> Incidentally Jobs has already issued a response [macworld.com] that is quite interesting.
I see a new Apple ad campaig in the making:
Jobs to Eisner - "Bite. My. Ass."
Actually, what I'd really like to see is Jobs going full-tilt and taking his case public.
How about a picture of Hollings, Eisner, and Valenti, with scrolling text describing what the SSSCA would do to the computer industry. ("In 2002, Congress held hearings on the SSSCA...") with
appropriate soundbites on how "they can create theft if they buy this computer" and other Hollywood claptrap droning on in the background, presented
on a giant screen, with throngs of dullards staring blankly
at the screen, until someone comes in and throws an iPod
through the screen, shattering the telestreen (and the
images of the Hollywood Cartel spokesdrones) into billions
of fragments.
"Rip. Mix. Burn. The reason why 2004 still won't be like 1984"
> If Etrade or Citibank or eBay *really* want to make any progress, they should skip the web browser and get to the desktop. They beat Microsoft that way. They beat Macromedia that way. They get as close to the customer as they can and they can use http or https for whatever data transactions they like.
WTF?
Sometime in 1996, I remember asking my bank a few years ago about how to bank online. They gave me a Windoze CD and said "run this, it's our online banking proggie."
The conversation immediately turned to "Your competitor has a web site that I can access from any platform, and no proprietary software. I barely trust my web browser, I sure as fsck don't trust your 'doze binary. Since you won't understand what that means, let me phrase my question in language you do understand: How can I close my account with you and transfer it to them?"
> To top this off, recently a lot of ad designers have started using Flash in their ads. Which means animation, sound, a lot of stuff that makes me IGNORE the advertisement and want to DISABLE Flash in the first place.
What you said.
The first time I saw an ad rotate 90 degrees and "drip" all over the page the user was trying to read, I said "Whoa, dude, you haven't already deleted the Flash DLLs? What are you waiting for?"
> Ashcroft, if you or one of your goons is reading this (and we all know you are;-), please,
during your term of office, eliminate the INS and start from scratch. > >
Bush, take the same advice, substituting "IRS" for "INS" and dropping the last part.
With the IRS, if you fuck up (read: "fail to follow one of the tens of thousands of sections of the law that you can't even comprehentd"), at least you can placate them by cutting them a check. With INS, the law is just as incomprehensible, but the consequence for fucking up is that you get detained and beaten for a week (if you're lucky, if you're not lucky, for a lifetime, and that was before 9/11), and then you pack your bags and go home.
But yeah, we also desperately need to get rid of the Internal Revenue Code. It's the canonical example of making the law so complex that nobody knows if they're in compliance or not, and therefore everybody spends more time and money paying lawyers and CPAs for at least some reassurance.
> The ethnic cleansing is mostly the fact of english canada, who have virtually eliminated the french from outside Québec.
Explain to me what law in English Canada imposed fines and jail time on those who spoke French.
> Québec language laws are there only to insure that immigrants don't get the notion that they can expect to be living in Québec without knowing french.
"We don't hate the niggers, we just want to make our communities safe for white people."
- Actual quote from some KKK goon on a talk show.
Take your Quebec nationalism and shove it up your pur-laine ass.
> Note to Xybernaut: Please don't sue me. I don't think you've acted like jerks. Or, if it turns out that I do, I'm certainly not
going to say so here.
Actually, that's the difference between what's libelous and what's not.
I, too, cannot condone what Xybernaut did in this instance.
But the poster should have been more careful. For instance, I can say that I believe the management of $COMPANY is a bunch of mindless gits who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes. That's not libel, it's a statement of opinion.
If, on the other hand, I state that the management of $COMPANY is a bunch of mindless gits, that's libel.
Similarly - If I state that "$JERKOFF would be flipping burgers had he not eaten the throbbing gristle of his uncle to get that job", I'm libelling $JERKOFF. But if I modify that only so slightly to read "What, did $JERKOFF get his job there by blowing his uncle?" In the latter case, I'm only questioning $JERKOFF's competency for the job (albeit using rather colorful language to do so), which was, after all, the goal.
Finally, you can criticize by implication. The following paragraph, for instance, implies something about a company, but because nowhere in the following paragraph do I actually declare that any of the company's employees are, in fact, SLAPP-happy over-ligitious fucknozzles, (although it wouldn't surprise me;-), I can say the following without fear:
Because $COMPANY doesn't appear to be (see? not "isn't", "doesn't appear to be", which is a reasonable opinion to hold after reading this Slashdot thread) capable of telling the difference between libel and normal messageboard flaming, and because I don't believe in supporting SLAPP-happy over-ligitious fucknozzles with my customer dollars, I will not be purchasing my wearables from $COMPANY. Their loss, not mine.
If you replace $COMPANY with "Xybernaut", is that paragraph critical of Xybernaut's legal strategy? Sure. Libellous? Sure ain't.
(Of course, if someone subsequently says they think the reason I didn't replace $COMPANY with "Xybernaut" in that post as a result of actions taken by Xybernaut's team of SLAPP-happy over-^W^W^Whighly-skilled legal experts has chilled free speech, that would also be a reasonable belief.)
> Those who are going to argue about health care systems would do themselves justice reading Canada's Burning, an expose on the media lies that are being fed to us all.
Dude, if I had mod points and hadn't posted to this thread, I'd mod you up. That's an excellent article, and covers both sides.
> Before everyone goes off half-cocked here about how political spam should be illegal, I'd like to gently remind people to think of the potential consequences to our society of banning any form of political speech, regardless of how tacky it might be.
If Bill Jones had spammed from Bill Jones' machine, and paid Bill Jones' ISP to deliver the outbound spew, you might have a point.
But according to the article, Bill Jones didn't do that. According to the article, Bill Jones raped an open relay in Korea. That is, he sent an SMTP transaction to a server (a server on which he had no authorized access), and commanded that server's MTA to deliver multiple copies of his spew to recipients in California and Canada.
Ignoring the theft-of-service issue that applies to all spam delivered through open relays, the server was on foreign soil -- that is, he appropriated the resources of a foreign government to influence the results of a domestic political event. That sounds like it could be in violation of numerous election finance laws (at a minimum), and a potential diplomatic incident to boot.
I happen to believe that all spam is theft (by conversion) of my mailbox. That is, Bill Jones has the right to speak, but he doesn't have the right to appropriate my resources to deliver his speech.
But even if you choose accept that sort of theft as OK in certain cases, how can you deny that (if the article is true) what he did is anything other than unauthorized access to, and theft of service from (if not a denial-of-service attack on) the Korean high school's server?
> Besides, they knocked the required score back down to 70 this week, because it was deemed 80 was unfair to people who have already applied. Note that you would now be allowed in. They are going to raise it back to 80 at some point in the future.
The other important distinction is that the points system can be understood by anyone.
You download a form. You check the boxes. You have a pretty good idea of whether or not you qualify. One form. One organization. And if you're a Canadian Immigration drone, it's pretty easy to sort the "yes" and the "no" piles.
Contrast this with the INS system.
Dozens of statuses under which you can get in, dozens of parallel (and contradictory) regimes that say what you can do when you're here, reams of paperwork resulting in 3-6 month delays to hire people or change statuses, a maze of statuses through which one must migrate to get to the green card stage, and a green card process that throws the merit system ("best person for the job") out the window and requires a 2-3 year dance between three or four government agencies (state labor board, DOL, INS, and Department of State), and a maze of regulations that INS itself doesn't even know how to follow.
The only people whose interests are served by the US immigration system are the bureaucrats at INS, the terrorists who sneak through the cracks, and the immigration lawyers whom companies have to hire to make sure they're in compliance.
Ashcroft, if you or one of your goons is reading this (and we all know you are;-), please, during your term of office, eliminate the INS and start from scratch.
> > OTOH, getting a Bad Thing won't bankrupt you. > > No, just kill you.
Well, you've both got good points.
In Canada, getting a Bad Thing won't bankrupt you, because the quality of care is lower -- but there's no guarantee you'd have gotten that care in the States anyways.
Why? In the States, unless you're paying through the nose for "anything goes" health coverage, the insurance company will do its damnedest to deny you reimbursement anyways.
There were many cases of people at HMOs (for Canadians, that's the not-high-end option) that got letters from their insurance companies saying "Holy crap, cancer? That could cost our company a bundle! If you don't get a second opinion from one of our doctors (heh-heh!), we won't pay for your treatment. Our doctor should be able to see you in, oh, 6 months! What, your doc says the cancer will probably be untreatable by then? Gosh, that's just too bad!"
When pressed for a comparison, I'd say Canadian health care is like a "malice-free" HMO. Because of the profit motive, the HMO wants you to die cheaply, and will work to prevent your doctor from treating you. The Canuck doctor, on the other hand, wants to help, but because of the lack of profit motive, there are fewer Canuck doctors who can help (less profit == fewer MRI machines, etc. at hospitals) and you end up with delayed or second-tier treatment anyways.
The underlying reasons are completely different, but the results are the same - both systems' doctors end up being hamstrung by their respective systems:(
Re:There's alway a way to break copy protection
on
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· Score: 2
> And that's point of all this, isn't it? Maintaining the status quo? As I noted in another reply: Imagine what might have been had the buggy whip makers had deeper pockets. We might not be having this ``conversation'' unless we were standing in the same room.
Better example: Imagine what the world would be like if we'd saved the morse code operators at the expense of Edison's invention.
WHAT ABOUT USING TELEGRAM AT FIFTY CENTS A WORD QUERY
> Goodbye! Have fun at wahtever web site you wind up. Just hope it doesn't get too successful or you will have to move again.
Yeah, serves me right for posting without RTFarticle:)
As many have said for +5 points, Junkbuster's my subscription.
And on a more serious note, the people pointing out that nobody reads/. for the articles, they read it for the comments, and that it's the comment posters (the 3% minority) who produce the value that is/. for the other 97%, I wouldn't be surprised to see/. permit things like ad-blocking for subscribers with maxed karma.
Side note: I'd love to know just how many/. pageviews I go through every month. That's be a cool statistic to see on my user page. (Better yet, "xxxx pageviews, yyyy kilobytes transferred". We could then multiply "yyyy" by a cost-per-megabyte to figure out how much we were "costing" Slashdot to run.)
>...the fact that trying to actually get in to Canada "sucks [cbc.ca]".
What could be harder than proving you have a college degree, can speak English, and a job offer? That's most of the "points" you need right then and there!
Especially compared to the 6-7 years of hoop-jumping with INS -- an agency that seems dedicated to the propostion that terrorists can get in just fine on student visas, but technology professionals have to stick with the same job for the better part of a decade and beg for permission from a state employment agency (3-6 months), the federal department of labor (another month), then back to the INS to ask for permission to apply for a green card (between 3 months to 1 year), and then another year or two after permission's granted, to actually get the green card. Get laid off or company reorgs? Get on the next plane back home and start from scratch.
If you've got half a brain and a degree, getting into Canada to do high-tech work is trivial.
INS incompetency has made it clear that high-tech workers are neither wanted nor valued in the States.
> One major centre which is not mentioned in Montreal - which is incredibly cheap compared to the other major urban centres in Canada. It's generally cheaper Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa in almost every category for employees (rent, car insurance, food, beer...) Only problem is that Quebec has a high rate of provincial tax, so maybe it factors out a bit in the end.
If you have more than 50 employees, and French isn't the official language of your workplace, you're fined.
If you immigrate and try to have your kids placed in an English school, you can't. Your kids will be educated in French, or not at all.
If you have a sign on your building that's in English, you get fined. If you have both English and French, you still get fined unless the French print is "predominant" (usually means "at least 50% larger").
Montreal is part of Quebec, which is governed by a bunch of wannabe ethnic-cleansers. It's off the list of business jurisdictions for good reason.
Given the choice between setting up business in Montreal and eating a mile my own shit, I'd be straining over a plate, fork and spoon in hand.
> Interestingly, the "Brain Drain" has also been called a hoax. It seems lately that a lot of skilled American workers are moving up here to follow the companies that are moving up here. Especially since Ontario has been named the most cost-effective place in North America to do business.
At the height of the "Brain Drain" (Canada-to-US migration of skilled workers), Ontario was governed by a socialist party and had marginal tax rates about 10-15% higher than its current rates (umm, and in conjunction with the tax hikes, welfare benefits doubled, and the commie bastards in power were confused as to why they'd gone to record deficits for the duration of their rule). British Columbia was in a similar mess.
Both parties were swept out of office in landslide elections (Ontario about 6 years ago, BC more recently) and neoconservative governments were put in place with aggressive tax-cutting policies.
Federally, Canada had a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 70%, and similarly high taxes. (Canadian tax brackets weren't indexed for inflation when inflation was under 3% -- as such, there was tremendous bracket creep). In this case, the party in power didn't change, but its policies did, largely due to the actions of a reasonably-clued Finance Minister.
Canada appears to have done the right thing - cut taxes, cut spending, foster growth. But 10 years ago, there was no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, and in a move reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged", many Canadians simply gave up on their country and came to the States to seek their fortunes in the dot-com boom.
Of course, the dot-com implosion is the largest factor in people migrating from California to cheaper jurisdictions, but at the rate US legislation is going, a "reverse Brain Drain" may well take place in a few years.
> Canada? Wouldn't the taxes alone make that less appealing? When I think it's expensive in California, all I have to do is remember the GST and PST I paid in Ontario. Gads. Probably lots of available land, but so has most of the midwest.
If you're in CA (California) and making $US 75K, you're paying a marginal federal rate of 27%, plus 9.3% state taxes (on everything over $30000), plus 6.3% for the SS pyramid scheme (up to $86000 and increasing by 5% per year), plus another 1.5% for medicare taxes. Works out to a marginal rate of about 45%.
If you're in.ca (Canada) and making $CAD 75K, you've stopped paying into CPP (the Canadian version of the SS pyramid scheme) and EI (unemployment insurance) after C$35K or so. The marginal rates aren't really any different.
Of course, a $CAD is worth about $0.63 US, so your C$80K is only $50K. But the cost of living is much lower.
Got investments? Canada taxes capital gains at only half the marginal rates, and has no long-term vs. short-term rate difference. (In the US, you have to hold it for a year to qualify for the 20% "long-term" federal rate, and in CA, you're still paying that 9.3% CA income tax on it. So your long-term capital gains in California are taxed at 29.3%, and your short-term trades are at 40%. In Canada, all trades are taxed at about 20%.)
GST/PST? OK, compare 15% vs. 8.25%. But how much do you spend, vs. how much do you save? The better-off you are, the less a consumption tax hits you.
And if you have kids, what do you get for your money? In the US, you pretty much need a private school and university education costs are about double. And you have to pay for your own medical insurance. In Canada, the health care for Bad Stuff (cancer, etc) sucks ass, but for 90% of the population that only has to deal with colds, flu, and the occasional broken bone, it seems pretty good.
Bottom line - The US may be tax-competitive for an individual, but California sure as fuck ain't.
> So far I've stopped reading Wired.com and the NYT because of incredibly intrusive advertising. I got tired of Wired's ads dropping down over the article text. The NYT sent me packing with a single offensive ad - it filled the screen with a fake story rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees for 5 seconds before disappearing.
Dude, you need to disable Flash and Javascript.
I had no idea NYTimes and Wired had gotten that bad. (Then again, I disabled Flash two years ago and have surfed with Javashit off since the first piece of bad Javashit started consistently crashing Netscape 3. I haven't missed either. But thanks for saving me the 5 minutes it would take to turn 'em on and conclude that I'm still better off without 'em.)
Re:overseas....
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 3, Funny
> > How will you get it through customs?
> > It could get tough. We already have a "War on Drugs" and a "War on Terrorism". Soon, our law enforcement officials will be waging a "War on Turing-Complete Computing Apparatus".
> > Columbian drug lords will set up chip fabs in the jungle. Chip runners will swallow condoms full of CPUs and crap them out once they get inside the USA. You'll see people selling unregulated CPUs on the street for $100/MHz.
And the gang violence we used to see between Crips and Bloods over cocaine distribution rights...
...is replaced by hordes of AMDroids and DDR fanatics allied against the Intellabees. And both sides beating the shit outa the former mack-lawyer-daddy Rambusters;)
Y'know, the future of tech under SSSCA could be kinda fun. Shitty for the US tech industry, but hey, our kids can flip fuckin 'burgers. Meantime, us Slashdotters with our pimpin' case m0dz will 0wn tha str33tz!
I'm thinking that buying a computer, post-SSSCA, will be something like a cross between a William Gibson novel and the Japanese Akibahara markets.
~wavy lines~
"Yo! Tackhead! I gotz dat AMD Hammerz you wanted! The newest steppings! Come right off the muthafukkin' fab in Dresden, man, then shoved up some guy's ass, then shat out in a motherboard plant in Taiwan, with the assembled boards shipped to Colombia and smuggled into the States buried in bags of coke! Hah! Dumb muthafukkin' customs bitchez thought tha truck was just another tonne of cocaine for Eisner and Valenti to pay off Hollings with, y'see, so they let it in, but it was fuckin' CPUs, man, CPUs! Soon as we crossed tha border, we flushed the worthless cocaine down the fuckin' toilet and broke out the fluorinert for tha mad pimpin overclock!"
Re:Should I send this to my congressmen?
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 1
Yes. Yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes.
You might want to add a sentence or two up front saying "I'm $FOO, I live in your district", and you might want to write it out by hand (or at least print it in Courier so it looks typewritten:) but you're dead on -- if SSSCA passes, it'll destroy the IT industry. That's great for Eisner and his $50-100B industry, but it's the end of the world for the $1T tech industry.
Re:There's alway a way to break copy protection
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 3, Informative
> Heck, even Bill Nye the Science Guy (aka `science for the ADD afflicted') doesn't have a show anymore. But we do have Winnie the Pooh educating children that it's good to be nice to each other. Not that that's bad but it hardly qualifies as educational.
Oh, but it is educational. As long as we're cutting-and-pasting quotations...
...I recently came across a memorable rant that touches on this subject.
Even if schools don't teach literacy or thinking skills, they teach
everyone to watch the clock constantly, to be sedentary most of the day,
and do activities they have no interest in. They teach about pecking
orders, that any weakness will be exploited, and that going against the
grain will have very negative consequences. They teach you to wake up
not when your body tells you to, but when the alarm goes off. They teach
you to respond to bells and orders. They teach that displaying any
extraordinary skills or talents will result in persecution.
Most people don't benefit from a society "educated" this way, but
certain key people do. A critically-thinking, educated public would be
very hard to control. A society of passive consumers and docile workers
maintains the status quo.
- Nina Paley
A generation raised on Britney "Look at my tits" Spears is much easier to control than one raised on, say, Clock DVA. Which leads me to plug my favorite lyric of all time:
(I also lament the demise of Heathkit. They were a little before my time, but I got my hands on some surplus kits, and that's where I caught the hardware bug. That, and catching the software bug from an Apple ][ sitting idle with no games, just a programming manual, was arguably the start of what I eventually turned into a successful career. Had that Apple been an SSSCA-compliant PC (i.e. a movie/game console), I'd never have discovered "the language of machines" and would probably be flipping burgers.)
> And I hope you don't mind... but your post just went into my ``quotes'' file.
Cut-and-paste away, and feel free to fix my guesstimated tech-vs-hollyweird revenue figures when and as you find the data.
Re:There's alway a way to break copy protection
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 2
> > I think we're on the verge of self-destructing our $1T technology industry goodbye for the $50M Hollyweird industry. > > I disagree with your dollar figures (I think they're too low but that's just a gut feeling) but I heartily agree with your assessment of the long term effect that this legislation will have.
Oops. I "M"d when I shoulda "B"'d.
I'd guesstimate annual tech revenues in the $1T range, and hollyweird at $50B. $100B tops. Thanks for calling me on it.
> We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer.
Unless this is a spec-fucking-tacular troll, what your advertisers want aren't what I want.
Buh-bye.
Re:There's alway a way to break copy protection
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 5, Insightful
> We'll all be running some Open Design homebrew box if this happens. What is the government going to do,.. outlaw electronics as a hobby?
When electronics are outlawed, only outlaws will develop electronics.
I think we're on the verge of self-destructing our $1T technology industry goodbye for the $50M Hollyweird industry.
Right now, there's some geeky Chinese kid tinkering with a soldering iron. When he's in high school, he'll be playing around with FPGAs. When he goes to university, he'll meet another kid from India (he spent his childhood salvaging parts from our junked computers), and together, they'll develop a way to mass-produce quantum transistors.
Your kids, by government edict, won't have such advantages. Valenti, Eisner and Hollings would rather have the nation's kids watch The Lion King so Disney can make a 5-year profit projection.
25 years from now, your kids will be working in sweatshops assembling quantum computers. Because that Chinese kid and that Indian kid will form the next AT&T Labs. Your kid could have done the same in America, but his government destroyed his economic future for the sake of a fucking cartoon mouse.
On the other hand, the education budget can be cut - if SSSCA passes, all you'll need to prepare your kids for the future is a mop and a spatula. There'll still be some money for the gifted and talented ones -- they'll get squeegees.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a new Apple ad campaig in the making:
Jobs to Eisner - "Bite. My. Ass."
Actually, what I'd really like to see is Jobs going full-tilt and taking his case public.
How about a picture of Hollings, Eisner, and Valenti, with scrolling text describing what the SSSCA would do to the computer industry. ("In 2002, Congress held hearings on the SSSCA...") with appropriate soundbites on how "they can create theft if they buy this computer" and other Hollywood claptrap droning on in the background, presented on a giant screen, with throngs of dullards staring blankly at the screen, until someone comes in and throws an iPod through the screen, shattering the telestreen (and the images of the Hollywood Cartel spokesdrones) into billions of fragments.
"Rip. Mix. Burn. The reason why 2004 still won't be like 1984"
WTF?
Sometime in 1996, I remember asking my bank a few years ago about how to bank online. They gave me a Windoze CD and said "run this, it's our online banking proggie."
The conversation immediately turned to "Your competitor has a web site that I can access from any platform, and no proprietary software. I barely trust my web browser, I sure as fsck don't trust your 'doze binary. Since you won't understand what that means, let me phrase my question in language you do understand: How can I close my account with you and transfer it to them?"
What you said.
The first time I saw an ad rotate 90 degrees and "drip" all over the page the user was trying to read, I said "Whoa, dude, you haven't already deleted the Flash DLLs? What are you waiting for?"
>
> Bush, take the same advice, substituting "IRS" for "INS" and dropping the last part.
With the IRS, if you fuck up (read: "fail to follow one of the tens of thousands of sections of the law that you can't even comprehentd"), at least you can placate them by cutting them a check. With INS, the law is just as incomprehensible, but the consequence for fucking up is that you get detained and beaten for a week (if you're lucky, if you're not lucky, for a lifetime, and that was before 9/11), and then you pack your bags and go home.
But yeah, we also desperately need to get rid of the Internal Revenue Code. It's the canonical example of making the law so complex that nobody knows if they're in compliance or not, and therefore everybody spends more time and money paying lawyers and CPAs for at least some reassurance.
Explain to me what law in English Canada imposed fines and jail time on those who spoke French.
> Québec language laws are there only to insure that immigrants don't get the notion that they can expect to be living in Québec without knowing french.
"We don't hate the niggers, we just want to make our communities safe for white people."
- Actual quote from some KKK goon on a talk show.
Take your Quebec nationalism and shove it up your pur-laine ass.
Actually, that's the difference between what's libelous and what's not.
I, too, cannot condone what Xybernaut did in this instance.
But the poster should have been more careful. For instance, I can say that I believe the management of $COMPANY is a bunch of mindless gits who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes. That's not libel, it's a statement of opinion.
If, on the other hand, I state that the management of $COMPANY is a bunch of mindless gits, that's libel.
Similarly - If I state that "$JERKOFF would be flipping burgers had he not eaten the throbbing gristle of his uncle to get that job", I'm libelling $JERKOFF. But if I modify that only so slightly to read "What, did $JERKOFF get his job there by blowing his uncle?" In the latter case, I'm only questioning $JERKOFF's competency for the job (albeit using rather colorful language to do so), which was, after all, the goal.
Finally, you can criticize by implication. The following paragraph, for instance, implies something about a company, but because nowhere in the following paragraph do I actually declare that any of the company's employees are, in fact, SLAPP-happy over-ligitious fucknozzles, (although it wouldn't surprise me ;-), I can say the following without fear:
If you replace $COMPANY with "Xybernaut", is that paragraph critical of Xybernaut's legal strategy? Sure. Libellous? Sure ain't.
(Of course, if someone subsequently says they think the reason I didn't replace $COMPANY with "Xybernaut" in that post as a result of actions taken by Xybernaut's team of SLAPP-happy over-^W^W^Whighly-skilled legal experts has chilled free speech, that would also be a reasonable belief.)
Dude, if I had mod points and hadn't posted to this thread, I'd mod you up. That's an excellent article, and covers both sides.
That depends on whether it's North or South Korea ;-)
If Bill Jones had spammed from Bill Jones' machine, and paid Bill Jones' ISP to deliver the outbound spew, you might have a point.
But according to the article, Bill Jones didn't do that. According to the article, Bill Jones raped an open relay in Korea. That is, he sent an SMTP transaction to a server (a server on which he had no authorized access), and commanded that server's MTA to deliver multiple copies of his spew to recipients in California and Canada.
Ignoring the theft-of-service issue that applies to all spam delivered through open relays, the server was on foreign soil -- that is, he appropriated the resources of a foreign government to influence the results of a domestic political event. That sounds like it could be in violation of numerous election finance laws (at a minimum), and a potential diplomatic incident to boot.
I happen to believe that all spam is theft (by conversion) of my mailbox. That is, Bill Jones has the right to speak, but he doesn't have the right to appropriate my resources to deliver his speech.
But even if you choose accept that sort of theft as OK in certain cases, how can you deny that (if the article is true) what he did is anything other than unauthorized access to, and theft of service from (if not a denial-of-service attack on) the Korean high school's server?
The other important distinction is that the points system can be understood by anyone.
You download a form. You check the boxes. You have a pretty good idea of whether or not you qualify. One form. One organization. And if you're a Canadian Immigration drone, it's pretty easy to sort the "yes" and the "no" piles.
Contrast this with the INS system.
Dozens of statuses under which you can get in, dozens of parallel (and contradictory) regimes that say what you can do when you're here, reams of paperwork resulting in 3-6 month delays to hire people or change statuses, a maze of statuses through which one must migrate to get to the green card stage, and a green card process that throws the merit system ("best person for the job") out the window and requires a 2-3 year dance between three or four government agencies (state labor board, DOL, INS, and Department of State), and a maze of regulations that INS itself doesn't even know how to follow.
The only people whose interests are served by the US immigration system are the bureaucrats at INS, the terrorists who sneak through the cracks, and the immigration lawyers whom companies have to hire to make sure they're in compliance.
Ashcroft, if you or one of your goons is reading this (and we all know you are ;-), please, during your term of office, eliminate the INS and start from scratch.
>
> No, just kill you.
Well, you've both got good points.
In Canada, getting a Bad Thing won't bankrupt you, because the quality of care is lower -- but there's no guarantee you'd have gotten that care in the States anyways.
Why? In the States, unless you're paying through the nose for "anything goes" health coverage, the insurance company will do its damnedest to deny you reimbursement anyways.
There were many cases of people at HMOs (for Canadians, that's the not-high-end option) that got letters from their insurance companies saying "Holy crap, cancer? That could cost our company a bundle! If you don't get a second opinion from one of our doctors (heh-heh!), we won't pay for your treatment. Our doctor should be able to see you in, oh, 6 months! What, your doc says the cancer will probably be untreatable by then? Gosh, that's just too bad!"
When pressed for a comparison, I'd say Canadian health care is like a "malice-free" HMO. Because of the profit motive, the HMO wants you to die cheaply, and will work to prevent your doctor from treating you. The Canuck doctor, on the other hand, wants to help, but because of the lack of profit motive, there are fewer Canuck doctors who can help (less profit == fewer MRI machines, etc. at hospitals) and you end up with delayed or second-tier treatment anyways.
The underlying reasons are completely different, but the results are the same - both systems' doctors end up being hamstrung by their respective systems :(
Better example: Imagine what the world would be like if we'd saved the morse code operators at the expense of Edison's invention.
WHAT ABOUT USING TELEGRAM AT FIFTY CENTS A WORD QUERY
THAT WOULD SUCK ASS STOP
Yeah, serves me right for posting without RTFarticle :)
As many have said for +5 points, Junkbuster's my subscription.
And on a more serious note, the people pointing out that nobody reads /. for the articles, they read it for the comments, and that it's the comment posters (the 3% minority) who produce the value that is /. for the other 97%, I wouldn't be surprised to see /. permit things like ad-blocking for subscribers with maxed karma.
Side note: I'd love to know just how many /. pageviews I go through every month. That's be a cool statistic to see on my user page. (Better yet, "xxxx pageviews, yyyy kilobytes transferred". We could then multiply "yyyy" by a cost-per-megabyte to figure out how much we were "costing" Slashdot to run.)
Yeah, but you know California's even more screwed when they all move back home for the same reason!
What could be harder than proving you have a college degree, can speak English, and a job offer? That's most of the "points" you need right then and there!
Especially compared to the 6-7 years of hoop-jumping with INS -- an agency that seems dedicated to the propostion that terrorists can get in just fine on student visas, but technology professionals have to stick with the same job for the better part of a decade and beg for permission from a state employment agency (3-6 months), the federal department of labor (another month), then back to the INS to ask for permission to apply for a green card (between 3 months to 1 year), and then another year or two after permission's granted, to actually get the green card. Get laid off or company reorgs? Get on the next plane back home and start from scratch.
If you've got half a brain and a degree, getting into Canada to do high-tech work is trivial.
INS incompetency has made it clear that high-tech workers are neither wanted nor valued in the States.
If you have more than 50 employees, and French isn't the official language of your workplace, you're fined.
If you immigrate and try to have your kids placed in an English school, you can't. Your kids will be educated in French, or not at all.
If you have a sign on your building that's in English, you get fined. If you have both English and French, you still get fined unless the French print is "predominant" (usually means "at least 50% larger").
Montreal is part of Quebec, which is governed by a bunch of wannabe ethnic-cleansers. It's off the list of business jurisdictions for good reason.
Given the choice between setting up business in Montreal and eating a mile my own shit, I'd be straining over a plate, fork and spoon in hand.
At the height of the "Brain Drain" (Canada-to-US migration of skilled workers), Ontario was governed by a socialist party and had marginal tax rates about 10-15% higher than its current rates (umm, and in conjunction with the tax hikes, welfare benefits doubled, and the commie bastards in power were confused as to why they'd gone to record deficits for the duration of their rule). British Columbia was in a similar mess.
Both parties were swept out of office in landslide elections (Ontario about 6 years ago, BC more recently) and neoconservative governments were put in place with aggressive tax-cutting policies.
Federally, Canada had a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 70%, and similarly high taxes. (Canadian tax brackets weren't indexed for inflation when inflation was under 3% -- as such, there was tremendous bracket creep). In this case, the party in power didn't change, but its policies did, largely due to the actions of a reasonably-clued Finance Minister.
Canada appears to have done the right thing - cut taxes, cut spending, foster growth. But 10 years ago, there was no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, and in a move reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged", many Canadians simply gave up on their country and came to the States to seek their fortunes in the dot-com boom.
Of course, the dot-com implosion is the largest factor in people migrating from California to cheaper jurisdictions, but at the rate US legislation is going, a "reverse Brain Drain" may well take place in a few years.
According to Ernst & Young Canada Tax Calculator, marginal rates in most provinces top out at around 40-50%.
If you're in CA (California) and making $US 75K, you're paying a marginal federal rate of 27%, plus 9.3% state taxes (on everything over $30000), plus 6.3% for the SS pyramid scheme (up to $86000 and increasing by 5% per year), plus another 1.5% for medicare taxes. Works out to a marginal rate of about 45%.
If you're in .ca (Canada) and making $CAD 75K, you've stopped paying into CPP (the Canadian version of the SS pyramid scheme) and EI (unemployment insurance) after C$35K or so. The marginal rates aren't really any different.
Of course, a $CAD is worth about $0.63 US, so your C$80K is only $50K. But the cost of living is much lower.
Got investments? Canada taxes capital gains at only half the marginal rates, and has no long-term vs. short-term rate difference. (In the US, you have to hold it for a year to qualify for the 20% "long-term" federal rate, and in CA, you're still paying that 9.3% CA income tax on it. So your long-term capital gains in California are taxed at 29.3%, and your short-term trades are at 40%. In Canada, all trades are taxed at about 20%.)
GST/PST? OK, compare 15% vs. 8.25%. But how much do you spend, vs. how much do you save? The better-off you are, the less a consumption tax hits you.
And if you have kids, what do you get for your money? In the US, you pretty much need a private school and university education costs are about double. And you have to pay for your own medical insurance. In Canada, the health care for Bad Stuff (cancer, etc) sucks ass, but for 90% of the population that only has to deal with colds, flu, and the occasional broken bone, it seems pretty good.
Bottom line - The US may be tax-competitive for an individual, but California sure as fuck ain't.
Dude, you need to disable Flash and Javascript.
I had no idea NYTimes and Wired had gotten that bad. (Then again, I disabled Flash two years ago and have surfed with Javashit off since the first piece of bad Javashit started consistently crashing Netscape 3. I haven't missed either. But thanks for saving me the 5 minutes it would take to turn 'em on and conclude that I'm still better off without 'em.)
>
> It could get tough. We already have a "War on Drugs" and a "War on Terrorism". Soon, our law enforcement officials will be waging a "War on Turing-Complete Computing Apparatus".
>
> Columbian drug lords will set up chip fabs in the jungle. Chip runners will swallow condoms full of CPUs and crap them out once they get inside the USA. You'll see people selling unregulated CPUs on the street for $100/MHz.
And the gang violence we used to see between Crips and Bloods over cocaine distribution rights...
Y'know, the future of tech under SSSCA could be kinda fun. Shitty for the US tech industry, but hey, our kids can flip fuckin 'burgers. Meantime, us Slashdotters with our pimpin' case m0dz will 0wn tha str33tz!
I'm thinking that buying a computer, post-SSSCA, will be something like a cross between a William Gibson novel and the Japanese Akibahara markets.
~wavy lines~
"Yo! Tackhead! I gotz dat AMD Hammerz you wanted! The newest steppings! Come right off the muthafukkin' fab in Dresden, man, then shoved up some guy's ass, then shat out in a motherboard plant in Taiwan, with the assembled boards shipped to Colombia and smuggled into the States buried in bags of coke! Hah! Dumb muthafukkin' customs bitchez thought tha truck was just another tonne of cocaine for Eisner and Valenti to pay off Hollings with, y'see, so they let it in, but it was fuckin' CPUs, man, CPUs! Soon as we crossed tha border, we flushed the worthless cocaine down the fuckin' toilet and broke out the fluorinert for tha mad pimpin overclock!"
You might want to add a sentence or two up front saying "I'm $FOO, I live in your district", and you might want to write it out by hand (or at least print it in Courier so it looks typewritten :) but you're dead on -- if SSSCA passes, it'll destroy the IT industry. That's great for Eisner and his $50-100B industry, but it's the end of the world for the $1T tech industry.
Oh, but it is educational. As long as we're cutting-and-pasting quotations...
A generation raised on Britney "Look at my tits" Spears is much easier to control than one raised on, say, Clock DVA. Which leads me to plug my favorite lyric of all time:
(I also lament the demise of Heathkit. They were a little before my time, but I got my hands on some surplus kits, and that's where I caught the hardware bug. That, and catching the software bug from an Apple ][ sitting idle with no games, just a programming manual, was arguably the start of what I eventually turned into a successful career. Had that Apple been an SSSCA-compliant PC (i.e. a movie/game console), I'd never have discovered "the language of machines" and would probably be flipping burgers.)
> And I hope you don't mind... but your post just went into my ``quotes'' file.
Cut-and-paste away, and feel free to fix my guesstimated tech-vs-hollyweird revenue figures when and as you find the data.
>
> I disagree with your dollar figures (I think they're too low but that's just a gut feeling) but I heartily agree with your assessment of the long term effect that this legislation will have.
Oops. I "M"d when I shoulda "B"'d.
I'd guesstimate annual tech revenues in the $1T range, and hollyweird at $50B. $100B tops. Thanks for calling me on it.
Unless this is a spec-fucking-tacular troll, what your advertisers want aren't what I want.
Buh-bye.
When electronics are outlawed, only outlaws will develop electronics.
I think we're on the verge of self-destructing our $1T technology industry goodbye for the $50M Hollyweird industry.
Right now, there's some geeky Chinese kid tinkering with a soldering iron. When he's in high school, he'll be playing around with FPGAs. When he goes to university, he'll meet another kid from India (he spent his childhood salvaging parts from our junked computers), and together, they'll develop a way to mass-produce quantum transistors.
Your kids, by government edict, won't have such advantages. Valenti, Eisner and Hollings would rather have the nation's kids watch The Lion King so Disney can make a 5-year profit projection.
25 years from now, your kids will be working in sweatshops assembling quantum computers. Because that Chinese kid and that Indian kid will form the next AT&T Labs. Your kid could have done the same in America, but his government destroyed his economic future for the sake of a fucking cartoon mouse.
On the other hand, the education budget can be cut - if SSSCA passes, all you'll need to prepare your kids for the future is a mop and a spatula. There'll still be some money for the gifted and talented ones -- they'll get squeegees.