I suppose a tax loophole is nothing more then a clever application of the law, right? So, forget about tax laws, take a simple example traffic rules.
Well, then I'm filing a patent for stopping at a red light: everyone that stops at a red light must pay me 1$.
This is exactly the same as a patent on a tax loophole: the application of laws. You must pay the patent holder for using a specific tax loophole, which is just an application of the law. Now I'm making you all paying for applying another law.
There can be several reasons why a product doesn't sell. One of the possible reasons is that the product in question is crap. In that case the manufacturer will have learned all there is to learn from their screw-up in a very short time. It is then no problem that the product gets pulled rather soon.
A second possibility is that the competition is better and/or cheaper. Also in that case the manufacturer can take their expensive/under-performing product rapidly off the market.
But in many cases the reason that a product doesn't not sell immediately is simply that the consumers don't know it exists. Established names like Apple, and Microsoft can bring out a product and even get coverage on the evening news. Others simply don't get that exposure to the masses. Then it is normal that a product doesn't take of immediately. The problem is that while a product is on the shelf, competing products are coming out. Since they are newer, there is a large possibility that they will be better or cheaper, pushing the "old" product towards one of the categories described above...
Does this study include the cost of the surface area (land) needed to put up a solar plant of industrial sizing?
Maybe NC has enough free space, but there are regions on this globe that are in high demand of energy, but where there simply is not enough space (at affordable price) to build such a power plant.
I've seen this before.
Months ago exactly the same system was set up over here.
But nothing is sent to any mobile phone, nor is there any need to store any private data: The only thing one needs to measure is the frequnecy of handovers.
A handover is when a mobile phone in a cellular systems hops from one cell to the next. So when you measure per cell the amount of phones comong into the cell and the amount of phones leaving the cell, you get a very good idea of the traffic:
If incoming is about equal to outgoing then traffic is flowing.
If incoming is larger then outgoing then there is a buildup of traffic, the start of a jam
If outgoing is larger then incoming, a jam is dissapating
If the freqency of handovers is high, the traffic rolling going fast
If the frequncy of handovers is low, the traffic is rolling slow
(So it is like measuring pressure and flowspeed of a fluid)
Again, Note that there is no real reason at all to collect individual IDs.
The data gained this way is simply combined with data coming from other measuring techniques (loops in the road most of the time) to control electronic road signs and the classic radio traffic announcements and TMC.
The set up over here was specifically aimed at tunnels: there it is very easy to measure traffic since the inside of the tunnel is usually one cell and both ends are two other cells.
Belgium is a small west-european country where every person over 18 must vote.
The major part of the votes since more then five years have been entered electronically.
The majority of the systems are made by Steria (formally, Integris, a part of Bull) http://www.steria.be/
The system consits of PC running some old M$ DOS version (4.5 I think) with a pen-screen and a magnetic card reader.
Secrecy of vote + audit trail: each voter gets one anonymous card. The card is writtten using the voting computer (in a ballot box) and is then dropped into a drop-box vault. You see the parallells with paper-and-pencil voting I suppose... Counting happens afterwards and recounting remains possible (untill the cards are wiped for the next elections)
Open-Source: Even though the software is written by a commercial company (Steria) the software is open for scrunity (by any citizen) at the Interior Ministry. Before last elections, Steria's source was examined by a professor and he detected one weak point (regarding the use of a random generator using the PC's BIOS) but it requires physical access to the voting card (in the vault) and it only couldcompromises secrecy of the vote (if you manage to track the order in which cards have been written). There is also a competitor with some (similar) voting computers, but they represent a minority and that same professor called their coding "very bad spaghetti code that is impossible to understand"...
One big difference with the rest of the world: like I said, every adult citizen has to vote, meaning that the number of vote(r)s is perfectly known. Also, since it is a nation wide occurence there is only one voting day. The benefit of this is that the effort of actually organising the vote, including the counting (there are still votes on paper!) can be perfectly predicted.
There are some communues that (in last elections) still voted on paper. In those communues the time allowed to vote is much shorter (only untill noon often), and still the results of those communes are the last to come in: electronic voting really does have major benefits here: longer opening hours of the polling stations and faster results.
If those phones are GSMs, they will hardly ever be transmitting at the same time: there is some kind of Time Division Multiple Access going on.
to parent: both phones will be talking to the _same_ cell tower if they are that close to each other (unless there just happens to be a saturation at that moment)
I'm still puzzled about the function of the HiFi though...
I'm a bit surprised that you only talk about "what is professional".
Where I live this kind of cases is simply described by law:
When an emplyment contract needs to be terminated there is a term of X days between the notice and the actual end.
The amount of days X, depends on who is terminating the contract (if it is the emplyer X will be larger then when it is the employee) and on the length of the contract that is being terminated (the older the contract, the larger X will be).
In many cases (like yours), one of the parties does not want to fulfil the period of X days. In that case it is that party that will pay the other. The amount can be determined mutually or by court.
In any case it is not very extraordinary (for people that have been in service rather long) that an employer will be paying 20 months after having fired somebody...
If it is the employer that is firing somebody, the employee has the right to a few (Like X,, i do not know exactly how much) days per week (paid!) to use for looking for new employment.
Drawbacks: if your boss want's to annoy you, he can legally demand that you "stay on" during the full period (which can be several weeks or even months). "Stay on" does not meen work: there have been people that have been dumped on an empty desk, with not even a phone or a piece of paper to write. reading a bookin such cases would also be well adviced, since it would be fair reason for the empluyer to fire you "for urgent reasons" (not doing your work (whatever that is or is not) is always an urgent reason unfortunately...)
Well, in one word: Yes.
I used to use the winblows search tool a lot. It gave me loads of time for coffee and disturbing friends over the phone.
Now, whenver I'm looking for something (file/mail/webpage) I know I received/saw in januari 2001 and contained keyword "foo". it takes me a couple of seconds to find it.
It has allready (I've only been using GDS for a couple of weeks) saved me et least twice of writing something one of my predecessors has written before: instaid of diving into the editor whenever somebody asks me to write some code to this or that, I first search this huge pile of junk that is called a code archive and often it turns up nice things.
I agree with other ppl here that if you organise your pc well, there is no need for such tools. But in my position, where I "posess" a sh*tload of files that was compiled by many different persons over time, It really helps.
In fact the basis of the problem is one that is lurking around every corner on the Internet: What countries laws ara applicable when a transaction is performed by a person in country X, when the server is in country Y?
In this case: whenever somebody in Australia will download GwtW from that Australian server it is clear that only Austeralian laws are applicable.
But when somebody in the US downloads that same e-book from that same server. Is the transaction of obtaining that book performed in Australia or in the US?
Suppose it was not Gone with the Wind but Main Kampf and that the packets between Australia and the US are routed over France. Is in that case the French law applicabble? There are some Frensh laws that prohibit the distribution of Nasi parafernalia...
The same question is of course also applicable to differences in child porn law, etc.
Another example closer to my home is the belgion law for buyer protection in the case of remote selling. This law explicitely includes internet sales and it says that the buyer has the right to return any remotely bought product within seven days after reception of the goods and get a full refund (except for transport costs).
Does this law apply when somebody in Belgium buys via E-bay something from an individual in The Netherlands?
Very complex issues for which somebody needs to find a solution in this global economy.
Somebody interested in more? We allready defined countries X and Y. But suppose that the company that is expploiting the server in Y is in fact located in country Z...
The new Belgian ID cards (currently still in testing, nationwide distribution to begin once the village gevernments are convinced they won't have to pay for the extra cost;-) ) will NOT contain an RFID chip, but a classic SIM-like chip with electrical surface contacts.
The Belgian government (at all levels) has proven its everlasting lack of gripping IT-technology over and over aigain: for example there still is no central repository for drivers licences (there are only 10^7 Belgians, not all drive...) I therefore think Belgians have nothing to fear. For once security (of privacy in this case) through obscurity (by lack of knowledge by the gevernment) does work:-)
I did indeed forget the imortant words "as a trademark" in that very confusing sentence... My mistake, sorry.
But the explication in another post about trademarks not having to be registreded explicitely changes the value of the argument a bit. A shift in favor of the domain owner clearly.
When the book was written, the domain "katie.com" was not registered. Therefore anybody was/is allowed to use the words "Katie.com" as the title of a book. (This is confirmed bt the fact that the owner of the domain never did anything against the publishers of the book.)
Today there is no reasen why the owner of the domain should give it up. Just as well, there is no reason to change the title of the book. This is confirmed by the fact that the two have been co-existing for some time.
The owner of the domain is not cybersquatting since the domain was there (long) before the book.
The writer of the book did not violate a trademark.
Both are protected by the same free speech rights. (I guess)
UK legislators make the same mistake as all others. Instaid of printing the law "the way it is from now on" (and implicitly replacing "the way it was before") they just print how the text for "the way it was beforze" must be changed to get the text of "the way it is from now on". This system might be usefull if you want to see the changes (very little, some, a lot), but does not at all tell you what you can and can not do!
there is also a very funny line of text:
(a) in the heading for the words from "broadcast" to "service" there shall be substituted "
wireless broadcast by cable";
and a bit further on:
" (13) In this section references to re-transmission by cable include the transmission of microwave energy between terrestrial fixed points.".
I see what the legislator is getting at, but somebody has to clarify the notion "wireless"...
Strange. MNP has been available for quite some time now over here.
We sure had our load of problems with it, mostly due the vast number of people changing. The operaters just couldn't keep up.
There is just one problem. Without MNP you allways knew that somebode with a number with the same "network code" as yous was cheap to call. Now you might be calling another network without knowing it (and therefore paying more).
The operators had to set up a system to let a caller know (with a beep) that he is using another network. (This was demendad by consumer organisations...)
But in any case, it seems to work fine now.
Since all mobile operators of more or les the same service, most transfers were purely based on "Price".
There has been a movent from the more expensive one to the cheaper one, but the net result is apparently insignificant compared to the number new customers (not coming in via MNP)
ok, nice! The next thing we need is phones with slightly bigger screens. Small is beautiful, but I like it practical as well. Look at the first mobile phones (GSM style). They were thicker. That is not good. But they were broader than the current models without that ever being a problem. Why not go back to the slightly larger models and put a bigger screen in them?
if I were creating something of the sort, I wouldn't have any sort of network services (Apache, login, whatever) accessible from the internet side.
Very good! But even the Smoothwall devs knew that: the only way to use the "webserver" (only admin pages: not to be used as intranet server!) or log in is on the inTRAnet side. There must be two physically separate devices (NIC and modem or 2 NICs) for the two sides (internet - intranet)
...this thing is really just meant to secure a LAN from outside attack.
Correct. IMO the product is aimed at home users who want to use NAT with some more security than M$ ICS...
From what I've read,
You should have read a bit more:-) Than you would have know the intranet - Internet / login - webserver thing too.
About the 2 interfaces. They are called "red" (Internet) and "green" (intranet). But you can add a third nic (orange) to add a DMZ ((web)server that can be reached from the Internet)
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose a tax loophole is nothing more then a clever application of the law, right?
So, forget about tax laws, take a simple example traffic rules.
Well, then I'm filing a patent for stopping at a red light: everyone that stops at a red light must pay me 1$.
This is exactly the same as a patent on a tax loophole: the application of laws.
You must pay the patent holder for using a specific tax loophole, which is just an application of the law.
Now I'm making you all paying for applying another law.
Patents are hilarious and disastrous.
There can be several reasons why a product doesn't sell.
One of the possible reasons is that the product in question is crap.
In that case the manufacturer will have learned all there is to learn from their screw-up in a very short time. It is then no problem that the product gets pulled rather soon.
A second possibility is that the competition is better and/or cheaper. Also in that case the manufacturer can take their expensive/under-performing product rapidly off the market.
But in many cases the reason that a product doesn't not sell immediately is simply that the consumers don't know it exists. Established names like Apple, and Microsoft can bring out a product and even get coverage on the evening news. Others simply don't get that exposure to the masses. Then it is normal that a product doesn't take of immediately.
The problem is that while a product is on the shelf, competing products are coming out. Since they are newer, there is a large possibility that they will be better or cheaper, pushing the "old" product towards one of the categories described above...
Does this study include the cost of the surface area (land) needed to put up a solar plant of industrial sizing?
Maybe NC has enough free space, but there are regions on this globe that are in high demand of energy, but where there simply is not enough space (at affordable price) to build such a power plant.
I've seen this before. Months ago exactly the same system was set up over here. But nothing is sent to any mobile phone, nor is there any need to store any private data: The only thing one needs to measure is the frequnecy of handovers. A handover is when a mobile phone in a cellular systems hops from one cell to the next. So when you measure per cell the amount of phones comong into the cell and the amount of phones leaving the cell, you get a very good idea of the traffic: If incoming is about equal to outgoing then traffic is flowing. If incoming is larger then outgoing then there is a buildup of traffic, the start of a jam If outgoing is larger then incoming, a jam is dissapating If the freqency of handovers is high, the traffic rolling going fast If the frequncy of handovers is low, the traffic is rolling slow (So it is like measuring pressure and flowspeed of a fluid) Again, Note that there is no real reason at all to collect individual IDs. The data gained this way is simply combined with data coming from other measuring techniques (loops in the road most of the time) to control electronic road signs and the classic radio traffic announcements and TMC. The set up over here was specifically aimed at tunnels: there it is very easy to measure traffic since the inside of the tunnel is usually one cell and both ends are two other cells.
Belgium is a small west-european country where every person over 18 must vote.
The major part of the votes since more then five years have been entered electronically.
The majority of the systems are made by Steria (formally, Integris, a part of Bull) http://www.steria.be/
The system consits of PC running some old M$ DOS version (4.5 I think) with a pen-screen and a magnetic card reader.
Secrecy of vote + audit trail: each voter gets one anonymous card. The card is writtten using the voting computer (in a ballot box) and is then dropped into a drop-box vault. You see the parallells with paper-and-pencil voting I suppose...
Counting happens afterwards and recounting remains possible (untill the cards are wiped for the next elections)
Open-Source: Even though the software is written by a commercial company (Steria) the software is open for scrunity (by any citizen) at the Interior Ministry. Before last elections, Steria's source was examined by a professor and he detected one weak point (regarding the use of a random generator using the PC's BIOS) but it requires physical access to the voting card (in the vault) and it only couldcompromises secrecy of the vote (if you manage to track the order in which cards have been written).
There is also a competitor with some (similar) voting computers, but they represent a minority and that same professor called their coding "very bad spaghetti code that is impossible to understand"...
One big difference with the rest of the world: like I said, every adult citizen has to vote, meaning that the number of vote(r)s is perfectly known. Also, since it is a nation wide occurence there is only one voting day. The benefit of this is that the effort of actually organising the vote, including the counting (there are still votes on paper!) can be perfectly predicted.
There are some communues that (in last elections) still voted on paper.
In those communues the time allowed to vote is much shorter (only untill noon often), and still the results of those communes are the last to come in: electronic voting really does have major benefits here: longer opening hours of the polling stations and faster results.
If those phones are GSMs, they will hardly ever be transmitting at the same time: there is some kind of Time Division Multiple Access going on.
to parent: both phones will be talking to the _same_ cell tower if they are that close to each other (unless there just happens to be a saturation at that moment)
I'm still puzzled about the function of the HiFi though...
I'm a bit surprised that you only talk about "what is professional". Where I live this kind of cases is simply described by law: When an emplyment contract needs to be terminated there is a term of X days between the notice and the actual end. The amount of days X, depends on who is terminating the contract (if it is the emplyer X will be larger then when it is the employee) and on the length of the contract that is being terminated (the older the contract, the larger X will be). In many cases (like yours), one of the parties does not want to fulfil the period of X days. In that case it is that party that will pay the other. The amount can be determined mutually or by court. In any case it is not very extraordinary (for people that have been in service rather long) that an employer will be paying 20 months after having fired somebody... If it is the employer that is firing somebody, the employee has the right to a few (Like X,, i do not know exactly how much) days per week (paid!) to use for looking for new employment. Drawbacks: if your boss want's to annoy you, he can legally demand that you "stay on" during the full period (which can be several weeks or even months). "Stay on" does not meen work: there have been people that have been dumped on an empty desk, with not even a phone or a piece of paper to write. reading a bookin such cases would also be well adviced, since it would be fair reason for the empluyer to fire you "for urgent reasons" (not doing your work (whatever that is or is not) is always an urgent reason unfortunately...)
Hmm, I didn't even know about the SMS part...
:-)
Keeping the proverbial workingspeed of government employed workers in mind, the "rapid" part of the service has to be thoroghly scrutinized
Well, in one word: Yes. I used to use the winblows search tool a lot. It gave me loads of time for coffee and disturbing friends over the phone. Now, whenver I'm looking for something (file/mail/webpage) I know I received/saw in januari 2001 and contained keyword "foo". it takes me a couple of seconds to find it. It has allready (I've only been using GDS for a couple of weeks) saved me et least twice of writing something one of my predecessors has written before: instaid of diving into the editor whenever somebody asks me to write some code to this or that, I first search this huge pile of junk that is called a code archive and often it turns up nice things. I agree with other ppl here that if you organise your pc well, there is no need for such tools. But in my position, where I "posess" a sh*tload of files that was compiled by many different persons over time, It really helps.
In fact the basis of the problem is one that is lurking around every corner on the Internet:
What countries laws ara applicable when a transaction is performed by a person in country X, when the server is in country Y?
In this case: whenever somebody in Australia will download GwtW from that Australian server it is clear that only Austeralian laws are applicable.
But when somebody in the US downloads that same e-book from that same server. Is the transaction of obtaining that book performed in Australia or in the US?
Suppose it was not Gone with the Wind but Main Kampf and that the packets between Australia and the US are routed over France. Is in that case the French law applicabble? There are some Frensh laws that prohibit the distribution of Nasi parafernalia...
The same question is of course also applicable to differences in child porn law, etc.
Another example closer to my home is the belgion law for buyer protection in the case of remote selling. This law explicitely includes internet sales and it says that the buyer has the right to return any remotely bought product within seven days after reception of the goods and get a full refund (except for transport costs).
Does this law apply when somebody in Belgium buys via E-bay something from an individual in The Netherlands?
Very complex issues for which somebody needs to find a solution in this global economy.
Somebody interested in more?
We allready defined countries X and Y. But suppose that the company that is expploiting the server in Y is in fact located in country Z...
The new Belgian ID cards (currently still in testing, nationwide distribution to begin once the village gevernments are convinced they won't have to pay for the extra cost ;-) ) will NOT contain an RFID chip, but a classic SIM-like chip with electrical surface contacts.
:-)
The Belgian government (at all levels) has proven its everlasting lack of gripping IT-technology over and over aigain: for example there still is no central repository for drivers licences (there are only 10^7 Belgians, not all drive...)
I therefore think Belgians have nothing to fear. For once security (of privacy in this case) through obscurity (by lack of knowledge by the gevernment) does work
Jups. You are all completely right.
I did indeed forget the imortant words "as a trademark" in that very confusing sentence... My mistake, sorry.
But the explication in another post about trademarks not having to be registreded explicitely changes the value of the argument a bit. A shift in favor of the domain owner clearly.
I agree.
The domain was there first, so it can stay.
When the book was written, the domain "katie.com" was not registered. Therefore anybody was/is allowed to use the words "Katie.com" as the title of a book. (This is confirmed bt the fact that the owner of the domain never did anything against the publishers of the book.)
Today there is no reasen why the owner of the domain should give it up. Just as well, there is no reason to change the title of the book.
This is confirmed by the fact that the two have been co-existing for some time.
The owner of the domain is not cybersquatting since the domain was there (long) before the book.
The writer of the book did not violate a trademark.
Both are protected by the same free speech rights. (I guess)
Instaid of printing the law "the way it is from now on" (and implicitly replacing "the way it was before") they just print how the text for "the way it was beforze" must be changed to get the text of "the way it is from now on". This system might be usefull if you want to see the changes (very little, some, a lot), but does not at all tell you what you can and can not do!
there is also a very funny line of text:
and a bit further on:
I see what the legislator is getting at, but somebody has to clarify the notion "wireless"...
I wish our government would try it also.
They are currently doing the budget negotiations, they could find a huge saving post in OS...
Strange.
MNP has been available for quite some time now over here.
We sure had our load of problems with it, mostly due the vast number of people changing. The operaters just couldn't keep up.
There is just one problem. Without MNP you allways knew that somebode with a number with the same "network code" as yous was cheap to call. Now you might be calling another network without knowing it (and therefore paying more).
The operators had to set up a system to let a caller know (with a beep) that he is using another network. (This was demendad by consumer organisations...)
But in any case, it seems to work fine now.
Since all mobile operators of more or les the same service, most transfers were purely based on "Price".
There has been a movent from the more expensive one to the cheaper one, but the net result is apparently insignificant compared to the number new customers (not coming in via MNP)
Maybe he wants to (contunue to) use a "system for conducting a discussion relating to an item" that is housed in the US (like slashdot?).
In that case he has a valid concern.
Those are pictures from may 2000. (the last one is clearly dated may 13th 2000).
On that day a fireworks factory exploded in the city. The university is out of the center and was not at all affected then.
This is a completely different, new story, fortunatly with less lives lost.
Let's hope they don't forget the real server builders in the process
European Union Beitrittsaspirant: Candidate member for the European Union.
:-) )
Beitrittsaspirant: look up "Beitritt" and "Aspirant" (German, like Dutch, likes composed words
ok, nice!
The next thing we need is phones with slightly bigger screens.
Small is beautiful, but I like it practical as well.
Look at the first mobile phones (GSM style). They were thicker. That is not good. But they were broader than the current models without that ever being a problem.
Why not go back to the slightly larger models and put a bigger screen in them?
Maybe I miseed it in the specs, but I did not see a shovel nor sandplates.
:-)
Did the guys who designed this thing ever look at the Paris-Dacar rally for example?
The first dune they hit this thing is stuck.
PS. I would also like to see a trailer being pulled through sandunes
...And I will gladly install the patches :-)
I don't know too much about the product
...this thing is really just meant to secure a LAN from outside attack.
:-) Than you would have know the intranet - Internet / login - webserver thing too.
That's obvious!
if I were creating something of the sort, I wouldn't have any sort of network services (Apache, login, whatever) accessible from the internet side.
Very good! But even the Smoothwall devs knew that: the only way to use the "webserver" (only admin pages: not to be used as intranet server!) or log in is on the inTRAnet side. There must be two physically separate devices (NIC and modem or 2 NICs) for the two sides (internet - intranet)
Correct. IMO the product is aimed at home users who want to use NAT with some more security than M$ ICS...
From what I've read,
You should have read a bit more
About the 2 interfaces. They are called "red" (Internet) and "green" (intranet). But you can add a third nic (orange) to add a DMZ ((web)server that can be reached from the Internet)
yup, I realised that to when I got my change this noon :-)
Anyway, the color is different