Loved the Mars trilogy, though book three got kind of slow.
I have to agree that while Antarctica is a good read, it has too much similarity to the Mars series.
If you liked Mars, you'll like the style of Antarctica. He captures the essence of life on The Ice, including amusing real-world anecdotes. I chuckled greatly over "The Snowmobile Incident", which ocurred while I was in McMurdo.
He's right on the money -- if you've ever been there, it will forever beckon you. Something Zen about the beauty of emptyness.
Summary: Typical KSR style. Very similar to Mars. You'll like it if you liked Mars. You might like it more if you _didn't_ read Mars.
I just stopped in this morning to check my email before going to a relative's wedding rehearsal. My one comment is -- keep it up. This is exactly why I wanted the Slashdot community to comment on the proposal -- already several great ideas have been put forth that deserve real consideration. Particularly the possible need for reputation/authentication control, and the web-of-trust model. And obviously, the massive scale of such an endeavour. I will revise the document again this weekend to incorporate the offered suggestions.
Don't view INMD as censorship. It's not. Or, doesn't have to be.
It can be used to censor things by rating them negatively, and if you choose to allow yourself to be directed in that way, by "authorities" who will shield you from things they think you don't want to see, then that is your choice.
I would prefer to use it in a sorting manner, and would choose rating-groups that I believed would mark good stuff as good, and ignore the crap. In this way, I can choose to see _everything_, but look through the good stuff first.
Heck, you could use it as anti-censorship. Form your own smutpr0n ratings cabal, and go seek out the best-looking sheep on the Internet, and let the world know where to find 'em.
It's just a tool. It's a more flexible tool than some of the systems out there, because it can be used for good, not just for censorship.
And yes, the Word document is a pig. My apologies, but my TeX is very rusty.
Please do me the favor of reading my draft proposal for Internet/Usenet profile-based collaborative rating. I believe it addresses most of the issues we're all concerned about.
The reason this problem is so thorny is that it is extremely complicated. Several previous posters have done an excellent job of explaining how the current tax system (tries to) work, why, and where it doesn't work. Rather than applying more duct-tape and bailing wire to the existing system, maybe we should consider what the perfect system would be. Now, ideally in the perfect system I'd pay no taxes. But I'm enough of a realist to understand that our Local, State and Fed buddies do perform useful (though usually grossly inefficient) services for us that we'd miss if they all went broke. I don't mind the theory of paying taxes. The practise is just a little inefficient and unfair. The challenge is to use whatever means we have available (computer and old-fashioned) to rework the design of the public-service-sector-income system. Not just for the locals, state, or feds, but why not for the whole world?
Background: The problem facing internet tax collection now is one of severe complexity. The actual amount due is calculated based on a number of factors, some of which could be the location of purchaser and seller, origin of the goods (if they're even material goods), destination of the goods and a host of factors relating to the composition and tax history of the goods themselves. As an internet merchant myself, I realize that just accurately collecting tax on our shipments to the other 49 United States would greatly complicate the infrastructure of our order processing system, not to mention the unavoidable paperwork and bureaucracy involved in dealing with 49 other uniquely different state governments. It's not practical as is. Add into this the complexity of dealing with tax calculation and collection for other countries (something that is now dealt with as goods enter a foreign country, and is usually the responsibility of the recipient) and you can see that the system threatens to fall over and catch fire.
Review the different types of tax systems: Federal Income Tax: In the US, it's very complicated, no one feels it's fair, and regulation/enforcement/evasion/fraud are a constant problem. Non-Federal Sales Tax: Simple, and ubiquitous. Some amount of evasion/fraud goes on already, currently deemed inconsequential though a number of state/local entities are cracking down on this. Because it is administrated below the federal level, it leads to a morass of different systems, and interstate transactions can result in confusing or difficult-to-enforce situations. Federal GST: Don't know. Never lived anywhere where it was in effect. Some people seem to like it, some don't.
I would love to see our federal income tax go away, if only because I think our GNP would skyrocket given that the entire country would have the equivalent of one extra month of productivity from the man-hours no longer spent calculating Uncle Sam's take. However, I think a federal GST or uniform sales tax would be as prone to abuse as our current income tax system. Maybe more. It's very easy to do small transactions under the table for cash. It's harder to sweep income transactions under the rug because one side of the deal is almost always a corporation with lots to lose if they get audited.
The Digital Fractional Flat Tax: Here's a really shocking idea: I think a true digital currency would HELP resolve the tax situation. As Big-Brother as it seems, it might help with our freedom. Basically, all digital bank account transactions could bleed a little bit off the top for their jurisdictions. The actual amount would be determined by the jurisdictions of the origin and destination accounts. Transactions between two of your own accounts would be exempt. Any other transaction, including to/from paper currency would incur the tax. The idea would be to make the actual tax percent quite small, but ubiqitous. Transactions into other currencies would incur the half-taxation rates of both governments. We pay fees like this all the time already to banks. If we streamlined the currency system so we needed banks less, those fees we already pay could take the place of our governmental taxes, and we would have a net win.
If I (in Colorado) buy something from someone in Texas, both states can skim their bit off the top of the transaction. Maybe the feds get a little bit too. If I live in a state with no taxes, then one less bite gets taken out. If I want to have an offshore bank that doesn't charge taxes (dunno how they'd keep the doors open and the lights on, but..) then I never pay that part of the transaction tax. But even in that situation, if I buy something at a local store, my city, state and maybe the feds, will each collect their fractional-tax. I buy an information-product from an offshore tax-free merchant and pay for it from my offshore tax-haven bank? No jurisdiction. No tax. No problem.
The advantage? You can see it all going on. It's accountable, visible, summable and provable. You know what you're paying and who's getting the money, and you can choose to do your transactions accordingly. I think it would raise awareness of how much you really pay, and where it goes, which would hopefully lead to some government spending reform. Obviously, some transactions and people/organizations will probably try to become tax-exempt. Dunno if it's really important. Digital money also offers a way to really see the movement of your money. I'd like to see at the end of the year, an accounting of how much of my tax money went where. And maybe the ability to decide how much of my money I _wanted_ to go where. But that's another story entirely.
So, tell me if you think I'm crazy. Sorry for the length, but I wanted to say it completely and correctly.
So, if a foreign embassy allowed you to work on crypto code on their soveirgn soil, wouldn't that be like commuting across the border each day to Canada (or, more awkwardly, Switzerland) to work on code, and returning home for dinner?
Is that legal?
If it is, I could see multi-story embassies becoming data havens for crypto work. Except that nobody would really do it -- political pressures being what they are.
Interesting thought experiment. If you can use it to prove how ridiculous the current laws are, maybe it will encourage their reform.
Hey, I like free strong crypto. But I bet if I had the weight of our government's responsibilities on my shoulders, I'd probably be pretty terrified of free strong crypto too.
Comparing D.Net's IP tracking of the client to Microsoft's is a moot point. D.Net has proven by their actions that they (and their motivations) are worthy of our trust. Microsoft however, has proven by their actions that even when they do follow the letter of the law, their motivations are not worthy of our trust.
Remember? Reputations. Reputations. Reputations.
Identical actions can be interpreted as either good or evil depending on the overall context.
Phil Anschutz (large force behind Qwest) is a ruthless and cagey businessman who knows how to run a business and make a buck along the way. Phil is an old oil tycoon who did railroads and then telecom as the markets changed. He's one of the best-known businessmen in Denver, and for good reason.
Solomon (Sol) Trujillo (US West) can't seem to keep his company running, much less make any progress. US West is a joke among their customers and other telecom people. But they have valuable assets and customer base.
Don't get me wrong, the time period immediately following a merger of the two wouldn't necessarily be pretty -- Phil's known for brutal management when necessary, but I bet the combined company would come out of the gate kicking butt.
Everyone I know who works for USWest has told me that no-one understood the merits of the Global Crossing deal, but everyone feels Qwest could work wonders.
What is the meaning of Amiga? It used to stand for a particular nifty hardware/software system that did cool stuff. But any new Amiga system will not fit that same definition because it will not be the same hardware or the same software as what we used to call an Amiga.
What is it then? It is the embodiment of the spirit of innovation and coolness in computer hardware and software. Who cares what the Amiga NG is, just make it and make it cool. Even it is never commercially successful, it can still help advance the industry. The original Amigas never achieved market dominance, but think of what they did. Would we have multimedia the way we have today? Probably not. Think of all the pioneering multimedia apps that started on the Amiga and were then ported to other platforms. Lightwave. Truespace. Real3D. Elastic Reality. WCS. Think of all the PC/Mac apps that were written by ex-Amigans who had seen the light, and then seen the money elsewhere.
I still program for Amigas. Why? Because I enjoy it, and despite making a living writing software, I still have to be able to enjoy it in order to justify getting out of bed in the morning and sitting at a keyboard all day. I do not enjoy programming for the Mac or Windows, but I do it for money. I think I would enjoy programming for the Be. Because it's elegant and different and cool, the same adjectives that you find when you look up Amiga in the thesaurus. Be is just defining a new synonym for Amiga, and I for one, approve.
Don't get me wrong, the original Amiga had/has its problems, and deserves a just retirement. But the spirit must go on, and the more people pursuing their different visions of that spirit, the better.
What does Linux/BSD have to do with Amiga? Much in spirit, little in substance. Linux embodies the same pursuit of elegance and coolness and difference as the Amiga, but with more of a technical power aspect rather than the visual whiz-bang. No screen hacks or Euro-demos for Linux. But that's ok, too. To each their own. I like them both.
I don't think any new Amiga hardware needs to run Linux. It'd be neat if it _could_, and it probably will someday.
All I really want to get across is that you shouldn't disparage the idea of Amigas (should new ones ever materialize -- I have my doubts) based upon what you didn't like about the old Amigas or their users or that you prefer Macs or Windows or Linux. Just recognise that new blood is good purely for the sake of new ideas.
Nike says Just Do It.
Amiga and Linux say Just Do Something Different.
(Yes, I'm writing this on NetScape on my WinNT Intel PC. I'm a realist too.)
Slashdot Mirror
World Construction Set.
Sorry, but I haven't had enough time to port it to Linux or Be yet. Currently Amiga, Mac and Windows.
Loved the Mars trilogy, though book three got kind of slow.
I have to agree that while Antarctica is a good read, it has too much similarity to the Mars series.
If you liked Mars, you'll like the style of Antarctica. He captures the essence of life on The Ice, including amusing real-world anecdotes. I chuckled greatly over "The Snowmobile Incident", which ocurred while I was in McMurdo.
He's right on the money -- if you've ever been there, it will forever beckon you. Something Zen about the beauty of emptyness.
Summary: Typical KSR style. Very similar to Mars. You'll like it if you liked Mars. You might like it more if you _didn't_ read Mars.
I just stopped in this morning to check my email before going to a relative's wedding rehearsal. My one comment is -- keep it up. This is exactly why I wanted the Slashdot community to comment on the proposal -- already several great ideas have been put forth that deserve real consideration. Particularly the possible need for reputation/authentication control, and the web-of-trust model. And obviously, the massive scale of such an endeavour. I will revise the document again this weekend to incorporate the offered suggestions.
Don't view INMD as censorship. It's not. Or, doesn't have to be.
It can be used to censor things by rating them negatively, and if you choose to allow yourself to be directed in that way, by "authorities" who will shield you from things they think you don't want to see, then that is your choice.
I would prefer to use it in a sorting manner, and would choose rating-groups that I believed would mark good stuff as good, and ignore the crap. In this way, I can choose to see _everything_, but look through the good stuff first.
Heck, you could use it as anti-censorship. Form your own smutpr0n ratings cabal, and go seek out the best-looking sheep on the Internet, and let the world know where to find 'em.
It's just a tool. It's a more flexible tool than some of the systems out there, because it can be used for good, not just for censorship.
And yes, the Word document is a pig. My apologies, but my TeX is very rusty.
Please do me the favor of reading my draft proposal for Internet/Usenet profile-based collaborative rating. I believe it addresses most of the issues we're all concerned about.
It is on my Homepage in the INMP/NNMP section.
I have written and am polishing an Internet Draft to address this sort of problem for NNTP news, and it was primarily inspired by Slashdot.
Basically it allows everyone to moderate/rate/vote and then allows readers to select who's opinions will impact the presentation for themselves.
I think it's fairly concise and may be useful in this situation, and many others.
It's callen NNMP (NetNews Metadata Protocol):
http://www.dimensional.com/~xenon
The reason this problem is so thorny is that it is extremely complicated. Several previous posters have done an excellent job of explaining how the current tax system (tries to) work, why, and where it doesn't work. Rather than applying more duct-tape and bailing wire to the existing system, maybe we should consider what the perfect system would be. Now, ideally in the perfect system I'd pay no taxes. But I'm enough of a realist to understand that our Local, State and Fed buddies do perform useful (though usually grossly inefficient) services for us that we'd miss if they all went broke. I don't mind the theory of paying taxes. The practise is just a little inefficient and unfair. The challenge is to use whatever means we have available (computer and old-fashioned) to rework the design of the public-service-sector-income system. Not just for the locals, state, or feds, but why not for the whole world?
Background: The problem facing internet tax collection now is one of severe complexity. The actual amount due is calculated based on a number of factors, some of which could be the location of purchaser and seller, origin of the goods (if they're even material goods), destination of the goods and a host of factors relating to the composition and tax history of the goods themselves. As an internet merchant myself, I realize that just accurately collecting tax on our shipments to the other 49 United States would greatly complicate the infrastructure of our order processing system, not to mention the unavoidable paperwork and bureaucracy involved in dealing with 49 other uniquely different state governments. It's not practical as is. Add into this the complexity of dealing with tax calculation and collection for other countries (something that is now dealt with as goods enter a foreign country, and is usually the responsibility of the recipient) and you can see that the system threatens to fall over and catch fire.
Review the different types of tax systems:
Federal Income Tax: In the US, it's very complicated, no one feels it's fair, and regulation/enforcement/evasion/fraud are a constant problem.
Non-Federal Sales Tax: Simple, and ubiquitous. Some amount of evasion/fraud goes on already, currently deemed inconsequential though a number of state/local entities are cracking down on this. Because it is administrated below the federal level, it leads to a morass of different systems, and interstate transactions can result in confusing or difficult-to-enforce situations.
Federal GST: Don't know. Never lived anywhere where it was in effect. Some people seem to like it, some don't.
I would love to see our federal income tax go away, if only because I think our GNP would skyrocket given that the entire country would have the equivalent of one extra month of productivity from the man-hours no longer spent calculating Uncle Sam's take. However, I think a federal GST or uniform sales tax would be as prone to abuse as our current income tax system. Maybe more. It's very easy to do small transactions under the table for cash. It's harder to sweep income transactions under the rug because one side of the deal is almost always a corporation with lots to lose if they get audited.
The Digital Fractional Flat Tax: Here's a really shocking idea: I think a true digital currency would HELP resolve the tax situation. As Big-Brother as it seems, it might help with our freedom. Basically, all digital bank account transactions could bleed a little bit off the top for their jurisdictions. The actual amount would be determined by the jurisdictions of the origin and destination accounts. Transactions between two of your own accounts would be exempt. Any other transaction, including to/from paper currency would incur the tax. The idea would be to make the actual tax percent quite small, but ubiqitous. Transactions into other currencies would incur the half-taxation rates of both governments. We pay fees like this all the time already to banks. If we streamlined the currency system so we needed banks less, those fees we already pay could take the place of our governmental taxes, and we would have a net win.
If I (in Colorado) buy something from someone in Texas, both states can skim their bit off the top of the transaction. Maybe the feds get a little bit too. If I live in a state with no taxes, then one less bite gets taken out. If I want to have an offshore bank that doesn't charge taxes (dunno how they'd keep the doors open and the lights on, but..) then I never pay that part of the transaction tax. But even in that situation, if I buy something at a local store, my city, state and maybe the feds, will each collect their fractional-tax. I buy an information-product from an offshore tax-free merchant and pay for it from my offshore tax-haven bank? No jurisdiction. No tax. No problem.
The advantage? You can see it all going on. It's accountable, visible, summable and provable. You know what you're paying and who's getting the money, and you can choose to do your transactions accordingly. I think it would raise awareness of how much you really pay, and where it goes, which would hopefully lead to some government spending reform. Obviously, some transactions and people/organizations will probably try to become tax-exempt. Dunno if it's really important. Digital money also offers a way to really see the movement of your money. I'd like to see at the end of the year, an accounting of how much of my tax money went where. And maybe the ability to decide how much of my money I _wanted_ to go where. But that's another story entirely.
So, tell me if you think I'm crazy. Sorry for the length, but I wanted to say it completely and correctly.
So, if a foreign embassy allowed you to work on crypto code on their soveirgn soil, wouldn't that be like commuting across the border each day to Canada (or, more awkwardly, Switzerland) to work on code, and returning home for dinner?
Is that legal?
If it is, I could see multi-story embassies becoming data havens for crypto work. Except that nobody would really do it -- political pressures being what they are.
Interesting thought experiment. If you can use it to prove how ridiculous the current laws are, maybe it will encourage their reform.
Hey, I like free strong crypto. But I bet if I had the weight of our government's responsibilities on my shoulders, I'd probably be pretty terrified of free strong crypto too.
Comparing D.Net's IP tracking of the client to Microsoft's is a moot point. D.Net has proven by their actions that they (and their motivations) are worthy of our trust. Microsoft however, has proven by their actions that even when they do follow the letter of the law, their motivations are not worthy of our trust.
Remember? Reputations. Reputations. Reputations.
Identical actions can be interpreted as either good or evil depending on the overall context.
MX602a ~$100
MX802a ~$210
at
Musician's Friend.
(Just bought an MX802A myself.)
Phil Anschutz (large force behind Qwest) is a ruthless and cagey businessman who knows how to run a business and make a buck along the way. Phil is an old oil tycoon who did railroads and then telecom as the markets changed. He's one of the best-known businessmen in Denver, and for good reason.
Solomon (Sol) Trujillo (US West) can't seem to keep his company running, much less make any progress. US West is a joke among their customers and other telecom people. But they have valuable assets and customer base.
Don't get me wrong, the time period immediately following a merger of the two wouldn't necessarily be pretty -- Phil's known for brutal management when necessary, but I bet the combined company would come out of the gate kicking butt.
Everyone I know who works for USWest has told me that no-one understood the merits of the Global Crossing deal, but everyone feels Qwest could work wonders.
What is the meaning of Amiga? It used to stand for a particular nifty hardware/software system that did cool stuff. But any new Amiga system will not fit that same definition because it will not be the same hardware or the same software as what we used to call an Amiga.
What is it then? It is the embodiment of the spirit of innovation and coolness in computer hardware and software. Who cares what the Amiga NG is, just make it and make it cool. Even it is never commercially successful, it can still help advance the industry. The original Amigas never achieved market dominance, but think of what they did. Would we have multimedia the way we have today? Probably not. Think of all the pioneering multimedia apps that started on the Amiga and were then ported to other platforms. Lightwave. Truespace. Real3D. Elastic Reality. WCS. Think of all the PC/Mac apps that were written by ex-Amigans who had seen the light, and then seen the money elsewhere.
I still program for Amigas. Why? Because I enjoy it, and despite making a living writing software, I still have to be able to enjoy it in order to justify getting out of bed in the morning and sitting at a keyboard all day. I do not enjoy programming for the Mac or Windows, but I do it for money. I think I would enjoy programming for the Be. Because it's elegant and different and cool, the same adjectives that you find when you look up Amiga in the thesaurus. Be is just defining a new synonym for Amiga, and I for one, approve.
Don't get me wrong, the original Amiga had/has its problems, and deserves a just retirement. But the spirit must go on, and the more people pursuing their different visions of that spirit, the better.
What does Linux/BSD have to do with Amiga? Much in spirit, little in substance. Linux embodies the same pursuit of elegance and coolness and difference as the Amiga, but with more of a technical power aspect rather than the visual whiz-bang. No screen hacks or Euro-demos for Linux. But that's ok, too. To each their own. I like them both.
I don't think any new Amiga hardware needs to run Linux. It'd be neat if it _could_, and it probably will someday.
All I really want to get across is that you shouldn't disparage the idea of Amigas (should new ones ever materialize -- I have my doubts) based upon what you didn't like about the old Amigas or their users or that you prefer Macs or Windows or Linux. Just recognise that new blood is good purely for the sake of new ideas.
Nike says Just Do It.
Amiga and Linux say Just Do Something Different.
(Yes, I'm writing this on NetScape on my WinNT Intel PC. I'm a realist too.)