This looks like a patent for the sort of anti-anti-spam technique that only bugs ISP's, all the more evidence that AT&T is using it to give their IT end (and those of their "friends") another weapon to fight spammers. Individuals can't use this kind of screening, it only works on the mail server level and above. There are plenty of other techniques they use for confusing individuals; heck, considering the USPTO's ineptitude these days someone could probably patent "Method for disguising the commercial nature of e-mail by use of misleading subject lines". Or "Method for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail that does not include the word 'ADV:' in the subject line". Or just patent "Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail" and sue them all.
Yeah, but my point is, when these ridiculous election results start popping up the entire system will be shown to be faulty. If Kevin Mitnick is indeed elected write-in governor of Minnesota then the 5% inflated Bush numbers will be discarded along with everything else. Windows security vulnerabilities didn't suddenly become a big media thing because a terrorist secretly installed an undetectable backdoor program on a top-secret government computer, they became a big media thing because of idiot pre-teen hackers launching big, stupid, obvious attacks.
It's not like this is going to favor Republicans just because the guy running Diebold is a Republican - with security this bad it's open season for everyone. I think the more worrying thing would be if these machines weren't hackable but were iron-clad, then the only backdoors would belong to the guys who wrote the code; instead, the backdoors are wide open to any idiot who wishes to wander in.
If these machines really are hackable then they'll be hacked, and going by the intelligence of your average script kiddie they'll be hacked to such a ridiculous degree that the results will clearly be fake and the judiciary will declare all of these elections invalid. I mean, really, when Kevin Mitnick is mysteriously elected governor of Minnesota in a write-in vote and NORML supporters sweep the legislative elections in nine states, somebody's going to start asking questions...
Here's a radical but not unreasonable idea: let's institute a mandatory federal death penalty for any serious involvement in election fraud.
At first glance this might seem nuts, since after all election fraud is a white-collar crime and it's not like they murdered anyone, but democracies are built and organized on a free and honest vote and it seems to me like any crime against the democratic system is easily the equal of a capital crime like high treason.
If the Diebold brass knew that they could go to the electric chair for stealing votes they might think twice about being so secretive; at the very least, they'd have a hard time convincing employees to keep quiet when their very lives were on the line.
Actually it would be 50 checks, because the bill requires that taxes from multiple jurisdictions in a state be collected on a single form.
And even if the figure is lowered, there are enough companies that cater to small businesses that someone will probably come up with a way to simplify this to everyone; for an additional 1-2% of the gross, Yahoo Store et al might offer a service where they'll take care of the sales tax accounting and filing on your behalf.
Plus, according to the bill, the states are required to compensate "remote sellers" for the costs of implementing these rules for the first few years; if those costs are going to add up to a substantial percentage of the taxes collected from a $50,000/year business (and they are), the states will have no interest in being saddled with the bill for that.
On top of which, the Amazon.com's are concentrated in just a few states, while the mom and pop businesses can be found almost anywhere; any state that isn't home to a lot of huge catalog vendors is going to want to protect its local businesses. Similarly with local politics within a particular state, since the big warehouses and catalog vendors will often be concentrated in a small area around a UPS logistics hub while Gramma Ellie's Arts and Crafts can be almost anywhere.
I own my own small software business, but lucky for me I deal exclusively online and thus far I don't believe any state has been able to tax non-tangible goods... still, even if they did I for one wouldn't be too worried about this.
The logic behind this is that the state where the person lives is generally the one that's losing revenue, since it's assumed that without the online/catalog option people would simply buy from vendors in their own states. Most of the services which sales taxes pay for, education, health, welfare, etc, go to individuals rather than businesses, so it seems reasonable to tax based on your population's spending rather than your business' sales. (though actually it's a lot more complicated than that...)
Of course in a lot of cases states may actually be getting sales tax income they don't deserve, for example in small states like Rhode Island that may not have a lot of stores of their own (when I was living there, at least half of my non-necessity purchases were from Massachusetts) or in a large and high-tax city like NYC or Chicago (almost 9% in each) that's near the border to a state with lower taxes. Those places have the most to benefit from this, since they may potentially be recovering taxes that they wouldn't be earning anyway, while "strip mall" states like New Jersey will be less happy about this.
That's just bad economic sense. The effect of higher sales taxes is to penalize spending and encourage savings; the rich who save and invest their money instead of frittering it away pay less tax than the ones with expensive tastes, and same goes for the less rich. 20% of a $300,000 sports car is enough for even the rich to notice.
This already exists, more or less, in the form of the Toshiba HopBit. And I think that Toshiba's smarter than Intel in positioning their personal server as an accessory for PDA's rather than as a replacement for them. A box with no screen doesn't have very much sex appeal, and people like to be able to access information on the go, so people will probably buy these things mostly to serve as video storage for their Tungsten T's and iPaqs.
The pirate disk sellers would never go along with any kind of reporting or POS system; they live in constant fear of being busted or shut down, and it would be almost impossible to convince them that this device wasn't some kind of PSB trick to accumulate evidence against them.
But yes, the factories churning out CD's most definitely do know what's popular, and the agents who keep the stands with the old ladies stocked have a pretty good idea about it too. That part of the article is a mischaracterization, anyway; a lot of the sellers now are young men from the countryside who may not have a spectacularly strong grasp of popular music but who do at least pay attention to what sells and what doesn't. (half the time they'll be competing with seven other guys for the customer's attention, and they don't want to be plugging something that she's not interested in)
This is actually a rather distorted figure. Most urban Chinese have a considerably higher income than this; in Beijing the average per capita figure last year exceeded $1500, and considering that a large percentage of them own their homes (or live in state-owned ones), that basic necessities like food and household goods cost much much less there than in the US, and that most of them don't own cars, in terms of lifestyle they're at least on par with lower class US urban dwellers. If the prices stayed at a reasonable $3 or so, an awful lot of Chinese could easily afford to buy legitimate CD's.
Re:Gould: The millenium started on Jan 1, 2000
on
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
He actually had a pretty good argument for the scientific types, too: the first century only had 99 years. Simple enough, no?
I said "just about". And it's difficult to call Hawking a "geek", anyway; brilliant, yes, scientist, yes, wacky, no. Hawking's more of a stuffy academic, while Gould was the sort of guy who would spend months and years on a lush tropical island paying more attention to snail shells than to the scenery and/or island girls. And Hawking bet magazine subscriptions with his professional rivals, while Gould went on CNN and wrote scathing editorials attacking his (Dawkins, the creationists, et al). Gould is the Linux to Hawking's BSD.
Having met him briefly (signed my copy of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" and joked to me about dollars per pound and how dull it was) and sat in on many of his lectures, I have to say he was a fascinating guy. His class was often as amusingly off-topic as his Natural History articles, but he could talk about almost anything and make it sound interesting. And he's just about the only science geek to ever get his own Simpsons character... He'll be missed at Harvard, anyway; in a year when we've already lost half a dozen stellar faculty members to Princeton and Columbia, this was the last thing we needed now.
We may be behind Europe in some ways, but one area in which we are more established is that of judicial review. For that reason I think that if and when this issue comes up, public dissent and the blatant illegality of this tax would compel the courts to throw it out. (you can complain about the Supreme Court in Gore v. Bush, but that was something of direct importance to the Court's members - on almost any other matter the fact that they're appointed for life makes them much better removed from the influence of Hilary "I'm A Dumb F*cking Bi+ch" Rosen and Jack "The Non-Linux Gimp" Valenti).
There's a difference between the OJ case and this. In OJ's case, he had ALREADY been responsible for the deaths of Nicole and Ron and was paying DAMAGES in the established manner, making up for the mistake he'd already made. This is a simple tax; taxes aren't punitive, they're levied either to collect general government revenue or to connect revenue associated with some specific activity which offsets the cost of supporting that activity. For example, gasoline taxes which help pay for road maintenance, cigarette taxes which help pay for the cost of treating smokers, etcetera. Taxes like this make up for the cost of a given activity to society by requiring those who participate in that activity to contribute a greater share of the cost than those who do not.
The upshot of this is that, in my non-accredited opinion, you could indeed make a valid legal case that since you were being required to pay a tax on this activity that constituted a tacit acknowledgement by the government authorities of that activity's legality. Now the judge probably wouldn't suddenly tell you copyright infringement is legal, but he might have a problem with the legitimacy of the tax, particularly if it was actually going to compensate the copyright holders. You can't bill somebody for something you're not giving them...
Re:I think I've got it...
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
Wait, no, personal non-liquid-propellant jetpack sounds better. That could actually be less than $2k and could fit in a few duffel bags.
Yeah, that's it. This seriously would be bigger than the web - not only does it make transportation incredibly easy, think of the kind of weird fun you can have with this! Voyeurism! Mid-air sex without the surrounding airplane! Dropping things on people! Hell, Ultimate Frisbee would have to become Ultimate Ultimate Frisbee.
I think I've got it...
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
We know it's a transportation device, since robotic dogs already exist. Teleportation might be possible someday, but there's no way he's made this kind of step in quantum mechanics, so it's not that. Electric cars and fuel-cell cars are already well-known, though I suppose he might have some alternate transportation method, but I think that "this might change the way cities are designed" points to a Wired article I saw a few years ago about the hovercar. The one I read about had four small turbine engines and VTOL; it got something like 300 miles to a tank of gas (or a few other possible fuel types) and sounded pretty impressive, possibly revolutionary. Initial price was supposed to be $1mil, but it was expected to come down.
Does this sound possible?
Sure, sure it will, just like it killed demand for mod chips. And even if it did kill demand, the fact that this is "not to complicated to build" would mean that plans to build them would be pretty easy to obtain and coerce an EE student friend into executing.
The DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention impossible to enforce without turning America into a police state, it will probably die in its first real legal challenge (whenever that comes) and while it certainly reflects a disturbing trend it's not that much of a threat itself.
Honestly, these sorts of laws are, by their very nature, impossible to enforce; I bet there's not a single person reading this posting who, given ten minutes and a T1, couldn't find a perfectly functional copy of Photoshop 6. Let alone Napster... you need only look at Prohibition to see that unpopular laws with mass oppositition can never be effectively enforced.
You guys are forgetting something about timeshifting - NBC et al want us to be able to timeshift programs, they just want us to watch the commercials along with them. Why would any TV network deliberately prevent some people from being able to watch their shows?
I think (or at least, I hope) that once broadband gets to be more mainstream, the TV networks will start putting their star shows online using some sort of reasonably-restricted streaming format that forces you to watch commercials (which really aren't that bad) but lets you watch any episode you want, any time you want. I'm sure that Fox knows about the Simpsons collections floating around Hotline by now, but if they've got any brains whatsoever they'll realize that instead of shutting this sort of thing down they should try to satisfy the obvious need for on-demand Simpsons reruns with a nice, high-quality, fully legit method.
And as for hard drive encryption, that movement seems to be founded in the mistaken belief that the media somehow controls the computer hardware industry. Software companies do that, and if even Microsoft is smart enough to see the stupidity of hard drive copy protection then I can't imagine it'll find much support (Microsoft's.NET model, while only slightly less evil, makes far more practical sense and is, as an added bonus, much easier to hack). Look at PalmOS shareware registration; early on a few people tried to key their programs to hardware serial numbers, but it was far more trouble than it was worth. And then there's Intel's Processor ID fiasco...
The point is, they have tried this crap before and they've usually failed; the people these systems are designed to hurt most (namely, us) are the ones who are the most willing and the most able to inconvenience themselves slightly to circumvent them. Most of the people who care about import DVD's know where to go for jumper-hacking instructions or region-free players, and most of the people who are so desperate to play Final Fantasy 9 six months early that they're willing to play it in Japanese know exactly where to go to get their mod chips.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like a patent for the sort of anti-anti-spam technique that only bugs ISP's, all the more evidence that AT&T is using it to give their IT end (and those of their "friends") another weapon to fight spammers. Individuals can't use this kind of screening, it only works on the mail server level and above. There are plenty of other techniques they use for confusing individuals; heck, considering the USPTO's ineptitude these days someone could probably patent "Method for disguising the commercial nature of e-mail by use of misleading subject lines". Or "Method for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail that does not include the word 'ADV:' in the subject line". Or just patent "Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail" and sue them all.
Yeah, but my point is, when these ridiculous election results start popping up the entire system will be shown to be faulty. If Kevin Mitnick is indeed elected write-in governor of Minnesota then the 5% inflated Bush numbers will be discarded along with everything else. Windows security vulnerabilities didn't suddenly become a big media thing because a terrorist secretly installed an undetectable backdoor program on a top-secret government computer, they became a big media thing because of idiot pre-teen hackers launching big, stupid, obvious attacks.
It's not like this is going to favor Republicans just because the guy running Diebold is a Republican - with security this bad it's open season for everyone. I think the more worrying thing would be if these machines weren't hackable but were iron-clad, then the only backdoors would belong to the guys who wrote the code; instead, the backdoors are wide open to any idiot who wishes to wander in.
If these machines really are hackable then they'll be hacked, and going by the intelligence of your average script kiddie they'll be hacked to such a ridiculous degree that the results will clearly be fake and the judiciary will declare all of these elections invalid. I mean, really, when Kevin Mitnick is mysteriously elected governor of Minnesota in a write-in vote and NORML supporters sweep the legislative elections in nine states, somebody's going to start asking questions...
Here's a radical but not unreasonable idea: let's institute a mandatory federal death penalty for any serious involvement in election fraud.
At first glance this might seem nuts, since after all election fraud is a white-collar crime and it's not like they murdered anyone, but democracies are built and organized on a free and honest vote and it seems to me like any crime against the democratic system is easily the equal of a capital crime like high treason.
If the Diebold brass knew that they could go to the electric chair for stealing votes they might think twice about being so secretive; at the very least, they'd have a hard time convincing employees to keep quiet when their very lives were on the line.
Easy: you-hahng-yooan
Actually it would be 50 checks, because the bill requires that taxes from multiple jurisdictions in a state be collected on a single form.
And even if the figure is lowered, there are enough companies that cater to small businesses that someone will probably come up with a way to simplify this to everyone; for an additional 1-2% of the gross, Yahoo Store et al might offer a service where they'll take care of the sales tax accounting and filing on your behalf.
Plus, according to the bill, the states are required to compensate "remote sellers" for the costs of implementing these rules for the first few years; if those costs are going to add up to a substantial percentage of the taxes collected from a $50,000/year business (and they are), the states will have no interest in being saddled with the bill for that.
On top of which, the Amazon.com's are concentrated in just a few states, while the mom and pop businesses can be found almost anywhere; any state that isn't home to a lot of huge catalog vendors is going to want to protect its local businesses. Similarly with local politics within a particular state, since the big warehouses and catalog vendors will often be concentrated in a small area around a UPS logistics hub while Gramma Ellie's Arts and Crafts can be almost anywhere.
I own my own small software business, but lucky for me I deal exclusively online and thus far I don't believe any state has been able to tax non-tangible goods... still, even if they did I for one wouldn't be too worried about this.
The logic behind this is that the state where the person lives is generally the one that's losing revenue, since it's assumed that without the online/catalog option people would simply buy from vendors in their own states. Most of the services which sales taxes pay for, education, health, welfare, etc, go to individuals rather than businesses, so it seems reasonable to tax based on your population's spending rather than your business' sales. (though actually it's a lot more complicated than that...)
Of course in a lot of cases states may actually be getting sales tax income they don't deserve, for example in small states like Rhode Island that may not have a lot of stores of their own (when I was living there, at least half of my non-necessity purchases were from Massachusetts) or in a large and high-tax city like NYC or Chicago (almost 9% in each) that's near the border to a state with lower taxes. Those places have the most to benefit from this, since they may potentially be recovering taxes that they wouldn't be earning anyway, while "strip mall" states like New Jersey will be less happy about this.
That's just bad economic sense. The effect of higher sales taxes is to penalize spending and encourage savings; the rich who save and invest their money instead of frittering it away pay less tax than the ones with expensive tastes, and same goes for the less rich. 20% of a $300,000 sports car is enough for even the rich to notice.
This already exists, more or less, in the form of the Toshiba HopBit. And I think that Toshiba's smarter than Intel in positioning their personal server as an accessory for PDA's rather than as a replacement for them. A box with no screen doesn't have very much sex appeal, and people like to be able to access information on the go, so people will probably buy these things mostly to serve as video storage for their Tungsten T's and iPaqs.
The pirate disk sellers would never go along with any kind of reporting or POS system; they live in constant fear of being busted or shut down, and it would be almost impossible to convince them that this device wasn't some kind of PSB trick to accumulate evidence against them.
But yes, the factories churning out CD's most definitely do know what's popular, and the agents who keep the stands with the old ladies stocked have a pretty good idea about it too. That part of the article is a mischaracterization, anyway; a lot of the sellers now are young men from the countryside who may not have a spectacularly strong grasp of popular music but who do at least pay attention to what sells and what doesn't. (half the time they'll be competing with seven other guys for the customer's attention, and they don't want to be plugging something that she's not interested in)
This is actually a rather distorted figure. Most urban Chinese have a considerably higher income than this; in Beijing the average per capita figure last year exceeded $1500, and considering that a large percentage of them own their homes (or live in state-owned ones), that basic necessities like food and household goods cost much much less there than in the US, and that most of them don't own cars, in terms of lifestyle they're at least on par with lower class US urban dwellers. If the prices stayed at a reasonable $3 or so, an awful lot of Chinese could easily afford to buy legitimate CD's.
He actually had a pretty good argument for the scientific types, too: the first century only had 99 years. Simple enough, no?
I said "just about". And it's difficult to call Hawking a "geek", anyway; brilliant, yes, scientist, yes, wacky, no. Hawking's more of a stuffy academic, while Gould was the sort of guy who would spend months and years on a lush tropical island paying more attention to snail shells than to the scenery and/or island girls. And Hawking bet magazine subscriptions with his professional rivals, while Gould went on CNN and wrote scathing editorials attacking his (Dawkins, the creationists, et al). Gould is the Linux to Hawking's BSD.
Having met him briefly (signed my copy of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" and joked to me about dollars per pound and how dull it was) and sat in on many of his lectures, I have to say he was a fascinating guy. His class was often as amusingly off-topic as his Natural History articles, but he could talk about almost anything and make it sound interesting. And he's just about the only science geek to ever get his own Simpsons character... He'll be missed at Harvard, anyway; in a year when we've already lost half a dozen stellar faculty members to Princeton and Columbia, this was the last thing we needed now.
We may be behind Europe in some ways, but one area in which we are more established is that of judicial review. For that reason I think that if and when this issue comes up, public dissent and the blatant illegality of this tax would compel the courts to throw it out. (you can complain about the Supreme Court in Gore v. Bush, but that was something of direct importance to the Court's members - on almost any other matter the fact that they're appointed for life makes them much better removed from the influence of Hilary "I'm A Dumb F*cking Bi+ch" Rosen and Jack "The Non-Linux Gimp" Valenti).
The upshot of this is that, in my non-accredited opinion, you could indeed make a valid legal case that since you were being required to pay a tax on this activity that constituted a tacit acknowledgement by the government authorities of that activity's legality. Now the judge probably wouldn't suddenly tell you copyright infringement is legal, but he might have a problem with the legitimacy of the tax, particularly if it was actually going to compensate the copyright holders. You can't bill somebody for something you're not giving them...
Yeah, that's it. This seriously would be bigger than the web - not only does it make transportation incredibly easy, think of the kind of weird fun you can have with this! Voyeurism! Mid-air sex without the surrounding airplane! Dropping things on people! Hell, Ultimate Frisbee would have to become Ultimate Ultimate Frisbee.
We know it's a transportation device, since robotic dogs already exist. Teleportation might be possible someday, but there's no way he's made this kind of step in quantum mechanics, so it's not that. Electric cars and fuel-cell cars are already well-known, though I suppose he might have some alternate transportation method, but I think that "this might change the way cities are designed" points to a Wired article I saw a few years ago about the hovercar. The one I read about had four small turbine engines and VTOL; it got something like 300 miles to a tank of gas (or a few other possible fuel types) and sounded pretty impressive, possibly revolutionary. Initial price was supposed to be $1mil, but it was expected to come down. Does this sound possible?
The DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention impossible to enforce without turning America into a police state, it will probably die in its first real legal challenge (whenever that comes) and while it certainly reflects a disturbing trend it's not that much of a threat itself.
Honestly, these sorts of laws are, by their very nature, impossible to enforce; I bet there's not a single person reading this posting who, given ten minutes and a T1, couldn't find a perfectly functional copy of Photoshop 6. Let alone Napster... you need only look at Prohibition to see that unpopular laws with mass oppositition can never be effectively enforced.
I think (or at least, I hope) that once broadband gets to be more mainstream, the TV networks will start putting their star shows online using some sort of reasonably-restricted streaming format that forces you to watch commercials (which really aren't that bad) but lets you watch any episode you want, any time you want. I'm sure that Fox knows about the Simpsons collections floating around Hotline by now, but if they've got any brains whatsoever they'll realize that instead of shutting this sort of thing down they should try to satisfy the obvious need for on-demand Simpsons reruns with a nice, high-quality, fully legit method.
And as for hard drive encryption, that movement seems to be founded in the mistaken belief that the media somehow controls the computer hardware industry. Software companies do that, and if even Microsoft is smart enough to see the stupidity of hard drive copy protection then I can't imagine it'll find much support (Microsoft's .NET model, while only slightly less evil, makes far more practical sense and is, as an added bonus, much easier to hack). Look at PalmOS shareware registration; early on a few people tried to key their programs to hardware serial numbers, but it was far more trouble than it was worth. And then there's Intel's Processor ID fiasco...
The point is, they have tried this crap before and they've usually failed; the people these systems are designed to hurt most (namely, us) are the ones who are the most willing and the most able to inconvenience themselves slightly to circumvent them. Most of the people who care about import DVD's know where to go for jumper-hacking instructions or region-free players, and most of the people who are so desperate to play Final Fantasy 9 six months early that they're willing to play it in Japanese know exactly where to go to get their mod chips.