I really wish states would outlaw stupid "use tax" laws. They really serve no purpose whatsoever. Unless the state actually takes part in the transaction (e.g., when you buy a car out of state and register it in your state), they should not be in this business.
If you buy something online or through mail order from a company which has an actual physical presence in your state (e.g., you order from BestBuy.com and there is a Best Buy store somewhere in your state), then the vendor must collect state sales tax for your state.
If you buy something online or through mail order from a company which does not have an actual physical presence in your state, the vendor is not obligated to collect the sales tax for your state, but you are obligated to pay the sales tax yourself (which no one does). Incidentally, the same thing is true if you drive to a state which has no tax, buy something there, and bring it back to your own state. Additionally, some states enter into agreements with individual vendors to collect sales tax for purchases being shipped there.
If there is a local sales tax, most vendors don't collect that unless they are located in and shipping within the jurisdiction in which the tax applies. Again, its up to the consumer to pay the tax themselves.
The reason the internet tax ban is good is because there are literally tens of thousands of state, county, municipal, school district and other governments within the USA alone that can collect varying amounts of tax on purchases. And this changes every year with changes to the tax code. Imagine the complexity of a program that would have to keep track of all of that.
And if people think it can be done with a few lines of Perl and MySQL, then they've never programmed.
Thank you... if poorer nations did what the US does, then they would not be poor anymore. The US built itself up from nothing, sure we aren't complete angels and we have some dirty laundry of our own, but for the most part, we succeed because we allow our people to become the best they can be on their own.
Its like the bum on the street who spends his money on drugs instead of food, why pity him?
And yes... we DO have a real man in the whitehouse now!
Afghanistan is lucky that Bush is such a nice guy... we're the only people who care enough to feed the poor Afghani people who are ALSO victims of state sponsored terrorism. If Bush had just followed the opinion polls, he'd have nuked Afghanistan into a lake on Sept. 11 right after the towers fell (which we all know would be a truly horrible thing).
Costs matter. Price the service to reach critical mass first; adjust the pricing for profitability later; obsessively drive down internal costs at every opportunity.
Amazon is doing this, and they have yet to make a profit. The better strategy is to focus on short term profit first, that is, start with aa small thing that makes you a little bit of money, and then build that up into something that can make you more.
I always hear that businesses need to think of the "long term" when it comes to planning, but if there is no short term profit, there won't ever be a "long term" to worry about.
Actually, "community standards" DO apply in a case like this (according to the US Supreme Court). This means that theoretically, if someone is caught looking at porn in a place in which the "community standards" outlaw it, or if someone operates a porn site in that same community, then that person could be sanctioned. However, this does not apply to a site operator who is outside of the community.
This all implies of course, that someone can simply sniff your net connection without a warrent, or your consent. There is no way tapping everyone's net connection under the "probable cause" that they'd be looking at porn would ever hold up in court (simply because its not looked at as being a "real" crime).
hehehe... of course we Americans should not be bound by international laws. If not for us, not only would the Internet not exist, but the world would probably stop turning too:)
Nobody who wants to profit does .biz-ness anyway!
on
.biz Open For Biz
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· Score: 1
Agreed... this new domain is simply going to create the same stampede/disputes we have already with the.com,.net,.org, etc. suffices. Although I suppose that it can't cost that much for a company to buy its.biz domain so that it simply points to their existing site.
But my main disagreement with this.biz domain is that it sounds so immature. Given that ICANN itself is not a business, it lacks the perspective needed to make the right choices in choosing the names for these TLDs..biz sounds like something a little kid might say. I'd rather they have gone with something far more professional, such as.inc or.ltd or the like.
The only reason that the litigation started under the Clinton regime was because Sun, Oracle, etc. each paid tons of money to lobby the regime to bring the original lawsuit. Up to that point, Microsoft never entered the foray of politics.
As for Gates, I can't blame him at all for lobbying the Bush administration for a way out. Because he had made the mistake of not forking over "protection money" to the Clinton regime, he ended up being subject to its wrath.
As we all have seen, the lawsuit got us nothing, Microsoft is STILL a monopoly, and that is not going to change any time soon... and all the tax money thrown at this case was a total waste. I think that the Bush administration is doing a good thing by bringing this waste of our money to an end.
Frankly, I was hoping a settlement would bring an end to this BS, but it seems some of the states are more than happy to throw more of our money at it.
It's illegal to do that? Not my problem, I liken this to a publicly accessable park.
I'm wondering if its possible to track down people who are illegally gaining access down to their physical locations, such as through triangulations and such.
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 1
I find the decision to remove any and all CLI from Windows a bit odd, considering that Apple went the opposite direction with Mac OS X.
Actually, the terminal command is somewhat well hidden from the average user in OS X. The traditional Mac user will never need to open up a terminal window to issue commands unless he specifically sets out to do it. Kinda reminds me of the old job that the most commonly run Xwindows program is Xterm:)
formkey bugs have been pissing me off for longer than just the weekend
I say put in a AC asshole filter
Ok, so you don't like ads, and you abhor paying a subscription fee. Where do you expect these guys to get the money to make these changes you want?
Ads have never bothered me. If your eyes are so easily distracted because of ads, you probably have other issues. But that's another story.
I still will never understand though, why you people here are not only opposed to actually paying money for something they like, and why they are also opposed to online ventures finding other ways to get money when you people won't pay.
It's interesting that when I (25 year old tech) propose an idea it gets shot down, but when our CTO (Early 40's, an experienced tech, but studying for law exams) puts fourth the exact same idea it gets snapped up and hailed as revolutionary
Its because you didn't do that hand gesture like that guy did in that commercial:)
The above is not informative. newgrp does not add new groups - it allows a user to switch their current group, asking for a password if necessary. It is explicitly designed for users to run, but also requires root privileges.
That may be the point of the command, but isn't allowing non-root users to manage anything related to security still playing with fire?
How can this possibly be a troll. If the data was important to the user it should have been backed up, firing might be a bit harsh but a reprimand at least.
Absolutely not, the technician should be fired immediately. Whether or not the user backed it up before handing it over was not the issue here. Technicians with the kind of attitude mentioned in the article obviously have no understanding that people who work use their machines for *working*, not as toys. When people who are supposed to be helping you get your job done (such as IT people who are supposed to keep end-users' machines up and running) are obviously failing to do the task (or worse, deliborately hampering the effort), they should be fired and replaced with people who realize that the goal of IT in the enterprise is to help the company make money, not lose it.
Why not try the following!
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
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· Score: 1, Informative
Geez... I suppose if you make the useradd (or adduser) command world executable, make your shadow password list world readable, and then make a guest account on your system open to the public, then you too can have an insecure system!
The point is, at least for the second exploit mentioned in the mail, that unless a admin has set world-executable permissions on files to which only root should have such access, then this problem shouldn't exist. As others have said, its not like some random person out there can do all this stuff remotely to your box!
This kid we had interning with us for a few months. Said using MS Visual C++'s built in RSA encyrption schemes was "too hard" so he thought he could go and write "something better" in 3 hours.:)
I'm just gonna stick with Windows 98 First Edition for now hehehehe
I work for one of the major phone companies. After the recommendation to move off IIS came out, the management started a project to do just that.
Was that decision in the works for a long time? Or did the company decided right there and then after reading that one report to switch? If the latter is true, it seems like a really rash (bad) decision!
There is only one thing that will finally put an end to this endless cycle of patching. Companies need to start suing Microsoft over these bugs. As mentioned here on many previous occasions, if this were any other company putting out a crappy product, they would immediately feel the wrath of the lawyers. Don't think for a second a company would do this because they actually care about the safety of their customers.
This approach is so effective that other companies voluntarily recall defective products in order to avoid this.
Yes, I know most EULA's make it "illegal" to sue the software manufacturer, but if one considers the fact that most of what is said in your typical EULA won't stand up in court, then this argument makes perfect sense.
There should be a clause in US Patent law that requires you to actually implement your ideas.
There used to be. Back in the early 20th century, the USPTO received so many applications for perpetual motion machines that they required any submission actually be working for a full year prior to submission.
Call me a quibbler, but it seems to me that the rights granted by the US Constitution are meant to inhere to humans, not pretend-people like Microsoft, Inc. Grrr.
The Constitution grants no rights. It merely lists the ones you have and then states the government cannot take them away.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish states would outlaw stupid "use tax" laws. They really serve no purpose whatsoever. Unless the state actually takes part in the transaction (e.g., when you buy a car out of state and register it in your state), they should not be in this business.
If you buy something online or through mail order from a company which has an actual physical presence in your state (e.g., you order from BestBuy.com and there is a Best Buy store somewhere in your state), then the vendor must collect state sales tax for your state.
If you buy something online or through mail order from a company which does not have an actual physical presence in your state, the vendor is not obligated to collect the sales tax for your state, but you are obligated to pay the sales tax yourself (which no one does). Incidentally, the same thing is true if you drive to a state which has no tax, buy something there, and bring it back to your own state. Additionally, some states enter into agreements with individual vendors to collect sales tax for purchases being shipped there.
If there is a local sales tax, most vendors don't collect that unless they are located in and shipping within the jurisdiction in which the tax applies. Again, its up to the consumer to pay the tax themselves.
The reason the internet tax ban is good is because there are literally tens of thousands of state, county, municipal, school district and other governments within the USA alone that can collect varying amounts of tax on purchases. And this changes every year with changes to the tax code. Imagine the complexity of a program that would have to keep track of all of that.
And if people think it can be done with a few lines of Perl and MySQL, then they've never programmed.
Thank you... if poorer nations did what the US does, then they would not be poor anymore. The US built itself up from nothing, sure we aren't complete angels and we have some dirty laundry of our own, but for the most part, we succeed because we allow our people to become the best they can be on their own.
Its like the bum on the street who spends his money on drugs instead of food, why pity him?
And yes... we DO have a real man in the whitehouse now!
Why do you complain? If you want to see it so bad, download it on a machine which is capable of playing it.
Afghanistan is lucky that Bush is such a nice guy... we're the only people who care enough to feed the poor Afghani people who are ALSO victims of state sponsored terrorism. If Bush had just followed the opinion polls, he'd have nuked Afghanistan into a lake on Sept. 11 right after the towers fell (which we all know would be a truly horrible thing).
Costs matter. Price the service to reach critical mass first; adjust the pricing for profitability later; obsessively drive down internal costs at every opportunity.
Amazon is doing this, and they have yet to make a profit. The better strategy is to focus on short term profit first, that is, start with aa small thing that makes you a little bit of money, and then build that up into something that can make you more.
I always hear that businesses need to think of the "long term" when it comes to planning, but if there is no short term profit, there won't ever be a "long term" to worry about.
1)Yes what Dimitry did is legal in Russia.
Damnit! No wonder there are no more good programming jobs left in the USA!
Actually, "community standards" DO apply in a case like this (according to the US Supreme Court). This means that theoretically, if someone is caught looking at porn in a place in which the "community standards" outlaw it, or if someone operates a porn site in that same community, then that person could be sanctioned. However, this does not apply to a site operator who is outside of the community.
This all implies of course, that someone can simply sniff your net connection without a warrent, or your consent. There is no way tapping everyone's net connection under the "probable cause" that they'd be looking at porn would ever hold up in court (simply because its not looked at as being a "real" crime).
hehehe... of course we Americans should not be bound by international laws. If not for us, not only would the Internet not exist, but the world would probably stop turning too :)
Agreed... this new domain is simply going to create the same stampede/disputes we have already with the .com, .net, .org, etc. suffices. Although I suppose that it can't cost that much for a company to buy its .biz domain so that it simply points to their existing site.
.biz domain is that it sounds so immature. Given that ICANN itself is not a business, it lacks the perspective needed to make the right choices in choosing the names for these TLDs. .biz sounds like something a little kid might say. I'd rather they have gone with something far more professional, such as .inc or .ltd or the like.
But my main disagreement with this
The only reason that the litigation started under the Clinton regime was because Sun, Oracle, etc. each paid tons of money to lobby the regime to bring the original lawsuit. Up to that point, Microsoft never entered the foray of politics.
As for Gates, I can't blame him at all for lobbying the Bush administration for a way out. Because he had made the mistake of not forking over "protection money" to the Clinton regime, he ended up being subject to its wrath.
As we all have seen, the lawsuit got us nothing, Microsoft is STILL a monopoly, and that is not going to change any time soon... and all the tax money thrown at this case was a total waste. I think that the Bush administration is doing a good thing by bringing this waste of our money to an end.
Frankly, I was hoping a settlement would bring an end to this BS, but it seems some of the states are more than happy to throw more of our money at it.
It's illegal to do that? Not my problem, I liken this to a publicly accessable park.
I'm wondering if its possible to track down people who are illegally gaining access down to their physical locations, such as through triangulations and such.
I find the decision to remove any and all CLI from Windows a bit odd, considering that Apple went the opposite direction with Mac OS X.
Actually, the terminal command is somewhat well hidden from the average user in OS X. The traditional Mac user will never need to open up a terminal window to issue commands unless he specifically sets out to do it. Kinda reminds me of the old job that the most commonly run Xwindows program is Xterm :)
Exactly... no way in heck a rational web-based vendor will abandon all non-Passport potential customers... they'll go from dot-net to dot-bomb hehe :)
Besides, unless you order everything and then some online, what is the big deal in having to re-enter payment information?
Advertisements.. Eat me.
formkey bugs have been pissing me off for longer than just the weekend
I say put in a AC asshole filter
Ok, so you don't like ads, and you abhor paying a subscription fee. Where do you expect these guys to get the money to make these changes you want?
Ads have never bothered me. If your eyes are so easily distracted because of ads, you probably have other issues. But that's another story.
I still will never understand though, why you people here are not only opposed to actually paying money for something they like, and why they are also opposed to online ventures finding other ways to get money when you people won't pay.
It's interesting that when I (25 year old tech) propose an idea it gets shot down, but when our CTO (Early 40's, an experienced tech, but studying for law exams) puts fourth the exact same idea it gets snapped up and hailed as revolutionary
Its because you didn't do that hand gesture like that guy did in that commercial :)
The above is not informative. newgrp does not add new groups - it allows a user to switch their current group, asking for a password if necessary. It is explicitly designed for users to run, but also requires root privileges.
That may be the point of the command, but isn't allowing non-root users to manage anything related to security still playing with fire?
How can this possibly be a troll. If the data was important to the user it should have been backed up, firing might be a bit harsh but a reprimand at least.
Absolutely not, the technician should be fired immediately. Whether or not the user backed it up before handing it over was not the issue here. Technicians with the kind of attitude mentioned in the article obviously have no understanding that people who work use their machines for *working*, not as toys. When people who are supposed to be helping you get your job done (such as IT people who are supposed to keep end-users' machines up and running) are obviously failing to do the task (or worse, deliborately hampering the effort), they should be fired and replaced with people who realize that the goal of IT in the enterprise is to help the company make money, not lose it.
Geez... I suppose if you make the useradd (or adduser) command world executable, make your shadow password list world readable, and then make a guest account on your system open to the public, then you too can have an insecure system!
The point is, at least for the second exploit mentioned in the mail, that unless a admin has set world-executable permissions on files to which only root should have such access, then this problem shouldn't exist. As others have said, its not like some random person out there can do all this stuff remotely to your box!
This kid we had interning with us for a few months. Said using MS Visual C++'s built in RSA encyrption schemes was "too hard" so he thought he could go and write "something better" in 3 hours. :)
I'm just gonna stick with Windows 98 First Edition for now hehehehe
I work for one of the major phone companies. After the recommendation to move off IIS came out, the management started a project to do just that.
Was that decision in the works for a long time? Or did the company decided right there and then after reading that one report to switch? If the latter is true, it seems like a really rash (bad) decision!
There is only one thing that will finally put an end to this endless cycle of patching. Companies need to start suing Microsoft over these bugs. As mentioned here on many previous occasions, if this were any other company putting out a crappy product, they would immediately feel the wrath of the lawyers. Don't think for a second a company would do this because they actually care about the safety of their customers.
This approach is so effective that other companies voluntarily recall defective products in order to avoid this.
Yes, I know most EULA's make it "illegal" to sue the software manufacturer, but if one considers the fact that most of what is said in your typical EULA won't stand up in court, then this argument makes perfect sense.
There should be a clause in US Patent law that requires you to actually implement your ideas.
There used to be. Back in the early 20th century, the USPTO received so many applications for perpetual motion machines that they required any submission actually be working for a full year prior to submission.
Call me a quibbler, but it seems to me that the rights granted by the US Constitution are meant to inhere to humans, not pretend-people like Microsoft, Inc. Grrr.
The Constitution grants no rights. It merely lists the ones you have and then states the government cannot take them away.
We can have Al Gore be the repository for the information. He will keep it safe in a lockbox!