Yeah. I don't know if you have ever taken an accounting class, much less a tax class. IRS opinions are generally treated as law unless and until overturned by a court.
Your point about semantics and the word proof is understood. Of course, you are conflating proof in a mathematical sense with scientific proof. Scientific theories are proven repeatedly, when testable predictions are confirmed. (This is the traditional use of the word in science) They can still be disproven, but scientific proof is very different than mathematical proof. Of course, proof in the common sense meaning of the word is a completely different idea, and yet a third thing. If you're going to make semantic points, make sure the words you use are the ones you want. "Proof" is a bad one to pick apart semantically, because there are a couple different meaning depending on context and meaning. (Yes, in the same context, the same word can mean 2 different things. That's language for you.)
Of course, you then stop making sense. One CAN understand science. See many comments of Feynman about just that point.You may think you are a scientist, but you seem to think about science a hell of a lot like an engineer.
The key issue would be to define "similar." The courts will define it as the same good as purchased in a store, not as the value of a different product. Courts are reasonable in cases like this, and interpret intent, to some extent at least. I think it is clear here, as badly phrased as it was, that "similar" was intended to mean the same item in a different format, not similar in the colloquial sense.
Wrong. You need to pay taxes on illegally gotten money. This is clear in the law, and there is no issue at all. Al Capone was nabbed for tax evasion on the money he earned illegally. And you downloaded a song, possibly in an encrypted format. If the data you got is intended to be re-assembled into a product with a value, you acquired it.
If you don't know what you're talking about, don't.
Damn it. I accidentally moderated this as underrated instead of overrated, and can't change it (Bad UI design.) This wastes the point, but at least it removes the moderation.
Wrong. It costs money to receive text messages, and you pay for the minutes on the phone whether you are calling, or being called.
I don't understand why, but that is the way it works here. We should not live in a place where capitalism is understood as see how you can screw people by making it impossible to do anything about the current system, and neutering the FTC and Justice department by upward revisions of the concentration needed for industries to be considered monopolistic, or ogliopolistic. Also, where they have skew the legal stem so that only the rich can afford to use it to redress grievances, and obfuscate the law so that the average citizen cannot tell whether what companies do is legal, and then misinform them by having industry shills write the textbooks used in classrooms to teach economics and social studies.
You better not be the bastard who keeps crashing our server becuase they decided that FF3 was a better idea than IE, even though it crashed the server every time FF is used to access the web-based application, the one bough from a third party that has been rolled out internally on our systems, used globally by hundreds of users, and won't get this bug fixed for months.
Why does noone take a break between jobs - tell the new job you'll start in a month, and go to the beach. Or skiing. Of just play D&D for a couple weeks straight. Whatever.
And if you tell me that you need a paycheck to pay the mortgage, electric bill, or whatever, you aren't being fiscally responsible having no safety buffer. If you think that it doesn't matter unless something goes wrong, well, your life sucks more that it needs to because you aren't taking the vacation.
The problem with saying that people get their ideas about what the government does from movies is that the underlying assumption is that the government doesn't get them from the same place.
Items with high capital costs don't work well as "open source;" basically, the manufacturing plants costs so many billions of dollars that no one who isn't doing proprietary work could afford it. Even if you could open source chip design (a dicey proposition, since there are many fewer EE Phds that want to donate time than there are CS Phds,) there are still difficulties with the actual manufacturing, and we would still need to guarantee the physical chips, which are individual, and cannot be "re-compiled;" if you think there may be an issue with a batch, you can't start over without paying for new chips.
Maybe, however, I am missing something about the procedure you are proposing; what parts would be open source?
I would assume that for governmental fines, the goal isn't to compensate the owners, it is to penalize the perpetrators. This is true because the government is simply trying to disincentify these behaviors. If people stop cutting the cables, the problem is solved, therefor the fine should be in proportion to profit margins in the shipping industry to dissuade them, not in proportion to the damage caused, unless negligence or malicious intent can be presumed a priori.
The difference can be paid in civil court, if the owners of the cable wish to pursue it.
Also, answer the question. More important than politeness is what you respond to. Maybe our discussion here on Slashdot could even center around the actual issues they are considering. (And by the way, Point 1 probably means "we don't care about out of state, ill-informed public opinion, only about those who either have qualifications, or vested interests because they interact with this state government.")
With those caveats in mind, please respond to the following general questions:
1. Contact Information: Please provide name, organizational affiliation if any, and means for contacting you (e.g. e-mail address, street address, phone number). Contact information collected in Question 1 will not be displayed on a public website.
2. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York establish for accessing and reading its electronic records in order to encourage public access to those records?
3. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York establish for accessing and reading its electronic records to encourage interoperability and data sharing with citizens, business partners and other jurisdictions?
4. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York implement to encourage appropriate government control of its electronic records?
5. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York consider for encouraging choice and vendor neutrality when creating, maintaining, exchanging and preserving its electronic records?
6. Are there mechanisms and processes the State of New York should establish that are specific to the management of its electronic records in its various life cycle stages (creation, maintenance, exchange, preservation and disposal)?
7. How should the State address the long term preservation of its electronic records? What should the State consider regarding public access to such archived content?
8. What changes, if any, should be made to the government records management provisions in New York Statutes? (Please reference those laws which are cited here: http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/records/mr_laws.shtml).
9. What constraints and benefits should the State of New York consider regarding the costs of implementing a comprehensive plan for managing its electronic records?
10. What should the State of New York consider regarding the management of highly specialized data formats such as CAD, digital imaging, Geographic Information Systems and multimedia?
11. What constraints and benefits should the State of New York consider regarding potential savings or additional costs associated with the management of defined electronic record formats?
12. What existing policies and procedures in the private or public sector for the management of electronic records would be appropriate for the State of New York to examine? Please cite specific examples.
13. Are New York State's existing standards, regulations and guidelines regarding records management adequate to meet the challenges of electronic records retention? How should these standards, regulations and guidelines be changed?
14. What else should the State of New York consider about this subject?
Does anyone pay attention to how much money has been put into an astroturfing campaign to "prove" that doctors are going under because of malpractice? Did anyone notice that insurance companies donate literally billions of dollars to campaigns over the past decades to get this passed?
"The Bush administration largely gets it backwards, they say health care is expensive because of lawsuits. I say lawsuits are expensive because of our health care system." William M. Sage, Columbia University law professor and physician.
Why legislate? I suspect it is the only way to change the behavior of large numbers of people. Morality is a meme which has been largely supplanted in todays culture, because of our shallow education and understanding. Basically, people really think that morality is a completely negative personal trait, so that the only real ethic is "don't get caught," or at least balance the reward and the risk - being a person who doesn't violate a code of ethics isn't valued in itself, so morality is legislated (which is never a good idea, and rarely even is effective.)
A central finding of modern game theory is that a group is frequently better off following certain types of morality. Religion and societal norms once filled this function, but with the advances we have seen, these have largely fallen by the wayside. Currently, we have an environment falling apart and a government that is unresponsive to its citizens, but so few people are willing to do anything but locally maximize their utility that any change is unreasonable. If we want changes in copyright law, or limitations on corporate power, or anything else in the public realm, one of the central concerns should be understanding and teaching while morality is important, even in absence of god, or even a society that values it.
Behavior changes when we need it to, and this is about as important an issue as exists right now. Stealing from musicians or Hollywood is externalizing the costs of entertainment, and leaving the producers with less motivation for making quality entertainment. The personal costs of not having integrity are much higher than the costs of the music and movies that are pirated, but our consumerist society doesn't tend to recognize that fact. An understanding of ethical theory would be a good start towards changing norms without coercive legislation.
Actually, I've never had a problem getting a meeting with my representative - have you ever tried to do so? It would be a shame if you were just talking out of you ass...
I'd go one better - What percentage of jobs fail to Google names when they hire? It might be difficult to get a job when you are famous for trying to drink underage. She'll have a hell of a time if she wants a job anywhere that wants responsible employees. She ruined her own life, and I'm only a little sorry.
It's an interesting idea - but from by time at Givat Ra'am, it's not true. (Givat Ra'am is the technical campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem) There are more male CS majors than female, though by a smaller margin than here in the US (by which I mean only 2 or 3 to one - it's not like here, where they barely exist at many schools.)
We tend to judge a system by its failures, not its successes. In this case, we judge a group by how it treats members least able to protect itself. With this metric, the US does about average for the world - worse than most industrial countries, better than most countries overall. This is sad given that we are the richest country in the world.
You are, however, correct. This post in no way refutes the near-incoherent rant made in the anti-communist post. We should defer to the social theorists on this one - there is mounting evidence that increasing GDP above third world conditions widens the income gap, rather than narrowing it. This means that the poorest people are less able to afford the basics. (Yes, in Africa it is possible to live well off of $5/day, but in the US it is not. We see that the income gap, and not the actual income, is in fact the point to be considered. Absolute wealth is mostly irrelevant for the bottom 10% - it doesn't matter that the food you can't pay for is healthier.)
Actually, ussually they need a warrant. They may have a warrant to seize your computer. It happens. They may have one to seize records on site. But unless you're actually making the child porn, they won't have such a huge amount of time to waste on the insignificant portion of the case that you make up. And if it's the RIAA, they definitely don't have the resources to be doing the type of shadowing you're worried about for a music infringement case.
You could install a copy of windows 98 with a couple worms and viruses, that looks somewhat used - then you could also claim that the internet access wasn't your fault either!
And of course, if you're not backing up your files (the ones you work on) on something if you are planning to use a mechanism to wipe your disk, you deserve to lose the work. And if you're trading kiddie porn, prison is too good for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I don't know if you have ever taken an accounting class, much less a tax class. IRS opinions are generally treated as law unless and until overturned by a court.
Your point about semantics and the word proof is understood. Of course, you are conflating proof in a mathematical sense with scientific proof. Scientific theories are proven repeatedly, when testable predictions are confirmed. (This is the traditional use of the word in science) They can still be disproven, but scientific proof is very different than mathematical proof. Of course, proof in the common sense meaning of the word is a completely different idea, and yet a third thing. If you're going to make semantic points, make sure the words you use are the ones you want. "Proof" is a bad one to pick apart semantically, because there are a couple different meaning depending on context and meaning. (Yes, in the same context, the same word can mean 2 different things. That's language for you.)
Of course, you then stop making sense. One CAN understand science. See many comments of Feynman about just that point.You may think you are a scientist, but you seem to think about science a hell of a lot like an engineer.
In economics, we would call windows a "bad."
The key issue would be to define "similar." The courts will define it as the same good as purchased in a store, not as the value of a different product. Courts are reasonable in cases like this, and interpret intent, to some extent at least. I think it is clear here, as badly phrased as it was, that "similar" was intended to mean the same item in a different format, not similar in the colloquial sense.
Wrong. You need to pay taxes on illegally gotten money. This is clear in the law, and there is no issue at all. Al Capone was nabbed for tax evasion on the money he earned illegally. And you downloaded a song, possibly in an encrypted format. If the data you got is intended to be re-assembled into a product with a value, you acquired it.
If you don't know what you're talking about, don't.
Feel free to vote to ban this user:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/5326-4049
Also, feel free to tell him to stop.
His email address is davecreacrea@gmail.com
(see http://davecreacrea.newsvine.com/ and
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/28707/ )
Damn it. I accidentally moderated this as underrated instead of overrated, and can't change it (Bad UI design.) This wastes the point, but at least it removes the moderation.
Wrong. It costs money to receive text messages, and you pay for the minutes on the phone whether you are calling, or being called.
I don't understand why, but that is the way it works here. We should not live in a place where capitalism is understood as see how you can screw people by making it impossible to do anything about the current system, and neutering the FTC and Justice department by upward revisions of the concentration needed for industries to be considered monopolistic, or ogliopolistic. Also, where they have skew the legal stem so that only the rich can afford to use it to redress grievances, and obfuscate the law so that the average citizen cannot tell whether what companies do is legal, and then misinform them by having industry shills write the textbooks used in classrooms to teach economics and social studies.
You better not be the bastard who keeps crashing our server becuase they decided that FF3 was a better idea than IE, even though it crashed the server every time FF is used to access the web-based application, the one bough from a third party that has been rolled out internally on our systems, used globally by hundreds of users, and won't get this bug fixed for months.
So no, no need to thank you at all.
Stupid goddamn users.
Fact: You are wrong.
Why does noone take a break between jobs - tell the new job you'll start in a month, and go to the beach. Or skiing. Of just play D&D for a couple weeks straight. Whatever.
And if you tell me that you need a paycheck to pay the mortgage, electric bill, or whatever, you aren't being fiscally responsible having no safety buffer. If you think that it doesn't matter unless something goes wrong, well, your life sucks more that it needs to because you aren't taking the vacation.
The problem with saying that people get their ideas about what the government does from movies is that the underlying assumption is that the government doesn't get them from the same place.
Items with high capital costs don't work well as "open source;" basically, the manufacturing plants costs so many billions of dollars that no one who isn't doing proprietary work could afford it. Even if you could open source chip design (a dicey proposition, since there are many fewer EE Phds that want to donate time than there are CS Phds,) there are still difficulties with the actual manufacturing, and we would still need to guarantee the physical chips, which are individual, and cannot be "re-compiled;" if you think there may be an issue with a batch, you can't start over without paying for new chips.
Maybe, however, I am missing something about the procedure you are proposing; what parts would be open source?
I would assume that for governmental fines, the goal isn't to compensate the owners, it is to penalize the perpetrators. This is true because the government is simply trying to disincentify these behaviors. If people stop cutting the cables, the problem is solved, therefor the fine should be in proportion to profit margins in the shipping industry to dissuade them, not in proportion to the damage caused, unless negligence or malicious intent can be presumed a priori.
The difference can be paid in civil court, if the owners of the cable wish to pursue it.
Also, answer the question. More important than politeness is what you respond to. Maybe our discussion here on Slashdot could even center around the actual issues they are considering. (And by the way, Point 1 probably means "we don't care about out of state, ill-informed public opinion, only about those who either have qualifications, or vested interests because they interact with this state government.")
(And the correct url is http://www.oft.state.ny.us/News/erecords-study.htm)
From the site:
With those caveats in mind, please respond to the following general questions:
1. Contact Information: Please provide name, organizational affiliation if any, and means for contacting you (e.g. e-mail address, street address, phone number). Contact information collected in Question 1 will not be displayed on a public website.
2. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York establish for accessing and reading its electronic records in order to encourage public access to those records?
3. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York establish for accessing and reading its electronic records to encourage interoperability and data sharing with citizens, business partners and other jurisdictions?
4. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York implement to encourage appropriate government control of its electronic records?
5. What mechanisms and processes should the State of New York consider for encouraging choice and vendor neutrality when creating, maintaining, exchanging and preserving its electronic records?
6. Are there mechanisms and processes the State of New York should establish that are specific to the management of its electronic records in its various life cycle stages (creation, maintenance, exchange, preservation and disposal)?
7. How should the State address the long term preservation of its electronic records? What should the State consider regarding public access to such archived content?
8. What changes, if any, should be made to the government records management provisions in New York Statutes? (Please reference those laws which are cited here: http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/records/mr_laws.shtml).
9. What constraints and benefits should the State of New York consider regarding the costs of implementing a comprehensive plan for managing its electronic records?
10. What should the State of New York consider regarding the management of highly specialized data formats such as CAD, digital imaging, Geographic Information Systems and multimedia?
11. What constraints and benefits should the State of New York consider regarding potential savings or additional costs associated with the management of defined electronic record formats?
12. What existing policies and procedures in the private or public sector for the management of electronic records would be appropriate for the State of New York to examine? Please cite specific examples.
13. Are New York State's existing standards, regulations and guidelines regarding records management adequate to meet the challenges of electronic records retention? How should these standards, regulations and guidelines be changed?
14. What else should the State of New York consider about this subject?
No personal vested interest - but where is the revert log? what is the article?
Does anyone pay attention to how much money has been put into an astroturfing campaign to "prove" that doctors are going under because of malpractice? Did anyone notice that insurance companies donate literally billions of dollars to campaigns over the past decades to get this passed?
"The Bush administration largely gets it backwards, they say health care is expensive because of lawsuits. I say lawsuits are expensive because of our health care system." William M. Sage, Columbia University law professor and physician.
Why legislate? I suspect it is the only way to change the behavior of large numbers of people.
Morality is a meme which has been largely supplanted in todays culture, because of our shallow education and understanding. Basically, people really think that morality is a completely negative personal trait, so that the only real ethic is "don't get caught," or at least balance the reward and the risk - being a person who doesn't violate a code of ethics isn't valued in itself, so morality is legislated (which is never a good idea, and rarely even is effective.)
A central finding of modern game theory is that a group is frequently better off following certain types of morality. Religion and societal norms once filled this function, but with the advances we have seen, these have largely fallen by the wayside. Currently, we have an environment falling apart and a government that is unresponsive to its citizens, but so few people are willing to do anything but locally maximize their utility that any change is unreasonable. If we want changes in copyright law, or limitations on corporate power, or anything else in the public realm, one of the central concerns should be understanding and teaching while morality is important, even in absence of god, or even a society that values it.
Behavior changes when we need it to, and this is about as important an issue as exists right now. Stealing from musicians or Hollywood is externalizing the costs of entertainment, and leaving the producers with less motivation for making quality entertainment. The personal costs of not having integrity are much higher than the costs of the music and movies that are pirated, but our consumerist society doesn't tend to recognize that fact. An understanding of ethical theory would be a good start towards changing norms without coercive legislation.
Actually, I've never had a problem getting a meeting with my representative - have you ever tried to do so? It would be a shame if you were just talking out of you ass...
I'd go one better - What percentage of jobs fail to Google names when they hire? It might be difficult to get a job when you are famous for trying to drink underage. She'll have a hell of a time if she wants a job anywhere that wants responsible employees. She ruined her own life, and I'm only a little sorry.
It's an interesting idea - but from by time at Givat Ra'am, it's not true. (Givat Ra'am is the technical campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem) There are more male CS majors than female, though by a smaller margin than here in the US (by which I mean only 2 or 3 to one - it's not like here, where they barely exist at many schools.)
We tend to judge a system by its failures, not its successes. In this case, we judge a group by how it treats members least able to protect itself. With this metric, the US does about average for the world - worse than most industrial countries, better than most countries overall. This is sad given that we are the richest country in the world.
You are, however, correct. This post in no way refutes the near-incoherent rant made in the anti-communist post. We should defer to the social theorists on this one - there is mounting evidence that increasing GDP above third world conditions widens the income gap, rather than narrowing it. This means that the poorest people are less able to afford the basics.
(Yes, in Africa it is possible to live well off of $5/day, but in the US it is not. We see that the income gap, and not the actual income, is in fact the point to be considered. Absolute wealth is mostly irrelevant for the bottom 10% - it doesn't matter that the food you can't pay for is healthier.)
Actually, ussually they need a warrant. They may have a warrant to seize your computer. It happens. They may have one to seize records on site. But unless you're actually making the child porn, they won't have such a huge amount of time to waste on the insignificant portion of the case that you make up. And if it's the RIAA, they definitely don't have the resources to be doing the type of shadowing you're worried about for a music infringement case.
You could install a copy of windows 98 with a couple worms and viruses, that looks somewhat used - then you could also claim that the internet access wasn't your fault either!
And of course, if you're not backing up your files (the ones you work on) on something if you are planning to use a mechanism to wipe your disk, you deserve to lose the work. And if you're trading kiddie porn, prison is too good for you.
RTFA. This is why I hate Slashdot - kneejerk reactions to anything government related, and stupid jokes.
They were spot on for almost all of the issues. They just couldn't do anything to prevent it.