No, Microsoft should not have to pay corporate taxes. All profits go to someone, who in turn pay either income/sales/property or capital gains tax. Corporate taxation is merely a form of double taxation, which is counter-productive to the state anyway. The more tax they take from the corps, the less workers can be hired, which reduces the income tax/property taxes they get and use to fix the roads, bridges, and schools.
I am not against taxation as a concept but merely the corrupt and counter-productive means by which they are currently implemented. If I were "King," I would either tax corporations, or the people, but not both, anything else is double taxation. Our current system is designed by and for the lawyers.
Corporations are often afforded psuedo-personhood under the law. Until this is repealed, corporations enjoy much of the same rights as a real person does, including giving money to candidates who run for office(moveon.org), endorsing candidates who run for office(New York Times), etc. I for one would love to see the day where corporations are not considered to be persons in any way, including paying taxes(all the profits go to someone and would be taxed at the personal level anyway), or sheltering guilty executives from liability when their decisions cause harm to actual people. Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-business... but I don't think its wise to grant rights of any kind to a non-person.
Some might contend that this limits freedom of speech, but I don't feel the rights as outlined in the Bill of Rights should be extended to unreal entities.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that Sony will win this war... Here are several telling signs that they have no where to go but down.
1. What are the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD hardware sales ratios... 5:1 in favor of Blu if you count the PS3?
2. What are the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD software sales ratios... 2:1 for the year.
3. Studio adoption are roughly equivalent
With all the supposed advantage that Blu-Ray has with the PS3's having sold several million players, why aren't the sales ratio for the software staggering different in blu-ray's favor. As mentioned many times before, Most of the PS3 owners bought the console to play games on. Sure, the move player feature is a bonus, but with only 40% of the owners knowing that capability even exists, and an even smaller percentage who actually own the HDTV to make it useful, its clear that the PS3 isn't as big of a boon as some suggest for the Sony camp. One thing that this past weekend's sale did was show that if they players were priced right, folks would bust out the plastic and pony up. If Toshiba et al. can keep the players in the same ballpark price wise ($100-$200), I am willing to bet the software sales figures will start to swing dramatically as a result.
Of course, all the companies in question would be best served by extolling the virtues of getting an HDTV over keeping their current SDTV's so that these players will have a chance of capturing remaing 90+ percent of the DVD market. Until the adoption rates for HDTV starts to rise, both formats will be a tough sell to Joe Six pack. Personally, I did purchase the HD-A2 at Best Buy this past weekend for $99 and I don't regret it, but until the war has a more clearly defined winner, I probably won't be purchasing much media to with it (hooray for netflix). I will happily jump on the Blu-Ray bandwagon if they drop their prices, but $399 is still about $200 too steep for me where a movie player is concerned, and I am willing to bet that most HD buying folk will agree with me.
What I would like to know is why the allegation is being made. Folks can allege all they want, it doesn't make it true. The problem with trying VMware in a public forum like this is that even if the allegation is false, many will read the headlines and treat it as if it were the gospel according to slashdot and respond as if they have already proven guilty.
It's sort of analogous with the "Have you stopped beating your wife yet" question. Instead of asking, "Did you derive your code from GPL'd software?" instead, many in the community will ask "How come you aren't releasing the code for the GPL derived works you have created?" Knee-jerk reactions like this are counter productive to the adoption of Linux as a development platform as it places a fear (however irrational and baseless) into the minds of the decision makers who are considering supporting Linux.
If someone is violating the GPL, by all means, go after them, but until it's shown that they are, let's keep the speculation to a minumum.
Seeing how the cost was being discussed in US Dollars on a US Based discussion site, I don't think it unreasonable to assume that one should follow the US convention of writing monetary values for clarity's sake. Granted, it was pretty trollish to slam someone for an easily made typo, but that is pretty standard fare here at/.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the law either, but how does being in the EU affect this whatsoever? Did France give up its sovereignty when it joined the EU?
What sort of power does the BSA actually have? If they aren't a gov't entity, what gives them the right to demand anything from said small business?
"We need to look at your computers to make sure your software is licensed." Says the BSA.
"Hell no, now get off our property"... Says small business owner.
I am honestly asking what can the BSA do if this scenario were to happen.
Pop3 is not the problem here, its smtp. Pop3 is simply the means for a user to get their mail off a server to read it. The biggest problem we face is in the adoption of any change to internet mailing protocols. Just because the big 10 do it, doesn't mean the rest of them will...and of course new RFC's would have to be written so that these "new" protocols could actually be implemented in software, ie Sendmail, Postfix, MS Exchange, Qmail, Exim.... and the list goes on.
It would be convenient if there were some sort of Internet Czar that could decree this switch to a newer, more secure system, but that just isn't the reality. It would cost the industry billions of dollars so many will simply drag their feet and do nothing but put another band-aid on the problem. Just look at what has happened to the web, with all the incompatible websites because one company chose to extend the meaning of what HTML was supposed to be, then you get idiotic web developers who follow that company like a flock of sheep, saying to themselves, wow, what a cool feature, and include it in their website only to break that site for the millions of other users who don't use that non-standards compliant browser. If this were to happen to the new version of SMTP, it would cause a myriad of problems for companies who chose to do the right thing by following established standard only to find out that they can't get their mail out of the door. Ugh, what a mess... I wish I had a solution.
It's easy to explain actually.... Corporate America bought into the Microsoft monopoly, which in turn forced the unclean masses to follow in kind because they didn't want to be "incompatible," or they didn't want to learn something else. I wonder what Apple's install base is compared to Microsoft if you were to remove all of the corporate installs from the calculation. 95% is a big number, but to me, it says more about the Lemming mentality of corporate IT departments, than it does for the average user.
Back in the day, when NT 4.0 was coming on strong, and the dotcom boom was just starting to happen... Microsoft was successful in touting its MCSE certification which guaranteed them a large throng of loyal corporate IT types who would naturally choose Microsoft over OS X or Linux. This legacy continues today, not because MS always has the better solution, but because it's what the guys who are in charge of the spending dollars know.
Microsoft is in the precarious position of being too successful, where it has no where to go but down. Granted, the slow spiral downward will take time as a new breed of IT worker who is more UNIX/Linux savvy come into power, but the end is inevitable... Microsoft will fall from it's lofty position of 95% market dominance eventually... the only real question is how soon. Once that happens, Microsoft will have to start competing on merit instead of its past monopoly, which in turn will be good for everyone.
If all the folks that bought windows for the 3D games used linux/BSD or Mac OS X instead, guess where the game developers would spend most of their development dollars. I hate to say it, but the people who bought into the Microsoft monopoly are responsible for the consequences their choices brought about.
With the delays of the Vista release, now seems to be a good time to cast aside Windows and choose something else if you don't like the way Microsoft is treating you. All it would take is for 10 to 15 percent of windows users to switch over to something else to catch the attention of Game devs. This chicken and the egg cycle needs to be broken by somehow and I am guessing that Microsoft has nothing to gain, so they won't be the ones to do it... You have to.
I too had a TI-99/4a as my first box as a kid. Couple that with a cassette recorder to save all my Basic programs that I typed in from computer magazines and the beloved Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus games that I played for hours... Ahhh, fond memories. But you are right, the speech synthesizer was the cat's meow when it came to impressing your Atari 2600 owning buddies.
Boy we have a lot in common... I too was in the Navy, got started with BSD in the mid 90's after I got out, and live in/near Denver as well.. and now we have the TI-99/4a in common too... You didn't by any chance own a Apple II clone called a Franklin Ace did you?
The slide show shows that the only thing Linux about the cluster is the NFS server. Seems that OS X 10.3.5 nfs server maxes out at 50 clients.
If it saved only one life, wouldn't it be worth it
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 1
I say no!!!
Sometimes ideals and principals are worth the cost of a few lives. Guns in the hands of criminals should be considered "A Bad Thing," but the only way to keep this from ever happening is to eliminate guns completely...which will never happen. To pass silly laws which only get rid of certain weapons while ignoring all the other ones with similar capabilities is simply a waste of time for Congress. Neither party is willing to take the drastic step I mentioned above, so let's stop blowing smoke up the American public's ass by telling them that they will be "Safer" if this bill gets renewed.
For someone to assert that there is "no legitimate need" for a 30 round clip is simply missing the point of what freedom is. Certainly, I am not saying that we as citizens of a "Free Country" are free to do what we please no matter who it hurts, but when has simply owning a gun hurt anyone. There are already a myriad of laws making it a crime to shoot, kill, and even threaten people with said gun. If for no other reason than it is fun to shoot off 30 rounds in one second I think we should be able to own and legally use what ever gun we choose.
Sure, I feel bad for the victims of gun crimes, but making all the legal users suffer for the failings of a very small minority known as criminals, just doesn't seem all that American to me.
It amazes me that people think a president who runs as a uniter should automatically ignore all the things he believes in just to placate the other side of the aisle. The "Left" is just as much at fault for there not being a meeting of minds in the middle. Why is it only the president's responsibility to move toward the center. Daschle and rest of the Democrats in the Senate have done nothing since the inauguration but throw road blocks in the Bush's way. From fillibustering Judicial appointments to voting against a spending package to support the troops, the list goes on.
If you were to ask any true conservative about many of the pieces of legislation that have passed on G.W. Bush's watch, many would say that they either don't like them or think that they aren't very conservative. From the medicare drug benefit to the No child left behind act, time and time again, this president has definately leaned more toward the left than he is given credit for by the liberals. Sure, the war and all that entails is controversial, as well as the tax cuts he has delivered...(controversial to the Democrats anyway), but you can hardly say that all of Bush's action since he has taken office have been nothing but partisan...for that's a bold face lie.
If you honestly think that a Republican president should do nothing to but champion Democrat ideology so that you will think he truly is a uniter instead of a divider, then you really need to wake up. The fact remains that Gore lost the election...legally. Popular vote means very little in our election process for the Presidency and until you and your friends get that part of the Constitution changed, we have no recourse but to follow the rules until it is.
No where in your post do you mention which card it fails to detect. I happen to have an nforce2 chipset with NVIDIA's proprietary NIC built in, which is also not supported, but I also have another NIC installed that it does support...so while I agree with you that networking is of prime importance, there are viable workarounds such as the one I mentioned.
If you are truly trying to get a working version of FreeBSD onto your system, I suggest you go back to the one of the -RELEASE versions you have had success with in the past. Otherwise, post your findings to the bug database and be patient for just a while longer.
Since you are obviously much more enamored with Dragonfly, Linux, and the other flavors of BSD, I am still puzzled as to why you are even bothering with FreeBSD in the first place. You obviously are more interested in bashing FreeBSD than getting it running on your system.
Guess I don't understand why you think that your NIC being detected is the the end all be all for an OS. If you have been around a the BSD circles for a while you should know that it does not support as much hardware as Linux. However, what it does support is usually supported quite well. Instead of complaining about it, go to the store and buy one it does support, it's not like they are expensive...at the very least, see what you can do to get support for the NIC you are talking about. Open Source operating systems are open so that folks like you, can contribute code to fill in the known holes. If you aren't a programmer, fine, but look for other ways of helping.
Yeah, FreeBSD 5-stable has been a long time coming, but like you said, there are alternatives for those who simply cannot wait.
"If I were to dis you for anything..."
It's a good thing you said "IF." The parent mentioned his experience with Apple's recentely announced battery recall, and unless you honestly think he would go to the trouble of sending his Powermac in to have the onboard clock battery replaced, a reasonable person would assume he was talking about a laptop computer.
Building a computer is all fine and good if you are so inclined technically, but not everyone is... Another thing to consider is that perhaps the parent bought his Apple so that he could run Mac OSX instead of yet another Windows or Linux distribution...which would be rather difficult on anything other than Apple hardware. Now we can argue day and night about Apple's prices and perceived value, but the parent poster seems happy with his decision in buying a Powerbook even though it only has one button on the touchpad (BTW...USB mice with multiple buttons work flawlessly on Macs).
Yes, the same principle would apply. Keep in mind that while this still works for you the phone user, the cell phone company in question doesn't like you taking up more than your fair share of channels available to all the other phone users. Most people with their phones on can probably hit several cell sites at any given time, and the cell phone company expects this. The company in question however doesn't expect everyones phone to hit every site and therefore they don't have to offer as much capacity per cell site to handle it. If the airlines were to allow the use of cell phones on aircraft, all of the cell companies would probably have to increase their ground resources to account for all the tied up cell site channels(barring some new tech that would allow take this into account.)
While the cell phones work fine from 30,000 feet, its the cell sites have have a problem with you turning on your phone. Cellular technology relies on the Line Of Sight spectrum and from 30k feet, your phone can establish line of site comms with virtually all of the ground cell sites while over any given city. The result is that your phone is tieing up a channel at the cell site that would otherwise go to someone driving along through that particular region.
Normally, as you travel, any given cell site picks up your phone and as you start to pass out of range it is handed off to the next closest cell site. Airline passengers with their cell phones turned on throw a kink in this system...
So while there is certainly a revenue aspect of this issue, there is also a technological one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for 32GB and 3G.... oh and first post.
I am not against taxation as a concept but merely the corrupt and counter-productive means by which they are currently implemented. If I were "King," I would either tax corporations, or the people, but not both, anything else is double taxation. Our current system is designed by and for the lawyers.
Some might contend that this limits freedom of speech, but I don't feel the rights as outlined in the Bill of Rights should be extended to unreal entities.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that Sony will win this war... Here are several telling signs that they have no where to go but down. 1. What are the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD hardware sales ratios... 5:1 in favor of Blu if you count the PS3? 2. What are the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD software sales ratios... 2:1 for the year. 3. Studio adoption are roughly equivalent With all the supposed advantage that Blu-Ray has with the PS3's having sold several million players, why aren't the sales ratio for the software staggering different in blu-ray's favor. As mentioned many times before, Most of the PS3 owners bought the console to play games on. Sure, the move player feature is a bonus, but with only 40% of the owners knowing that capability even exists, and an even smaller percentage who actually own the HDTV to make it useful, its clear that the PS3 isn't as big of a boon as some suggest for the Sony camp. One thing that this past weekend's sale did was show that if they players were priced right, folks would bust out the plastic and pony up. If Toshiba et al. can keep the players in the same ballpark price wise ($100-$200), I am willing to bet the software sales figures will start to swing dramatically as a result. Of course, all the companies in question would be best served by extolling the virtues of getting an HDTV over keeping their current SDTV's so that these players will have a chance of capturing remaing 90+ percent of the DVD market. Until the adoption rates for HDTV starts to rise, both formats will be a tough sell to Joe Six pack. Personally, I did purchase the HD-A2 at Best Buy this past weekend for $99 and I don't regret it, but until the war has a more clearly defined winner, I probably won't be purchasing much media to with it (hooray for netflix). I will happily jump on the Blu-Ray bandwagon if they drop their prices, but $399 is still about $200 too steep for me where a movie player is concerned, and I am willing to bet that most HD buying folk will agree with me.
It's sort of analogous with the "Have you stopped beating your wife yet" question. Instead of asking, "Did you derive your code from GPL'd software?" instead, many in the community will ask "How come you aren't releasing the code for the GPL derived works you have created?" Knee-jerk reactions like this are counter productive to the adoption of Linux as a development platform as it places a fear (however irrational and baseless) into the minds of the decision makers who are considering supporting Linux.
If someone is violating the GPL, by all means, go after them, but until it's shown that they are, let's keep the speculation to a minumum.
Seeing how the cost was being discussed in US Dollars on a US Based discussion site, I don't think it unreasonable to assume that one should follow the US convention of writing monetary values for clarity's sake. Granted, it was pretty trollish to slam someone for an easily made typo, but that is pretty standard fare here at /.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the law either, but how does being in the EU affect this whatsoever? Did France give up its sovereignty when it joined the EU?
What sort of power does the BSA actually have? If they aren't a gov't entity, what gives them the right to demand anything from said small business? "We need to look at your computers to make sure your software is licensed." Says the BSA. "Hell no, now get off our property"... Says small business owner. I am honestly asking what can the BSA do if this scenario were to happen.
It would be convenient if there were some sort of Internet Czar that could decree this switch to a newer, more secure system, but that just isn't the reality. It would cost the industry billions of dollars so many will simply drag their feet and do nothing but put another band-aid on the problem. Just look at what has happened to the web, with all the incompatible websites because one company chose to extend the meaning of what HTML was supposed to be, then you get idiotic web developers who follow that company like a flock of sheep, saying to themselves, wow, what a cool feature, and include it in their website only to break that site for the millions of other users who don't use that non-standards compliant browser. If this were to happen to the new version of SMTP, it would cause a myriad of problems for companies who chose to do the right thing by following established standard only to find out that they can't get their mail out of the door. Ugh, what a mess... I wish I had a solution.
Microsoft is in the precarious position of being too successful, where it has no where to go but down. Granted, the slow spiral downward will take time as a new breed of IT worker who is more UNIX/Linux savvy come into power, but the end is inevitable... Microsoft will fall from it's lofty position of 95% market dominance eventually... the only real question is how soon. Once that happens, Microsoft will have to start competing on merit instead of its past monopoly, which in turn will be good for everyone.
With the delays of the Vista release, now seems to be a good time to cast aside Windows and choose something else if you don't like the way Microsoft is treating you. All it would take is for 10 to 15 percent of windows users to switch over to something else to catch the attention of Game devs. This chicken and the egg cycle needs to be broken by somehow and I am guessing that Microsoft has nothing to gain, so they won't be the ones to do it... You have to.
Boy we have a lot in common... I too was in the Navy, got started with BSD in the mid 90's after I got out, and live in/near Denver as well.. and now we have the TI-99/4a in common too... You didn't by any chance own a Apple II clone called a Franklin Ace did you?
The slide show shows that the only thing Linux about the cluster is the NFS server. Seems that OS X 10.3.5 nfs server maxes out at 50 clients.
Sometimes ideals and principals are worth the cost of a few lives. Guns in the hands of criminals should be considered "A Bad Thing," but the only way to keep this from ever happening is to eliminate guns completely...which will never happen. To pass silly laws which only get rid of certain weapons while ignoring all the other ones with similar capabilities is simply a waste of time for Congress. Neither party is willing to take the drastic step I mentioned above, so let's stop blowing smoke up the American public's ass by telling them that they will be "Safer" if this bill gets renewed.
For someone to assert that there is "no legitimate need" for a 30 round clip is simply missing the point of what freedom is. Certainly, I am not saying that we as citizens of a "Free Country" are free to do what we please no matter who it hurts, but when has simply owning a gun hurt anyone. There are already a myriad of laws making it a crime to shoot, kill, and even threaten people with said gun. If for no other reason than it is fun to shoot off 30 rounds in one second I think we should be able to own and legally use what ever gun we choose.
Sure, I feel bad for the victims of gun crimes, but making all the legal users suffer for the failings of a very small minority known as criminals, just doesn't seem all that American to me.
If you were to ask any true conservative about many of the pieces of legislation that have passed on G.W. Bush's watch, many would say that they either don't like them or think that they aren't very conservative. From the medicare drug benefit to the No child left behind act, time and time again, this president has definately leaned more toward the left than he is given credit for by the liberals. Sure, the war and all that entails is controversial, as well as the tax cuts he has delivered...(controversial to the Democrats anyway), but you can hardly say that all of Bush's action since he has taken office have been nothing but partisan...for that's a bold face lie.
If you honestly think that a Republican president should do nothing to but champion Democrat ideology so that you will think he truly is a uniter instead of a divider, then you really need to wake up. The fact remains that Gore lost the election...legally. Popular vote means very little in our election process for the Presidency and until you and your friends get that part of the Constitution changed, we have no recourse but to follow the rules until it is.
If you are truly trying to get a working version of FreeBSD onto your system, I suggest you go back to the one of the -RELEASE versions you have had success with in the past. Otherwise, post your findings to the bug database and be patient for just a while longer.
Since you are obviously much more enamored with Dragonfly, Linux, and the other flavors of BSD, I am still puzzled as to why you are even bothering with FreeBSD in the first place. You obviously are more interested in bashing FreeBSD than getting it running on your system.
Guess I don't understand why you think that your NIC being detected is the the end all be all for an OS. If you have been around a the BSD circles for a while you should know that it does not support as much hardware as Linux. However, what it does support is usually supported quite well. Instead of complaining about it, go to the store and buy one it does support, it's not like they are expensive...at the very least, see what you can do to get support for the NIC you are talking about. Open Source operating systems are open so that folks like you, can contribute code to fill in the known holes. If you aren't a programmer, fine, but look for other ways of helping. Yeah, FreeBSD 5-stable has been a long time coming, but like you said, there are alternatives for those who simply cannot wait.
"If I were to dis you for anything..." It's a good thing you said "IF." The parent mentioned his experience with Apple's recentely announced battery recall, and unless you honestly think he would go to the trouble of sending his Powermac in to have the onboard clock battery replaced, a reasonable person would assume he was talking about a laptop computer. Building a computer is all fine and good if you are so inclined technically, but not everyone is... Another thing to consider is that perhaps the parent bought his Apple so that he could run Mac OSX instead of yet another Windows or Linux distribution...which would be rather difficult on anything other than Apple hardware. Now we can argue day and night about Apple's prices and perceived value, but the parent poster seems happy with his decision in buying a Powerbook even though it only has one button on the touchpad (BTW...USB mice with multiple buttons work flawlessly on Macs).
Yes, the same principle would apply. Keep in mind that while this still works for you the phone user, the cell phone company in question doesn't like you taking up more than your fair share of channels available to all the other phone users. Most people with their phones on can probably hit several cell sites at any given time, and the cell phone company expects this. The company in question however doesn't expect everyones phone to hit every site and therefore they don't have to offer as much capacity per cell site to handle it. If the airlines were to allow the use of cell phones on aircraft, all of the cell companies would probably have to increase their ground resources to account for all the tied up cell site channels(barring some new tech that would allow take this into account.)
While the cell phones work fine from 30,000 feet, its the cell sites have have a problem with you turning on your phone. Cellular technology relies on the Line Of Sight spectrum and from 30k feet, your phone can establish line of site comms with virtually all of the ground cell sites while over any given city. The result is that your phone is tieing up a channel at the cell site that would otherwise go to someone driving along through that particular region. Normally, as you travel, any given cell site picks up your phone and as you start to pass out of range it is handed off to the next closest cell site. Airline passengers with their cell phones turned on throw a kink in this system... So while there is certainly a revenue aspect of this issue, there is also a technological one.