Of course the votes are easy to count! You only have a 1 party system (like the old Soviet Union). You can either vote for the Liberal party or... well, the Liberal Party.
Great program but missing MUST HAVE feature
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OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think OpenOffice (OO) and StarOffice are great programs, but until they allow me to use different line numbering schemes for each section/style, I can't use them.
I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majority of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.
While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.
I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.
I think OpenOffice (OO) and StarOffice are great programs, but until they allow me to use different line numbering schemes for each section/style, I can't use them.
I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majoirty of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.
While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.
I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.
One example in the article is the guy running a meth lab
1) I fail to have any sympathy for a guy who runs a meth lab.
2) The sad fact is, Patriot Act or no, in the US and most "civilized" countries there are so many laws that the police can pick you up anytime they want for breaking the law. They just have to care enough to target you and figure out which of the gazilla laws you inadvertently broke.
The "if you're a law abiding citizen" comment, misses the mark. There are so many laws, none of us can go through life without breaking some law. None of us are law abiding anymore, regardless of our intentions.
Also, the sentencing is so Draconian nowadays that the penalty for fighting the arrest and losing makes a plea bargain much more attractive. Given the choice between a 20 years minimum sentence and a 2 year plea bargain, most people take the plea bargain. The 20 years just scares them too much.
The problem isn't "those damn Republicans." Remember many Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. The problem is the political system. Rarely does a politician get elected because they voted to repeal a criminal law. Rarely does a politician get elected for being "soft on crime." Willie Horton anyone? Left or Right, you get votes by promising to protect "the public" and their children. That means you pass MORE laws, even if the existing laws are adequate, because that shows you did something. You pass TOUGHER penalties, because that shows you did something.
That is why we end up with drunk driving laws that set the blood alcohol level at a value lower than the margin of error on the testing devices. And, when this is pointed out to the legislature they just change the margin of error on the test. Not by changing the test, but by changing the definition of margin of error. (Next up, Congress sets the acceleration due to gravity at 11m/s^2.) Because, we HAVE to be tough on drunk drivers "for the children."
That is just one example of the stupid and unreasonable results of the "democractic" political system. I am sure you have your own examples.
I am not supporting the Patriot Act. I wish it and the system that created it wasn't so. But, don't act like this is new. Don't act like the Patriot Act is an exception. And, don't act like the US and only one party is the US plays this horrible game. It is played by both sides, all over the world, all the time.
It isn't being cynical. It is standard evidence and civil procedure.
Off the top of my head (and I am a guy that doesn't often deal with evidence and civil procedure. So, your mileage may differ)...
1) It isn't a settlement contract. You are not giving any consideration (one of the 3 main elements of a contract). You are just promising to refrain from an illegal action. Refraining from illegal acts isn't consideration, it is a pre-existing duty. So, no contract.
2) It is an admission against interest (i.e. a hearsay exception) and therefore admissible evidence against you. And, it is notarized. So, what is the jury going to think about it?
Also, as a notarized document outside the hearsay exclusion, other parties (i.e. the Federal government) can use this against you in a separate case. Oh, and for a few reasons, including that it is a voluntary admission, you've waived your 5th Amendment privileges in a criminal case with this.
If the RIAA was trying to be nice, they did a horrible job of it. If they were trying to slip a Trojan Horse by us, they didn't do too well either. If they were trying to make a PR point, it all depends on what the media reports now doesn't it?
I never understood the Plaintiff's legal logic behind these "linking" equals "copyright violation" cases. (I get the overall logic of "We are powerful. You are not. We'll make you shut-up if we don't like what you say." But, it is the logic in the legal briefs I don't get.)
As far as I am concerned the A tag of HTML is just a citation format. If the link is a copyright violation, why aren't citations made in MLA or Blue Book formats similar copyright violations? The idea extends to deep-linking cases. If deep-linking allows you to skip past the ads on a web page and is supposedly illegal because of that, why aren't pin-point citations (where you cite both the book and the page on the book where the quote is from) illegal?
I'll accept that a trade secret case could be filed, but copyright? If it is a link, it is not a copy; it is a citation, i.e. a pointer to the original "copy" of the web page.
I haven't bothered to do any research on this (because it has yet to directly affect my life). Has any defendant advanced the A tag as citation argument? Did the judge buy it?
Regular Expression Searches
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Google Turns 5
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've now used Google for so long that I can't remember what I used before.
However, when is Google going to let me use full Perl-style regular expression searching?
"full stop"
Oh we all wish. But it ain't so Joe.
We have a full line of bad cases out there that make them enforceable.
Fire up WestLaw/Lexis and read ProCD. ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3D 1447 (7th Cir., June 20, 1996)
Also, http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/p rocd.htm
the entire point of a democracy is to allow majority rule while still protecting minority rights.
No, democracy (in its purest form) has not a damn thing to do with protecting minority rights. That is why we had to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, to protect the minority from the tyranical power pure-democracy allows the majority.
Yeah, in the American verion of representative democracy, we protect minority rights, but that is because of the modifcations we've made to the idea of democracy not because of democracy.
You'll notice in the definition below that the word "minority" is never used.
democracy (di-mokre-se) noun
plural democracies
1.Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2.A political or social unit that has such a government.
3.The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4.Majority rule.
[French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek demokratia : demos, people + -kratia, -cracy.]
OK, it appears B7 will finally be coming out on DVD (as opposed to the $20 per episode VHS). Unfortunatly, it is only in the UK.
So, having never thought about this before and having 1 million people in the forum who have, what do I need to do to play the Region-2/PAL DVDs on my Region-1/NTSC system?
I assume the Region coding is no problem and can be handled in at least 1 of 3 ways (below). But does the PAL/NTSC formating matter? Won't the DVD-Player just reformat the MPEG to whatever the TV expects?
I assume I can get around the Region coding (MPAA bastards) by:
Buying/Modding my DVD player to region free mode;
Using the Windows Control Panel setting to turn the DVD-Drive into a Region-2 drive. I have to 2 DVD-Drives, I assume 1 can be R1 and the other R2; or
Rip the DVD to the hard drive and during ripping romove the Macrovision & Region coding.
Thoughts from those with more experience doing this?
From Sec 3 of the Act: "an e-mail service provider that the sender knew or should have known is located in this state or to an e-mail address that the sender knew or should have known is held by a resident of this state"
Requiring willful conduct or intent as this law does (in Sec 3, not Sec 4) puts a huge burden on the prosecution/plaintiff. With email addresses that have no physical correspondence to the receipt's real address, how is the spammer supposed to "know or should know" if the resident is in Michigan? Once this, nearly unprovable, element is part of the crime, the crime becomes nearly unenforceable. And, all the draconian requirements that got this law the press coverage may be ignored.
I guess the real battle is "can you assume that if a Domain Name is registered to a MI address that the email server is physically in MI?" After all, the Domain Name's mailing address may be a corporate headquarters and the server may be located in Florida.
Sec. 4 of the Act is a good old strict liability requirement (no intent or negligence needed to prove the crime). But, the requirements imposed by Sec. 4 aren't that odd, just standard "truth in advertising" applied to email.
With the huge cash reserves they have, they should be taking a beating on the Accumulated Earnings Tax [FN-1]. I haven't done a lot of research on this (my Google research is below) but the short of it seems to be "if a corporation allows earnings to accumulate beyond the reasonable needs of the business, it may be subject to an accumulated earnings tax of 38.6%." This 38.6% would certainly exceed any ordinary income tax (now capital gains tax under the newest law, I think) that the shareholder would pay on the dividend.
Also, if memory severs, wasn't MSFT getting hit with a shareholder suit to force it to pay dividends?
See also: Open Letter to Bill Gates, http://www.cptech.org/ms/rn2bg20020104dividend.htm l An update from our friends at CCH, http://www.toolkit.cch.com/text/P12_4785.asp Fool .com on shareholders asking for MSFT dividends, http://www.fool.com/dripport/2002/dripport021107.h tm
Why is Firebird that wonderful?
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Mozilla 1.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I hate to say that the Emperor has no clothes, but...
I haven't bothered to update from Moz 1.2.1 because it works and I am happy with it. I don't see how the browser (the only portion I use) has improved significantly. From the 1.3.x and 1.4 release notes, it seems most improvements have come to the newsgroups/mail.
As for Firebird (a.k.a. the browser formerly known as Phoenix), is it just me or is this the most IE-clone, kiddie like browser. I know we're all supposed to say how much better Firebird is, but I don't feel like an adult while using it. Most of the settings are only reachable (unless I am missing something) from the about:config screen. The preferences (under the Tools menu, just like IE) is so icon centric. Maybe Firebird is trying to reach out to the mom/pop crowd, but could I have an option to put it in advanced mode? In addition, NONE of my XUL/XPI/whatever plug-ins/skins work. The plug-ins and tabs are what makes Moz worth running in my opinion.
Yeah, the bloat comments have legitimacy, but I have HDD and CPU speed to waste (except when gaming). The only thing I am concerned about is the way Win Moz 1.2.1 seems to memory-leak.
"[It] will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder"
Since copyright (US at least) attaches on creation, as opposed to registration, everything on the web (including this post) is copyrighted. When you go to a web site and download the page (e.g. index,html) there is an assumption of IMPLICIT copyright permission. The theory is, if the copyright holder put the web page up to be viewed, and the only way you can view it is by downloading a copy, the copyright holder must have implicitly granted you permission to copy the page to your computer.
If Sweden is going to require EXPLICIT permission before downloading, youâ(TM)d have to get an email giving you permission to download from every site you visit.
And, no Iâ(TM)d didnâ(TM)t actually read the article. What type of self-respecting Slashdot poster would do that?
1) As a RIT alum, out of 7 colleges and 11 years in higher education, both as a student and a teacher, I think RIT is by far the best college I have attended. Of course, that is mostly because of the co-op program and the emphasis on undergrad teaching versus graduate research.
2) Private higher education is drastically over priced. By all signs, it is going to get worse. It is going to price the middle class out of higher education. And, instead of being a tool for social mobility, higher education will become (for my children's generation) a barrier to social mobility.
Hopefully this will mean less worthless degrees, such as, English and History, being issued. Do you really need to spend $100- 250k on a major that doesn't have a career path and you could do as a hobby? My wife graduated at the top of her class with an Art/English degree. You know what she was qualified to do? Secretary at a hotel or secretary at a museum. (So much for women's lib.) She had to get a Masters to even be able to teach.
3) More students should consider attending a State or Community college for the first 2 years of under-grad. It is cheaper and, for the first 2 years, the worthless subjects taught are about the same. Your choice is a high-priced "great" teacher who doesn't care about your Calculus class of 250, or a low-priced "OK" teacher who cares about your Calculus class of 25. Of course, if you're not motivated and view it merely as a stepping stone, community college quickly turns into high school with ash trays.
There constant marketing to me and cross-marketing over the years already let me know Intuit viewed me as a profit center not a valued customer.
This DRM silliness was the straw that broke my back. I tried H&R blocks software and found no real difference. Now H&R has me as a customer. And, I strongly frightened my family and friends awy from TurboTax.
The big problem is that Intuit, H&R et al aren't bound by the same sacrosanct statutes as the IRS. So, there is no legel provision stopping them from selling/giving away your person informaiton and your income statements.
With them treating me as a profit center (as opposed to a customer) I have lost faith that they're not (at least capable of) storing and selling my info either when I use electronic filing or when the software silently phones home.
I always accepted that such behaviour was technically possible, but not something they would do, until the DRM coupled with excessive cross-marketing.
My relationship with them was based on trust and now they've lost that.
On order to satisfy the Commerce clause, the states have to give you a credit on your use taxes for sales taxes paid in another state (for the same item). That way they can't mess around with inter-state commerce by hitting you up for double taxation (\sarcasm\ that's what corporate tax & dividends are for \sarcasm\).
For example, you are a NY resident, which has (I don't know. Lets say...) a 7.5% sales/use tax. You go to MD and buy something for $100 with a 5% sales tax. You pay $5 of sales tax to MD. When you return to NY you're supposed to be a good citizen and pay $7.50 in use tax to NY. However, you credit your $5 of sales tax paid towards the NY use tax. This gives you an adjusted NY use tax due of $2.50 (= $7.50 - $5). So, you really just wind-up paying the higher of the 2 state's sale/use tax rates.
Good thing I turned in my class paper before this came out, or else I'd have had to write 3 more pages.
A few quick thoughts on this and its relation to U.S. Constitutional law (citations, if any, at the end). Sorry this is long.
The Constitution limits a state's ability to collect, or force a business to collect, sales and use taxes. In order to collect these taxes the Constitution's Due Process and Commerce Clauses must be satisfied.
The Due Process Clause is often referred to as the personal jurisdiction requirement and focuses on whether the taxpayer has purposefully availed themselves to the taxing sovereign. Modern due process rules have utilized a fairness test, which is refereed to in International Shoe as a "minimum contacts" test. The question, in short, is "Is it fair to drag the retailer into a CA court?" The business is usually considered to have availed themselves to the taxing sovereign if they have purposefully made sales into a particular state. The due process inquiry examines accessing the quality and quantity of the seller's contacts with the state.
Until the Quill decision in 1992, the Supreme Court had applied the Due Process and Commerce Clause requirement interchangeably. However, unlike the Due Process clause, which deals with the fairness of litigating against the taxpayer, the Commerce clause focuses on the effect the state taxation would have on interstate commerce. Therefore, the question is whether the imposition of the tax on interstate business would impede interstate commerce.
In Quill, the Court applied a four-prong test to satisfy the Commerce Clause requirement. The test dictated that the tax must " [1] be applied to an activity with a substantial nexus with the taxing State, [2] be fairly apportioned, [3] not discriminate against interstate commerce, and [4] be fairly related to the services provided by the State."
The Court stated that the 1st prong of the test established a "bright-line" requirement of "physical presence" to determine a "substantial nexus" and. the older "minimum contacts" view was rejected. Since Quill did not have a physical presence in the taxing state (North Dakota), it was not required to collect use taxes.
The Quill decision essentially exempted the mail order industry from state sales and use taxes, unless the business owner was physically located within the state. This rule has carried over to the Internet sales industry.
Two cases were the Internet retailer screwed up and got hit with CA's sales and use tax are Borders.com and Bn.com. Essentially, these two "click-through" retailers had no direct physical presence within CA. But, the two retailers had "brick-and-mortar" affiliates, Border's Bookstores, and Barnes & Nobles, Booksellers, respectively. The two legally and supposedly financially separated "click-through" and "bricks-and-mortar" companies were so closely affiliated that the CA taxing authority (and the administrative appeal Board) felt that the "click-through" company fulfilled the Quill "substantial nexus" test. These guys so intertwined their businesses that they shared marketing functions, and allowed customers to returns books purchased at "click-through" store to the "bricks-and-mortar" store.
So, the rule, if you don't want to be forced to collect state sales/use taxes, is don't put a physical presence in the state and don't so intertwine your "click-through" business with a local "bricks-and-mortar" business that the "bricks-and-mortar's" physical presence gets imputed to you via agency.
These two cases where done before CA passed this law. So, without reading the new CA, I'd guess it's a change in enforcement not a change in powers, which would be limited by the U.S. Constitution anyhow.
PS: Every state that has a sales tax, must also have a use tax. Otherwise, the sales tax fails a Commerce clause test. However, normally, no one ever knows or cares about the use tax. And, especially after Quill, i
Actually, when we created Merced (1st Itanic) it was designed to be able to be FULLY backwards compatible (i.e. boot MS-Dos 1.0). 25%-33% of the chip was actually a HARDWARE ia32 to ia64 translation engine. You could put the chip is EPIC (ia64) mode and everything would run though the normal pipeline or ia32 mode and things 1st ran through the ia32 translator then most of the normal pipline. Yeah, you took a performance hit in ia32 mode, but it was the price you paid for "100%" backwards compatibility.
So, I am not sure why the change to a software emulator, unless: 1) they ditched the hardware emulator to get back some real estate of the die, or 2) they didn't like the switching the chip between ia32 & ia64 bit modes.
Also, you can tell I've been out of the Itanic design loop for 5 years now. So, some information is out-of-date or lost in the fog of memory. And, I'd like to say that Merced was such a horribly managed project I left engineering.
. China is already the 2nd superpower and has been since the fall of Soviet Russia.
We used to live in a world of 3 superpowers now we live in a world with only 2.
China has the economic and military might and 1/8th of the world's population needed to supplant the USA as the dominant player in the late-21st/early-22nd century. I hate when people say "the US is the only superpower" because it lets me know they have a huge blindspot. China is smart enough to exploit that blindspot.
Sorry, some people have pipedreams of "people power" and the EU being a counterweight to "the only superpower," but you're seriously disconnected from reality.
And, to state my bias (because everyone has one), I am a pro-American, American. I don't like the idea of the PRC, and not the Angloshpere, running the planet, but the smart money is on China.
As one of the previous posters pointed out since this is a sale of real estate, there are Statue of Fraud issues here (which I neglected, B- for me). Please refer to the SoF post above.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the votes are easy to count! ... well, the Liberal Party.
You only have a 1 party system (like the old Soviet Union). You can either vote for the Liberal party or
I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majority of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.
While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.
I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.
I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majoirty of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.
While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.
I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.
1) I fail to have any sympathy for a guy who runs a meth lab.
2) The sad fact is, Patriot Act or no, in the US and most "civilized" countries there are so many laws that the police can pick you up anytime they want for breaking the law. They just have to care enough to target you and figure out which of the gazilla laws you inadvertently broke.
The "if you're a law abiding citizen" comment, misses the mark. There are so many laws, none of us can go through life without breaking some law. None of us are law abiding anymore, regardless of our intentions.
Also, the sentencing is so Draconian nowadays that the penalty for fighting the arrest and losing makes a plea bargain much more attractive. Given the choice between a 20 years minimum sentence and a 2 year plea bargain, most people take the plea bargain. The 20 years just scares them too much.
The problem isn't "those damn Republicans." Remember many Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. The problem is the political system. Rarely does a politician get elected because they voted to repeal a criminal law. Rarely does a politician get elected for being "soft on crime." Willie Horton anyone? Left or Right, you get votes by promising to protect "the public" and their children. That means you pass MORE laws, even if the existing laws are adequate, because that shows you did something. You pass TOUGHER penalties, because that shows you did something.
That is why we end up with drunk driving laws that set the blood alcohol level at a value lower than the margin of error on the testing devices. And, when this is pointed out to the legislature they just change the margin of error on the test. Not by changing the test, but by changing the definition of margin of error. (Next up, Congress sets the acceleration due to gravity at 11m/s^2.) Because, we HAVE to be tough on drunk drivers "for the children."
That is just one example of the stupid and unreasonable results of the "democractic" political system. I am sure you have your own examples.
I am not supporting the Patriot Act. I wish it and the system that created it wasn't so. But, don't act like this is new. Don't act like the Patriot Act is an exception. And, don't act like the US and only one party is the US plays this horrible game. It is played by both sides, all over the world, all the time.
It isn't being cynical. It is standard evidence and civil procedure.
...
Off the top of my head (and I am a guy that doesn't often deal with evidence and civil procedure. So, your mileage may differ)
1)
It isn't a settlement contract. You are not giving any consideration (one of the 3 main elements of a contract). You are just promising to refrain from an illegal action. Refraining from illegal acts isn't consideration, it is a pre-existing duty. So, no contract.
2)
It is an admission against interest (i.e. a hearsay exception) and therefore admissible evidence against you. And, it is notarized. So, what is the jury going to think about it?
Also, as a notarized document outside the hearsay exclusion, other parties (i.e. the Federal government) can use this against you in a separate case. Oh, and for a few reasons, including that it is a voluntary admission, you've waived your 5th Amendment privileges in a criminal case with this.
If the RIAA was trying to be nice, they did a horrible job of it.
If they were trying to slip a Trojan Horse by us, they didn't do too well either.
If they were trying to make a PR point, it all depends on what the media reports now doesn't it?
I never understood the Plaintiff's legal logic behind these "linking" equals "copyright violation" cases. (I get the overall logic of "We are powerful. You are not. We'll make you shut-up if we don't like what you say." But, it is the logic in the legal briefs I don't get.)
As far as I am concerned the A tag of HTML is just a citation format. If the link is a copyright violation, why aren't citations made in MLA or Blue Book formats similar copyright violations? The idea extends to deep-linking cases. If deep-linking allows you to skip past the ads on a web page and is supposedly illegal because of that, why aren't pin-point citations (where you cite both the book and the page on the book where the quote is from) illegal?
I'll accept that a trade secret case could be filed, but copyright? If it is a link, it is not a copy; it is a citation, i.e. a pointer to the original "copy" of the web page.
I haven't bothered to do any research on this (because it has yet to directly affect my life). Has any defendant advanced the A tag as citation argument? Did the judge buy it?
I've now used Google for so long that I can't remember what I used before.
However, when is Google going to let me use full Perl-style regular expression searching?
Oh we all wish. But it ain't so Joe.
We have a full line of bad cases out there that make them enforceable.
Fire up WestLaw/Lexis and read ProCD.p rocd.htm
ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3D 1447 (7th Cir., June 20, 1996)
Also, http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/
No, democracy (in its purest form) has not a damn thing to do with protecting minority rights. That is why we had to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, to protect the minority from the tyranical power pure-democracy allows the majority.
Yeah, in the American verion of representative democracy, we protect minority rights, but that is because of the modifcations we've made to the idea of democracy not because of democracy.
You'll notice in the definition below that the word "minority" is never used.
democracy (di-mokre-se) noun
plural democracies
1.Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2.A political or social unit that has such a government.
3.The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4.Majority rule.
[French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek demokratia : demos, people + -kratia, -cracy.]
So, having never thought about this before and having 1 million people in the forum who have, what do I need to do to play the Region-2/PAL DVDs on my Region-1/NTSC system?
I assume the Region coding is no problem and can be handled in at least 1 of 3 ways (below). But does the PAL/NTSC formating matter? Won't the DVD-Player just reformat the MPEG to whatever the TV expects?
I assume I can get around the Region coding (MPAA bastards) by:
Thoughts from those with more experience doing this?
From Sec 3 of the Act:
"an e-mail service provider that the sender knew or should have known is located in this state or to an e-mail address that the sender knew or should have known is held by a resident of this state"
Requiring willful conduct or intent as this law does (in Sec 3, not Sec 4) puts a huge burden on the prosecution/plaintiff. With email addresses that have no physical correspondence to the receipt's real address, how is the spammer supposed to "know or should know" if the resident is in Michigan? Once this, nearly unprovable, element is part of the crime, the crime becomes nearly unenforceable. And, all the draconian requirements that got this law the press coverage may be ignored.
I guess the real battle is "can you assume that if a Domain Name is registered to a MI address that the email server is physically in MI?" After all, the Domain Name's mailing address may be a corporate headquarters and the server may be located in Florida.
Sec. 4 of the Act is a good old strict liability requirement (no intent or negligence needed to prove the crime). But, the requirements imposed by Sec. 4 aren't that odd, just standard "truth in advertising" applied to email.
A thought here on MSFT's motivation. . .
m ll .com on shareholders asking for MSFT dividends, http://www.fool.com/dripport/2002/dripport021107.h tm
With the huge cash reserves they have, they should be taking a beating on the Accumulated Earnings Tax [FN-1]. I haven't done a lot of research on this (my Google research is below) but the short of it seems to be "if a corporation allows earnings to accumulate beyond the reasonable needs of the business, it may be subject to an accumulated earnings tax of 38.6%." This 38.6% would certainly exceed any ordinary income tax (now capital gains tax under the newest law, I think) that the shareholder would pay on the dividend.
Also, if memory severs, wasn't MSFT getting hit with a shareholder suit to force it to pay dividends?
[FN-1] IRS Publication 542, Accumulated Earnings Tax, http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p542.pdf
See also:
Open Letter to Bill Gates, http://www.cptech.org/ms/rn2bg20020104dividend.ht
An update from our friends at CCH, http://www.toolkit.cch.com/text/P12_4785.asp
Foo
I hate to say that the Emperor has no clothes, but ...
I haven't bothered to update from Moz 1.2.1 because it works and I am happy with it. I don't see how the browser (the only portion I use) has improved significantly. From the 1.3.x and 1.4 release notes, it seems most improvements have come to the newsgroups/mail.
As for Firebird (a.k.a. the browser formerly known as Phoenix), is it just me or is this the most IE-clone, kiddie like browser. I know we're all supposed to say how much better Firebird is, but I don't feel like an adult while using it. Most of the settings are only reachable (unless I am missing something) from the about:config screen. The preferences (under the Tools menu, just like IE) is so icon centric. Maybe Firebird is trying to reach out to the mom/pop crowd, but could I have an option to put it in advanced mode? In addition, NONE of my XUL/XPI/whatever plug-ins/skins work. The plug-ins and tabs are what makes Moz worth running in my opinion.
Yeah, the bloat comments have legitimacy, but I have HDD and CPU speed to waste (except when gaming). The only thing I am concerned about is the way Win Moz 1.2.1 seems to memory-leak.
"[It] will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder"
Since copyright (US at least) attaches on creation, as opposed to registration, everything on the web (including this post) is copyrighted. When you go to a web site and download the page (e.g. index,html) there is an assumption of IMPLICIT copyright permission. The theory is, if the copyright holder put the web page up to be viewed, and the only way you can view it is by downloading a copy, the copyright holder must have implicitly granted you permission to copy the page to your computer.
If Sweden is going to require EXPLICIT permission before downloading, youâ(TM)d have to get an email giving you permission to download from every site you visit.
And, no Iâ(TM)d didnâ(TM)t actually read the article. What type of self-respecting Slashdot poster would do that?
2) Private higher education is drastically over priced. By all signs, it is going to get worse. It is going to price the middle class out of higher education. And, instead of being a tool for social mobility, higher education will become (for my children's generation) a barrier to social mobility.
Hopefully this will mean less worthless degrees, such as, English and History, being issued. Do you really need to spend $100- 250k on a major that doesn't have a career path and you could do as a hobby? My wife graduated at the top of her class with an Art/English degree. You know what she was qualified to do? Secretary at a hotel or secretary at a museum. (So much for women's lib.) She had to get a Masters to even be able to teach.
3) More students should consider attending a State or Community college for the first 2 years of under-grad. It is cheaper and, for the first 2 years, the worthless subjects taught are about the same. Your choice is a high-priced "great" teacher who doesn't care about your Calculus class of 250, or a low-priced "OK" teacher who cares about your Calculus class of 25. Of course, if you're not motivated and view it merely as a stepping stone, community college quickly turns into high school with ash trays.
There constant marketing to me and cross-marketing over the years already let me know Intuit viewed me as a profit center not a valued customer.
This DRM silliness was the straw that broke my back. I tried H&R blocks software and found no real difference. Now H&R has me as a customer. And, I strongly frightened my family and friends awy from TurboTax.
The big problem is that Intuit, H&R et al aren't bound by the same sacrosanct statutes as the IRS. So, there is no legel provision stopping them from selling/giving away your person informaiton and your income statements.
With them treating me as a profit center (as opposed to a customer) I have lost faith that they're not (at least capable of) storing and selling my info either when I use electronic filing or when the software silently phones home.
I always accepted that such behaviour was technically possible, but not something they would do, until the DRM coupled with excessive cross-marketing.
My relationship with them was based on trust and now they've lost that.
Actually, no.
On order to satisfy the Commerce clause, the states have to give you a credit on your use taxes for sales taxes paid in another state (for the same item). That way they can't mess around with inter-state commerce by hitting you up for double taxation (\sarcasm\ that's what corporate tax & dividends are for \sarcasm\).
For example, you are a NY resident, which has (I don't know. Lets say...) a 7.5% sales/use tax. You go to MD and buy something for $100 with a 5% sales tax. You pay $5 of sales tax to MD. When you return to NY you're supposed to be a good citizen and pay $7.50 in use tax to NY. However, you credit your $5 of sales tax paid towards the NY use tax. This gives you an adjusted NY use tax due of $2.50 (= $7.50 - $5). So, you really just wind-up paying the higher of the 2 state's sale/use tax rates.
Lucky you.
Good thing I turned in my class paper before this came out, or else I'd have had to write 3 more pages.
A few quick thoughts on this and its relation to U.S. Constitutional law (citations, if any, at the end).
Sorry this is long.
The Constitution limits a state's ability to collect, or force a business to collect, sales and use taxes. In order to collect these taxes the Constitution's Due Process and Commerce Clauses must be satisfied.
The Due Process Clause is often referred to as the personal jurisdiction requirement and focuses on whether the taxpayer has purposefully availed themselves to the taxing sovereign. Modern due process rules have utilized a fairness test, which is refereed to in International Shoe as a "minimum contacts" test. The question, in short, is "Is it fair to drag the retailer into a CA court?" The business is usually considered to have availed themselves to the taxing sovereign if they have purposefully made sales into a particular state. The due process inquiry examines accessing the quality and quantity of the seller's contacts with the state.
Until the Quill decision in 1992, the Supreme Court had applied the Due Process and Commerce Clause requirement interchangeably. However, unlike the Due Process clause, which deals with the fairness of litigating against the taxpayer, the Commerce clause focuses on the effect the state taxation would have on interstate commerce. Therefore, the question is whether the imposition of the tax on interstate business would impede interstate commerce.
In Quill, the Court applied a four-prong test to satisfy the Commerce Clause requirement. The test dictated that the tax must "
[1] be applied to an activity with a substantial nexus with the taxing State,
[2] be fairly apportioned,
[3] not discriminate against interstate commerce, and
[4] be fairly related to the services provided by the State."
The Court stated that the 1st prong of the test established a "bright-line" requirement of "physical presence" to determine a "substantial nexus" and. the older "minimum contacts" view was rejected. Since Quill did not have a physical presence in the taxing state (North Dakota), it was not required to collect use taxes.
The Quill decision essentially exempted the mail order industry from state sales and use taxes, unless the business owner was physically located within the state. This rule has carried over to the Internet sales industry.
Two cases were the Internet retailer screwed up and got hit with CA's sales and use tax are Borders.com and Bn.com. Essentially, these two "click-through" retailers had no direct physical presence within CA. But, the two retailers had "brick-and-mortar" affiliates, Border's Bookstores, and Barnes & Nobles, Booksellers, respectively. The two legally and supposedly financially separated "click-through" and "bricks-and-mortar" companies were so closely affiliated that the CA taxing authority (and the administrative appeal Board) felt that the "click-through" company fulfilled the Quill "substantial nexus" test. These guys so intertwined their businesses that they shared marketing functions, and allowed customers to returns books purchased at "click-through" store to the "bricks-and-mortar" store.
So, the rule, if you don't want to be forced to collect state sales/use taxes, is don't put a physical presence in the state and don't so intertwine your "click-through" business with a local "bricks-and-mortar" business that the "bricks-and-mortar's" physical presence gets imputed to you via agency.
These two cases where done before CA passed this law. So, without reading the new CA, I'd guess it's a change in enforcement not a change in powers, which would be limited by the U.S. Constitution anyhow.
PS:
Every state that has a sales tax, must also have a use tax. Otherwise, the sales tax fails a Commerce clause test. However, normally, no one ever knows or cares about the use tax. And, especially after Quill, i
I thought that the Porsche 911 looked like a whale trying to surf.
Not impressed with this laptop either.
Actually, when we created Merced (1st Itanic) it was designed to be able to be FULLY backwards compatible (i.e. boot MS-Dos 1.0). 25%-33% of the chip was actually a HARDWARE ia32 to ia64 translation engine.
You could put the chip is EPIC (ia64) mode and everything would run though the normal pipeline or ia32 mode and things 1st ran through the ia32 translator then most of the normal pipline. Yeah, you took a performance hit in ia32 mode, but it was the price you paid for "100%" backwards compatibility.
So, I am not sure why the change to a software emulator, unless:
1) they ditched the hardware emulator to get back some real estate of the die, or
2) they didn't like the switching the chip between ia32 & ia64 bit modes.
Also, you can tell I've been out of the Itanic design loop for 5 years now. So, some information is out-of-date or lost in the fog of memory. And, I'd like to say that Merced was such a horribly managed project I left engineering.
. China is already the 2nd superpower and has been since the fall of Soviet Russia.
We used to live in a world of 3 superpowers now we live in a world with only 2.
China has the economic and military might and 1/8th of the world's population needed to supplant the USA as the dominant player in the late-21st/early-22nd century. I hate when people say "the US is the only superpower" because it lets me know they have a huge blindspot. China is smart enough to exploit that blindspot.
Sorry, some people have pipedreams of "people power" and the EU being a counterweight to "the only superpower," but you're seriously disconnected from reality.
And, to state my bias (because everyone has one), I am a pro-American, American. I don't like the idea of the PRC, and not the Angloshpere, running the planet, but the smart money is on China.
As one of the previous posters pointed out since this is a sale of real estate, there are Statue of Fraud issues here (which I neglected, B- for me). Please refer to the SoF post above.