Sure, its my birthday, happens every year. Best day of the year!
I can't be the only one that found many services to be borderline useless that day. Our backbone wasn't even maxed out and I still issues using VPNs between our offices (which weren't maxed out either). IM, various websites (the news ones), IRC. They were all sluggish and non-responsive at times.
Oh, the terror attack thing in 2001? Now I got you.
OK, what ~3,000 people died that day and your poor IM, VPNs and web access was slowed down.
But screw that, that does not even register on the radar of a pandemic. I would guess a pandemic is what ~20-30% of the population dead? So ~1 to 2 billion people dead?
And we are concerned about how this will hurt the internet?
Fuck you people. I'm worried who is going to pump my gas to fill up my Hummer, and how much a kilo of cocaine will cost when this pandemic happens.
To some degree artists and record labels benefit from piracy, but lets hold off on that, but it is a form of marketing.
Harddrive manufactures, companies that sell MP3 players, blank media, and all of that benefits from piracy.
Personally, I believe that content should be free or kinda taxed/subsidized by hardware. Hardware breaks, and has to be either replaced or done without.
I pay my ISP a flat fee for internet, but I don't pay for "content" besides my donation to slashdot.
I pay hundreds/thousands of dollars for hardware that breaks all the time, but I don't pay a small fraction of that on software because its just not worth it.
Autism is a fad right now. I get moderated all over the place (troll, insighful, interesting, etc) when I bring it up, but since someone else noticed this discrepance, so I'll comment and take whatever moderation comes my way.
I heard on NPR the other day that "they" are now estimating that 1 in 150 or so people are born with autism. This is complete bullshit. Autism is very rare.
There is a ton of disinformation out there about autism. I don't have the time now to dissect the autism.org site, but much of the data out there on Temple Grandin is sensationalized so that some authors can sell books (which Grandin gets a cut of as well). If you read Grandin's writing and interviews carefully, she never will say she has autism, but rather she does have some behaviors similar to those with autism (some of which have similar origins in her visual thinking). Its other people that posit that she has autism, and to the best of my knowledge, none of these people are doctors.
Yes, everything is on some kind of a continuum. Even male vs female, but over 99.999999% of males are really males and over 99.999999% of females are really females, and sure there will be that Pat or whatever that is unfortunatly kinda caught between being male and female, but that is _VERY_ rare.
Real autism is a congenital neurological disorder that is noticeable very early in life, and very close to 100% of all autistics do not develop things like language.
The problem is that many of the behavioral symptons of autism are learned, not innate to the neurological disorder itself. Things like rocking, walking on toes, screeming, and all that are _symptoms_ which can be shared with other disorders that may or may not be neurolically based like autism is.
No, I am not a medical doctor, but I have worked in mental hospitals and I have worked with autistic children before, and unfortunately like being born without legs, there is nothing to just make the birth defect magically go away.
Grouping things like Asperger's and Rett syndrom with autism is controversial at best by those that know much more about the topic than I do. I'm not saying that autism, Aspergers or Rett are not real, but all of these are very rare and little is known about them.
Why would single moms need to know distances in photographs any more than married moms?
Married moms tell their husband to do the feat.
I can't believe I replied to this, or that this was moderated up. These marketing lists of people that might find a product useful are rarely surveyed, quantified, or measured, but rather just a product of a brainstorming session.
I guess this software won't make a great gift because the marketing people didn't tell me it would?!?!
Have you actually looked at what Sun is doing these days?
Yes:) And Sun is refinding themselves (if that makes any sense).
Sun used to only have a few products that were relatively expensive, but very good.
Look at there offerings today. They have _many_ products in all shapes and sizes, and there prices have really come down in price. I've been critical of Sun for years, and they really seem to be adapting to the market by offering everything from an E15k to inexpensive x86 boxes at about commodity prices with better engineering than your COTS junk.
Things like the x4500 are really turning heads (even here on slashdot).
Today's market requires more disposable and inexpensive computers. Why pay $10k for a server today that will last for years, when in 2-3 years it is way outperformed by a $1-2k server? Answering this question took Sun a few years, but now they seem to have answered that question.
Does the US really have no laws protecting consumers from this sort of crap?
Sure, antitrust laws. But all in all, no. The little guys here in the US are getting littler, and it will take a downright revolution to balance the scale.
I'm not trolling, I'm really asking a question to see if there is a good answer.
Is there anything positive to say about Vista? Granted, I'm not a Windows user, and I get my info from slashdot, digg, and standard media outlets, and I saw Gates on the Daily Show, but seriously, is this a bundle of software that has any merit?
I hear about licenses not working. I hear about it being beta quality. I hear about it having OS X like features that just aren't as good. I hear about it ambiently consuming 10-20% of the CPU. I hear about all of the real features like WinFS that were abandoned.
Are there any honest or real positive opinions of this product?
WindowBlinds and ObjectDesktop changes the Windows desktop in large ways - where's your standard GUI there?
The standard GUI, like with OS X*, is the single choice you have when installing the system. In fact, to my knowledge, you don't even have a choice to not install that standard GUI.
There is no standard GUI with Linux or even the need to run a GUI at all.
* I'm unfamiliar with OS X server and what, if any, GUI options are available there.
I think you have fallen into the trap of thinking that Linux is an operating system. It's not. Linux is the kernel.
Linux is as much of an operating system as Windows, FreeBSD, or OS X.
Yes, to be pedantic, it is a kernel, but nobody boots a kernel and stops there, not even embedded Linux people.
If you want to get really pedantic, Linux is not even a kernel, but a state of mind:) Open source, modular, flexible, runs on everything, fun, new, always new, picky about who its friends with, etc, etc.
I used to feel bad for traditional animation since I felt way too much is lost in the transition to 3D.
The thing is that "traditional animation" has been gone for 40-50 years. I'm talking about when the artists actually painted each and every frame. They have been making shortcuts for quite some time with using overlays, repeated backgrounds, CGI, etc.
Although CGI is not as good as it will be, to be honest, its more like "traditional animation" than animation has been in years. The ability to move the camera is a good thing.
They have NO right to single out bittorrent for traffic shaping.
Am I a minority here?
Personally, I want my bittorent shaped. There are so many variables with a torrent, and I cap my upload and download speeds myself so that my other network stuff is still responsive. When I d/l a 1 gig+ download, I don't expect it to be instantanious, but I do expect my web pages to be pretty much instantanious when I'm downloading a torrent or not.
Keeping in mind the source (CheckFree, Visa, and WellsFargo)
I recently got a "check" from my credit card for $20. By depositing that check they would automatically enroll me in an identity theft insurance protection plan.
For my convenience, they would bill my credit card (plus interest I assume).
Basically, this is legal fraud.
First, my CC is unsecured credit. If I don't pay, its no big deal aside from them screwing my credit or whatever they do.
My point, is that don't these people want the illusion that ID theft is on the rise so that they can sell this insurance to people?
1) Dells gets paid for placing the bloatware: it keeps the price down and boosts their margins. 2) Lots of people ARE gibbering idiots. 3) Many people have low expectations of PCs 4) They are quite likely to blame software problems on MS anyway. 5) Corporate buyers will do a clean re-install anyway. 6) Home users will probably have the machine just as bloated with malware in a week anyway. The is the reason for 3 above.
All of this is true*. Its sad that there apparently is no profit in a mass produced consumer level PC, and this stems from #3. People still expect computers just to suck because they have for such a long time.
I'm typing this on a Dell, but it is running Linux from a custom standard install by my work. Its a fine computer as far as a Linux machine can be. Personally, I would prefer to have a Mac. I would be more productive, and I just prefer a Mac, but that is a different story.
I attribute the #3 thing to someone who is in an abusive relationship. They know it sucks, they complain about it all the time, but they won't/can't do anything about it because that is all they know.
The thing is that the simple, working days of consumer level products seems to be over. The guys at the top are too worried about staying up there. The customer is always right mantra is a thing of the past. To get quality, you have to get a niche product, and pay a little more for it, and your compatability with the majority of the world is out the window.
* I question #4. From the way I understand it, most people are unable to differentiate between software and hardware, its just a computer, and when they have computer problems, they blame the name on the box, not MS. There simply are not many computer makers today. Gateway is dead. HP has gone psychotic. IBM doesn't really sell consumer level products anymore. Compaq == HP. Sony is, well, Sony. Emachines (yuck) was bought by somebody. Basically, its kind of Dell or Apple, and an Apple is simply not an option for many people because it is percieved as being incompatable or different.
If he wants to do this right, tax them enough that CFLs are the same price on the shelf. (Or are cheaper...) Then people who really need incandescents for something can still buy them without going through buerocracy, but the average user will start noticing that CFLs are the same price on the shelf, and less expensive when used. Then watch people switch.
I vote for this too.
I use CFLs, but not exclusively. There are times when a good old incandescent bulb are simply better, and I would not mind paying more for the few that I use.
I can see the black market (no pun intended:) for incandescents for those that really want them. That would be pretty funny.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. This kind of stuff is foreign to me. The key thing is this:
Being that I think it is a trusted site I accecpt the code and bang I am in trouble. You can be smart enough to catch the problem 99% of the time but if you mess up that 1% you could be in trouble.
So, this is what we have been talking about, and this is primarily a Microsoft UI bug which then exploits other "features".
I remember that Windows was _very_ happy to annoy me whenever possible with popup dialog boxes asking me crap all the time. The signal to noise ratio here is apauling. Windows asks you to delete a file, to empty the recycle bin, to shut down, to log off. It yells at you saying you have too much crap on your desktop. After a while, people get sick of it, and just hit "OK".
From what I hear, Vista will annoy the user even more. So, these kinds of issues will be perpetuated.
What a shame. It would be nice if there were a real windows alternative. Not Linux, not OS X, but one that could run all of the windows programs, but had a better UI and better security.
The problem is that under the hood, Windows is such a mess, that this seems impossible. Wine is still unable to do too much after a decade of work. ReactOS will probably never get out of alpha.
Its a shame that MS has been pretty much uncontested for this long. If they were made to make all of their APIs public and standardize their OS, they would have some real competition. But their closed nature, and existing marketshare will never make for a really better computing experience for people, and that is sad.
BTW, why is it that software is the only product where supply and demand and mass production rules don't apply? Everything else that is mass produced comes down in price, software stays the same or gets more expensive.
Isn't the most effective way to "protest" it just not buy, to explain to your friends and workplaces why they shouldn't buy it, and most particularly, to aggressively pursue a refund for any bundled versions that you're forced to buy with hardware?
Not to buy. Have not given MS a dime since 1995.
Explain to friends and workplaces. I cannot recommend MS products over the alternatives. With my friends, I clearly tell them if they are asking my advice, my answer is to buy a Mac. None to date have taken my advice, and they still ask me about "Windows problems" when I politely told them that I don't do windows and that I could not help them with windows problems upfront. Workplaces. They seem to be MS dependant despite years of suggestions to change.
Refund? The principle of the thing is worth more than the money, and for most people, neither is that important to them.
All I can say is that this petition is a day late and a dollar short, but although I have fixed my microsoft problem. I still know plenty of people that don't care or just won't change from the MS problem.
I am _not_ brand loyal/disloyal. I treat all things as generic tools and will use what is best for the job at the current time, and things come and go on my shitlist, and I don't hold a permanant grudge until the company has gone too far. To date, only two companies have made my permanant shitlist, and I have brought one of them to court as well, and neither are Microsoft.
Macs were on my offlist before OS X, but they have seen the light:)
And what is the intrinsic value of gold if I can make it in a lab for $10/oz?
Sure, fiat currency has it issues and its relatively new, but its a completely arbitrary unit of measure like slashdot karma, casino chips, or whatever that seems OK.
If they award him the prize while he's in space, do US tax laws still apply?
I'm one of those guys that looks for loopholes to get ahead all the time, and believe it or not these government guys actually take care of 99.999% of those loopholes in the laws.
There is probably an importation tax that is greater than the regular one, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody remember 9/11?
Sure, its my birthday, happens every year. Best day of the year!
I can't be the only one that found many services to be borderline useless that day. Our backbone wasn't even maxed out and I still issues using VPNs between our offices (which weren't maxed out either). IM, various websites (the news ones), IRC. They were all sluggish and non-responsive at times.
Oh, the terror attack thing in 2001? Now I got you.
OK, what ~3,000 people died that day and your poor IM, VPNs and web access was slowed down.
But screw that, that does not even register on the radar of a pandemic. I would guess a pandemic is what ~20-30% of the population dead? So ~1 to 2 billion people dead?
And we are concerned about how this will hurt the internet?
Fuck you people. I'm worried who is going to pump my gas to fill up my Hummer, and how much a kilo of cocaine will cost when this pandemic happens.
Priorities people. Think.
To some degree artists and record labels benefit from piracy, but lets hold off on that, but it is a form of marketing.
Harddrive manufactures, companies that sell MP3 players, blank media, and all of that benefits from piracy.
Personally, I believe that content should be free or kinda taxed/subsidized by hardware. Hardware breaks, and has to be either replaced or done without.
I pay my ISP a flat fee for internet, but I don't pay for "content" besides my donation to slashdot.
I pay hundreds/thousands of dollars for hardware that breaks all the time, but I don't pay a small fraction of that on software because its just not worth it.
I recall at least several classes where Clippy hypnotized my class (and kept them preoccupied and easy to deal with.)
Leave that to the experts.
That is what drugs and TV are for.
Autism is a fad right now. I get moderated all over the place (troll, insighful, interesting, etc) when I bring it up, but since someone else noticed this discrepance, so I'll comment and take whatever moderation comes my way.
I heard on NPR the other day that "they" are now estimating that 1 in 150 or so people are born with autism. This is complete bullshit. Autism is very rare.
There is a ton of disinformation out there about autism. I don't have the time now to dissect the autism.org site, but much of the data out there on Temple Grandin is sensationalized so that some authors can sell books (which Grandin gets a cut of as well). If you read Grandin's writing and interviews carefully, she never will say she has autism, but rather she does have some behaviors similar to those with autism (some of which have similar origins in her visual thinking). Its other people that posit that she has autism, and to the best of my knowledge, none of these people are doctors.
Yes, everything is on some kind of a continuum. Even male vs female, but over 99.999999% of males are really males and over 99.999999% of females are really females, and sure there will be that Pat or whatever that is unfortunatly kinda caught between being male and female, but that is _VERY_ rare.
Real autism is a congenital neurological disorder that is noticeable very early in life, and very close to 100% of all autistics do not develop things like language.
The problem is that many of the behavioral symptons of autism are learned, not innate to the neurological disorder itself. Things like rocking, walking on toes, screeming, and all that are _symptoms_ which can be shared with other disorders that may or may not be neurolically based like autism is.
No, I am not a medical doctor, but I have worked in mental hospitals and I have worked with autistic children before, and unfortunately like being born without legs, there is nothing to just make the birth defect magically go away.
Grouping things like Asperger's and Rett syndrom with autism is controversial at best by those that know much more about the topic than I do. I'm not saying that autism, Aspergers or Rett are not real, but all of these are very rare and little is known about them.
Why would single moms need to know distances in photographs any more than married moms?
Married moms tell their husband to do the feat.
I can't believe I replied to this, or that this was moderated up. These marketing lists of people that might find a product useful are rarely surveyed, quantified, or measured, but rather just a product of a brainstorming session.
I guess this software won't make a great gift because the marketing people didn't tell me it would?!?!
Have you actually looked at what Sun is doing these days?
:) And Sun is refinding themselves (if that makes any sense).
Yes
Sun used to only have a few products that were relatively expensive, but very good.
Look at there offerings today. They have _many_ products in all shapes and sizes, and there prices have really come down in price. I've been critical of Sun for years, and they really seem to be adapting to the market by offering everything from an E15k to inexpensive x86 boxes at about commodity prices with better engineering than your COTS junk.
Things like the x4500 are really turning heads (even here on slashdot).
Today's market requires more disposable and inexpensive computers. Why pay $10k for a server today that will last for years, when in 2-3 years it is way outperformed by a $1-2k server? Answering this question took Sun a few years, but now they seem to have answered that question.
"It's the users, not the system!" syndrome
Aren't the users part of "the system" by definition?
I guess they've understood that they cannot beat Microsoft in the corporate environment, so they no longer even try.
Well, another big Apple environment is with the UNIX sysadmin, educational, and research environment.
Basically, smart people that just so happen to gravitate towards Macs and OS X.
Does the US really have no laws protecting consumers from this sort of crap?
Sure, antitrust laws. But all in all, no. The little guys here in the US are getting littler, and it will take a downright revolution to balance the scale.
I'm not trolling, I'm really asking a question to see if there is a good answer.
Is there anything positive to say about Vista? Granted, I'm not a Windows user, and I get my info from slashdot, digg, and standard media outlets, and I saw Gates on the Daily Show, but seriously, is this a bundle of software that has any merit?
I hear about licenses not working. I hear about it being beta quality. I hear about it having OS X like features that just aren't as good. I hear about it ambiently consuming 10-20% of the CPU. I hear about all of the real features like WinFS that were abandoned.
Are there any honest or real positive opinions of this product?
WindowBlinds and ObjectDesktop changes the Windows desktop in large ways - where's your standard GUI there?
The standard GUI, like with OS X*, is the single choice you have when installing the system. In fact, to my knowledge, you don't even have a choice to not install that standard GUI.
There is no standard GUI with Linux or even the need to run a GUI at all.
* I'm unfamiliar with OS X server and what, if any, GUI options are available there.
I think you have fallen into the trap of thinking that Linux is an operating system. It's not. Linux is the kernel.
:) Open source, modular, flexible, runs on everything, fun, new, always new, picky about who its friends with, etc, etc.
Linux is as much of an operating system as Windows, FreeBSD, or OS X.
Yes, to be pedantic, it is a kernel, but nobody boots a kernel and stops there, not even embedded Linux people.
If you want to get really pedantic, Linux is not even a kernel, but a state of mind
Oscars don't come with cheques.
No, but they are kinda like IOUs though, because it helps sell future works.
I used to feel bad for traditional animation since I felt way too much is lost in the transition to 3D.
The thing is that "traditional animation" has been gone for 40-50 years. I'm talking about when the artists actually painted each and every frame. They have been making shortcuts for quite some time with using overlays, repeated backgrounds, CGI, etc.
Although CGI is not as good as it will be, to be honest, its more like "traditional animation" than animation has been in years. The ability to move the camera is a good thing.
They have NO right to single out bittorrent for traffic shaping.
Am I a minority here?
Personally, I want my bittorent shaped. There are so many variables with a torrent, and I cap my upload and download speeds myself so that my other network stuff is still responsive. When I d/l a 1 gig+ download, I don't expect it to be instantanious, but I do expect my web pages to be pretty much instantanious when I'm downloading a torrent or not.
Am I a minority?
Keeping in mind the source (CheckFree, Visa, and WellsFargo)
I recently got a "check" from my credit card for $20. By depositing that check they would automatically enroll me in an identity theft insurance protection plan.
For my convenience, they would bill my credit card (plus interest I assume).
Basically, this is legal fraud.
First, my CC is unsecured credit. If I don't pay, its no big deal aside from them screwing my credit or whatever they do.
My point, is that don't these people want the illusion that ID theft is on the rise so that they can sell this insurance to people?
Stuff like this makes me question humanity.
1) Dells gets paid for placing the bloatware: it keeps the price down and boosts their margins.
2) Lots of people ARE gibbering idiots.
3) Many people have low expectations of PCs
4) They are quite likely to blame software problems on MS anyway.
5) Corporate buyers will do a clean re-install anyway.
6) Home users will probably have the machine just as bloated with malware in a week anyway. The is the reason for 3 above.
All of this is true*. Its sad that there apparently is no profit in a mass produced consumer level PC, and this stems from #3. People still expect computers just to suck because they have for such a long time.
I'm typing this on a Dell, but it is running Linux from a custom standard install by my work. Its a fine computer as far as a Linux machine can be. Personally, I would prefer to have a Mac. I would be more productive, and I just prefer a Mac, but that is a different story.
I attribute the #3 thing to someone who is in an abusive relationship. They know it sucks, they complain about it all the time, but they won't/can't do anything about it because that is all they know.
The thing is that the simple, working days of consumer level products seems to be over. The guys at the top are too worried about staying up there. The customer is always right mantra is a thing of the past. To get quality, you have to get a niche product, and pay a little more for it, and your compatability with the majority of the world is out the window.
* I question #4. From the way I understand it, most people are unable to differentiate between software and hardware, its just a computer, and when they have computer problems, they blame the name on the box, not MS. There simply are not many computer makers today. Gateway is dead. HP has gone psychotic. IBM doesn't really sell consumer level products anymore. Compaq == HP. Sony is, well, Sony. Emachines (yuck) was bought by somebody. Basically, its kind of Dell or Apple, and an Apple is simply not an option for many people because it is percieved as being incompatable or different.
If he wants to do this right, tax them enough that CFLs are the same price on the shelf. (Or are cheaper...) Then people who really need incandescents for something can still buy them without going through buerocracy, but the average user will start noticing that CFLs are the same price on the shelf, and less expensive when used. Then watch people switch.
:) for incandescents for those that really want them. That would be pretty funny.
I vote for this too.
I use CFLs, but not exclusively. There are times when a good old incandescent bulb are simply better, and I would not mind paying more for the few that I use.
I can see the black market (no pun intended
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. This kind of stuff is foreign to me. The key thing is this:
Being that I think it is a trusted site I accecpt the code and bang I am in trouble. You can be smart enough to catch the problem 99% of the time but if you mess up that 1% you could be in trouble.
So, this is what we have been talking about, and this is primarily a Microsoft UI bug which then exploits other "features".
I remember that Windows was _very_ happy to annoy me whenever possible with popup dialog boxes asking me crap all the time. The signal to noise ratio here is apauling. Windows asks you to delete a file, to empty the recycle bin, to shut down, to log off. It yells at you saying you have too much crap on your desktop. After a while, people get sick of it, and just hit "OK".
From what I hear, Vista will annoy the user even more. So, these kinds of issues will be perpetuated.
What a shame. It would be nice if there were a real windows alternative. Not Linux, not OS X, but one that could run all of the windows programs, but had a better UI and better security.
The problem is that under the hood, Windows is such a mess, that this seems impossible. Wine is still unable to do too much after a decade of work. ReactOS will probably never get out of alpha.
Its a shame that MS has been pretty much uncontested for this long. If they were made to make all of their APIs public and standardize their OS, they would have some real competition. But their closed nature, and existing marketshare will never make for a really better computing experience for people, and that is sad.
I am not using IE or windows, so I don't get infested with spyware
Forgive my ignorance here. But is this a reality?
Is using the default web browser on the most popular OS that bad that making a typo will screw your whole computer up?
I knew Windows was bad, but is it really that bad?
If you looked over every benchmark, the new kernel had improved performance in almost every test, save for two of the last three.
I calculated differences in the range of 0.42% to 2.67%
Which in my eye are the same, which is what I would expect.
Also, these tests were on a laptop.
I love benchmarks and all that, but WTF?
FWIW, here http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/opteron/pdf
To be a plot spoiler, they conclude that dual core is a good thing.
this will get really interesting, really fast
Oh, things already have: http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
BTW, why is it that software is the only product where supply and demand and mass production rules don't apply? Everything else that is mass produced comes down in price, software stays the same or gets more expensive.
Isn't the most effective way to "protest" it just not buy, to explain to your friends and workplaces why they shouldn't buy it, and most particularly, to aggressively pursue a refund for any bundled versions that you're forced to buy with hardware?
:)
Not to buy. Have not given MS a dime since 1995.
Explain to friends and workplaces. I cannot recommend MS products over the alternatives. With my friends, I clearly tell them if they are asking my advice, my answer is to buy a Mac. None to date have taken my advice, and they still ask me about "Windows problems" when I politely told them that I don't do windows and that I could not help them with windows problems upfront. Workplaces. They seem to be MS dependant despite years of suggestions to change.
Refund? The principle of the thing is worth more than the money, and for most people, neither is that important to them.
All I can say is that this petition is a day late and a dollar short, but although I have fixed my microsoft problem. I still know plenty of people that don't care or just won't change from the MS problem.
I am _not_ brand loyal/disloyal. I treat all things as generic tools and will use what is best for the job at the current time, and things come and go on my shitlist, and I don't hold a permanant grudge until the company has gone too far. To date, only two companies have made my permanant shitlist, and I have brought one of them to court as well, and neither are Microsoft.
Macs were on my offlist before OS X, but they have seen the light
using currency with intrinsic value, like gold
And what is the intrinsic value of gold if I can make it in a lab for $10/oz?
Sure, fiat currency has it issues and its relatively new, but its a completely arbitrary unit of measure like slashdot karma, casino chips, or whatever that seems OK.
If they award him the prize while he's in space, do US tax laws still apply?
I'm one of those guys that looks for loopholes to get ahead all the time, and believe it or not these government guys actually take care of 99.999% of those loopholes in the laws.
There is probably an importation tax that is greater than the regular one, or something.
Its just like thermodynamics, you can never win.