Samsung is going after the iPad, the one product which has been responsible for Apple's crazy revenue growth.
Is that even true? I mean, sure, the iPad has been successful, way more than I gave it credit for when it launched, but if you asked me what product has been responsible for Apple's growth I'd say it was the iPhone, the iPhone, and the iPhone. If I go to a bar I don't see any iPads, and I see very few on the train, but when people pull their phones out (in San Francisco, at least), all I see are iPhones.
The summary is bogus in another respect - I don't believe the "Made in USA" thing was mentioned at all during I/O.
It wasn't, but there's a label stamped onto the bottom of the device itself that says, "Designed and manufactured in the USA." Some people have suggested that it probably should read "assembled," rather than "manufactured."
Mr.Gates resources are actually pretty close to not limited. He could easily set enough aside for the foundation that only the interest would ever have to be spent.
Actually, one of the characteristics of Mr. Gates's charity is that this will not happen.
Gates's position is that while this sounds good, what you end up with is a charity that exists to function like a business. And then, like a business (let's take Microsoft for example), you end up with an organization that's weighed down with layers of middle managers, most of whose chief priority is to keep the business (charity) running -- not to achieve its goals, but to protect their own jobs.
Gates rejected that model. Instead his charity has a mandate that it must spend ALL of its money by XYZ date. After that date, the Gates Foundation will be broke, and it will disappear. Personally I admire this decision.
In short, Red Hat/Fedora aren't exactly in the good books of RMS.
I think that's overstating it. The FSF "doesn't endorse" Fedora because it bundles someone else's proprietary firmware in certain of its hardware drivers. Not endorsing something is not the same thing as condemning it. It's also a totally different issue from how Sveasoft twists the letter and spirit of the GPL. Red Hat has been a huge upstream contributor to the Linux kernel and many, many free software packages, and has been widely recognized for such. Sveasoft doesn't contribute much of crap.
How are these strongarm tactics? Sveasoft provides the software - both source and binaries - to the customer, and does not prevent them from re-distributing it. Only thing it does - if they do, they terminate their paid subscription accounts, and do not sell or give future versions of the software.
If they "did not prevent" you from distributing the software, but just beat you up when you do, would those count as "strongarm tactics" by your book? (Because they would count by the dictionary.) What about if Sveasoft stole $50 from their wallets? Because that's closer to what Sveasoft is actually doing.
Sveasoft "does not prevent" its users from taking actions that are their right to perform, as granted by the GPL -- but when they do, Sveasoft unilaterally takes away something that they had before. It's exactly like my earlier example, when an employer retaliates against a whistleblower by firing him. The whistleblower had the right and even the moral obligation to disclose wrongdoing at his company, and the company didn't prevent him from disclosing it; it merely fired him. You call that justice?
Mobsters "do not prevent" you from refusing to pay them protection money. They just burn your business down. (An exaggerated example, perhaps, but unless you work for Sveasoft I have a hard time understanding why saying they "don't prevent" you from doing something is a reasonable argument. The fear of reprisals from Sveasoft does prevent people from doing something they would otherwise be perfectly within their rights to do, as spelled out clearly in a legal contract, the GPL.)
You also seem to want to ignore the fact that Sveasoft is setting these terms for software it did not write. The bulk of the Sveasoft distro is the Linux kernel, software which was created by many, many hands, all of which agreed that the software will be distributed under the terms of the GPL. If Sveasoft really did all of the work to create the Linux kernel that its product relies on, it would be fully justified to set any licensing terms it wants. It could make its product proprietary software. Instead, it seems to want to take someone else's GPL software and pretend that it's its own, proprietary software, and that's a lousy thing to do.
I would bet on most well-fare countries collecting taxes for their citizens aboard.
You can "bet on" all you want. The fact is that for most European countries and the UK, when you are no longer resident in the country you are no longer required to pay taxes to its government. (And why should you, since you are using none of the services your taxes would be paying for?) The definition of residency varies per country, but it generally means you are seldom there (no more than half the year or possibly less), you earn no income there, and you don't have any immediate family (spouse, children) who are resident there. By contrast, the United States don't care about any of this, and demand taxes from you no matter where you live, no matter for how long.
You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.
That's hardly the same thing as saying "you'd be justified in writing GPL software but using strongarm tactics to prevent users from doing things that would otherwise be legal under the terms of the GPL." I interpret his statement to mean, "if you can't uphold your end of the GPL bargain, don't release your software under the GPL."
To the degree that it's possible to make money on GPL software he's no example of that, in fact he's the last person on earth I'd look to for guidance on how to make money.
But there are plenty of people making money from GPL software. Red Hat earns a billion dollars a year from it, without violating the letter or the spirit of the license -- and that's even given that CentOS exists.
However it is apparent that Sveasoft do NOT think so, based on the above description of their policy, as they distribute the source and permit the users to redistribute their software.
They "permit" users to redistribute their software only to the extent that the users agree to suffer reprisal from Sveasoft, in the form of the unilateral termination of their support contracts (which they paid for). That's sort of like saying "the whistleblower lost his job, but he should have expected to." It is definitely not in the spirit of the GPL as the FSF drafted it -- or have all these years of "Free as in Freedom" been lost on you?
I seriously doubt the intent of the GPL was to enable users to undermine the ability of people to create software for a living.
But its intent clearly was to preserve the freedoms of software users, one of which is the freedom to redistribute the software. You don't really have to "doubt the intent" of the GPL at all, since RMS has written extensively on the subject. He clearly does not believe that the user's right to redistribute software undermines the ability of people to create software for a living. If Sveasoft does think so, maybe it shouldn't be messing around in the world of GPL software to begin with.
I'm kind of confused about what he's actually doing. "I build and maintain the “official” installers and packages and provide them, to those that contribute." Does that mean he's holding back make files and install scripts?
Clicking through to his GitHub link, I can't even find any source code.
I worked for a company that liked to pride itself on its "culture." They had a pool table in the office that you could play any time you felt like, free sodas, etc., etc. And in particular, it would throw elaborate parties every few months that were really thinly-disguised recruitment efforts. At one party, they rented a room full of vintage videogame cabinets and turned the office into an 80s arcade. At another, they had a car theme where they rented a large-scale remote control car track that people could take turns racing. Employees were encouraged to bring any of their talented friends to the parties to enjoy the fun and games and have all the free beer, wine, and booze they could swallow.
Behind the scenes, the company was totally dysfunctional. Client services reps would agree to anything the client wanted, whenever they called, leading to constantly-shifting goals and endless scope creep. Working nights and weekends was the norm -- for developers, mind you, not the client services people. The VP of development actually tried a thing where he would start weekly meetings with a few minutes where developers could vent about what they hated about the company, just to get it off their chests. It was no secret that the founder of the company considered his graphic designers, hand-picked from CalArts, to be creative geniuses, but he felt programmers were a dime a dozen and were 100 percent replaceable. (The founder told the previous VP of development as much, in so many words, so he quit on the spot. The founder never understood this.) When the developers finally complained to senior management about how impossible the working conditions had become, the sales and client services department called a mandatory, company-wide meeting where they gave a PowerPoint presentation explaining why we were all wrong.
But hey, at least the company had a great, fun "culture."
Nobody is going to commute from San Francisco to Los Angeles for work. To drive takes at least 5 hours (and I honestly don't buy the "2.5 hours" estimate for high-speed rail for a minute).
The advantages of PHP have always been reducible to the fact that it is relatively easy for non-programmers to understand.
I would add that it's widely available. Pretty much any $4/month hosting plan is going to have PHP available. I'll warrant that this has caused some people to use PHP for Web sites when they might not otherwise have done so.
Zero. None. It's only the U.S. We're the only country in the world that doesn't stringently enforce laws that give citizens first crack at jobs (even if they are on the books).
When I last applied for a job, I had to fill out a form and show government identification to prove that I was eligible to work in the U.S. -- and that was to work for a company that's headquartered in the UK. I certainly didn't see much evidence of the U.S. not enforcing its laws.
But I suppose you're not talking about white-collar jobs in offices, but jobs for field workers and the like... the jobs no Americans are actually applying for.
You can't come to the US just because you want to. You can't come regardless of whether or not you have the means to support yourself. You can't come regardless of your education level or English-speaking ability. You can't even come if one of your family members is already here--you must be the direct blood relative of a US citizen, a non-citizen permanent resident sibling is, for instance, not good enough (and becoming a citizen takes decades).
I can't speak for today. Xenophobia certainly seems to have inflated to a frightening dimension in the U.S. today.
But I can speak for 1978, the year I crossed the border from Canada with my sister and my parents. We had no relatives living in the United States. My father was a Rhodes scholar with a D.Phil from Oxford, and at the time he was a practicing M.D. We didn't have to do any "Green Card lottery" -- as far as I know, I had a Green Card from the moment I crossed the border, as did my whole family. At minimum, one was issued to me within the first year I lived in the country -- and I've been Stealing American Jobs since about 1990. I know lots of other immigrants who weren't so fortunate, so I daresay my father's profession and education definitely did have something to do with it. But again, that was the 1970s.
Here's a hint: if you and your friend don't care enough about each other to be in contact in some way that doesn't require Facebook to facilitate it, then you don't really have a friendship. In the old days if you lost touch with someone you just let it go
No, in the old days when someone moved away you bought a bunch of stamps and sent postal letters, and a roundtrip conversation took weeks. How is Facebook making it worse?
"Oh well yes well you may think you have friends but are they real friends? I mean like really really real?" Give me a break. Emo much?
That, and everything at Google seems to be geared around making you feel like you're still in college... forever. There's the big campus, where everybody eats together in the cafeterias or in the quad, the free T-shirts and sweatshirts (around San Francisco, you constantly see Googlers out at bars wearing their Google shirts, just like how you see people wearing college shirts around campus), the little coding tips posted all over the place ("Hey kids! Remember to use the right data structures")... hell, when you go to a Google event, the sessions when you can talk to Google engineers and ask them your questions are actually called "office hours." If you really, really, really enjoy being treated like a college student, it might seem like heaven to you, but I can imagine that a seasoned, professional developer could feel pretty insulted by that level of paternalism. That said, Google also seems to favor hiring people right out of college.
No, I don't think "the usefulness of potential features" should be considered, if you're talking about something like bolting object orientation onto C. As other people have said, that has already been done, several times. If you want object-oriented C, use C++ or Objective-C. If you want to go even further that direction, use C# or even Java. The difference between an object oriented language and a structured procedural language like C is significant. Or maybe you could explain a little more what you mean by "some OOP." You seem to be arguing that C gives you nothing but C++ gives you too much -- but complaining that a language gives you too much of exactly what you're asking for is a pretty confusing way to make your case.
Also, a 2012 report shows Arizona companies have applied for 4,387 work visas. The average salary for these positions is $75,473. The most recent U.S. Census data (compiled through 2007) shows the average salary in Arizona is $47,750. So something tells me the people who might actually have these visas are not the same people who are getting pulled over in beat-up white Ford pickup trucks.
If I slice my thumb off with a sharper than standard steak knife, it shouldn't matter if the steak knife manufacturer discussed this possibility internally or not.
But the purpose of a steak knife is to cut things, so you should recognize that you run the risk of cutting yourself if you use it improperly. The purpose of coffee is not to scald the flesh right off your body. Nobody has a reasonable expectation that their coffee might do so.
The woman in the McDonald's case in question didn't burn the roof of her mouth and cry "owie." She suffered second- and third-degree burns on 20 percent of her body and had to get skin grafts. McDonald's was clearly in the wrong.
It must be said... I grew up in that "different time," also, and did many of the things you and others are talking about in this thread. By extension, then, so did all of the other kids that graduated high school with me (and I did many of those things with those kids). And I've gotta tell you... some of those kids who grew up in that "different time" with me are fucking nitwits. Some of them couldn't cook a frozen burrito if you gave them an instruction manual. So let's not get too rosy about this whole "it was different when I was young" thing. Running around outside and shooting BB guns doesn't magically turn you into some kind of übermensch.
That has nothing to do with Switzerland, though. The U.S. is pretty much the only Western country that taxes you right into the grave, no matter where you live. Even if the overseas income exemptions mean you pay no U.S. taxes, you're still expected to file, every year. The only way out is to formally renounce your U.S. citizenship -- and good luck coming back then, even for a visit.
That story may in fact have already been written. It's called "Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon R. Dickson, and it originally appeared in Analog in September 1965. It's an amusing little fable about a man who ends up in the electric chair over a dispute with his computerized mail-order book club. You can find it reprinted online in a few different places.
Slashdot Mirror
Samsung is going after the iPad, the one product which has been responsible for Apple's crazy revenue growth.
Is that even true? I mean, sure, the iPad has been successful, way more than I gave it credit for when it launched, but if you asked me what product has been responsible for Apple's growth I'd say it was the iPhone, the iPhone, and the iPhone. If I go to a bar I don't see any iPads, and I see very few on the train, but when people pull their phones out (in San Francisco, at least), all I see are iPhones.
firefox tools/options/advanced/update But you may not be qualified to install firefox if you couldn't figure that out.
So can you configure the .msi to set that option by default? What's that? Mozilla doesn't ship Firefox as an .msi? Oh.
The summary is bogus in another respect - I don't believe the "Made in USA" thing was mentioned at all during I/O.
It wasn't, but there's a label stamped onto the bottom of the device itself that says, "Designed and manufactured in the USA." Some people have suggested that it probably should read "assembled," rather than "manufactured."
Mr.Gates resources are actually pretty close to not limited. He could easily set enough aside for the foundation that only the interest would ever have to be spent.
Actually, one of the characteristics of Mr. Gates's charity is that this will not happen.
Gates's position is that while this sounds good, what you end up with is a charity that exists to function like a business. And then, like a business (let's take Microsoft for example), you end up with an organization that's weighed down with layers of middle managers, most of whose chief priority is to keep the business (charity) running -- not to achieve its goals, but to protect their own jobs.
Gates rejected that model. Instead his charity has a mandate that it must spend ALL of its money by XYZ date. After that date, the Gates Foundation will be broke, and it will disappear. Personally I admire this decision.
In short, Red Hat/Fedora aren't exactly in the good books of RMS.
I think that's overstating it. The FSF "doesn't endorse" Fedora because it bundles someone else's proprietary firmware in certain of its hardware drivers. Not endorsing something is not the same thing as condemning it. It's also a totally different issue from how Sveasoft twists the letter and spirit of the GPL. Red Hat has been a huge upstream contributor to the Linux kernel and many, many free software packages, and has been widely recognized for such. Sveasoft doesn't contribute much of crap.
How are these strongarm tactics? Sveasoft provides the software - both source and binaries - to the customer, and does not prevent them from re-distributing it. Only thing it does - if they do, they terminate their paid subscription accounts, and do not sell or give future versions of the software.
If they "did not prevent" you from distributing the software, but just beat you up when you do, would those count as "strongarm tactics" by your book? (Because they would count by the dictionary.) What about if Sveasoft stole $50 from their wallets? Because that's closer to what Sveasoft is actually doing.
Sveasoft "does not prevent" its users from taking actions that are their right to perform, as granted by the GPL -- but when they do, Sveasoft unilaterally takes away something that they had before. It's exactly like my earlier example, when an employer retaliates against a whistleblower by firing him. The whistleblower had the right and even the moral obligation to disclose wrongdoing at his company, and the company didn't prevent him from disclosing it; it merely fired him. You call that justice?
Mobsters "do not prevent" you from refusing to pay them protection money. They just burn your business down. (An exaggerated example, perhaps, but unless you work for Sveasoft I have a hard time understanding why saying they "don't prevent" you from doing something is a reasonable argument. The fear of reprisals from Sveasoft does prevent people from doing something they would otherwise be perfectly within their rights to do, as spelled out clearly in a legal contract, the GPL.)
You also seem to want to ignore the fact that Sveasoft is setting these terms for software it did not write. The bulk of the Sveasoft distro is the Linux kernel, software which was created by many, many hands, all of which agreed that the software will be distributed under the terms of the GPL. If Sveasoft really did all of the work to create the Linux kernel that its product relies on, it would be fully justified to set any licensing terms it wants. It could make its product proprietary software. Instead, it seems to want to take someone else's GPL software and pretend that it's its own, proprietary software, and that's a lousy thing to do.
I would bet on most well-fare countries collecting taxes for their citizens aboard.
You can "bet on" all you want. The fact is that for most European countries and the UK, when you are no longer resident in the country you are no longer required to pay taxes to its government. (And why should you, since you are using none of the services your taxes would be paying for?) The definition of residency varies per country, but it generally means you are seldom there (no more than half the year or possibly less), you earn no income there, and you don't have any immediate family (spouse, children) who are resident there. By contrast, the United States don't care about any of this, and demand taxes from you no matter where you live, no matter for how long.
You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.
That's hardly the same thing as saying "you'd be justified in writing GPL software but using strongarm tactics to prevent users from doing things that would otherwise be legal under the terms of the GPL." I interpret his statement to mean, "if you can't uphold your end of the GPL bargain, don't release your software under the GPL."
To the degree that it's possible to make money on GPL software he's no example of that, in fact he's the last person on earth I'd look to for guidance on how to make money.
But there are plenty of people making money from GPL software. Red Hat earns a billion dollars a year from it, without violating the letter or the spirit of the license -- and that's even given that CentOS exists.
However it is apparent that Sveasoft do NOT think so, based on the above description of their policy, as they distribute the source and permit the users to redistribute their software.
They "permit" users to redistribute their software only to the extent that the users agree to suffer reprisal from Sveasoft, in the form of the unilateral termination of their support contracts (which they paid for). That's sort of like saying "the whistleblower lost his job, but he should have expected to." It is definitely not in the spirit of the GPL as the FSF drafted it -- or have all these years of "Free as in Freedom" been lost on you?
I seriously doubt the intent of the GPL was to enable users to undermine the ability of people to create software for a living.
But its intent clearly was to preserve the freedoms of software users, one of which is the freedom to redistribute the software. You don't really have to "doubt the intent" of the GPL at all, since RMS has written extensively on the subject. He clearly does not believe that the user's right to redistribute software undermines the ability of people to create software for a living. If Sveasoft does think so, maybe it shouldn't be messing around in the world of GPL software to begin with.
I'm kind of confused about what he's actually doing. "I build and maintain the “official” installers and packages and provide them, to those that contribute." Does that mean he's holding back make files and install scripts?
Clicking through to his GitHub link, I can't even find any source code.
Actually, as of a day or so ago, that would be Google's flagship Jelly Bean phone.
I worked for a company that liked to pride itself on its "culture." They had a pool table in the office that you could play any time you felt like, free sodas, etc., etc. And in particular, it would throw elaborate parties every few months that were really thinly-disguised recruitment efforts. At one party, they rented a room full of vintage videogame cabinets and turned the office into an 80s arcade. At another, they had a car theme where they rented a large-scale remote control car track that people could take turns racing. Employees were encouraged to bring any of their talented friends to the parties to enjoy the fun and games and have all the free beer, wine, and booze they could swallow.
Behind the scenes, the company was totally dysfunctional. Client services reps would agree to anything the client wanted, whenever they called, leading to constantly-shifting goals and endless scope creep. Working nights and weekends was the norm -- for developers, mind you, not the client services people. The VP of development actually tried a thing where he would start weekly meetings with a few minutes where developers could vent about what they hated about the company, just to get it off their chests. It was no secret that the founder of the company considered his graphic designers, hand-picked from CalArts, to be creative geniuses, but he felt programmers were a dime a dozen and were 100 percent replaceable. (The founder told the previous VP of development as much, in so many words, so he quit on the spot. The founder never understood this.) When the developers finally complained to senior management about how impossible the working conditions had become, the sales and client services department called a mandatory, company-wide meeting where they gave a PowerPoint presentation explaining why we were all wrong.
But hey, at least the company had a great, fun "culture."
Nobody is going to commute from San Francisco to Los Angeles for work. To drive takes at least 5 hours (and I honestly don't buy the "2.5 hours" estimate for high-speed rail for a minute).
The advantages of PHP have always been reducible to the fact that it is relatively easy for non-programmers to understand.
I would add that it's widely available. Pretty much any $4/month hosting plan is going to have PHP available. I'll warrant that this has caused some people to use PHP for Web sites when they might not otherwise have done so.
Zero. None. It's only the U.S. We're the only country in the world that doesn't stringently enforce laws that give citizens first crack at jobs (even if they are on the books).
When I last applied for a job, I had to fill out a form and show government identification to prove that I was eligible to work in the U.S. -- and that was to work for a company that's headquartered in the UK. I certainly didn't see much evidence of the U.S. not enforcing its laws.
But I suppose you're not talking about white-collar jobs in offices, but jobs for field workers and the like ... the jobs no Americans are actually applying for.
You can't come to the US just because you want to. You can't come regardless of whether or not you have the means to support yourself. You can't come regardless of your education level or English-speaking ability. You can't even come if one of your family members is already here--you must be the direct blood relative of a US citizen, a non-citizen permanent resident sibling is, for instance, not good enough (and becoming a citizen takes decades).
I can't speak for today. Xenophobia certainly seems to have inflated to a frightening dimension in the U.S. today.
But I can speak for 1978, the year I crossed the border from Canada with my sister and my parents. We had no relatives living in the United States. My father was a Rhodes scholar with a D.Phil from Oxford, and at the time he was a practicing M.D. We didn't have to do any "Green Card lottery" -- as far as I know, I had a Green Card from the moment I crossed the border, as did my whole family. At minimum, one was issued to me within the first year I lived in the country -- and I've been Stealing American Jobs since about 1990. I know lots of other immigrants who weren't so fortunate, so I daresay my father's profession and education definitely did have something to do with it. But again, that was the 1970s.
Google is mass-producing C++ zombies? Surely you mean Microsoft, at least...
Here's a hint: if you and your friend don't care enough about each other to be in contact in some way that doesn't require Facebook to facilitate it, then you don't really have a friendship. In the old days if you lost touch with someone you just let it go
No, in the old days when someone moved away you bought a bunch of stamps and sent postal letters, and a roundtrip conversation took weeks. How is Facebook making it worse?
"Oh well yes well you may think you have friends but are they real friends? I mean like really really real?" Give me a break. Emo much?
That, and everything at Google seems to be geared around making you feel like you're still in college... forever. There's the big campus, where everybody eats together in the cafeterias or in the quad, the free T-shirts and sweatshirts (around San Francisco, you constantly see Googlers out at bars wearing their Google shirts, just like how you see people wearing college shirts around campus), the little coding tips posted all over the place ("Hey kids! Remember to use the right data structures")... hell, when you go to a Google event, the sessions when you can talk to Google engineers and ask them your questions are actually called "office hours." If you really, really, really enjoy being treated like a college student, it might seem like heaven to you, but I can imagine that a seasoned, professional developer could feel pretty insulted by that level of paternalism. That said, Google also seems to favor hiring people right out of college.
No, I don't think "the usefulness of potential features" should be considered, if you're talking about something like bolting object orientation onto C. As other people have said, that has already been done, several times. If you want object-oriented C, use C++ or Objective-C. If you want to go even further that direction, use C# or even Java. The difference between an object oriented language and a structured procedural language like C is significant. Or maybe you could explain a little more what you mean by "some OOP." You seem to be arguing that C gives you nothing but C++ gives you too much -- but complaining that a language gives you too much of exactly what you're asking for is a pretty confusing way to make your case.
Also, a 2012 report shows Arizona companies have applied for 4,387 work visas. The average salary for these positions is $75,473. The most recent U.S. Census data (compiled through 2007) shows the average salary in Arizona is $47,750. So something tells me the people who might actually have these visas are not the same people who are getting pulled over in beat-up white Ford pickup trucks.
If I slice my thumb off with a sharper than standard steak knife, it shouldn't matter if the steak knife manufacturer discussed this possibility internally or not.
But the purpose of a steak knife is to cut things, so you should recognize that you run the risk of cutting yourself if you use it improperly. The purpose of coffee is not to scald the flesh right off your body. Nobody has a reasonable expectation that their coffee might do so.
The woman in the McDonald's case in question didn't burn the roof of her mouth and cry "owie." She suffered second- and third-degree burns on 20 percent of her body and had to get skin grafts. McDonald's was clearly in the wrong.
It must be said... I grew up in that "different time," also, and did many of the things you and others are talking about in this thread. By extension, then, so did all of the other kids that graduated high school with me (and I did many of those things with those kids). And I've gotta tell you... some of those kids who grew up in that "different time" with me are fucking nitwits. Some of them couldn't cook a frozen burrito if you gave them an instruction manual. So let's not get too rosy about this whole "it was different when I was young" thing. Running around outside and shooting BB guns doesn't magically turn you into some kind of übermensch.
And the US will tax you for years as well.
That has nothing to do with Switzerland, though. The U.S. is pretty much the only Western country that taxes you right into the grave, no matter where you live. Even if the overseas income exemptions mean you pay no U.S. taxes, you're still expected to file, every year. The only way out is to formally renounce your U.S. citizenship -- and good luck coming back then, even for a visit.
That story may in fact have already been written. It's called "Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon R. Dickson, and it originally appeared in Analog in September 1965. It's an amusing little fable about a man who ends up in the electric chair over a dispute with his computerized mail-order book club. You can find it reprinted online in a few different places.