What if the IRS encoded its rules in XML? It might be fairly easy to build an OSS engine to ask the questions and fill out the forms. With all the actual tax logic embedded in the xml, the liability for correctness would fall on the IRS where it belongs.
This would be a step in the right direction. Recently I read that if you call the IRS help line there's only a 50% chance that they will give you the right answer.
Wrong, oh optimistic one! The state government could easily follow the RIAA's lead and assess 5% of full market value for sharing music files. The only exempt downloads would be ones that are offered for free.
The problem is paying the people for doing the editing, etc.
The article addresses that. It says the underlying assumption is that whoever funds the research would also fund the publication cost. Makes sense to me. If they pay for test tubes and lab rats, why wouldn't they pay to get the results published?
What the article does question is how to cover the cost of keeping the article online forever. I think might be a moot point, given how many Gutenberg-like projects are underway. The Library of Congress supposedly keeps a copy of everything published. It is already the repository. Why couldn't it become the online repository? Seems like a use of tax money for the public good.
record labels are able to promote an album the way most people couldn't
Yeah they can, or not, depending on whether they want to, which depends on how your sales figures are doing that week. When they start to top out, guess what happens? The promotion money dries up like Motley Crue's old hair gel, your phone calls don't get returned, and since you assigned all recording rights to the record company, you can't reissue your own songs on a different label, or even perform them in any venue that's being recorded. Ever.
You also can't record ANY songs for another label, because (in a standard contract) you have a 7 CD deal. Until you record those 7 CDs you belong to that one company. They get to decide which, if any, of your songs are good enough to record, so they can essentially switch off your career like a light bulb whenever they decide your last CD didn't bring in enough money, and reallocate their hype dollars to the next new hotness. If you want to switch labels your alternative is to start a new band, and you can't bill yourself as "formerly blah blah." If you're a soloist you can't even record under your own name anymore.
Incidentally, one of the few musicians who beat his record company at that particular game was Prince. He didn't change his name to a symbol because he was weird, he did because his contract wouldn't allow him to record as Prince on his own. Rather than change his name and drop into obscurity like most guys in his situation, he changed it to a symbol that had no pronunciation, so the press and others took to calling him "the artist formerly known as Prince." He wouldn't legally have been able to get away with calling himself that, but the record company couldn't dictate how other people referred to him, so he basically kept his name without using it.
Nice to hear from someone in the musician community who also understands the web. The core issue is that there doesn't really need to be a "music industry" as we know it. One more line from the article bears comment:
The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs...
The key phrase is "those who own the publishing rights" -- in other words, record companies. Most musicians will get nothing from this 5 cents per song, because their contracts allow the record companies not to pay them royalties until all the expenses of producing a CD have been covered. That includes production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, every penny put into selling the CDs. Most musicians never see any of these royalties because of all the costs of moving and hyping the plastic.
Record companies justify their contract practices by whining that most CDs lose money. Big deal. 90% of all startups go out of business in the first year. In the rest of the business world this is called "investing." Record companies are essentially venture capitalists who demand 100% of profits until they recoup their entire investment, plus control of all rights and a share of all future profits. Would you finance a startup that way? I wouldn't. The only reason it works for them is that (with all due respect to the poster) musicians don't tend to be all that business savvy. Most see a recording contract as the Holy Grail, because it leads to fame and high-paying gigs, which is where they are going to make their money.
As more musicians realize that they can get the exposure online without actually producing pieces of plastic and giving their rights away to record companies, THAT's what will change the music industry as we know it.
I don't think the core of the "no harm was done" argument is that all of the letters were final. I think the core is that looking at a file on a web server is pretty trivial grounds for a major business university to base its admissions decisions on. We don't chop off hands in this country for shoplifting. The administrators who made this decision are overreacting because they're embarrassed that these documents were so easily accessible.
Suppose you saw that the Harvard Business School website had an image called "logo3.jpg" and you typed in "logo2.jpg" and "logo1.jpg" to see what the other versions looked like, and these images turned out to be nude women. Calling that "hacking the website" would be a stretch, and calling it a breach of ethics that would make you unworthy to attend Harvard Business School is ludicrous. However, call it a point of embarrassment that's sure to elicit a wrathful, over-rationalized over-reaction from administrative drones, and you're probably right on the money.
Glad somebody pointed out the method that was used to view the files. Typing in an URL to display a file is hardly "hacking." On the grand scale of things this is a parking ticket that's being treated like a hit-and-run. These are students who already passed all the admission requirements and have proven themselves good enough to go to Harvard Business School. All they did was look at information that was about to be mailed to them anyway, which shouldn't have been where it was if it was so special.
Whether it was ethical or not is a matter of judgement, but I think it's a lot more unethical to turn an administrative embarrassment into a major life-changing event for more than a hundred people.
Deciding who is at fault and who deserves what is a favorite online pastime, but we don't even know what it took to "hack" into the site to view the letters. Did the applicants do anything that would actually be illegal if they did it in the business world (where "ethical" seems to be synonymous with "legal" )? Or did they merely do something unexpected and embarassing?
If the business school is run by the same types who seem to run every other part of the school system, their automatic, totally predictable reaction would be to slam down hard on somebody and focus attention away from any possible mistake or oversight they themselves may have made. I'm not saying that's what happened here either, but we really don't know who the bad guys are.
Check out the "Pat-rights" website -- their slogan: "We innovate, we share and we gain". From the site: Early in 1995, Founder of Pat-rights, Mr. Philip H.K. Tse visualised Internet as the most promising environment for digital content distribution and began to develop ideas and technologies essential for these changes.
As a result of his long term efforts, several national patents are being issued. And, some of them are being infringed by Global Industrial giants.
Dripping with sincerity, isn't it? Shakespeare was right when he said, "All the world's a stage, it's people only players." If he were alive to watch some of the painfully transparent performances on the patent-piracy stage, I don't know if he would laugh or cry.
When somebody mentions the shuttle program ending, I never miss a chance to plug nuclear rockets. I know it's the "N" word, but read this fascinating article detailing a design for a fully reusable, non-polluting rocket ship based on the Saturn-V form factor. Powered by Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines emitting only non-radioactive hydrogen, the ship would be capable of carrying 1000 Tons of cargo into orbit and returning an equal amount of cargo to a powered landing. For comparison the shuttle's cargo capacity is less than 30 tons.
I don't know whether to believe this or not. It seems too reminiscent of an old Outer Limits episode called "Demon with a Glass Hand," in which the entire human race has been converted to electrical impulses and stored on a small piece of wire.
Also the article seems to confuse bits and bytes, and says "researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells" -- the wire is carrying out divisions? Either this is poorly written or a poorly conceived hoax.
If someone can be sued for calling something a ripoff or slapdash clone, think how many pro and amateur movie critics will have their heads on the chopping block.
this is a more impressive (and unique) way of looking at the problem
You got that right! Regardless of the possible sinister big-brother applications, didn't we all read this and deep down think Whoa, that's pretty damn cool! I know I did. This guy deserves major uber-geek points./golf clap
I've never understood the point of view that it's somehow immoral to let the government do something when somebody could be making a business out of it.
If WiFi were a metered service and the government was merely replicating a business model, with user accounts and billings, collecting on delinquent payments, and all the other business headaches that companies are much better at, then I would be against it. But blanketing a large area with unrestricted access to a service that is easy to deploy and cheap to maintain is exactly the type of thing governments should do.
Maybe you didn't read the article... This isn't really a "robot," it's just a glorified baby monitor wrapped in a bear. The bear doesn't actually do anything.
The article only mentions Warner Bros. I wonder if this process is also being applied to all the classic films Ted Turner bought the rights to and colorized? Hopefully they will remaster the original black and white versions. I know you can turn down the color controls to watch a colorized film in black and white, but then you're looking at the monochrome version of the colors that were added. To me it makes it look as if there's a gray filter over the whole thing. In the past Turner has had a very big-man-behind-the-desk attitude about colorized movies, responding to critics by saying things like, "Last time I looked I owned it." So I'm not holding my breath waiting for great remastered DVDs of Turner-controlled films.
I agree. Corporations can unduly restrict the use of their products, but only governments can censor. It's an important distinction, especially at a time when corporations are acting like governments, ideas are treated like property, and citizens are regarded as "consumers."
Relativistic time dilation has been demonstrated by synchronizing atomic clocks and sending one of them into space for a while at high speed. The one sent into space slows down a tiny bit. As I interpret this, one of the clocks is slightly in the past relative to the other one.
Suppose you did the same thing with two entangled particles. The particle sent into orbit be slightly in the past relative to the other one. So would they then be entangled across the dimension of time? Seems like this has big implications, though what they are is beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the IRS encoded its rules in XML? It might be fairly easy to build an OSS engine to ask the questions and fill out the forms. With all the actual tax logic embedded in the xml, the liability for correctness would fall on the IRS where it belongs.
This would be a step in the right direction. Recently I read that if you call the IRS help line there's only a 50% chance that they will give you the right answer.
Can somebody explain what a lazy BOFH is? I can't even come up with a good guess.
If the purchase price is $0, the tax is zero
Wrong, oh optimistic one! The state government could easily follow the RIAA's lead and assess 5% of full market value for sharing music files. The only exempt downloads would be ones that are offered for free.
The problem is paying the people for doing the editing, etc.
The article addresses that. It says the underlying assumption is that whoever funds the research would also fund the publication cost. Makes sense to me. If they pay for test tubes and lab rats, why wouldn't they pay to get the results published?
What the article does question is how to cover the cost of keeping the article online forever. I think might be a moot point, given how many Gutenberg-like projects are underway. The Library of Congress supposedly keeps a copy of everything published. It is already the repository. Why couldn't it become the online repository? Seems like a use of tax money for the public good.
record labels are able to promote an album the way most people couldn't
Yeah they can, or not, depending on whether they want to, which depends on how your sales figures are doing that week. When they start to top out, guess what happens? The promotion money dries up like Motley Crue's old hair gel, your phone calls don't get returned, and since you assigned all recording rights to the record company, you can't reissue your own songs on a different label, or even perform them in any venue that's being recorded. Ever.
You also can't record ANY songs for another label, because (in a standard contract) you have a 7 CD deal. Until you record those 7 CDs you belong to that one company. They get to decide which, if any, of your songs are good enough to record, so they can essentially switch off your career like a light bulb whenever they decide your last CD didn't bring in enough money, and reallocate their hype dollars to the next new hotness. If you want to switch labels your alternative is to start a new band, and you can't bill yourself as "formerly blah blah." If you're a soloist you can't even record under your own name anymore.
Incidentally, one of the few musicians who beat his record company at that particular game was Prince. He didn't change his name to a symbol because he was weird, he did because his contract wouldn't allow him to record as Prince on his own. Rather than change his name and drop into obscurity like most guys in his situation, he changed it to a symbol that had no pronunciation, so the press and others took to calling him "the artist formerly known as Prince." He wouldn't legally have been able to get away with calling himself that, but the record company couldn't dictate how other people referred to him, so he basically kept his name without using it.
What planet do you guys live on? Just this week the US and France jointly demanded that Syria pull troops out of Lebanon. Bush himself said, "when the United States and France say withdraw, we mean complete withdrawal."
Doesn't sound to me like they're working at odds.
Nice to hear from someone in the musician community who also understands the web. The core issue is that there doesn't really need to be a "music industry" as we know it. One more line from the article bears comment:
The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs...
The key phrase is "those who own the publishing rights" -- in other words, record companies. Most musicians will get nothing from this 5 cents per song, because their contracts allow the record companies not to pay them royalties until all the expenses of producing a CD have been covered. That includes production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, every penny put into selling the CDs. Most musicians never see any of these royalties because of all the costs of moving and hyping the plastic.
Record companies justify their contract practices by whining that most CDs lose money. Big deal. 90% of all startups go out of business in the first year. In the rest of the business world this is called "investing." Record companies are essentially venture capitalists who demand 100% of profits until they recoup their entire investment, plus control of all rights and a share of all future profits. Would you finance a startup that way? I wouldn't. The only reason it works for them is that (with all due respect to the poster) musicians don't tend to be all that business savvy. Most see a recording contract as the Holy Grail, because it leads to fame and high-paying gigs, which is where they are going to make their money.
As more musicians realize that they can get the exposure online without actually producing pieces of plastic and giving their rights away to record companies, THAT's what will change the music industry as we know it.
I don't think the core of the "no harm was done" argument is that all of the letters were final. I think the core is that looking at a file on a web server is pretty trivial grounds for a major business university to base its admissions decisions on. We don't chop off hands in this country for shoplifting. The administrators who made this decision are overreacting because they're embarrassed that these documents were so easily accessible.
Suppose you saw that the Harvard Business School website had an image called "logo3.jpg" and you typed in "logo2.jpg" and "logo1.jpg" to see what the other versions looked like, and these images turned out to be nude women. Calling that "hacking the website" would be a stretch, and calling it a breach of ethics that would make you unworthy to attend Harvard Business School is ludicrous. However, call it a point of embarrassment that's sure to elicit a wrathful, over-rationalized over-reaction from administrative drones, and you're probably right on the money.
Glad somebody pointed out the method that was used to view the files. Typing in an URL to display a file is hardly "hacking." On the grand scale of things this is a parking ticket that's being treated like a hit-and-run. These are students who already passed all the admission requirements and have proven themselves good enough to go to Harvard Business School. All they did was look at information that was about to be mailed to them anyway, which shouldn't have been where it was if it was so special.
Whether it was ethical or not is a matter of judgement, but I think it's a lot more unethical to turn an administrative embarrassment into a major life-changing event for more than a hundred people.
Deciding who is at fault and who deserves what is a favorite online pastime, but we don't even know what it took to "hack" into the site to view the letters. Did the applicants do anything that would actually be illegal if they did it in the business world (where "ethical" seems to be synonymous with "legal" )? Or did they merely do something unexpected and embarassing?
If the business school is run by the same types who seem to run every other part of the school system, their automatic, totally predictable reaction would be to slam down hard on somebody and focus attention away from any possible mistake or oversight they themselves may have made. I'm not saying that's what happened here either, but we really don't know who the bad guys are.
Check out the "Pat-rights" website -- their slogan: "We innovate, we share and we gain".
From the site:
Early in 1995, Founder of Pat-rights, Mr. Philip H.K. Tse visualised Internet as the most promising environment for digital content distribution and began to develop ideas and technologies essential for these changes.
As a result of his long term efforts, several national patents are being issued. And, some of them are being infringed by Global Industrial giants.
Dripping with sincerity, isn't it? Shakespeare was right when he said, "All the world's a stage, it's people only players." If he were alive to watch some of the painfully transparent performances on the patent-piracy stage, I don't know if he would laugh or cry.
When somebody mentions the shuttle program ending, I never miss a chance to plug nuclear rockets. I know it's the "N" word, but read this fascinating article detailing a design for a fully reusable, non-polluting rocket ship based on the Saturn-V form factor. Powered by Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines emitting only non-radioactive hydrogen, the ship would be capable of carrying 1000 Tons of cargo into orbit and returning an equal amount of cargo to a powered landing. For comparison the shuttle's cargo capacity is less than 30 tons.
I don't know whether to believe this or not. It seems too reminiscent of an old Outer Limits episode called "Demon with a Glass Hand," in which the entire human race has been converted to electrical impulses and stored on a small piece of wire.
Also the article seems to confuse bits and bytes, and says "researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells" -- the wire is carrying out divisions? Either this is poorly written or a poorly conceived hoax.
Because of course, in Soviet Union, flexible microwire reads you.
heh-heh, I crack myself up!
I like Risk too, and I don't even smoke.
If someone can be sued for calling something a ripoff or slapdash clone, think how many pro and amateur movie critics will have their heads on the chopping block.
this is a more impressive (and unique) way of looking at the problem
/golf clap
You got that right! Regardless of the possible sinister big-brother applications, didn't we all read this and deep down think Whoa, that's pretty damn cool! I know I did. This guy deserves major uber-geek points.
I've never understood the point of view that it's somehow immoral to let the government do something when somebody could be making a business out of it.
If WiFi were a metered service and the government was merely replicating a business model, with user accounts and billings, collecting on delinquent payments, and all the other business headaches that companies are much better at, then I would be against it. But blanketing a large area with unrestricted access to a service that is easy to deploy and cheap to maintain is exactly the type of thing governments should do.
Priceless!
Maybe you didn't read the article... This isn't really a "robot," it's just a glorified baby monitor wrapped in a bear. The bear doesn't actually do anything.
Robot-watched kids watch you?
The article only mentions Warner Bros. I wonder if this process is also being applied to all the classic films Ted Turner bought the rights to and colorized? Hopefully they will remaster the original black and white versions. I know you can turn down the color controls to watch a colorized film in black and white, but then you're looking at the monochrome version of the colors that were added. To me it makes it look as if there's a gray filter over the whole thing. In the past Turner has had a very big-man-behind-the-desk attitude about colorized movies, responding to critics by saying things like, "Last time I looked I owned it." So I'm not holding my breath waiting for great remastered DVDs of Turner-controlled films.
I agree. Corporations can unduly restrict the use of their products, but only governments can censor. It's an important distinction, especially at a time when corporations are acting like governments, ideas are treated like property, and citizens are regarded as "consumers."
As phones, PDAs, cameras and media players merge into one thing, we need to come up with a name for it. How about "camputalkman" ??
Or, more likely (in the US at least): "illegal general purpose information piracy device."
Relativistic time dilation has been demonstrated by synchronizing atomic clocks and sending one of them into space for a while at high speed. The one sent into space slows down a tiny bit. As I interpret this, one of the clocks is slightly in the past relative to the other one.
Suppose you did the same thing with two entangled particles. The particle sent into orbit be slightly in the past relative to the other one. So would they then be entangled across the dimension of time? Seems like this has big implications, though what they are is beyond me.