I actually saw a documentary where they did it with just period tools, they didn't build an entire one, as I recall they basically just did about 4 levels of the top of one, but if you can move 20 gigantic stone blocks with a dozen or so people, you can move a few thousand with a few thousand people, it'd take a long time the first few times, but the Egyptians didn't start with Giza either.
We could build a pyramid today, but they'd have to build specialty machines. Modern cranes aren't designed to move a multi-tonne stone block. Developing those machines would be crazy expensive I'd guess you'd burn at least a few million bucks and a decade or so just getting the thing together, which would basically make doing it infeasible. That's not the same thing as impossible though, and the fact that you couldn't just rock up with modern equipment and build one doesn't mean they could do things we can't. That'd be like saying that because our soldiers wouldn't be all that gooda t fighting with a spear from a chariot that the ancient Egyptians could beat us in battle, that like building pyramids, just isn't something we do these days.
That's not to say stuff hasn't been lost, reasonable evidence indicates that Damascus steel was what we'd call carbon steel today and it took about 500 years for us to rediscover that when it was lost, and I'm sure there are other things. The pyramids
Aside from the fact that this stuff generally doesn't work at all I'd hazard a guess that you're wrong about pedophiles and their relative degree of laziness.
Ya see, these are people who do something which is pretty much universally reviled. Even serial killers, drug dealers, murderers, and normal every day run of the mill rapists hate people who do this sort of this to kids. If they were capable of just "jerking off to something else" I reckon they would have. There's plenty of freak porn that won't have your neighbours trying to burn down your house and/or kill you. Terrorists are more popular than these people.
The corollary of this is of course that the automatic filter is supposed to be targeted at people who are likely to be more careful and paranoid than, as previously stated, terrorists. It would be harder to eliminate child pornography than it is to defeat terrorism, and we can all see what a lovely job the governments are doing at that.
I'm perfectly happy for them to block child pornography(though I confess that the recent court decisions here in Oz about the old Simpson's cartoons we all saw back in the late 90's are going a bit too far). The problem is that these filters don't work, they're not even particularly good at stopping accidental exposure to this sort of thing let alone deliberate exposure, and they require resources and add a burden to internet connectivity which should not be born for so little benefit. The example I alway give is that even oppressive regimes who have the authority to burst into your house and shoot your for no real reason at all(China, North Korea, Iran) can't actually make them work.
As someone who works with Novell's proprietary stack and SLES every day, not really. Certainly the Microsoft deal hurt them, a lot of what makes open source profitable is getting people to do work for free and when the raving loons decided that they'd done a deal with the devil(by taking cash from Microsoft in exchange for a whole lot of nothing in return) it would have cut into that quite a bit, but mostly their product offerings suck.
SLES is quite good, but it's slightly less well supported by third party vendors(that is to say if you want to run some proprietary software on a Linux offering you'll have more options if you go with RHEL). It's really very good though, and unlike RHEL isn't stuck with config utilities built and designed in the dark ages of Linux gui design. The consistent feel between the NCURSES and the X implementations of YAST is quite nice too.
SLED is of course a fantasy, the only people running it as a primary corporate desktop are doing it because they were forced by their IT department or for reasons of principle, and most of them are using a VM or Microsoft server somewhere to fill in the gaps. I honestly don't know why corporate Linux desktops didn't take off, but they haven't.
The biggest problems are that Groupwise, eDirectory, and even Zenworks(which used to be fantastic) are steaming piles of crap. Even if they weren't, I've dealt with too many vendors who basically laugh at you when you ask them for support and tell then you're running Novell. I had a vendor once blame Novell for a fault in their product when I could replicate it on a system which had never had any Novell software installed on it and wasn't connected to the network. They spent most of the 90's and early 00's arrogantly screwing their few remaining customers, failing to get new customers and generally screwing their profit margins into the ground. The few new sales they've picked up in the last 5 years or so have been based around their new middleware products and they don't even Demo those connecting to anything other than AD and Exchange anymore. Nothing like seeing a Novell sales rep coming to sell you in IDM and showing it connected to exchange and AD with no Novell backbone products in sight.
Novell have started to get a little better in the last few years, but like Sun they came in too little too late.
Microsoft has quite a few Open Source initiatives. They quite like Open Source as far as I can tell(not enough to open source their OS of course, or affect their bottom line in anyway). Some of the open source stuff they encourage or support is even GPL.
That said, part of your last sentence is true. As far as I can tell, Microsoft has absolutely zero interest in free software.
Get real. Novell were slowly bleeding to death before they even bought SuSe.
They've been noxious to their few customers for years and the few instances where they had a better product(which hasn't happened for a long time) they failed to turn it into succes.
Unfortunately they took SuSe with them practically giving it away to support their other failing product lines.
It's a bit of a tragedy but it's a long time coming.
As for Microsoft buying them, not a chance in hell. Even if they wanted to it would never be approved. Microsoft has other open source initiatives and the death of Novell won't hurt them all that much, and to be honest seeing open source fail wouldn't kill em.
The interesting thing at this point is who picks up the pieces and what they do with them.
Yes, because charging the customer $50-100 an hour to fix a problem which will take hours to solve or doing the work for a flat rate and losing money yourself is a much better option.
The reality is that if a system gets sufficiently infected(which they generally do before anyone asks for help) then the OS and the applications are almost certainly gone. You can spend hours trying to fix em, but you can never be absolutely sure that the system hasn't been modified in some way, there's just too many files which could be replaced.
Try to save the data if it looks relatively simple, if it's not, quote the customer what it'll cost you to get it back and let them decide. A rooted machine is just going to take too long to restore to be cost effective, you're either screwing the customer or screwing yourself.
I never said they've solved this problem. Thus far they seem to be working very very hard not to solve it. I only said that it had to be solved and that it shouldn't be difficult to solve.
Once you're owned, a lot of virus scanners fail to install. Malware that already has access to your system can do a lot of that. Realistically all you can do once you're computer is already infected is to back up what you can, blow the system away and secure the new one before you even attempt to restore your backups.
I've yet to see a single tool that can reliably restore an infected PC unless you know exactly what infections you have and can use a specific tool for that task. I once got a system I was building(it was an original XP disk and I was on a slower internet connection) owned before I could patch it(which taught me the lesson of installing AV first) and it screwed my system up so badly I couldn't even download anything that would still run. Luckily it happened before I'd installed any software or personal data to the machine, but once you're done you're done.
The thing is, even the law doesn't say that. National icons are and always have been a gray area in the law. They are more than just physical objects, and in large part they belong to everyone both as an idea and as a representation.
Now don't get me wrong, the government were stupid. They shouldn't have ever signed a contract allowing him to keep the rights(presuming that's what they did), but the thing of it is is that it's a war memorial. The rules are never going to be the same as when you make some piece of commercial work.
Personally I don't use em, our networks guy who is a friend of mine does however, I'll let him know such things exist.
None of this really changes the fact that for all intents and purposes, RS-232 is a dying standard. Simple it may be, elegant it may be, but in the war for board space on smaller and smaller laptops it's lost the battle. There are certainly things to lament about that, but it's largely a realty. Since laptops are the primary candidates for connecting with this kind of interface(if you're going to drag a desktop machine into a tiny switch cupboard to repair a malfunctioning switch you may as well take the switch back to your desktop.)
That essentially leaves us with a couple of different options, buy adapters for laptops, put adapters in devices or come up with another way.
I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be all that hard to implement USB as a replacement standard(it's the most logical choice), a specialized host controller to connect to a simple easy to maintain driver on the laptop(which would eventually become standard just like RS-232) wouldn't really be that difficult to stick in ROM or in some sort of boot loader separate from the main OS shouldn't be that hard to do.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, and it's definitely the kind of problem where making it yours instead of your customers is going to give you a competitive advantage.
Actually, unlike your rock concert which is covered by copyright, this is a very gray legal area.
Aside from work for hire issues as to whether he has the right to the copyright or not(which the judge seems to have argued he does). Public landmarks are more than a little bit fuzzy when it comes to copyright. How much of the value of the memorial is in the sculpture itself and how much of it is in what it represents to people. How much of the stamp is about the actual sculpture and how much of it is about what the sculpture represents.
I would argue that that sculpture represents the lives of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and perhaps more broadly the millions of soldiers who have fought died on all sides in conflicts throughout history. It is important and famous not because of what this guy did with a chisel, but because of what a lot of men and women did either because of what they believed in, or because they had no choice.
That postage stamp, like the memorial, is to commemorate those people, and Mr Gaylord, no matter how great an artist he may or may not be, owns nothing of that.
Just as a guess, and I'm not sure if they were used in Korea as well as Vietnam, but they have these land mines. They've got two charges, one to shoot the other up to about waist height. Can't recall the name, but that's probably the best bet.
The problem is though that it's only simple if you have an actual serial port on both ends.
The serial port is all but gone on laptops and not exactly common on desktops or workstations. That isn't going to change any more than lpt ports are destined for a comeback.
Yes adaptors exist but the drivers for them aren't by any means standard and I know that most of them don't work under windows in 64 bit. Add to that the fact that putting an incredibly complex software driver(which is what it is) to implement a "simple" interface is not exactly good design and you start to see a big problem.
To be honest the reason serial still exists is that it's cheap but it can't stay.
IANAL but the key phrase is the bit about for the purpose of.
I'd read that as saying you can't distribute your client as a second life client or do things like prefill the second life server details. To be honest that should be a legal requirement anyway a second life client that cannot connect to the second life servers is not fit for purpose and shouldn't be legal to distribute as such.
Distributing it as a client for opensim or whatever it is called is another story.
Every form of civilization leads to some form of tyrrany because a group of people cannot exist where everyone gets everything they want. If you think you've found a system wherein there is no tyrrany then either your deluded or you are the tyrant.
The purpose of democracy is to try and ensure that as much as possible tryanny and therefor the power of the tyrants is spread out over as many people as possible. In theory in a correctly working democracy any given action is wanted by more people than is any other option. Does this mean that it's always wanted by everyone? Of course not, and sometimes the results are worse than an individual tyrant, but while it's sometimes worse than an enlightened benevolent dictator, it's a hell of a lot better than the opposite.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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There are still ways to do this, though they're harder now.
The issue isn't about your relationship with your client, it's about calling a spade a spade. If you rock up to the office at 9 work for a boss till 5, and do a standard FTE job for the same company for a number of years, then you're an employee. You're not a consultant no matter how hard you might wish it were the case.
The fact that it protects you is also really only a byproduct, as I said it's mostly about tax. The government says that certain kinds of employment relationships are taxable at a certain rate in a certain way, and allow for certain kinds of deductions. The constitution allows them to do this. To enforce this they've set up a law which means that for tax purposes you can't just say "I'm not an employee" and not be one. The fact that it means that your employer can't just say "you're not an employee" and deny you benefits to which you are entitled is just an added bonus.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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Despite it's general left leaning, the NYT employs a few right wing loonies along with the left loonies, not as many as some, but still a few. It's also always popular to beat up on the tax man, and at the moment on the government in general.
There's also some limitations on the way they consultants can handle tax which I've mostly glossed over to make the point. Generally speaking employees were dodging tax and employers were dodging responsibility, the government was mostly concerned about the tax, but the benefits for employees are an added bonus.
Mate welcome to the 21st century, linux Without X uses more than 256 MB depending on driver load, forget X plus gnome or KDE and compiz and all the stuff it takes to look shiny like Windows.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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You pay capital gains on dividends last I checked.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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Investors get dividends my friend.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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It's not specific to software engineers, but neither is this law. It affected a large number of software engineers because at the time it was passed, a lot of software engineers were working that way. Software engineers tend also to sometimes, and I say this being one, be somewhat obtuse to the way the world works as opposed to the way they think it should, and so are also more likely to get caught by such a law than a lawyer or an accountant who knows damned well how the world works and milks it for all its worth.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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I haven't looked into this stuff in a long time, but as I've said before, last time I checked you had to be the exclusive employee of a company for at least 12 months before any of this kicked in. That's a fairly long project, and to be honest, if you're working for the same company doing a standard job for 12 months you are an employee.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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Not from personal experience, but I know it used to be the case. I'm making the presumption that it still is because taxation is the motivation for these kinds of laws 99.9999999% of the time.
You are the sole investor in a company, that company is property and achieves gains in capital, you can, or at least you could, transfer some of that capital to the shareholders.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Yes, but he can pay out a large percentage of the companies earnings as dividends.
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I actually saw a documentary where they did it with just period tools, they didn't build an entire one, as I recall they basically just did about 4 levels of the top of one, but if you can move 20 gigantic stone blocks with a dozen or so people, you can move a few thousand with a few thousand people, it'd take a long time the first few times, but the Egyptians didn't start with Giza either.
We could build a pyramid today, but they'd have to build specialty machines. Modern cranes aren't designed to move a multi-tonne stone block. Developing those machines would be crazy expensive I'd guess you'd burn at least a few million bucks and a decade or so just getting the thing together, which would basically make doing it infeasible. That's not the same thing as impossible though, and the fact that you couldn't just rock up with modern equipment and build one doesn't mean they could do things we can't. That'd be like saying that because our soldiers wouldn't be all that gooda t fighting with a spear from a chariot that the ancient Egyptians could beat us in battle, that like building pyramids, just isn't something we do these days.
That's not to say stuff hasn't been lost, reasonable evidence indicates that Damascus steel was what we'd call carbon steel today and it took about 500 years for us to rediscover that when it was lost, and I'm sure there are other things. The pyramids
Aside from the fact that this stuff generally doesn't work at all I'd hazard a guess that you're wrong about pedophiles and their relative degree of laziness.
Ya see, these are people who do something which is pretty much universally reviled. Even serial killers, drug dealers, murderers, and normal every day run of the mill rapists hate people who do this sort of this to kids. If they were capable of just "jerking off to something else" I reckon they would have. There's plenty of freak porn that won't have your neighbours trying to burn down your house and/or kill you. Terrorists are more popular than these people.
The corollary of this is of course that the automatic filter is supposed to be targeted at people who are likely to be more careful and paranoid than, as previously stated, terrorists. It would be harder to eliminate child pornography than it is to defeat terrorism, and we can all see what a lovely job the governments are doing at that.
I'm perfectly happy for them to block child pornography(though I confess that the recent court decisions here in Oz about the old Simpson's cartoons we all saw back in the late 90's are going a bit too far). The problem is that these filters don't work, they're not even particularly good at stopping accidental exposure to this sort of thing let alone deliberate exposure, and they require resources and add a burden to internet connectivity which should not be born for so little benefit. The example I alway give is that even oppressive regimes who have the authority to burst into your house and shoot your for no real reason at all(China, North Korea, Iran) can't actually make them work.
As someone who works with Novell's proprietary stack and SLES every day, not really. Certainly the Microsoft deal hurt them, a lot of what makes open source profitable is getting people to do work for free and when the raving loons decided that they'd done a deal with the devil(by taking cash from Microsoft in exchange for a whole lot of nothing in return) it would have cut into that quite a bit, but mostly their product offerings suck.
SLES is quite good, but it's slightly less well supported by third party vendors(that is to say if you want to run some proprietary software on a Linux offering you'll have more options if you go with RHEL). It's really very good though, and unlike RHEL isn't stuck with config utilities built and designed in the dark ages of Linux gui design. The consistent feel between the NCURSES and the X implementations of YAST is quite nice too.
SLED is of course a fantasy, the only people running it as a primary corporate desktop are doing it because they were forced by their IT department or for reasons of principle, and most of them are using a VM or Microsoft server somewhere to fill in the gaps. I honestly don't know why corporate Linux desktops didn't take off, but they haven't.
The biggest problems are that Groupwise, eDirectory, and even Zenworks(which used to be fantastic) are steaming piles of crap. Even if they weren't, I've dealt with too many vendors who basically laugh at you when you ask them for support and tell then you're running Novell. I had a vendor once blame Novell for a fault in their product when I could replicate it on a system which had never had any Novell software installed on it and wasn't connected to the network. They spent most of the 90's and early 00's arrogantly screwing their few remaining customers, failing to get new customers and generally screwing their profit margins into the ground. The few new sales they've picked up in the last 5 years or so have been based around their new middleware products and they don't even Demo those connecting to anything other than AD and Exchange anymore. Nothing like seeing a Novell sales rep coming to sell you in IDM and showing it connected to exchange and AD with no Novell backbone products in sight.
Novell have started to get a little better in the last few years, but like Sun they came in too little too late.
Microsoft has quite a few Open Source initiatives. They quite like Open Source as far as I can tell(not enough to open source their OS of course, or affect their bottom line in anyway). Some of the open source stuff they encourage or support is even GPL.
That said, part of your last sentence is true. As far as I can tell, Microsoft has absolutely zero interest in free software.
Get real. Novell were slowly bleeding to death before they even bought SuSe.
They've been noxious to their few customers for years and the few instances where they had a better product(which hasn't happened for a long time) they failed to turn it into succes.
Unfortunately they took SuSe with them practically giving it away to support their other failing product lines.
It's a bit of a tragedy but it's a long time coming.
As for Microsoft buying them, not a chance in hell. Even if they wanted to it would never be approved. Microsoft has other open source initiatives and the death of Novell won't hurt them all that much, and to be honest seeing open source fail wouldn't kill em.
The interesting thing at this point is who picks up the pieces and what they do with them.
Yes, because charging the customer $50-100 an hour to fix a problem which will take hours to solve or doing the work for a flat rate and losing money yourself is a much better option.
The reality is that if a system gets sufficiently infected(which they generally do before anyone asks for help) then the OS and the applications are almost certainly gone. You can spend hours trying to fix em, but you can never be absolutely sure that the system hasn't been modified in some way, there's just too many files which could be replaced.
Try to save the data if it looks relatively simple, if it's not, quote the customer what it'll cost you to get it back and let them decide. A rooted machine is just going to take too long to restore to be cost effective, you're either screwing the customer or screwing yourself.
I never said they've solved this problem. Thus far they seem to be working very very hard not to solve it. I only said that it had to be solved and that it shouldn't be difficult to solve.
Once you're owned, a lot of virus scanners fail to install. Malware that already has access to your system can do a lot of that. Realistically all you can do once you're computer is already infected is to back up what you can, blow the system away and secure the new one before you even attempt to restore your backups.
I've yet to see a single tool that can reliably restore an infected PC unless you know exactly what infections you have and can use a specific tool for that task. I once got a system I was building(it was an original XP disk and I was on a slower internet connection) owned before I could patch it(which taught me the lesson of installing AV first) and it screwed my system up so badly I couldn't even download anything that would still run. Luckily it happened before I'd installed any software or personal data to the machine, but once you're done you're done.
Well that's not really all that surprising given that your body needs oxygen, but doesn't need CO2.
There's a reason that you breath most of that stuff back out.
The thing is, even the law doesn't say that. National icons are and always have been a gray area in the law. They are more than just physical objects, and in large part they belong to everyone both as an idea and as a representation.
Now don't get me wrong, the government were stupid. They shouldn't have ever signed a contract allowing him to keep the rights(presuming that's what they did), but the thing of it is is that it's a war memorial. The rules are never going to be the same as when you make some piece of commercial work.
Personally I don't use em, our networks guy who is a friend of mine does however, I'll let him know such things exist.
None of this really changes the fact that for all intents and purposes, RS-232 is a dying standard. Simple it may be, elegant it may be, but in the war for board space on smaller and smaller laptops it's lost the battle. There are certainly things to lament about that, but it's largely a realty. Since laptops are the primary candidates for connecting with this kind of interface(if you're going to drag a desktop machine into a tiny switch cupboard to repair a malfunctioning switch you may as well take the switch back to your desktop.)
That essentially leaves us with a couple of different options, buy adapters for laptops, put adapters in devices or come up with another way.
I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be all that hard to implement USB as a replacement standard(it's the most logical choice), a specialized host controller to connect to a simple easy to maintain driver on the laptop(which would eventually become standard just like RS-232) wouldn't really be that difficult to stick in ROM or in some sort of boot loader separate from the main OS shouldn't be that hard to do.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, and it's definitely the kind of problem where making it yours instead of your customers is going to give you a competitive advantage.
Actually, unlike your rock concert which is covered by copyright, this is a very gray legal area.
Aside from work for hire issues as to whether he has the right to the copyright or not(which the judge seems to have argued he does). Public landmarks are more than a little bit fuzzy when it comes to copyright. How much of the value of the memorial is in the sculpture itself and how much of it is in what it represents to people. How much of the stamp is about the actual sculpture and how much of it is about what the sculpture represents.
I would argue that that sculpture represents the lives of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and perhaps more broadly the millions of soldiers who have fought died on all sides in conflicts throughout history. It is important and famous not because of what this guy did with a chisel, but because of what a lot of men and women did either because of what they believed in, or because they had no choice.
That postage stamp, like the memorial, is to commemorate those people, and Mr Gaylord, no matter how great an artist he may or may not be, owns nothing of that.
Just as a guess, and I'm not sure if they were used in Korea as well as Vietnam, but they have these land mines. They've got two charges, one to shoot the other up to about waist height. Can't recall the name, but that's probably the best bet.
The problem is though that it's only simple if you have an actual serial port on both ends.
The serial port is all but gone on laptops and not exactly common on desktops or workstations. That isn't going to change any more than lpt ports are destined for a comeback.
Yes adaptors exist but the drivers for them aren't by any means standard and I know that most of them don't work under windows in 64 bit. Add to that the fact that putting an incredibly complex software driver(which is what it is) to implement a "simple" interface is not exactly good design and you start to see a big problem.
To be honest the reason serial still exists is that it's cheap but it can't stay.
IANAL but the key phrase is the bit about for the purpose of.
I'd read that as saying you can't distribute your client as a second life client or do things like prefill the second life server details. To be honest that should be a legal requirement anyway a second life client that cannot connect to the second life servers is not fit for purpose and shouldn't be legal to distribute as such.
Distributing it as a client for opensim or whatever it is called is another story.
Every form of civilization leads to some form of tyrrany because a group of people cannot exist where everyone gets everything they want. If you think you've found a system wherein there is no tyrrany then either your deluded or you are the tyrant.
The purpose of democracy is to try and ensure that as much as possible tryanny and therefor the power of the tyrants is spread out over as many people as possible. In theory in a correctly working democracy any given action is wanted by more people than is any other option. Does this mean that it's always wanted by everyone? Of course not, and sometimes the results are worse than an individual tyrant, but while it's sometimes worse than an enlightened benevolent dictator, it's a hell of a lot better than the opposite.
There are still ways to do this, though they're harder now.
The issue isn't about your relationship with your client, it's about calling a spade a spade. If you rock up to the office at 9 work for a boss till 5, and do a standard FTE job for the same company for a number of years, then you're an employee. You're not a consultant no matter how hard you might wish it were the case.
The fact that it protects you is also really only a byproduct, as I said it's mostly about tax. The government says that certain kinds of employment relationships are taxable at a certain rate in a certain way, and allow for certain kinds of deductions. The constitution allows them to do this. To enforce this they've set up a law which means that for tax purposes you can't just say "I'm not an employee" and not be one. The fact that it means that your employer can't just say "you're not an employee" and deny you benefits to which you are entitled is just an added bonus.
Despite it's general left leaning, the NYT employs a few right wing loonies along with the left loonies, not as many as some, but still a few. It's also always popular to beat up on the tax man, and at the moment on the government in general.
There's also some limitations on the way they consultants can handle tax which I've mostly glossed over to make the point. Generally speaking employees were dodging tax and employers were dodging responsibility, the government was mostly concerned about the tax, but the benefits for employees are an added bonus.
Mate welcome to the 21st century, linux Without X uses more than 256 MB depending on driver load, forget X plus gnome or KDE and compiz and all the stuff it takes to look shiny like Windows.
You pay capital gains on dividends last I checked.
Investors get dividends my friend.
It's not specific to software engineers, but neither is this law. It affected a large number of software engineers because at the time it was passed, a lot of software engineers were working that way. Software engineers tend also to sometimes, and I say this being one, be somewhat obtuse to the way the world works as opposed to the way they think it should, and so are also more likely to get caught by such a law than a lawyer or an accountant who knows damned well how the world works and milks it for all its worth.
I haven't looked into this stuff in a long time, but as I've said before, last time I checked you had to be the exclusive employee of a company for at least 12 months before any of this kicked in. That's a fairly long project, and to be honest, if you're working for the same company doing a standard job for 12 months you are an employee.
Not from personal experience, but I know it used to be the case. I'm making the presumption that it still is because taxation is the motivation for these kinds of laws 99.9999999% of the time.
You are the sole investor in a company, that company is property and achieves gains in capital, you can, or at least you could, transfer some of that capital to the shareholders.
Yes, but he can pay out a large percentage of the companies earnings as dividends.
The property is the company itself.