation, that's very difficult to even start doing. I had several "false starts" with Python, abandoning it quickly because the documentation (and installation process) were so opaque. If not coerced by my employer into giving it another try, I never would have touched it again. The only reason I stuck with it this last time was because my employer had a stack of Python books for me to use.
In the "heavy scripting" domain, I've put a lot of time into Perl, Python, and PHP. PHP's online documentation is the exact opposite of Python's; entirely focused on the practical, with lots of examples and very little theory or background. Perl's is somewhere in the middle. Overall, as a learner I found Perl's documentation to be the best, and as an advanced developer I find PHP's to be supreme, bar none. Python's is a disgrace, useful to neither beginning nor advanced users.
It's great that people are writing good books about the language. But in this day and age, it shouldn't be necessary to buy a book just to make sense of an open-source tool.
Shouldn't be that amazing. It's pretty simple: The people who get hit with $100000 fines are not placed on the list of "old guys who come out unscathed."
sorry,contradiction still isn't a valid argument
If you want to participate in a debate, you're required to do a little thinking, and maybe even exercise your logic bone now and then. I hate to spell everything out from A to B to C because then it sounds like I'm talking to morons. But here goes.
You (or someone; I'm too lazy to check) claim that not paying taxes works perfectly well, and to prove it, you have a list of people who have not paid their taxes and have managed to evade adverse judgments in court.
The logical response to that is to question the comprehensiveness of the list and its stability over time. If your list contains everyone who didn't pay taxes and fought it in court, and they all remain unscathed from year to year, then congratulations, you have made a point.
If, on the other hand (which seems much more likely), your list just contains "some people who didn't pay their taxes and managed to make it past a judge" then it doesn't prove anything, because that list may only be 2% of the people who tried. It may be that all the people on the list get busted the next year. Without further proof, the contention that you introduced (namely, that it's feasible not to pay taxes) remains unsubstantiated and and is of no more use to readers here than any random piece of fiction.
Indian Average Household Income - $2,847
Indian Median Household Income - $1,005
The reason for the huge difference is due to the huge gap between the poor and the wealthy in India. In the US the average is $49K and the median is $42K which is a much smaller gap.
Nope, it's a $7000 gap! The gap in India is only $1800.
Okay, just kidding, I have no complaints with your reasoning.
Processing an electronically-filed return is cheaper for the IRS than a paper return. So it makes more sense for them to offer electronic filing for free and charge for paper filing.
Both are free. The IRS does not charge for paper filing.
You misunderstand me. When I say "cheaper for the IRS" I mean "costs the IRS less money." As in "costs less taxpayer money."
This amounts to a subsidy to the software vendors at the expense of taxpayers.
There are two options: Without the free file alliance, the IRS would have created its own e-file software and taken business away from the tax preparation companies. That's not their concern, of course, but I think this would actually be worse for us taxpayers. That's because with the free file program, the IRS can save money by not developing and maintaining its own e-file software; it can let private companies do that and compete against each other for customers. That drives down prices and increases the quality of the software. In order to be fair to taxpayers, the IRS has made sure that nobody gets left behind by having companies offer their services for free to low-income taxpayers. I do not see a subsidy here.
No. Without the Free File Alliance, the IRS would have gone ahead and offered free online filing, which it wanted to do because it would save the IRS a lot of money.
As it's played out, the people most likely to take advantage to file electronically are the ones who have to pay to do it. So a smaller number of them will do so (for instance, despite being a Great Big Geek, I filed on paper because it's almost the same amount of work for me, and filing on paper is free). So the IRS loses money (handling the extra paper returns, which is expensive) and private companies make money. This is a subsidy, whether or not you understand why.
So they want to minimize the number of people who will take them up on their offer. They do that by figuring out who isn't likely to use online computerized tax prep (i.e., people who aren't likely to have computers or be computer-literate) and offer it to them.
These people who have no computers and are not computer-literate would not be e-filing at all, not with the IRS or anyone else. So I don't think this point is logical.
It's logical if you follow the reasoning from the beginning. The people without computers are completely irrelevant, except as a smokescreen for the subsidy. They would not be e-filing under any circumstance, so offering them free e-filing is a meaningless act. The only thing that matters is offering free e-filing to people who would actually use it.
The IRS wants e-filing, so the IRS can save money.
The IRS starts building a free e-filing system, which is a win-win proposition: taxpayers win, and the IRS wins.
Tax software companies go apeshit, because they want to make money by imposing a transaction cost on e-filing.
The IRS receives nastygrams from Congress and sits down to negotiate with the tax software companies.
Hoping to preserve some of the win-win aspect, the IRS agrees to a deal where large number of taxpayers can still file electronically for free. The number is set at a point where IRS costs due to increased paper filing will offset the development costs for their e-filing system.
Tax software companies structure the offering in order to minimize participation in the free e-filing program.
IRS costs go up, private profits go up, the public loses.
Basically this program, as structured, moves money out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the coffers of the tax software people. It is bad policy and a typical case of corporate welfare. Worse still, it uses cynical misdirection - an empty lie about helping the poor with free e-filing - to cover up what's happeni
If we lived in a police state, armed thugs would not tell you, "You can't detail the flaws of our product." They'd just beat the living crap out of you and then go home, kick back, and drink a cold Coors 20 ouncer.
Okay, go ahead and give the presentation, and see how long until the thugs arrive.
1) You are using your DSL line as a home user, at which point "@verizon.com" is perfectly OK anyway, or
I move from time to time and wouldn't want to have to change email addresses every time. I've used the same address since the 1980s and have no interest in changing now just because I have a lazy ISP. And what about all those "free email address for life" forwarding services? Plenty of people use those.
2) You are using your email addy for actual business, at which point the "reasonable annual fee" is insignificant compared to the actual cashflow of any viable business.
What about do-it-yourself telecommuters? The large numbers of people who have convinced their bosses to grudgingly let them work from home but don't have the technical support resources to route their mail another way.
However, as a service provider, I'd be more than happy to accomodate you for a reasonable annual fee, assuming that you have a static IP.
Thanks for the offer - Verizon has taken away my static IP, so I run a tunnel to a colo box.
I mean, how many companies give their services away for free to 60% of their customers? Can you imagine Microsoft giving away free copies of Windows to 60% of computer users? I'm surprised that you can still be so cynical about the idea.
Processing an electronically-filed return is cheaper for the IRS than a paper return. So it makes more sense for them to offer electronic filing for free and charge for paper filing. They're not doing that because of pressure from the tax software industry. This amounts to a subsidy to the software vendors at the expense of taxpayers. You're damn right I'm cynical.
The bottom line is, They're providing their services for free to 60% of taxpayers. That's 78 million people who would otherwise have to pay.
No, they're OFFERING the service for free to 60% of taxpapers. They are not providing it to them. This is very important. They are obligated under their agreement to offer it. Each person they offer it to is one fewer person that will pay them a fee. So they want to minimize the number of people who will take them up on their offer. They do that by figuring out who isn't likely to use online computerized tax prep (i.e., people who aren't likely to have computers or be computer-literate) and offer it to them.
To put it into the framework of your Windows example, it's like if a judge told Microsoft to offer Windows for free to 60% of the population, so they went and offered it to all the people who didn't own computers or who owned Macintoshes or who preferred Linux.
Basically, the IRS got had - they didn't negotiate sufficiently strict requirements.
Would you rather they go back to where everyone has to pay?
You seem to be stuck in the fallacy of false alternatives. Are you still beating your wife?
These companies quickly offered a compromise: In exchange for the IRS dropping its plan, the companies would provide their online software for free to 60% of American taxpayers -- about 78 million people.... Note that not everyone qualifies for the Free File Alliance because each company sets its own eligibility requirements. H&R Block's program, for instance, is free only if you earned less than $28,000 last year.
Very clever. So each tax software company looks over its data to determine the 60% of people who are least likely to use their services and then offers it to them, thereby fulfilling their obligation at minimum cost.
Slashdot Mirror
It would probably sink the company.
The reason you have someone escorted out is because you believe they may cause some sort of damage.
If he wanted to do any damage, he would have done the dirty work in the period between deciding to leave, and telling everyone else that he was leaving.
At this point, the most damaging thing he could do is leave the building and not share any of the business-critical information inside his head about how the IT infrastructure works. Why would you want to force him to do that? You'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
Dumbest thing I ever heard.
Fact is, this company needs a lot more from the person who's leaving than he needs from them.
That's exactly the situation in which you kiss someone's ass.
Consider the possibilities: Either he has good intentions, or he has bad intentions. Now, hypothetically, the company he's leaving shakes this impotent piece of threat-paper at him.
If he had bad intentions, then any illegal acts were already illegal, and he could fairly assume he'd get in trouble if caught. However, now his bad intentions are magnified since he has been pissed off by clumsly handling by inept management. If he had the means to get away with something before, he still does now. The company has not gained any recourse or information source to help them punish or detect this.
If he had good intentions, then he was potentially very useful - he would know which cable to wiggle next time the network went down, etc., and would in all likelihood have provided that information for free. Now, however, if they get it from him at all, they're going to have to pay for it.
You get the Spin Doctor of the Week award. Put it on your mantelpiece.
WIPO was a backdoor for US content producer cartels to push through legislation that wasn't flying in Congress on its own.
The conference was dominated by legal experts hired by Disney et al, who blindsided junior trade reps stuck in a backwater assignment into going along with extremely vague language.
This language was then used as a justification to ramrod the initially-desired legislation through the US Congress, which had to pass it in order to adhere to the treaty.
That must come as a tremendous comfort to the Amish co-op farm in rural Ohio that owns e-Bay.
The trick is to seed the stack so that when the program crashes, your evil code runs.
You conveniently left out the most important part:
You can freely burn the songs onto a standard CD and then listen to them anywhere and in any manner you choose.
THAT's the different between Apple DRM and MS DRM. Apple did what they had to in order to make the deal with the record companies: put some barriers in the way of egregious out-and-out mass piracy. Microsoft, on the other hand, is going above and beyond the call of duty: They're workng overtime with hardware vendors to ensure that in the future nobody, including independent content creators themselves, will be able to generate, distribute, or play any media without express permission from the distribution cartels.
The only problem with your posting is that everything you said is wrong.
Starting here. Sniff attacks against switches are well-documented. Start by overloading the MAC table with a flurry of false ARPs.
You're simply incorrect. Electricity moving through a wire induces magnetic energy that can be measured from outside that wire. That's just how it works. Fiber optic cables, on the other hand, are pretty much immune to non-contact monitoring.
The absence of a carrier means you won't be able to use your crystal set to pick up the signal, but it doesn't mean there isn't any EM radiation.
This more or less parses as English, but it makes absolutely no sense at all.
Now you've returned from incoherence to being just plain wrong again.
1) 802.11 emulates ethernet.
2) PPPoE runs across 802.11
3) As proof, the message I'm posting right now is coming to you from my laptop, connected via PPPoE using an 802.11b card and bridge to my DSL modem.
Presumably people who, unlike you, don't live on dirt farms, driving pickup trucks and having sex with livestock.
Have you been to a "major city" recently? Or indeed ever?
Here in Washington DC (ooh, scaaaaaaary) I see people with laptops sitting out everywhere, including parks in all sorts of neighborhoods. When I'm in New York they're likewise ubiquitous. I've even seen people typing away in subway stations.
In that case, they could just require you to authenticate under PPPoE, which is what their east coast DSL customers all use anyway (except for those lucky few who haven't been de-grandfathered yet).
I have no idea whether Windows currently includes PPPoE support without requiring crappy add-on software, but for Mac and Linux users it's fairly painless these days.
For starters, have a look at the examples in the URL Rewriting Guide.
There are legions of other things. Have a look at the sample httpd.conf file that comes with the Apache distribution for lots of examples.
You're saying that nobody's ever installed rdist? I think what's actually happening here is that you're not as familiar with the available Linux tools as you are with the available Microsoft brochures.
Grab the USB mouse off your Windows machine, plug it into the Mac, right-click on the CD icon, and choose "eject". It's not hard, even for someone dumb enough to prefer the Windows UI.
Or hit command-E ('e' for Eject, get it?). Or click "eject" in the menu at the top of the window where you see the CD icon. Or choose "eject" from the File menu. Or control-click the icon and choose "eject" from the popup menu.
No you can't. Though, contrary to the poster you responded to, I wouldn't say it's because they are hidden elsewhere. I'd say it's just because IIS is about as configurable as a light bulb.
Apache provides an amazingly rich set of options allowing all sorts of wonderful things that IIS (at least as of 5; that's the last time I seriously used it) simply can't do (except maybe very slowly through ASP).
Why dump the ATA-186s? They work wll for 99% of people, and in the short term almost nobody wants to go out and buy a Wifip phone.
But there's no reason they can't allow both. In fact, you can use the tech note on Cisco's site to reset the admin password on your ATA-186, grab the settings, and plug them into your new device. No skin off Vonage's nose, so I imagine they wouldn't care unless your device made trouble.
Sounds delightful. My abortive experiences were back in Python 1.5 days, and I was unable to get it to run on Linux or FreeBSD. I had problems with missing libraries (both system libraries and internal Python libraries) and other random make errors. Finally I installed RedHat on a new machine and used the RPMs, which worked (though later failed to work on another machine that was not a fresh install).
Installing v2 from RPM this time around was easy.
The biggest problem with Python, IMHO, is the online documentation. It's the worst I've ever seen, so abstract that it's of no use to anyone except maybe as a reference for someone who wants to write real documentation.
I can only assume that like Python itself, the documentation is the result of an author who wanted to do things "the best" way, without being willing to look outside his own head to determine what that might be. For the language itself, the result was okay - if slightly annoying at times. For the documentation, it's unacceptable. New and different languages can be learned. But with indecipherable and oddly-organized documentation, that's very difficult to even start doing. I had several "false starts" with Python, abandoning it quickly because the documentation (and installation process) were so opaque. If not coerced by my employer into giving it another try, I never would have touched it again. The only reason I stuck with it this last time was because my employer had a stack of Python books for me to use.
In the "heavy scripting" domain, I've put a lot of time into Perl, Python, and PHP. PHP's online documentation is the exact opposite of Python's; entirely focused on the practical, with lots of examples and very little theory or background. Perl's is somewhere in the middle. Overall, as a learner I found Perl's documentation to be the best, and as an advanced developer I find PHP's to be supreme, bar none. Python's is a disgrace, useful to neither beginning nor advanced users.
It's great that people are writing good books about the language. But in this day and age, it shouldn't be necessary to buy a book just to make sense of an open-source tool.
What would a beer want with a mod point?
If you want to participate in a debate, you're required to do a little thinking, and maybe even exercise your logic bone now and then. I hate to spell everything out from A to B to C because then it sounds like I'm talking to morons. But here goes.
You (or someone; I'm too lazy to check) claim that not paying taxes works perfectly well, and to prove it, you have a list of people who have not paid their taxes and have managed to evade adverse judgments in court.
The logical response to that is to question the comprehensiveness of the list and its stability over time. If your list contains everyone who didn't pay taxes and fought it in court, and they all remain unscathed from year to year, then congratulations, you have made a point.
If, on the other hand (which seems much more likely), your list just contains "some people who didn't pay their taxes and managed to make it past a judge" then it doesn't prove anything, because that list may only be 2% of the people who tried. It may be that all the people on the list get busted the next year. Without further proof, the contention that you introduced (namely, that it's feasible not to pay taxes) remains unsubstantiated and and is of no more use to readers here than any random piece of fiction.
Nope, it's a $7000 gap! The gap in India is only $1800.
Okay, just kidding, I have no complaints with your reasoning.
You misunderstand me. When I say "cheaper for the IRS" I mean "costs the IRS less money." As in "costs less taxpayer money."
No. Without the Free File Alliance, the IRS would have gone ahead and offered free online filing, which it wanted to do because it would save the IRS a lot of money.
As it's played out, the people most likely to take advantage to file electronically are the ones who have to pay to do it. So a smaller number of them will do so (for instance, despite being a Great Big Geek, I filed on paper because it's almost the same amount of work for me, and filing on paper is free). So the IRS loses money (handling the extra paper returns, which is expensive) and private companies make money. This is a subsidy, whether or not you understand why.
It's logical if you follow the reasoning from the beginning. The people without computers are completely irrelevant, except as a smokescreen for the subsidy. They would not be e-filing under any circumstance, so offering them free e-filing is a meaningless act. The only thing that matters is offering free e-filing to people who would actually use it.
Basically this program, as structured, moves money out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the coffers of the tax software people. It is bad policy and a typical case of corporate welfare. Worse still, it uses cynical misdirection - an empty lie about helping the poor with free e-filing - to cover up what's happeni
Okay, go ahead and give the presentation, and see how long until the thugs arrive.
I move from time to time and wouldn't want to have to change email addresses every time. I've used the same address since the 1980s and have no interest in changing now just because I have a lazy ISP. And what about all those "free email address for life" forwarding services? Plenty of people use those.
What about do-it-yourself telecommuters? The large numbers of people who have convinced their bosses to grudgingly let them work from home but don't have the technical support resources to route their mail another way.
Thanks for the offer - Verizon has taken away my static IP, so I run a tunnel to a colo box.
Processing an electronically-filed return is cheaper for the IRS than a paper return. So it makes more sense for them to offer electronic filing for free and charge for paper filing. They're not doing that because of pressure from the tax software industry. This amounts to a subsidy to the software vendors at the expense of taxpayers. You're damn right I'm cynical.
No, they're OFFERING the service for free to 60% of taxpapers. They are not providing it to them. This is very important. They are obligated under their agreement to offer it. Each person they offer it to is one fewer person that will pay them a fee. So they want to minimize the number of people who will take them up on their offer. They do that by figuring out who isn't likely to use online computerized tax prep (i.e., people who aren't likely to have computers or be computer-literate) and offer it to them.
To put it into the framework of your Windows example, it's like if a judge told Microsoft to offer Windows for free to 60% of the population, so they went and offered it to all the people who didn't own computers or who owned Macintoshes or who preferred Linux.
Basically, the IRS got had - they didn't negotiate sufficiently strict requirements.
You seem to be stuck in the fallacy of false alternatives. Are you still beating your wife?
Very clever. So each tax software company looks over its data to determine the 60% of people who are least likely to use their services and then offers it to them, thereby fulfilling their obligation at minimum cost.