It is technically rather difficult. They can't do anything to tax Internet commerce itself - nothing distinguishes a packet containing part of a credit card number or an offer to send a money order from anything else. You can keep piecing it together and compare it to a regex, but even if you knew for sure what you were looking for, you could never even begin to search it all.
What is more likely is that they will find a way to force the credit card companies, eCash or whatever they call it providers, etc. to catalog and tax all the various transactions. If it's not a sales tax and is instead a duty tariff for importing goods, then this will just force sites that sell electronically transferrable goods to buy web space in the countries which they perceive as their target markets. Now, they could try to charge duty on that, but is it one copy per mirror, or infinite copies, both. It's not like they're importing fruit or something quantifiable like that.
If they respond by saying that you're essentially importing it from the contry of origin, well, I can buy a book by a European author from Chapters. Will the reciept have a duty charge because I imported it from Germany? No. So to make that change, they would have to change the music and book industries.
Of course, the credit card companies would stand to lose a lot if this happens. They'd have to purchase and maintain new infrastructure to implement this sort of thing, tracking the location of the purchaser and comparing it with the location of the store requires some simple software modifications and perhaps some new staff so that's not too bad. However, a lot of people don't normally use credit cards but might so that they can get something online. The more money tranferred through electronic commerce, the more the credit card companies get.
Microsoft doesn't like this either. They'd like nothing more than to stop printing boxes and pressing CDs - it eats into their margin. But that requires being able to sell things online. People won't buy online if it costs less and is easier otherwise. So, we have the credit card companies and just about any software company, bank, e-commerce startup, and a bunch of other corporate types against this.
The WTO is a group of nations, so they want more revenue for their governments. They see some of that revenue (tariffs on imported CDs, software, etc) going elsewhere and that market is growing. They don't see why it should be any different on-line and thus they want a way to get it.
Since Visa, et al are international organisations and the Internet has no borders, they need an international regulation.
Woo, corporations and governments with differing interests. In this particular case, it appears we're better off with the corporate, and in other issues (certain anti-trust lawsuits, various cases of companies generally ripping people off, etc) the government protects us. Neither really represents what's best or what individuals would want, the best we can hope for is that they keep each other in line.line if it costs less and is easier otherwise.
Umm, they said "tariffs", ie. duty and such paid when goods cross national borders.
Sales tax is entirely different.
Re:Somebody please post the article here.
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
·
· Score: 1
The only accurate information they can record about you is your IP address. There is nothing forcing you to use your real name, demographics, or anything else. They can't prove that you're not an 84 year old Albanian woman who makes half a million dollars each week from her investment portfolio.
So just create an account. Personally, I just randomly type letters and click boxes until it lets me in. The random crap is saved in a cookie, if the cookie goes away then I give it more gibberish.
Username: dkjal;ajk;lkdjasl Password: asdfgh (needs to be same twice) E-mail: lkj@sdfsdf.com
The mailing list is public. You can subscribe here and read the archives here. This, IMHO, is good. The existing posts on the list are, for the most part, high quality, constructive and thoughtful. One would hope that this being posted to Slashdot doesn't change that.
I've seen many people still using Netscape 3, especially in corporate settings. So, it doesn't matter how much nifty stuff they're adding support for now, it's not going to mean much for a few years.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this, "Ooooo... can I network things with it?" and no, unfortunately, one cannot. Bah. What kind of "cybertool" has no RJ-45 crimper?
Is there someone out there who knows something about encryption (I don't particularly) who can tell me if the thought of the NSA posessing say, oh, 50 of these machines means that I need to use a longer key?
Or will it take 20 billion years for even these to crack something?
I use Linux on my 486 SX 25 laptop and on my K6, and will soon use it on my Athlon.
Low end, high end, anything in between. Just because it doesn't do 420000 CPU SMP quite right in the current stable release does not mean that Linux is only good on the absolute low-end of things. It just happens not to be bad at it.
Umm.. Slashdot already has your IP address, so they can already try to get that. With your e-mail address or your IP, either way they need to go to your ISP to get your name and address.
AMD locked theirs too. Unless you don't mind opening the cover on the chip and moving surface-mount resistors when you feel like changing clock speeds.
As a group, we have more money than the average person. In our society that should mean we have more influence, right?
If we all donated $20 to the EFF and then to the ACLU and other such groups... Even just 500,000 of us is $10,000,000... do that once a year, it will help, right? Or does it need to be a factor of ten more? How much does it take to manipulate this system to our own ends?
Ah, but now your 350MB RedHat install has enough compilers and libraries that said system could compile itself.
Now, how much space would it take for all the junk used to compile windows above and beyond the existing space taken up. Will it all fit in the extra 60MB? Doubtful...
"no atmosphere"? Did you mistake this for one of those primarily single-player games? Get a PXO account and try that...
A K62-400 isn't that outrageous, it's rather inexpensive, even if you include a middlish Voodoo3. Besides, Descent III requires no where near that unless you're expecting 1024X768+.. D3 is my favorite game and runs fairly well on my K6-166 and Voodoo 1, it only gets *slow* when I'm the server for an 8 player game (my cable modem can handle it, my CPU can't), but that's ok since I usually limit it to 5 or 6. What is with you people who call anything less than 60FPS slow? I know motion is far more fluid and realistic at those speeds, but that doesn't make 20FPS unplayable or "slow".. sheesh, you people and your "upgrade every 18 months" syndrome. I played D1 on a 386 DX40!
Descent has always been my favorite game, and Parallax (now Outrage/Volition) is a good company.
I was happy when I saw that D3 came with a dedicated server for Linux, but a client... wow!
I must now go and send many letters of thanks and encouragement..
You think you have a tech shortage now ...
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
Hm. I rememeber hearing all this blather about a shortage of technically competent people. Now, how do you think those people are going to react if their Government keeps trying this sort of silliness?
They're going to leave. Maybe they'll tolerate a bit. But there will come a point at which it would become unbearable. If I get people knocking on my door requesting that I comply with such and such law and remove my unauthorised firewall.. yeah... I'll remove it, to Europe:-P
Hey, multi-billion dollar US tech industry, do you *want* employees? Or can your lawyers write code as well as they can propose codes?
Why must the government co-operate with industry? I think the ideal situation is to have the government and the corporations opposing each other continuously, hopefully leaving them too busy with each other to give us any more "service" than we require.
That's not what Hemos suggested. He was lamenting the fact that the American gov't *looked* like it was going to get a clue, but then promply lost it. Notice the past tense. He liked the old legislation and was disappointed by the new one.
Exactly! Why should we care if Windows is the dominant OS? We can still use Linux or BSD. What is the point in even trying to get desktop acceptance? If people want to use Windows, fine, let them, it doesn't have anything to do with us.
If they want to use Linux, that's good too. And if they want to use Linux but have it look like windows, they can write the necessary bits. Some do, some have. But it's nothing to get excited about.
With the demand for work so high, you don't get paid at least time and a half for overtime? No hourly wage? Guh? Then what's the motivation?
I come to work, they pay me for 8 hours / day that's how long I work. If they want me here any longer, they pay for it. Simple.
Even 40 hours is a fair bit. Too bad I don't have the willpower to force myself to be poor and only work part time.. though I'd likely appreciate the time more than the money..
Exactly. GUI and CLI aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't interchangeable. There are some things each does more efficiently than the other. Which things one prefers in each depend on the user. By having both done well, you have an operating system that everyone can use.
Previously, I was an OS/2 user. IMHO, it has the best GUI of them all. Assuming the programmer of your app wasn't being lazy, everything was an object and you could drag'n'drop, and otherwise manipulate all objects in a nice standard way. Want to e-mail someone an image from a web page? The URL? Just right click, drag it to your message and send. *poof*. There was even a third party tool that let you drag selected text. This was all from one common interface, everything had the same clipboard, all dragging and dropping was handled by the same mechanism. It was well and good, too bad it wasn't stable.
Linux (depending on configuration), and Win32 GUIs tend to have some objecty and d'n'd things, but it always seems to be only partially implemented and tends to not work in the instances I'd actually find it useful.
The CLI of both Windows and OS/2 were relatively useless and quite annoying out of the box. It required 4dos or 4os/2 to get them to behave, bah.
Linux has a great CLI, many shells available, and if you read the man page on bash or zsh or whichever, you can generally make it behave how you want. Plus, Linux has nice things like real globbing, common acceptance of standard I/O, and a wealth of command line utilities.
So, to sum up - OS/2 has a good GUI, bad CLI, Linux has good CLI, unfinished GUI, Windows has... umm... a lot of commercial support.
I don't suppose anyone is hiding something combining the best aspects of KDE/Gnome and OS/2 using a toolkit that is a GPLed Qt with GTK+ themes and a bunch of handy functions supporting seamless integration with apps? No? Well, could someone please merge all those projects together, or make them interoperable or something, because that's the limitation of GUI under Linux right now, it's too fragmented. The problem is, how can we maintain the ability to have multiple toolkit thingies, window managers, X servers and misc interface bits, while coming up with a way that we can use this mess without it seeming like such an eclectic assortment of unrelated bits?
I just realised, people are going to tell me to quit complaining and go use BeOS. Oh well. I'll post it anyhow...
Heh. I suppose that means that the computer market might be really interesting in a decade or so, instead of just chosing between different variations of similar technology, we'll have to see if we can settle for existing optical and/or biological devices or if we want to upgrade to the new devices based on quantum effects. Much more interesting than RISC or CISC, SCSI or IDE, blah blah..
Slashdot Mirror
It is technically rather difficult. They can't do anything to tax Internet
commerce itself - nothing distinguishes a packet containing part of a credit
card number or an offer to send a money order from anything else. You can
keep piecing it together and compare it to a regex, but even if you knew for
sure what you were looking for, you could never even begin to search it all.
What is more likely is that they will find a way to force the credit card
companies, eCash or whatever they call it providers, etc. to catalog and
tax all the various transactions. If it's not a sales tax and is instead
a duty tariff for importing goods, then this will just force sites that
sell electronically transferrable goods to buy web space in the countries
which they perceive as their target markets. Now, they could try to
charge duty on that, but is it one copy per mirror, or infinite copies,
both. It's not like they're importing fruit or something quantifiable
like that.
If they respond by saying that you're essentially importing it from the contry
of origin, well, I can buy a book by a European author from Chapters. Will
the reciept have a duty charge because I imported it from Germany? No.
So to make that change, they would have to change the music and book industries.
Of course, the credit card companies would stand to lose a lot if this
happens. They'd have to purchase and maintain new infrastructure to
implement this sort of thing, tracking the location of the purchaser
and comparing it with the location of the store requires some simple
software modifications and perhaps some new staff so that's not too
bad. However, a lot of people don't normally use credit cards but might
so that they can get something online. The more money tranferred through
electronic commerce, the more the credit card companies get.
Microsoft doesn't like this either. They'd like nothing more than to stop printing
boxes and pressing CDs - it eats into their margin. But that requires being able to
sell things online. People won't buy online if it costs less and is easier otherwise.
So, we have the credit card companies and just about any software company, bank, e-commerce startup, and a bunch of other corporate types against this.
The WTO is a group of nations, so they want more revenue for their governments.
They see some of that revenue (tariffs on imported CDs, software, etc) going
elsewhere and that market is growing. They don't see why it should be
any different on-line and thus they want a way to get it.
Since Visa, et al are international organisations and the Internet has no
borders, they need an international regulation.
Woo, corporations and governments with differing interests. In this particular
case, it appears we're better off with the corporate, and in other issues
(certain anti-trust lawsuits, various cases of companies generally
ripping people off, etc) the government protects us. Neither really
represents what's best or what individuals would want, the best
we can hope for is that they keep each other in line.line if it costs less and is easier otherwise.
Umm, they said "tariffs", ie. duty and such
paid when goods cross national borders.
Sales tax is entirely different.
The only accurate information they can record about you is your IP address. There is nothing forcing you to use your real name, demographics, or anything else. They can't prove that you're not an 84 year old Albanian woman who makes half a million dollars each week from her investment portfolio.
...
So just create an account. Personally, I just randomly type letters and click boxes until it lets me in. The random crap is saved in a cookie, if the cookie goes away then I give it more gibberish.
Username: dkjal;ajk;lkdjasl
Password: asdfgh (needs to be same twice)
E-mail: lkj@sdfsdf.com
etc
http://hyperion.cc.uregina.c a/~skomoroj/colourpalm.jpg
The mailing list is public. You can subscribe here and read the archives here. This, IMHO, is good. The existing posts on the list are, for the most part, high quality, constructive and thoughtful. One would hope that this being posted to Slashdot doesn't change that.
I've seen many people still using Netscape 3, especially in corporate settings. So, it doesn't matter how much nifty stuff they're adding support for now, it's not going to mean much for a few years.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this, ... can I network things with it?" and no,
"Ooooo
unfortunately, one cannot. Bah. What kind of
"cybertool" has no RJ-45 crimper?
Anyone mirroring the ISO yet?
Is there someone out there who knows something about encryption (I don't particularly) who can tell me if the thought of the NSA posessing say, oh, 50 of these machines means that I need to use a longer key?
Or will it take 20 billion years for even these to crack something?
Please enlighten me, I lack knowings.
I use Linux on my 486 SX 25 laptop and on my K6, and will soon use it on my Athlon.
Low end, high end, anything in between. Just because it doesn't do 420000 CPU SMP quite right in the current stable release does not mean that
Linux is only good on the absolute low-end of things. It just happens not to be bad at it.
Umm .. Slashdot already has your IP address, so
they can already try to get that. With your
e-mail address or your IP, either way they need
to go to your ISP to get your name and address.
AMD locked theirs too. Unless you don't mind opening the cover on the chip and moving surface-mount resistors when you feel like changing clock speeds.
As a group, we have more money than the average person. In our society that should mean we have more influence, right?
... Even just 500,000 of us is $10,000,000 ... do that once a year, it will help, right? Or does it need to be a factor of ten more? How much does it take to manipulate this system to our own ends?
If we all donated $20 to the EFF and then to the ACLU and other such groups
Ah, but now your 350MB RedHat install has enough
...
compilers and libraries that said system could compile itself.
Now, how much space would it take for all the junk used to compile windows above and beyond the existing space taken up. Will it all fit in the extra 60MB? Doubtful
"no atmosphere"? Did you mistake this ...
.. D3 is my favorite game and runs fairly well on my K6-166 and Voodoo 1, it only gets *slow* when I'm the server for an 8 player game (my cable modem can handle it, my CPU can't), but that's ok since I usually limit it to 5 or 6. What is with you people who call anything less than 60FPS slow? I know motion is far more fluid and realistic at those speeds, but that doesn't make 20FPS unplayable or "slow" .. sheesh, you people and your "upgrade every 18 months" syndrome. I played D1 on a 386 DX40!
for one of those primarily single-player games?
Get a PXO account and try that
A K62-400 isn't that outrageous, it's rather inexpensive, even if you include a middlish Voodoo3. Besides, Descent III requires no where near that unless you're expecting 1024X768+
Descent has always been my favorite game, and
... wow!
Parallax (now Outrage/Volition) is a good company.
I was happy when I saw that D3 came with a dedicated server for Linux, but a client
I must now go and send many letters of thanks and
encouragement..
Hm. I rememeber hearing all this blather about a shortage of technically competent people. Now, how do you think those people are going to react if their Government keeps trying this sort of silliness?
.. yeah ... I'll remove it, to Europe :-P
They're going to leave. Maybe they'll tolerate a bit. But there will come a point at which it would become unbearable. If I get people knocking on my door requesting that I comply with such and such law and remove my unauthorised firewall
Hey, multi-billion dollar US tech industry, do you *want* employees? Or can your lawyers write code as well as they can propose codes?
Why must the government co-operate with industry? I think the ideal situation is to have the government and the corporations opposing each other continuously, hopefully leaving them too busy with each other to give us any more "service" than we require.
That's not what Hemos suggested. He was lamenting the fact that the American gov't *looked* like it was going to get a clue, but then promply lost it. Notice the past tense. He liked the old legislation and was disappointed by the new one.
Ok, here's my guess:
In My Not So Humble Opinion
but what's the BIK for ?
Ok, here's my guess:
...
..
In My Not So Humble Opinion (I Know)
I'm fairly sure of the first bit, but not about the IK
Exactly! Why should we care if Windows is the dominant OS? We can still use Linux or BSD. What is the point in even trying to get desktop acceptance? If people want to use Windows, fine, let them, it doesn't have anything to do with us.
If they want to use Linux, that's good too. And if they want to use Linux but have it look like windows, they can write the necessary bits. Some do, some have. But it's nothing to get excited about.
With the demand for work so high, you don't get paid at least time and a half for overtime? No hourly wage? Guh? Then what's the motivation?
.. though I'd likely appreciate the time more than the money..
I come to work, they pay me for 8 hours / day that's how long I work. If they want me here any longer, they pay for it. Simple.
Even 40 hours is a fair bit. Too bad I don't have the willpower to force myself to be poor and only work part time
Read the comment on Slashdot. Apparently all you had to do was view source to find the backup.
Exactly. GUI and CLI aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't interchangeable. There are some things each does more efficiently than the other. Which things one prefers in each depend on the user. By having both done well, you have an operating system that everyone can use.
... umm... a lot of commercial support.
...
Previously, I was an OS/2 user. IMHO, it has the best GUI of them all. Assuming the programmer of your app wasn't being lazy, everything was an object and you could drag'n'drop, and otherwise manipulate all objects in a nice standard way. Want to e-mail someone an image from a web page? The URL? Just right click, drag it to your message and send. *poof*. There was even a third party tool that let you drag selected text. This was all from one common interface, everything had the same clipboard, all dragging and dropping was handled by the same mechanism. It was well and good, too bad it wasn't stable.
Linux (depending on configuration), and Win32 GUIs tend to have some objecty and d'n'd things, but it always seems to be only partially implemented and tends to not work in the instances I'd actually find it useful.
The CLI of both Windows and OS/2 were relatively useless and quite annoying out of the box. It required 4dos or 4os/2 to get them to behave, bah.
Linux has a great CLI, many shells available, and if you read the man page on bash or zsh or whichever, you can generally make it behave how you want. Plus, Linux has nice things like real globbing, common acceptance of standard I/O, and a wealth of command line utilities.
So, to sum up - OS/2 has a good GUI, bad CLI, Linux has good CLI, unfinished GUI, Windows has
I don't suppose anyone is hiding something combining the best aspects of KDE/Gnome and OS/2 using a toolkit that is a GPLed Qt with GTK+ themes and a bunch of handy functions supporting seamless integration with apps? No? Well, could someone please merge all those projects together, or make them interoperable or something, because that's the limitation of GUI under Linux right now, it's too fragmented. The problem is, how can we maintain the ability to have multiple toolkit thingies, window managers, X servers and misc interface bits, while coming up with a way that we can use this mess without it seeming like such an eclectic assortment of unrelated bits?
I just realised, people are going to tell me to quit complaining and go use BeOS. Oh well. I'll post it anyhow
Heh. I suppose that means that the computer market might be really interesting in a decade or so, instead of just chosing between different variations of similar technology, we'll have to see if we can settle for existing optical and/or biological devices or if we want to upgrade to the new devices based on quantum effects. Much more interesting than RISC or CISC, SCSI or IDE, blah blah ..