The uniqueness of fingerprints is important when considering criminal convictions where there's little or no other direct evidence besides latent prints, but it's not a big concern here.
A far easier attack here is to swap out the record in the database. If it doesn't have good auditing, it would be trivial to swap in somebody else's prints, make a large purchase of easily fenced goods, then swap the original prints back in without detection.
You could probably even just add additional prints as an additional purchaser. But that's risky since those prints could then be used by investigators.
Another good idea is to have your lawyer ensure that the contract terminates (without you owning money, of course) if your company (or group) is acquired or merges with another company. Three years is a *very* long time in this industry and you need to anticipate that new management would make an undesirable situation intolerable.
On a related note, I would also make sure that the contract terminated if the company files for bankruptcy. I've heard some absolute horror stories about some sharks being creative about finding people who owe the company money. I have no doubt that some would love to find a way to hit you for a reimbursement of that "loan." If they don't have qualms about seizing the homes from under retirees (and if some people killed themselves because they lost everything at the age of 70, because some shark couldn't see that they were the victims of a Ponzi scheme, not a coconspirator skimming money, well life's tough) they won't hesitate to nail you.
That's one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long time.
What are the problems with it?
1) it requires you keep track of that floppy, and remember that you need it. When you typically reboot your system once every three months, that can be a challenge.
2) it requires that your system check the floppy drive. It's common to take the floppy out of the boot sequence, to either speed up the boot sequence or to make it a bit harder for a casual attacker. (In an office, the BIOS may also be password protected. It won't stop anyone who knows how to clear the BIOS, but many casual attackers won't know this.)
3) it requires that your system have a floppy drive. Most of my systems don't - they have an IDE ZIP disk in place of the floppy.
Your rights depend greatly on your state. Colorado has a "make my day" law and lethal force is considered justified against any intruder, armed or unarmerd, if you felt threatened. Since "feeling threatened" is highly subjective, and is very different from knowing you were threatened because the intruder displayed a weapon and intent, it effectively covers everything but inviting your neighbor in for coffee then blowing him away as he crosses the threshold.
That was clearly the legislative intent - the law was only passed after several high profile cases where DAs prosecuted homeowners who were "too quick" to use lethal force against malicious intruders. The state legislature said that, in a private residence, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the occupant.
But in other states, you can't use lethal force even when threatened. You have an obligation to retreat until you are literally backed into a corner before you use force to defend yourself.
One of the best arguments I've seen against the enforceability of EULAs it the simple scenario: if you find the EULA unacceptable - something that you can only do after paying for the software - and attempt to return it for a refund, can you?
With almost no exceptions, the answer is NO. The author says it's an issue for the seller, the seller says that they don't refund software after it's been opened.
This means that you're coerced to agree to the EULA. If you click 'no,' you're out your money without appeal. This violates the basic premise of contract law (an exchange of items of value - in this case you aren't just getting a poor deal, you're getting *nothing* in exchange for hard currency) and has a strong coercive nature.
Nope, what you're talking about is basic "agency" and the original party *is* usually responsible for the misstatements of its agents. (It also has an obligation to monitor the agent's work, has the authority to terminate the agent if it's not doing an acceptable job, etc.) If the original party doesn't like it, it can't back out of contracts due to the action of its agent, it has to seek compensation from its agents.
As a concrete example, imagine that you are selling your house. You know that it is an old house that has some lead-based paint, and you tell your real estate agent that. But the agent lies to the buyers, and they're legitimately pissed to have a huge bill to make the house safe for their very young children. They sue you, and they'll win. You have to sue your real estate agent (or his employer) for damages caused by their misrepresentation.
Re:Once money changes hands, the contract is final
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Actually, when you provide your credit card it's not yet a payment - the merchant agreements usually prohibit charging a credit card prior to the actual shipment of the item. But it is a binding agreement to pay, and the confirmation notice can only be interpreted as agreement to the terms stated.
So the original poster's comment that once they accept payment (via credit card) is correct - a "meeting of the minds" has clearly occured, even if neither party has actually performed yet.
"fraud" = fradulent use of financial instrument
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There are different types of fraud. I was specifically refering to "fradulent use of financial instrument," e.g., using stolen checks. Depending on your state you may hit a felony at $100-500, with a 5- or even 10-year prison sentence. If it's a "three-strikes" state that doesn't specify violent felonies, you may be talking about a life sentence without parole.
The store manager filing a false police report isn't usually considered "fraud" since the purpose is clearly to harass another person, not to get unwarranted financial compensation.
(But IANAL - we're talking about fine enough details here that you should consult a local attorney, etc.)
Re:Thank God for the police...
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Think about why the police are normally called to a store like Bogo Buy.
Shoplifters.
Forged checks, stolen credit cards, etc.
The DA probably has written policies on how to deal with people accused of the normal crimes there. Someone accused of "fraud" (as in: using stolen credit cards or checks) may be looking at a *long* prison sentence so they'll be highly motivated to flee. Cuffing them makes sense.
The problem is that the manager undoubtably knows the keywords and it sounds like he really pumped them in this case. It wasn't a case of misunderstanding and a customer possibly getting pissed off at the run-around. It was "fraud," and the police had to take him in....
Only it wasn't fraud, and it can't reasonably be construed as fraud. (e.g., if he edited a copy of the BB website to create his own special sale -- BB is not disupting that the low price was offered.) The manager exploited the standard police procedures, and he should pay for it. Meanwhile the police and DA need to review their procedures to make sure that allegations of "fraud" only apply to attempts to pay, not attempts to get advertised prices.
Re:The police sided with the customer.
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What do you mean "he lost?" IIRC he reached "out of court settlements" with confidentiality clauses with the media outfits he sued. That tells me that the media folded because they saw they were going to lose. If he folded the suits would have either been dropped, dismissed, or settled for some token amount.
Yeah? When was the manager arrested?
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If the police now agree that he not only commited no crime, but that the manager shouldn't have called them in to arrest him for fraud, then when was the manager arrested for making a false police report and false arrest? (The manager's detainment of the individual, not the police taking custody.)
Talk is cheap. If they really think the manager was totally out of line, they should arrest the asshole to send a clear message to the other managers in town that detaining a shoplifter is one thing, detaining someone asking difficult questions is an entirely different thing.
Re:Its not "false arrest".
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I don't know Georgia's law, but in most states *anyone* can arrest someone if they witnessed them commit a crime. This is a limited arrest - they can only detain the person until the cops arrive - but if they deliberately lie about witnessing a crime then it's "false arrest."
On top of that, sworn police officers normally have limited immunity to false arrest charges. This isn't because cops are really getting a free ride, it's a deliberate tradeoff of letting police agencies deal with questionable cases internally instead of having the courts clogged with complaints by half the people arrested. Civilians don't have this limited liability.
If the manager witnessed someone grab merchandise, stuff it into his jacket, and attempt to walk out the door then he would certainly be within his rights to detain the person until the cops arrived.
If the manager witnessed someone attempting to use checks with the name "Bob Smith" even though all of his ID said "Jim Jones," he would be within his rights to detain the person.
But accusing someone of "fraud" for attempting to peacefully redeem a coupon from the BB website is an entirely different situation.
So what? By that time the manager who thinks it's cool to detain people (false arrest) and file false police reports will have been arrested himself, fired "for cause," and basically be greeted with "oh, you're THAT guy? Are you gonna have us arrested if we don't give you this job? Get the hell out of my office!" during every job interview for the next decade or so.
Damn arrogant Brits, spoiling shows for those of us stuck with patronizing networks that delayed the second half of the season! Not even a "Stargate Spoiler!" subject line!
It's worth recalling that the proposed changes to UCITA (since only two states were dumb enough to immediately adopt the original model law) contains a truly incomprehensible couplet.
Commercial contract can waive all liability. I seem to recall that the "technical self-help" measures (which allows them to write software that actively damages your system if it thinks your license has lapsed) has been removed, but it still gives them broad rights to gag you when you try to report problems, to falsely claim others haven't reported problems, to falsely claim that the problem either doesn't really exist or has been fixed, etc. It can do all of this because you handed over hard cash and a bona fide contract exists. (I'm not so sure it's bona fide - a contract requires an *exchange* of items of value, and I don't see much value in this software.)
In contrast, free software isn't covered by a contract (since no money was exchanged) and UCITA explictly requires that warranties apply.
This means that Microsoft (to pick a company at random), a company with billions of dollars in the bank and easily able to afford decent product testing, gets a free walk. Meanwhile Joe Sixpack, a professional programmer who released a simple "scratch my itch" program, can lose his house in legal fees defending himself even if he ultimately wins the court cases.
The commentators (UF law professors, working under the aegis of the ACM?) suggested that the voting delegates seemed indifferent to this indefensible state of affairs. Hopefully they'll either fix it, or the lawmakers in the various states will quickly realize that UCITA 2.0 is just as bad as the original.
But it's something that MUST be considered whenever we talk about the need for liability law to start applying in the software world. We can see the importance of having your own source code, but the people who would actually write the laws are still hearing from Microsoft et al, not us.
If you want to save bandwidth, just nuke the trash various image editing tools leave in the.jpg file. (E.g., use jpegtrans(1))
Maybe you want to keep thumbnails in images on your development system, but all they do is burn bandwidth on the production system. You can usually reduce the size by a significant amount, even if you decide to add your own copyright messages, etc.
If you saw Frontline last night (on what's happened to meat production in this country), the thought "feedlot" comes to mind.
As in "a cow doesn't see a blade of grass after the age of 6 months." (That cow is slaughtered by age 14 months. It used to be 5 years, but changes in feed cause the animals to mature much more quickly. Sorta like how humans are hitting puberty much earlier now.)
And "that's not black soil the cows are standing (and sleeping) on, that's a thick layer of manure."
And even the later statistics that modern meat processing techniques mean that a single hamburger patty may contain meat from hundreds or even thousands of animals. If *any* of these animals are infected, you'll get sick.
All in all, a pretty good model of the "ecosystem" Gates had in mind. Not the rich diversity of a natural forest which can withstand most challenges, but an industrial agriculture monoculture where a single case of hoof-and-mouth disease (or a single virus) can take out hundreds of thousands of animals at once. Or a single blight can take out an entire state's produce.
You need to get a better dictionary (or would that be a better dictionary.com?). Language evolves, and it's now widely accepted that "tax" can refer to any mandatory fee collected by one group on behalf of another group, esp. if the first group is a government entity of some type. This isn't entirely "fringe" groups pushing their own agenda - after California (and other states) passed tax limitation laws it becamse common for governments to enact taxes through third parties in an effort to evade those laws.
As for the common usage that lexigraphers love, the "blank media tax" that's a law requiring part of the money from the sale of blank media go to the RIAA regardless of how the media will be used. (E.g., even if you're dubbing tapes of your own garage band's original compositions, the RIAA gets a cut.)
Or the well-known "Microsoft tax" that's a license requirement that every system sold by OEM include payment for the Microsoft software license regardless of whether the user wants it or not.
If the bookstore required a $14 fee (once per semester) before students bought the software at this price, then that would be great. Students would get discounted software, Microsoft would get to warp impressionable young minds.
The problem is when they want $14 from EVERYONE regardless of need. A lot of courses - even many computer science courses (at least at the graduate level) don't require software of any kind. Or people may already have the software through other channels, e.g., it came preinstalled on their computers, or their boss makes their work systems available for academic work.
So a lab is required for Freshman English? BFD - that class ALONE has a lab fee associated with it. Same as the "glass fee" for most chemistry labs, the materials fee for some art classes, etc.
The issue isn't whether *some* classes may reasonably have a mandatory fee associated with them, it's whether it should apply to every single student regardless of need. Worse, in this case not only do not many students not need MS products for their courses, if they do they probably already licensed the software via some other mechanism.
The issue isn't whether students WHO WANT MICROSOFT PRODUCTS AND HAVEN'T ALREADY PURCHASED THEM are getting a great deal.
It's whether it's fair to force students to pay for software that they don't want, don't need, and possibly can't even use.
As a trivial example, I took one grad CS course a semester for about 7 years during the 1990s. 14 semesters. Had the University of Colorado had this mandatory plan, I would have paid close to $200 to Microsoft. For absolutely nothing of value in return.
Could I run any Microsoft application on my computers? No - I was already using Linux almost exclusively on my own equipment.
Did I need any Microsoft application for my graduate CS course work? No. It was either agnostic (e.g., email), or needed to be done on Unix systems.
Could I have saved money on my rare Microsoft purchase? No - my laptop already included a mandatory copy of Windows and applications. What possible value would there have been in replacing a copy of Office 95 with another copy of Office 95?
Maybe you're rich and can afford to give people $200 for absolutely nothing in return, but most of us aren't and we resent being forced to do so.
Why should students be forced to pay a $14 fee for a mandatory software license if they:
1) don't use computers in their class,
2) only use Unix or Apples computers with not one bit of Microsoft software on them, or
3) only use their own computers, purchased outside of the university, with independently and fully licensed software on them.
Remember that last item - many incoming students will arrive with computers their parents bought them before they learned about educational discounts (you think Best Buy will tell parents of college-bound students about the competition?), and many non-traditional students will already have computers because of their job.
This sounds a lot like a tax (second definition) - everybody pays regardless of whether they need it or not, and regardless of whether they've already paid for the product or service elsewhere.
There are actually two different types of entrapment.
If an undercover cop tells you to do something or he'll blow your head off it's an absolute form of entrapment. This situation is rare, but not unheard of.
But if an undercover cop makes you an offer too good to refuse it's a much more grey area. Many normally law-abiding citizens may be tempted by these offers, and there have been some high profile cases thrown out because the cours ruled that a reasonable person would not be able to resist the bait. E.g., I seem to recall that John DeLorean was acquitted because of this - the pressure to save his company was so great that no reasonable person could avoid the quick money for moving a relatively small amount of drugs.
It's hard to imagine a situation where car theft is irresistable, but it's much harder to make blanket statements about victimless crimes.
Nobody's saying that they want to do e-voting based on Passport, yet, but the services offered/required to use the service will inevitably grow.
And never underestimate the damage that even small changes can do. Change someone's address right before an election and there's a good chance you've disenfranchised them (think Florida). Or another change and you have full participation from the precincts located in the Shady Acres Memorial Park. Use the handy "write your Representative" feature and you can create another bogus grass-root support for protecting Microsoft's right to innovate.
If there's a need for such user authentication, and I think it's worth considering, then it should be handled by exactly one of two organizations. Either the US Postal Service, or the individual states existing voter registration service. Probably the USPS because resident aliens can still use government services even if they can't vote.
I'm not sure about Texas, but usually an enclosed area adjacent to the house is also considered an implicit 'no trespassing' area. There's a legal name for it, but I can't remember it at the moment.
But one problem with this is that you can't limit access to your front door. Because of the layout of our units, my neighbors can enclose their patio without blocking the front door - then nobody can legally enter the patio without their permission. But my front door opens onto my patio (since I have a unit against all other walls) and I can't keep people out.... but I can insist that they don't linger.
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The uniqueness of fingerprints is important when considering criminal convictions where there's little or no other direct evidence besides latent prints, but it's not a big concern here.
A far easier attack here is to swap out the record in the database. If it doesn't have good auditing, it would be trivial to swap in somebody else's prints, make a large purchase of easily fenced goods, then swap the original prints back in without detection.
You could probably even just add additional prints as an additional purchaser. But that's risky since those prints could then be used by investigators.
Another good idea is to have your lawyer ensure that the contract terminates (without you owning money, of course) if your company (or group) is acquired or merges with another company. Three years is a *very* long time in this industry and you need to anticipate that new management would make an undesirable situation intolerable.
On a related note, I would also make sure that the contract terminated if the company files for bankruptcy. I've heard some absolute horror stories about some sharks being creative about finding people who owe the company money. I have no doubt that some would love to find a way to hit you for a reimbursement of that "loan." If they don't have qualms about seizing the homes from under retirees (and if some people killed themselves because they lost everything at the age of 70, because some shark couldn't see that they were the victims of a Ponzi scheme, not a coconspirator skimming money, well life's tough) they won't hesitate to nail you.
That's one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long time.
What are the problems with it?
1) it requires you keep track of that floppy, and remember that you need it. When you typically reboot your system once every three months, that can be a challenge.
2) it requires that your system check the floppy drive. It's common to take the floppy out of the boot sequence, to either speed up the boot sequence or to make it a bit harder for a casual attacker. (In an office, the BIOS may also be password protected. It won't stop anyone who knows how to clear the BIOS, but many casual attackers won't know this.)
3) it requires that your system have a floppy drive. Most of my systems don't - they have an IDE ZIP disk in place of the floppy.
Your rights depend greatly on your state. Colorado has a "make my day" law and lethal force is considered justified against any intruder, armed or unarmerd, if you felt threatened. Since "feeling threatened" is highly subjective, and is very different from knowing you were threatened because the intruder displayed a weapon and intent, it effectively covers everything but inviting your neighbor in for coffee then blowing him away as he crosses the threshold.
That was clearly the legislative intent - the law was only passed after several high profile cases where DAs prosecuted homeowners who were "too quick" to use lethal force against malicious intruders. The state legislature said that, in a private residence, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the occupant.
But in other states, you can't use lethal force even when threatened. You have an obligation to retreat until you are literally backed into a corner before you use force to defend yourself.
One of the best arguments I've seen against the enforceability of EULAs it the simple scenario: if you find the EULA unacceptable - something that you can only do after paying for the software - and attempt to return it for a refund, can you?
With almost no exceptions, the answer is NO. The author says it's an issue for the seller, the seller says that they don't refund software after it's been opened.
This means that you're coerced to agree to the EULA. If you click 'no,' you're out your money without appeal. This violates the basic premise of contract law (an exchange of items of value - in this case you aren't just getting a poor deal, you're getting *nothing* in exchange for hard currency) and has a strong coercive nature.
Nope, what you're talking about is basic "agency" and the original party *is* usually responsible for the misstatements of its agents. (It also has an obligation to monitor the agent's work, has the authority to terminate the agent if it's not doing an acceptable job, etc.) If the original party doesn't like it, it can't back out of contracts due to the action of its agent, it has to seek compensation from its agents.
As a concrete example, imagine that you are selling your house. You know that it is an old house that has some lead-based paint, and you tell your real estate agent that. But the agent lies to the buyers, and they're legitimately pissed to have a huge bill to make the house safe for their very young children. They sue you, and they'll win. You have to sue your real estate agent (or his employer) for damages caused by their misrepresentation.
Actually, when you provide your credit card it's not yet a payment - the merchant agreements usually prohibit charging a credit card prior to the actual shipment of the item. But it is a binding agreement to pay, and the confirmation notice can only be interpreted as agreement to the terms stated.
So the original poster's comment that once they accept payment (via credit card) is correct - a "meeting of the minds" has clearly occured, even if neither party has actually performed yet.
There are different types of fraud. I was specifically refering to "fradulent use of financial instrument," e.g., using stolen checks. Depending on your state you may hit a felony at $100-500, with a 5- or even 10-year prison sentence. If it's a "three-strikes" state that doesn't specify violent felonies, you may be talking about a life sentence without parole.
The store manager filing a false police report isn't usually considered "fraud" since the purpose is clearly to harass another person, not to get unwarranted financial compensation.
(But IANAL - we're talking about fine enough details here that you should consult a local attorney, etc.)
Think about why the police are normally called to a store like Bogo Buy.
Shoplifters.
Forged checks, stolen credit cards, etc.
The DA probably has written policies on how to deal with people accused of the normal crimes there. Someone accused of "fraud" (as in: using stolen credit cards or checks) may be looking at a *long* prison sentence so they'll be highly motivated to flee. Cuffing them makes sense.
The problem is that the manager undoubtably knows the keywords and it sounds like he really pumped them in this case. It wasn't a case of misunderstanding and a customer possibly getting pissed off at the run-around. It was "fraud," and the police had to take him in....
Only it wasn't fraud, and it can't reasonably be construed as fraud. (e.g., if he edited a copy of the BB website to create his own special sale -- BB is not disupting that the low price was offered.) The manager exploited the standard police procedures, and he should pay for it. Meanwhile the police and DA need to review their procedures to make sure that allegations of "fraud" only apply to attempts to pay, not attempts to get advertised prices.
What do you mean "he lost?" IIRC he reached "out of court settlements" with confidentiality clauses with the media outfits he sued. That tells me that the media folded because they saw they were going to lose. If he folded the suits would have either been dropped, dismissed, or settled for some token amount.
If the police now agree that he not only commited no crime, but that the manager shouldn't have called them in to arrest him for fraud, then when was the manager arrested for making a false police report and false arrest? (The manager's detainment of the individual, not the police taking custody.)
Talk is cheap. If they really think the manager was totally out of line, they should arrest the asshole to send a clear message to the other managers in town that detaining a shoplifter is one thing, detaining someone asking difficult questions is an entirely different thing.
I don't know Georgia's law, but in most states *anyone* can arrest someone if they witnessed them commit a crime. This is a limited arrest - they can only detain the person until the cops arrive - but if they deliberately lie about witnessing a crime then it's "false arrest."
On top of that, sworn police officers normally have limited immunity to false arrest charges. This isn't because cops are really getting a free ride, it's a deliberate tradeoff of letting police agencies deal with questionable cases internally instead of having the courts clogged with complaints by half the people arrested. Civilians don't have this limited liability.
If the manager witnessed someone grab merchandise, stuff it into his jacket, and attempt to walk out the door then he would certainly be within his rights to detain the person until the cops arrived.
If the manager witnessed someone attempting to use checks with the name "Bob Smith" even though all of his ID said "Jim Jones," he would be within his rights to detain the person.
But accusing someone of "fraud" for attempting to peacefully redeem a coupon from the BB website is an entirely different situation.
So what? By that time the manager who thinks it's cool to detain people (false arrest) and file false police reports will have been arrested himself, fired "for cause," and basically be greeted with "oh, you're THAT guy? Are you gonna have us arrested if we don't give you this job? Get the hell out of my office!" during every job interview for the next decade or so.
What, Daniel Jackson leaves Stargate SG-1?!
Damn arrogant Brits, spoiling shows for those of us stuck with patronizing networks that delayed the second half of the season! Not even a "Stargate Spoiler!" subject line!
It's worth recalling that the proposed changes to UCITA (since only two states were dumb enough to immediately adopt the original model law) contains a truly incomprehensible couplet.
Commercial contract can waive all liability. I seem to recall that the "technical self-help" measures (which allows them to write software that actively damages your system if it thinks your license has lapsed) has been removed, but it still gives them broad rights to gag you when you try to report problems, to falsely claim others haven't reported problems, to falsely claim that the problem either doesn't really exist or has been fixed, etc. It can do all of this because you handed over hard cash and a bona fide contract exists. (I'm not so sure it's bona fide - a contract requires an *exchange* of items of value, and I don't see much value in this software.)
In contrast, free software isn't covered by a contract (since no money was exchanged) and UCITA explictly requires that warranties apply.
This means that Microsoft (to pick a company at random), a company with billions of dollars in the bank and easily able to afford decent product testing, gets a free walk. Meanwhile Joe Sixpack, a professional programmer who released a simple "scratch my itch" program, can lose his house in legal fees defending himself even if he ultimately wins the court cases.
The commentators (UF law professors, working under the aegis of the ACM?) suggested that the voting delegates seemed indifferent to this indefensible state of affairs. Hopefully they'll either fix it, or the lawmakers in the various states will quickly realize that UCITA 2.0 is just as bad as the original.
But it's something that MUST be considered whenever we talk about the need for liability law to start applying in the software world. We can see the importance of having your own source code, but the people who would actually write the laws are still hearing from Microsoft et al, not us.
If you want to save bandwidth, just nuke the trash various image editing tools leave in the .jpg file. (E.g., use jpegtrans(1))
Maybe you want to keep thumbnails in images on your development system, but all they do is burn bandwidth on the production system. You can usually reduce the size by a significant amount, even if you decide to add your own copyright messages, etc.
If you saw Frontline last night (on what's happened to meat production in this country), the thought "feedlot" comes to mind.
As in "a cow doesn't see a blade of grass after the age of 6 months." (That cow is slaughtered by age 14 months. It used to be 5 years, but changes in feed cause the animals to mature much more quickly. Sorta like how humans are hitting puberty much earlier now.)
And "that's not black soil the cows are standing (and sleeping) on, that's a thick layer of manure."
And even the later statistics that modern meat processing techniques mean that a single hamburger patty may contain meat from hundreds or even thousands of animals. If *any* of these animals are infected, you'll get sick.
All in all, a pretty good model of the "ecosystem" Gates had in mind. Not the rich diversity of a natural forest which can withstand most challenges, but an industrial agriculture monoculture where a single case of hoof-and-mouth disease (or a single virus) can take out hundreds of thousands of animals at once. Or a single blight can take out an entire state's produce.
You need to get a better dictionary (or would that be a better dictionary.com?). Language evolves, and it's now widely accepted that "tax" can refer to any mandatory fee collected by one group on behalf of another group, esp. if the first group is a government entity of some type. This isn't entirely "fringe" groups pushing their own agenda - after California (and other states) passed tax limitation laws it becamse common for governments to enact taxes through third parties in an effort to evade those laws.
As for the common usage that lexigraphers love, the "blank media tax" that's a law requiring part of the money from the sale of blank media go to the RIAA regardless of how the media will be used. (E.g., even if you're dubbing tapes of your own garage band's original compositions, the RIAA gets a cut.)
Or the well-known "Microsoft tax" that's a license requirement that every system sold by OEM include payment for the Microsoft software license regardless of whether the user wants it or not.
If the bookstore required a $14 fee (once per semester) before students bought the software at this price, then that would be great. Students would get discounted software, Microsoft would get to warp impressionable young minds.
The problem is when they want $14 from EVERYONE regardless of need. A lot of courses - even many computer science courses (at least at the graduate level) don't require software of any kind. Or people may already have the software through other channels, e.g., it came preinstalled on their computers, or their boss makes their work systems available for academic work.
So a lab is required for Freshman English? BFD - that class ALONE has a lab fee associated with it. Same as the "glass fee" for most chemistry labs, the materials fee for some art classes, etc.
The issue isn't whether *some* classes may reasonably have a mandatory fee associated with them, it's whether it should apply to every single student regardless of need. Worse, in this case not only do not many students not need MS products for their courses, if they do they probably already licensed the software via some other mechanism.
The issue isn't whether students WHO WANT MICROSOFT PRODUCTS AND HAVEN'T ALREADY PURCHASED THEM are getting a great deal.
It's whether it's fair to force students to pay for software that they don't want, don't need, and possibly can't even use.
As a trivial example, I took one grad CS course a semester for about 7 years during the 1990s. 14 semesters. Had the University of Colorado had this mandatory plan, I would have paid close to $200 to Microsoft. For absolutely nothing of value in return.
Could I run any Microsoft application on my computers? No - I was already using Linux almost exclusively on my own equipment.
Did I need any Microsoft application for my graduate CS course work? No. It was either agnostic (e.g., email), or needed to be done on Unix systems.
Could I have saved money on my rare Microsoft purchase? No - my laptop already included a mandatory copy of Windows and applications. What possible value would there have been in replacing a copy of Office 95 with another copy of Office 95?
Maybe you're rich and can afford to give people $200 for absolutely nothing in return, but most of us aren't and we resent being forced to do so.
Why should students be forced to pay a $14 fee for a mandatory software license if they:
1) don't use computers in their class,
2) only use Unix or Apples computers with not one bit of Microsoft software on them, or
3) only use their own computers, purchased outside of the university, with independently and fully licensed software on them.
Remember that last item - many incoming students will arrive with computers their parents bought them before they learned about educational discounts (you think Best Buy will tell parents of college-bound students about the competition?), and many non-traditional students will already have computers because of their job.
This sounds a lot like a tax (second definition) - everybody pays regardless of whether they need it or not, and regardless of whether they've already paid for the product or service elsewhere.
There are actually two different types of entrapment.
If an undercover cop tells you to do something or he'll blow your head off it's an absolute form of entrapment. This situation is rare, but not unheard of.
But if an undercover cop makes you an offer too good to refuse it's a much more grey area. Many normally law-abiding citizens may be tempted by these offers, and there have been some high profile cases thrown out because the cours ruled that a reasonable person would not be able to resist the bait. E.g., I seem to recall that John DeLorean was acquitted because of this - the pressure to save his company was so great that no reasonable person could avoid the quick money for moving a relatively small amount of drugs.
It's hard to imagine a situation where car theft is irresistable, but it's much harder to make blanket statements about victimless crimes.
Nobody's saying that they want to do e-voting based on Passport, yet, but the services offered/required to use the service will inevitably grow.
And never underestimate the damage that even small changes can do. Change someone's address right before an election and there's a good chance you've disenfranchised them (think Florida). Or another change and you have full participation from the precincts located in the Shady Acres Memorial Park. Use the handy "write your Representative" feature and you can create another bogus grass-root support for protecting Microsoft's right to innovate.
If there's a need for such user authentication, and I think it's worth considering, then it should be handled by exactly one of two organizations. Either the US Postal Service, or the individual states existing voter registration service. Probably the USPS because resident aliens can still use government services even if they can't vote.
I'm not sure about Texas, but usually an enclosed area adjacent to the house is also considered an implicit 'no trespassing' area. There's a legal name for it, but I can't remember it at the moment.
But one problem with this is that you can't limit access to your front door. Because of the layout of our units, my neighbors can enclose their patio without blocking the front door - then nobody can legally enter the patio without their permission. But my front door opens onto my patio (since I have a unit against all other walls) and I can't keep people out.... but I can insist that they don't linger.