You are assuming one earner per household. While this might have been true in the 1970s, it certainly isn't true today.
The figure of approx GBP 23,000 you quote is before income tax, national insurance, council tax and all the other various taxes levied by various parts of the government. They can easily eat up half of your income.
I agree, but the proportion of income paid in tax by a low income earner is smaller than that paid by a high income earner. While a high income earner may find half their income going on taxes, a low income earner won't.
Are you trying to suggest that poverty automatically leads to crime? That seems rather a shaky assertion to me.
I would not put it in those words. I would say that where there is poverty, there is a prevalence of a certain type of crime. I'm not saying that poverty explains "white-collar crime" like insider trading! But you are much more likely to be mugged in an area where there is poverty. Someone who is poor is much more likely to end up in prison. There are many explanations for this phenomenon (e.g. the best teachers don't want to live in poor neighbourhoods, so poor neighbourhoods get poor schools, so the children of the neighbourhood do not qualify for well-paid jobs), but I don't want to rehash them all here. I would make the general assertion that poverty is a significant cause of crime. I don't think this is a shaky assertion at all.
Perhaps you would care to explain how paying people not to engage in productive economic activity results in the creation of a productive economy?
That's not what's happening and it's a simplistic and biased way of looking at things. Getting back to your original assertion that the direct return on investment in the welfare system is negative, I admit this is true. However, the less you invest in a welfare system, the more negative the return on investment. That is to say, if there is no support for those who fall on hard times, like the sick, the mentally ill, the disabled and those in poor housing, there is an associated cost. This cost manifests itself as crime, political instability and disease. These factors have measurable negative effects on the economy. These are the reasons we have a welfare system. This is how the welfare system supports a productive economy. Give me examples of prosperous countries that have no welfare system and yet have low crime and disease rates and a stable political environment.
About the only way to do that would be to argue that welfare keeps the non-productive out of the way of the productive, but still, there are more cost effective ways to do that then paying them to sit around watching daytime TV and smoking cigarettes all day. I believe the Americans call it "workfare".
Your argument assumes that there is some sort of underclass of unproductive people whose sole purpose in life is to retard the progress of the productive. I disagree that all of those who claim unemployment benefit don't want to work. Look at the British mining and steel industries; consider the corporate practice of downsizing. I admit that during the 1980s, being on the dole was seen by many to be a career option, if all they wanted from life was to make do. The current emphasis on getting the unemployed into jobs makes this career option much less achievable. There is also a class of people who claim unemployment benefit while taking 'cash in hand' work. This is being stamped out, and technology is helping here. But I doubt that making do is the dream of anyone -- it is the last resort of those failed by the education and other systems who see no other way to survive.
On the surface, Workfare sounds like an attractive idea. Put the unemployed to work on menial tasks that nobody else wants to do and pay them a living wage.
The level of welfare spending in the UK at the moment is such that you could just give every man, woman and child in the country GBP 3000 (USD 5400 approx) every year, no questions asked. That works out as very nearly the current average household income!
GBP 3,000 is much smaller than the average income in the UK, which was GBP 23,607 in 2002, somewhat above the GBP 3,000 you quote. (This is an average, but given that the minimum wage is at least GBP 3.80 per hour (GBP 4.50 for those over 21), and assuming one works a 38 hour week 48 weeks of the year, this equates to a minimum income of GBP 6,931).
The difference between the money that goes into the welfare budget and comes out suggests that this is not a good use of money!
Surely, that depends whether you are unemployed, sick, disabled, mentally ill or living in poor accommodation, doesn't it? I presume you are none of the above. However, if a mentally ill person were to attack you in the street, you'd consider a welfare system quite desirable. If you were mugged or burgled, you might wonder if it would have been a good idea for the state to provide a safety net for that person before they turned to crime.
It would even be preferable to the current system if the entire government department responsible was simply abolished, all its bureaucrats fired, and the money paid directly to each citizen by the treasury.
Since the treasury doesn't actually own that money, surely it would be simpler not to tax citizens at all?
You know, you're probably living in the wrong country. There are places in the world without all this wasteful welfare baloney. We call them 'Third World Countries' -- perhaps you've seen them on the news -- their citizens tend to be a strange colour? Do you think that there might be even the slightest chance that there is a direct economic link between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support provided to the citizens of that country? It doesn't all boil down to this, but it's a significant contributory factor.
I've developed for EPOC/Symbian. The OS is targeted (of course) at embedded devices. When I was developing software for the platform, a modified GCC was used as the cross-compiler. It's one of the most standards-compliant C/C++ going!
Having an on-device debugger would be nice, but is often not possible with embedded devices due to memory restrictions etc. Most development is done using a PC-based emulator, which works very well.
It is slightly ridiculous to demand ANSI C and POSIX libraries: EPOC/Symbian has its own very well defined programming model. This model was designed to deliver (among other things) outstanding OS stability and OS-wide object-orientation. So, you should not use C paradigms (or C code), but the OO paradigms defined by their programming model (and C++ code). Just because they have made design decisions that you don't like doesn't mean the platform is bad. It means you dont understand it.
We don't have to debate the merits of global variables. We (should) all know that they are a bad idea except in a few restricted situations. For these situations, EPOC/Symbian provides thread-local storage (TLS) which can be used to create a singleton object; this can provide an OO interface to any global variables needed.
The UI changes are a nuisance for the developer, but if you are coding something serious (like a new cell phone, which is the sort of thing EPOC/Symbian is for), then you will have some sort of UI specification, and you will probably want to develop your own UI; the libraries are there to help.
The Palm and Win CE platforms are nowhere near as good for developing robust devices as EPOC/Symbian. This is largely due to the way in which their memory management works (or, rather, doesn't).
EPOC/Symbian allows multitasking. Provided that applications are written in strict compliance with the programming model (which isn't too difficult) then the device will be able to run for *very* long periods of time without crashing. At the time, I was using a WinNT workstation, and my EPOC-based device had a much better uptime.
Compare this to the Palm model, where (at least when I was developing for EPOC), multitasking was impossible. Memory was "managed" by the user exiting one app and starting another.
MS have improved Win CE since I was developing for EPOC, but at that stage, MS had no programming model to ensure good memory management, and the robustness of the platform was a joke. Maybe they've solved this problem now?
Memory management is a very important consideration when developing for cell phones: imagine the result of your phone crashing during a call to the emergency services.
Yes, there is a price to pay for using EPOC/Symbian. But what you get for paying that price is a very robust and efficient OS that allows developers to use elegant OO design and C++ (albeit with some reasonable design decision imposed on the developer).
When I was an undergrad, we had machines that were managed like this.
There were two different setups, and I can't tell you what software they used to achieve them, but I can tell you what happened from a user's perspective.
In the first setup (a small lab -- about 20 machines), the machines were setup to automatically replace their installation of Windows once a week at a "convenient time". The problem was, this time was convenient for the sys admins, rather than the users. So, when working on a project out of scheduled lab times, I would often have to wait for about 30 mins to start work while the machine got a fresh copy of Windows. This was even worse if there was more than one person trying to use the machine, as the network would slow down.
The obvious solution to the above problem is to change the time to something like 3am. However, in these days of devastating Windows worms, I don't think it's an option to install a new image once a week. Also, many university computer facilities are open 24/7; you often get students who like to work antisocial hours, so choosing a convenient time is pretty difficult.
The second setup was a more campus-wide solution. I'm not sure how they achieved it, but it seemed that each machine maintained a log of which files were changed while a particular user was logged on. When they logged off, the machine simply returned the disk to the state it had been in before.
There are many problems with doing what you suggest:
+ User ignorance: naive users are used to saving their stuff to C:. If you then overwrite the disk, they will complain about your policy eating their homework.
+ If you have one 'master' disk image, how do you manage the different drivers required for different hardware? It's impossible to maintain a large number of systems with exactly the same hardware (when you consider component failures etc).
I would suggest the following: Use the permissions and management facilities of the OS to prevent users installing their own software or writing to the C: drive etc. Really lock them down. Give each user networked disk space which only they can write to. Make sure that you have an automated way to roll out patches, and keep on top of things. Make sure your virus protection is tip-top. Try to reduce the possibility of students infecting systems via removable media (I'd outlaw floppy disks, but students still use these!).
Further, for each "group" who need to work together (e.g. small groups of final year students who are working on a particularly project), provide a "transfer"area which they can all read and write. For users who need to install their own software (e.g. computer science researchers), establish a small team of sys admins at their location and let them do their own thing -- just make sure they are sufficiently safe behind a firewall so they can't easily shoot themselves in the foot and your managed main network is safe from any of their screw-ups.
I don't think saving $2 on an album is that great of a bargain when the compression is lossy and you factor in the cost of disc and jewel case.
The fact is that the music you can download from iTunes will be better quality than the CD, as they digitise from the studio masters, rather than just ripping the CD.
My aunt is a nurse here in the UK. When car seat-belts were made compulsory (many years ago), she thought that they were dangerous because she was seeing far more injuries in the A&E department she was working in. That was, of course, until someone pointed out to her that all these injuries she was seeing used to be deaths and the bodies went straight to the morgue rather than via A&E.
What you want to look at is whether, after the introduction of a particular safety device, the number of deaths goes down. It is obvious that if a safety device reduces the number of deaths, the number of injuries will increase. So, looking at the number of injuries is not useful and leads to false conclusions being drawn.
Having recently been on holiday to South Beach, FL, I can understand why US medics refer to motorcycles as donorcycles: no-one wears helmets!
I don't see the point in using Perl and Tk to write you own scientific plotting software. There is already plenty of software out there to do this, and it's better written and tested than anything one would produce in an afternoon with Perl and Tk.
The last thing you need when exploring large and complex data sets is to find that the code you are using to visualise the data is buggy! Don't roll your own!
I use Matlab for my work, and it has a fantastic range of scientific plotting features. It's not cheap, but there are some good free/OS packages too:
I do not consider the data that was used in the example to be complex or large, and I don't see how Perl could help, as numerical processing is certainly not its strength!
Perl may be useful for massaging data into a form that is accepted by a scientific visualisation package, however.
I think that companies who write and sell their software have a right to try and ensure that their software is not stolen. The current economic climate, coupled with the huge hurdle of trying to compete in a market that is dominated by corporations like Microsoft and others with terrible histories of monopolistic behaviour, makes earning a profit from software pretty difficult.
However, from what I read, US companies seem to take very aggressive preemptive action against people and companies who they have the mildest suspicion of infringing their copyright. For example: BSA Accuses Open Office Mirrors -- there's many more (just read slashdot for a few weeks).
But these companies, going to great lengths to find and then harass potentially illegal users of their software, are forgetting one very important thing: these users want to use these companies' software. Not all know that they are doing so illegally, and of those who do know, not all are using the software illegally because they don't want to buy licenses. They may be trialling the software, they may have meant to buy a license but have forgotten.
I would suggest that, if a piece of software detects that it is being used illegally, it should do the following:
Tell the user that it thinks they are using the software without a license, and why (we all know that software makes mistakes -- I had Synmantec Anti-Virus tell me my subscription had timed-out when it hadn't -- you don't want to piss off genuine customers by stopping the product from working!). This gives the user a chance to check if they are legal or not.
Tell the user that the product will operate in a fully-functioning mode for two weeks, to give them time to sort the licensing out.
Ask the user if the software can send their details securely to the software vendor, so that a customer service agent can get in touch and help them sort their licensing out. If the user says no, then that's fine -- the user might want to make the call themselves. Keep operating in the full-featured mode for the two weeks.
After the two weeks, remind them that they are not licensed, and tell them that the product will operate in a demo mode for two weeks (e.g. disable power features and pop-up windows containing 'adverts' for your product -- tell them why it is so great and where and how to get a license. Tell them about licensing options.)
If, after four weeks of subtle hinting to the user that they buy a license, tell them that the product will stop working in 5 days. Give them another chance to submit their details to a customer service agent.
The other key to ensuring you sell your software is to have simple, reasonable, licensing terms. Don't charge for named users, let the license be able to be passed on. Offer a reasonable pricing structure, take into account home users, students, educational and research institutions and small businesses as well as large corporations. You might need to sell your $1500 per license product to students and home users for $30. So what. This will spread word of mouth and you've bought mind-share.
Companies that go storming in with the legal stuff just piss users off and give a very bad impression of the software company.
If you are really talking about the computer minus its I/O devices, I tend to call it the "system box".
My girlfriend used to call it the "hard drive", but has since seen the error of her ways:-)
I know that scolding people for using the term CPU is pretty anal, but its just plain wrong -- how can we expect the layperson to gain any level of computer literacy when we can't be bothered to use correct terminology?
Sorry, but "...nothing but the main CPU..." means you only got the processor. I think you meant that you only got the console, or the system unit.
A CPU (reasonable definition) in a desktop computer would be the Pentium/SPARC/PowerPC etc. -- CPU does not refer to the whole system box (which along with the CPU usualy has a HD, CD/DVD, power supply, motherboard, memory etc.). Similarly with consoles: the CPU is the processor and the console usually also houses a power supply, memory, I/O circuitry, graphics processor(s) etc.
Sorry for the pedantry, but I expect a little more from the/. crowd.
I don't agree. I've used many computer UI systems, including Amiga's Workbench, Win3.x, Win9x, Win2k, WinXP, CDE, GNOME, KDE and OS X.
Of all of these, I find OS X the most productive. It does have some UI problems (mainly addressed in Panther with Expose and the new Finder).
The usability of OS X certainly lasts after first unpacking the box. Icons do not have to be ugly to be recognisable; in fact, recognisability is only one criterion used by icon designers.
Microsoft have a good article on their MSDN site. While I think that the OS X interface is better than any of the Windows interfaces seen so far, they do put a lot of effort and research into UI design: Microsoft's Icon Design Page.
Apple's icons in OS X are very good-looking, rendered in a photo-realistic way (Apple often use Pixar for rendering their UI elements, I have heard). In no way are they ugly (as most traditional UNIX icons are). Most people consider Apple computers the easiest to use, and so I think this goes some way to disproving your assertion that ugly means recognisable means good.
Whether this translates into high levels of productivity depends on the user. I like Aqua and I don't like the X-ey UIs like CDE. You may have the opposite preference. But nice icons or little animations are not the reason you are unproductive in OS X.
If you work in the business world, and only ocassionally need to insert equations and don't care much about how they look, and you don't need to build bibliographies and use citations, then you can go ahead and use Word.
However, Word has a few serious problems that make it useless for academic scientific writing (people still use Word, but you can spot their papers a mile off as they look awful):
Word has no built-in way to handle citations and bibliographies. You can use a footnote, but this is only good when you are not writing to a specific house style and don't want a bibliography. To do this in Word, you need to go and buy Endnote or something similar: you end up paying twice for a solution that is not as good as the free one (LaTeX).
You edit Word documents visually. Most people use it to write short documents, and alter the formatting by highlighting text and changing its properties ("Hmm, I'll make this bold and make this italic, and oh, that's supposed to be a title, so I'll just make that 14 point..."). This is wrong -- the structure of the document should dictate the style, not the other way around. You *can* do this in Word, by setting up templates, but even these are flawed. This is essentially because when designing a GUI, you have to follow the 80-20 rule: devote 80% of the UI to make the features people use most often most easy, and devote 20% of the UI to those advanced features only a few people will use. Developer time and testing is also proportioned that way, so the advanced features are more poorly written and tested.
Word does not allow you to easily make drastic changes uniformly to your document. Ever tried to renumber a large document's sections in Word? It is very easy to break things, and then you have to do the job *manually*! Changing the style of all text and layout is a breeze in LaTeX, but in Word seems to be virtually impossible. Most people don't know that equations can be written in different styles: changing styles in LaTeX is both possible and easy, doing so in Word is almost impossible (the equation editor is limited) and is a manual task.
Word is a WYSIWYG editor. On the face of it, this is a good thing, but it has one major problem. The layout of the document changes as you type and as the display is updated. This has two significant problems. 1) You need to keep the whole document in memory. A friend who wrote a large Word document with many images in it found that Word would very frequently crash because of the huge memory demands being placed upon it. 2) When you open a document, its layout is recomputed and hence may change (because of a different internal state of the Word process or because of a different version of Word). So, I have had colleagues who have written a large document in Word, and then printed two copies at the same time. Because the internal state of the program changed slightly between prints, the layout was recomputed differently for the two prints and they looked different. This is not what one wants when you have to write a paper with "no more than four pages" -- it is easy to end up in a situation where on one version of Word you have a 4 page paper and on another you have a 5 page paper. In LaTeX, you edit a plain text document which is then parsed to form the final document (a PDF, say). The final document will then never change, and you can make as many printouts as you want. Because, when editing your LaTeX document, you do not need to keep all images in memory (they just sit on the HD), you can easily run many other programs without fearing that your document is going to vanish.
Most critics of LaTeX say it is too hard to learn, that commands are harder than clicking buttons. However, to overcome all the problems of Word and use it properly, in order to create good documents, you need to know an awful lot. A friend is a Word user, and bought a reference book to allow him to produce documents properly using Word. Myself and another LaTeX user compared our LaTeX references with
"Mac [sic] are for people that don't care what goes into their box": Not true -- I buy Macs because I care deeply what is inside my system. I might suggest that PCs are for people who have no knowledge about what makes one architecture better than another.
What are you gibbering on about: "not much out there for the Mac"? Have you heard of this thing called UNIX?
Ditto: "don't have to support much". Plus, it's a damned good idea to limit the number of hardware platforms an OS can run on -- it allows you to highly optimise the OS and test your OS -- MS can't possibly test their OS on all configurations of PC that it will run on. That's one of the reasons Windows is so unstable (Win2k upwards have been very stable, in terms of blue screens of death, but it's still easy to have non-fatal problems caused by hardware).
You obviously didn't/couldn't read my post properly (probably due to the poor antialiased fonts on your system, poor thing): I said that "I was let down by some dodgy components and very poor aftersales service" -- i.e. even though I am more than able to build a PC (hell, I can and have designed processors, so don't come over so superior), when you get faulty components and the store won't accept responsibility, the cost of building a PC can go through the roof.
As for building a Mac -- don't hold your breath. Although I've seen 'build your own Mac' instructions on the net, Apple don't want you to do this: they make their money by building hardware. So, by cutting your nose off to spite your face (if you can do such a thing), you're stuck with a PC: poor integration between hardware and software, power-hungry big MHz processors in systems with archaic architectures (floppy drives! an instruction set rooted in a 1970s calculator!) that under-perform.
I just ran a similar comparison on the UK Dell and Apple stores: Putting together a single processor G5 Apple sytem comes in about £200 more expensive than the Dell system. This is largely due to the cost of Apple's displays (whilst I think they are far superior to the LCD displays I've seen for PCs, they are damned expensive).
However, I don't agree with your assertion that the PC you specced is "high-end", or that compared to the PC, the G5 system is 'under-performing'.
This is a matter of opinion, but a high-end system in my mind would have more processing power than just a single P4 (we're talking a dual-Xeon system really, in PC-speak), would have more than 512MB RAM and would have a DVD burner.
As for performance, check out these graphics from Apple: DNA sequence matching performance and Hidden Markov Model performance. The work that I do is *very* similar to these scientific applications -- and the difference in performance is extreme. This is probably due to the 64-bit architecture and high CPU-RAM bandwidth (about 4 times that of a PC).
So, for these systems, which you consider "high spec", the Apple is about £200 more expensive than the PC, but is likely to perform about 5 times better on the type of scientific computation that I do. The £200 doesn't seem so expensive now.
I just specced out two high-spec (my definition) systems, one Apple (dual G5), one PC (dual 3GHz Xeon). The Apple system costs £3,000 and the Dell system costs £3,234 (both include the manufacturers' best warranties). Again, looking at Apple's benchmarks, the G5 system out-performs the dual Xeons by far.
But let's be realistic. A computer is just a tool. Some people will need a PC because of corporate policy, because they need to run Windows-specific software, or one of a hundred other reasons. One just needs to work out what one needs, and then buy the system. Me: I'd go for the Mac at the moment for three main reasons: performance, price and the integration between hardware and software.
I think that the $$$ argument is flawed -- it's a myth.
If you compare the price of a G5 (or pretty much any Apple system), with an equivalently-specced PC from a reputable supplier (such as Dell) -- if you can in fact find an equivalent (and frequently you can't, Apple now out-perform PCs, and often you get standard features on an Apple that you can't get on a PC) -- then you will find the Dell system to be more expensive than the Apple.
Granted, you will probably be able to build your own system, or buy from a local PC shop, a PC with a decent spec that is cheaper than an Apple system. However, I have had a couple of very bad experiences with small/mid-size PC builders, and a horrible experience building my own system (I'm a qualified electronics engineer, but I was let down by some dodgy components and very poor aftersales service). Others may have better experiences, but I think it's a matter of luck over judgement. So, ever since, I've vowed to only buy from the big boys.
Next we come to software. On an Apple system, OS X is included in the price of the system -- you often have to pay extra on the PC system for Windows (OK, Linux etc. are often cost-free if you want to go that route). Sometimes Apple software is more expensive or unavailable on the Mac -- but in my line of work (statistical modelling), all the software I need is available. For Word document monkeys, you also have MS Office on the Mac (I'm told it's better than the PC version). Games are slower to appear on the Mac -- that's a potential drawback.
I spend almost every working day in front of a computer. If you had to drive around for a living, you'd want a decent vehicle: any extra cost of an Apple system over a PC system, amortised over the time spent using the system, is almost zero. Oftentimes, the Apple system is cheaper anyway.
But here's the real reason to buy a Mac: The integration between the hardware (some of the best-engineered in the industry) and the OS (OS X is probably the best OS around at the moment). "It just works" is something I hear from people who make the 'switch' from PC to Mac, and it's true.
The 15" PowerBook will do you great -- I do light development on an iBook, and that's fine. Make sure you put plenty of memory in it (I'd go with at least 512MB, if not a Gig) -- this will make your life easier in the long run.
I know two people who use the 1.42GHz 15" PowerBook, and they say it's comparable to a 2GHz PC. But, you'll be using OS X, so you'll get a *much* better user-experience out of those '2' GHz compared with using a PC-based OS.
Also go for plenty of HD space: iTunes makes ripping your CDs to HD very tempting, and this will fill your HD pretty quicky:-)
The following is an extract of a post I made some time ago. Qualifications revelant to the release of the G5 are in ((double parens))
I am typing this on a 12" iBook, and I'd say that it the best computer I've ever used.
OK, let me qualify that: It isn't the fastest computer I've used, but then I do computationally demanding numerical research and use a beefy PC for that ((I'd go for the G5 now instead)). But in terms of the iBook being a nice computer to use, it is unbeaten in my experience.
Here's what I like about it:
+ It's small -- but not too small. OK, the screen is 12", and a 12" screen on a PC looks shit, but Apple make it look great. The reolution is 1024x768 (the same as on most 14/15" PCs), but because each pixel is smaller, the screen looks better. The superiour anti-aliasing makes fonts look really smooth, almost like a printed page.
+ The integration between the hardware and the OS means that everything just works. The OS comes into its own with the location manager: you can define different locations which have associated network settings, and flip between them as you travel about. WiFi just works. In fact, I'd use the phrase 'It just works' to describe Apple computers in general.
There's so much more I could say, but let me put it this way: While Apple keep up this fantastic work, I'm never going to buy a PC again. All my friends who have seen the iBook and compared it to their PC have told me that they will buy an Apple when they buy their next computer.
As far as which model to buy, I would go for the 12" PowerBook ((This post was originally aimed at someone who wanted to travel with a laptop a great deal -- I'd go with the 15" PowerBook)). This has a better processor ((than the iBook)), it's thinner, and has a slot-loading CD-R/W/DVD drive ((Get a SuperDrive -- it'll make backups smoother)). Go for as much RAM as you can afford (256MB minimum). This is an ideal laptop for travelling with, and an ideal computer in general. If you think that you need a bigger screen, go for the 15" PowerBook, but the 15"-er will be harder to travel with.
From the Wired article: "He then suggested the technology would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer." Any such technology would be in violation of federal antihacking laws. The senator, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested Congress would have to make copyright holders exempt from current laws for them to legally destroy people's computers."
I don't know what the legal situation is eactly in the US, but in the UK anyone who creates a work that can be copyrighted, automatically gets the copyright assigned to them (i.e. they do not need to write (c) 2003 Joe Blow or register their work anywhere etc.). I imagine that much the same is true in the US.
So, in order for the antihacking laws to be properly circumvented, thus allowing a copyright holder to blow up the computer of anyone breaching their copyright, then everyone who holds a copyright must be made exempt from those antihacking laws.
This will be anyone who has written a story, painted a picture, put up a website, etc. -- i.e. pretty much every US citizen. So, the law would allow anyone to distroy anyone else's computer.
Unless of course, by "compyright holder", what is really meant is "the music and film industries".
but it's quite difficult to introduce a whole new system of taxation over 15 countries.
I didn't mean a subtle alteration of current VAT laws, I meant a giant upheaval (e.g. "scrap VAT, we'll levy all tax on yoghurt" -- although, obviously, something more sensible than this).
If I'm a small company (possibly even a one-man company) I've probably never heard of the EU rules.
That's a bit like saying, "I hadn't heard of that law, I can't be guilty of breaking it!". Obviously we have a slightly different situation here, as we're talking about tax laws across territories, but you get my drift.
Hell, OK , you got me! I don't have a solution. Maybe we should be taxing credit/debit card transactions between private individuals and businesses then, and force the card issuers to manage the tax.
On the eBay issue, I don't think you can consider each "seller" to be their own 1-man business. eBay are acting as the middle-man, scraping off a small profit on each sale. That's exactly what the big players like Wal-Mart do: except eBay are being quite smart -- they reduce their overhead to almost zero (they don't need to buy real-estate, they don't need checkout assistants etc.). Everything eBay does has a parallel in terms of real world outlets like Wal-Mart, but somehow they convince people that they are an almost invisible conduit for people to sell their stuff to other people.
I didn't mean that a US company wanting to do business in the EU had to set up offices in the EU. What I meant was that they must register their business in the EU. The sales infrastructure would be the same as it it now (e.g. US-based web store, delivery by mail), but all sales to the EU would need to be reported to the EU taxation authorities by the EU registered company.
If someone from that country sends me money and I mail him a mousetrap you'd have no alternative but to confiscate it at customs.
This pretty much happens at the moment. If I buy a DVD from the US, the post office won't give it me until I pay VAT on it. Under my scheme, there could be some mechanism whereby a bar-code is placed on the packaging that contains a unique and verifiable 'VAT paid ID number' or something, so that it passes straight through the post office.
I agree that trade barriers and protectionism aren't the best idea -- but it's quite difficult to introduce a whole new system of taxation over 15 countries.
I agree that if I was to live in the US, I could buy DVDs for $15 and have a health service that works.
However, if I were to live in the US and be poor, then my access to health care would be much worse than it is here. For a country that seemingly advocates equality so strongly, the attitude the US takes to health care provision for the disadvantaged is quite shocking.
Don't belive me? Look here. In the UK, all women are routinely screened for breast cancer between the high risk ages of 40 and 70, free of cost at the point of provision. US citizen and can't afford health insurance? You'd have to rely on charity.
Yeah. I think this sort of tax collection method is cumbersome at best, and without too much modification in the future, is completely unworkable.
I think it would be better to compel businesses who want to sell products outside their own territory, to register companies in those territories. This would make tax collection easier and more transparent, and also force those companies to obey other laws relating to working practices (e.g. it might prevent an Amazonistanian* company who use child slaves to package up books and DVDs from selling their products in the EU or US).
* This is obviously an invented country, and I'm not implying in any way that amazon uses child slaves.
If an American bought something from an EU country the tax would stay in the EU.
This isn't true. I know of at least one chain of stores in the UK who have adverts in their store windows that say that non-EU citizens can apply to have the VAT returned to them (or to have it knocked off the price paid at the checkout -- I'm not sure exactly how it works). I presume that the same would count on *all* goods subject to VAT, but it may not be advertised much. I guess the store in question is keen to attract the business of tourists.
I agree, as I pointed out in my post, that my example was simplistic. But I believe that what I said was largely true. I don't think that healthcare should be paid for by taxes on DVDs, it was just an example. I agree that 5 child families should pay more for education than 1 child families. But, whatever the system of taxation, there will be those who are treated unfairly.
The crux of my argument is that it is entirely sensible to make EU citizens pay the taxes that they are supposed to. Buying from abroad, where a different system of taxation exists, in order to get cheaper goods, only reduces the amount of money the government has to spend.
What I was actually trying to say was that, yes, our system is broken and underfunded, but we need to be able to collect taxes in order to properly fund our services. If EU citizens are spending their money elsewhere and are not paying tax to the EU, then the result will be underfunding.
US citizens won't be paying the tax.
It might cost US companies a small amount to adminstrate the collection of EU taxes, and certainly this isn't the best solution, but it won't (or shouldn't) cost US comsumers any money, and it shouldn't cost EU citizens with better services than in the UK (in fact, it will maintain the taxation level of these citizens and will help to ensure their services keep on working).
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You are assuming one earner per household. While this might have been true in the 1970s, it certainly isn't true today.
I agree, but the proportion of income paid in tax by a low income earner is smaller than that paid by a high income earner. While a high income earner may find half their income going on taxes, a low income earner won't.
I would not put it in those words. I would say that where there is poverty, there is a prevalence of a certain type of crime. I'm not saying that poverty explains "white-collar crime" like insider trading! But you are much more likely to be mugged in an area where there is poverty. Someone who is poor is much more likely to end up in prison. There are many explanations for this phenomenon (e.g. the best teachers don't want to live in poor neighbourhoods, so poor neighbourhoods get poor schools, so the children of the neighbourhood do not qualify for well-paid jobs), but I don't want to rehash them all here. I would make the general assertion that poverty is a significant cause of crime. I don't think this is a shaky assertion at all.
That's not what's happening and it's a simplistic and biased way of looking at things. Getting back to your original assertion that the direct return on investment in the welfare system is negative, I admit this is true. However, the less you invest in a welfare system, the more negative the return on investment. That is to say, if there is no support for those who fall on hard times, like the sick, the mentally ill, the disabled and those in poor housing, there is an associated cost. This cost manifests itself as crime, political instability and disease. These factors have measurable negative effects on the economy. These are the reasons we have a welfare system. This is how the welfare system supports a productive economy. Give me examples of prosperous countries that have no welfare system and yet have low crime and disease rates and a stable political environment.
Your argument assumes that there is some sort of underclass of unproductive people whose sole purpose in life is to retard the progress of the productive. I disagree that all of those who claim unemployment benefit don't want to work. Look at the British mining and steel industries; consider the corporate practice of downsizing. I admit that during the 1980s, being on the dole was seen by many to be a career option, if all they wanted from life was to make do. The current emphasis on getting the unemployed into jobs makes this career option much less achievable. There is also a class of people who claim unemployment benefit while taking 'cash in hand' work. This is being stamped out, and technology is helping here. But I doubt that making do is the dream of anyone -- it is the last resort of those failed by the education and other systems who see no other way to survive.
On the surface, Workfare sounds like an attractive idea. Put the unemployed to work on menial tasks that nobody else wants to do and pay them a living wage.
GBP 3,000 is much smaller than the average income in the UK, which was GBP 23,607 in 2002, somewhat above the GBP 3,000 you quote. (This is an average, but given that the minimum wage is at least GBP 3.80 per hour (GBP 4.50 for those over 21), and assuming one works a 38 hour week 48 weeks of the year, this equates to a minimum income of GBP 6,931).
Surely, that depends whether you are unemployed, sick, disabled, mentally ill or living in poor accommodation, doesn't it? I presume you are none of the above. However, if a mentally ill person were to attack you in the street, you'd consider a welfare system quite desirable. If you were mugged or burgled, you might wonder if it would have been a good idea for the state to provide a safety net for that person before they turned to crime.
Since the treasury doesn't actually own that money, surely it would be simpler not to tax citizens at all?
You know, you're probably living in the wrong country. There are places in the world without all this wasteful welfare baloney. We call them 'Third World Countries' -- perhaps you've seen them on the news -- their citizens tend to be a strange colour? Do you think that there might be even the slightest chance that there is a direct economic link between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support provided to the citizens of that country? It doesn't all boil down to this, but it's a significant contributory factor.
I've developed for EPOC/Symbian. The OS is targeted (of course) at embedded devices. When I was developing software for the platform, a modified GCC was used as the cross-compiler. It's one of the most standards-compliant C/C++ going!
Having an on-device debugger would be nice, but is often not possible with embedded devices due to memory restrictions etc. Most development is done using a PC-based emulator, which works very well.
It is slightly ridiculous to demand ANSI C and POSIX libraries: EPOC/Symbian has its own very well defined programming model. This model was designed to deliver (among other things) outstanding OS stability and OS-wide object-orientation. So, you should not use C paradigms (or C code), but the OO paradigms defined by their programming model (and C++ code). Just because they have made design decisions that you don't like doesn't mean the platform is bad. It means you dont understand it.
We don't have to debate the merits of global variables. We (should) all know that they are a bad idea except in a few restricted situations. For these situations, EPOC/Symbian provides thread-local storage (TLS) which can be used to create a singleton object; this can provide an OO interface to any global variables needed.
The UI changes are a nuisance for the developer, but if you are coding something serious (like a new cell phone, which is the sort of thing EPOC/Symbian is for), then you will have some sort of UI specification, and you will probably want to develop your own UI; the libraries are there to help.
The Palm and Win CE platforms are nowhere near as good for developing robust devices as EPOC/Symbian. This is largely due to the way in which their memory management works (or, rather, doesn't).
EPOC/Symbian allows multitasking. Provided that applications are written in strict compliance with the programming model (which isn't too difficult) then the device will be able to run for *very* long periods of time without crashing. At the time, I was using a WinNT workstation, and my EPOC-based device had a much better uptime.
Compare this to the Palm model, where (at least when I was developing for EPOC), multitasking was impossible. Memory was "managed" by the user exiting one app and starting another.
MS have improved Win CE since I was developing for EPOC, but at that stage, MS had no programming model to ensure good memory management, and the robustness of the platform was a joke. Maybe they've solved this problem now?
Memory management is a very important consideration when developing for cell phones: imagine the result of your phone crashing during a call to the emergency services.
Yes, there is a price to pay for using EPOC/Symbian. But what you get for paying that price is a very robust and efficient OS that allows developers to use elegant OO design and C++ (albeit with some reasonable design decision imposed on the developer).
When I was an undergrad, we had machines that were managed like this.
There were two different setups, and I can't tell you what software they used to achieve them, but I can tell you what happened from a user's perspective.
In the first setup (a small lab -- about 20 machines), the machines were setup to automatically replace their installation of Windows once a week at a "convenient time". The problem was, this time was convenient for the sys admins, rather than the users. So, when working on a project out of scheduled lab times, I would often have to wait for about 30 mins to start work while the machine got a fresh copy of Windows. This was even worse if there was more than one person trying to use the machine, as the network would slow down.
The obvious solution to the above problem is to change the time to something like 3am. However, in these days of devastating Windows worms, I don't think it's an option to install a new image once a week. Also, many university computer facilities are open 24/7; you often get students who like to work antisocial hours, so choosing a convenient time is pretty difficult.
The second setup was a more campus-wide solution. I'm not sure how they achieved it, but it seemed that each machine maintained a log of which files were changed while a particular user was logged on. When they logged off, the machine simply returned the disk to the state it had been in before.
There are many problems with doing what you suggest:
+ User ignorance: naive users are used to saving their stuff to C:. If you then overwrite the disk, they will complain about your policy eating their homework.
+ If you have one 'master' disk image, how do you manage the different drivers required for different hardware? It's impossible to maintain a large number of systems with exactly the same hardware (when you consider component failures etc).
I would suggest the following: Use the permissions and management facilities of the OS to prevent users installing their own software or writing to the C: drive etc. Really lock them down. Give each user networked disk space which only they can write to. Make sure that you have an automated way to roll out patches, and keep on top of things. Make sure your virus protection is tip-top. Try to reduce the possibility of students infecting systems via removable media (I'd outlaw floppy disks, but students still use these!).
Further, for each "group" who need to work together (e.g. small groups of final year students who are working on a particularly project), provide a "transfer"area which they can all read and write. For users who need to install their own software (e.g. computer science researchers), establish a small team of sys admins at their location and let them do their own thing -- just make sure they are sufficiently safe behind a firewall so they can't easily shoot themselves in the foot and your managed main network is safe from any of their screw-ups.
The fact is that the music you can download from iTunes will be better quality than the CD, as they digitise from the studio masters, rather than just ripping the CD.
My aunt is a nurse here in the UK. When car seat-belts were made compulsory (many years ago), she thought that they were dangerous because she was seeing far more injuries in the A&E department she was working in. That was, of course, until someone pointed out to her that all these injuries she was seeing used to be deaths and the bodies went straight to the morgue rather than via A&E.
What you want to look at is whether, after the introduction of a particular safety device, the number of deaths goes down. It is obvious that if a safety device reduces the number of deaths, the number of injuries will increase. So, looking at the number of injuries is not useful and leads to false conclusions being drawn.
Having recently been on holiday to South Beach, FL, I can understand why US medics refer to motorcycles as donorcycles: no-one wears helmets!
I don't see the point in using Perl and Tk to write you own scientific plotting software. There is already plenty of software out there to do this, and it's better written and tested than anything one would produce in an afternoon with Perl and Tk.
The last thing you need when exploring large and complex data sets is to find that the code you are using to visualise the data is buggy! Don't roll your own!
I use Matlab for my work, and it has a fantastic range of scientific plotting features. It's not cheap, but there are some good free/OS packages too:
Look at:
gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info/)
KMatplot (http://kmatplot.sourceforge.net/)
GGobi (http://www.ggobi.org/)
Gri (http://gri.sourceforge.net/)
There are others, too.
I do not consider the data that was used in the example to be complex or large, and I don't see how Perl could help, as numerical processing is certainly not its strength!
Perl may be useful for massaging data into a form that is accepted by a scientific visualisation package, however.
I think that companies who write and sell their software have a right to try and ensure that their software is not stolen. The current economic climate, coupled with the huge hurdle of trying to compete in a market that is dominated by corporations like Microsoft and others with terrible histories of monopolistic behaviour, makes earning a profit from software pretty difficult.
However, from what I read, US companies seem to take very aggressive preemptive action against people and companies who they have the mildest suspicion of infringing their copyright. For example: BSA Accuses Open Office Mirrors -- there's many more (just read slashdot for a few weeks).
But these companies, going to great lengths to find and then harass potentially illegal users of their software, are forgetting one very important thing: these users want to use these companies' software. Not all know that they are doing so illegally, and of those who do know, not all are using the software illegally because they don't want to buy licenses. They may be trialling the software, they may have meant to buy a license but have forgotten.
I would suggest that, if a piece of software detects that it is being used illegally, it should do the following:
The other key to ensuring you sell your software is to have simple, reasonable, licensing terms. Don't charge for named users, let the license be able to be passed on. Offer a reasonable pricing structure, take into account home users, students, educational and research institutions and small businesses as well as large corporations. You might need to sell your $1500 per license product to students and home users for $30. So what. This will spread word of mouth and you've bought mind-share.
Companies that go storming in with the legal stuff just piss users off and give a very bad impression of the software company.
If you are really talking about the computer minus its I/O devices, I tend to call it the "system box".
:-)
My girlfriend used to call it the "hard drive", but has since seen the error of her ways
I know that scolding people for using the term CPU is pretty anal, but its just plain wrong -- how can we expect the layperson to gain any level of computer literacy when we can't be bothered to use correct terminology?
Sorry, but "...nothing but the main CPU..." means you only got the processor. I think you meant that you only got the console, or the system unit.
A CPU (reasonable definition) in a desktop computer would be the Pentium/SPARC/PowerPC etc. -- CPU does not refer to the whole system box (which along with the CPU usualy has a HD, CD/DVD, power supply, motherboard, memory etc.). Similarly with consoles: the CPU is the processor and the console usually also houses a power supply, memory, I/O circuitry, graphics processor(s) etc.
Sorry for the pedantry, but I expect a little more from the /. crowd.
Of all of these, I find OS X the most productive. It does have some UI problems (mainly addressed in Panther with Expose and the new Finder).
The usability of OS X certainly lasts after first unpacking the box. Icons do not have to be ugly to be recognisable; in fact, recognisability is only one criterion used by icon designers.
Microsoft have a good article on their MSDN site. While I think that the OS X interface is better than any of the Windows interfaces seen so far, they do put a lot of effort and research into UI design: Microsoft's Icon Design Page.
Apple's icons in OS X are very good-looking, rendered in a photo-realistic way (Apple often use Pixar for rendering their UI elements, I have heard). In no way are they ugly (as most traditional UNIX icons are). Most people consider Apple computers the easiest to use, and so I think this goes some way to disproving your assertion that ugly means recognisable means good.
Whether this translates into high levels of productivity depends on the user. I like Aqua and I don't like the X-ey UIs like CDE. You may have the opposite preference. But nice icons or little animations are not the reason you are unproductive in OS X.
Being more accurate still: There are things that Word can do that LaTeX can't do and which I have absolutely no interest in.
If you work in the business world, and only ocassionally need to insert equations and don't care much about how they look, and you don't need to build bibliographies and use citations, then you can go ahead and use Word.
However, Word has a few serious problems that make it useless for academic scientific writing (people still use Word, but you can spot their papers a mile off as they look awful):
What are you gibbering on about: "not much out there for the Mac"? Have you heard of this thing called UNIX?
Ditto: "don't have to support much". Plus, it's a damned good idea to limit the number of hardware platforms an OS can run on -- it allows you to highly optimise the OS and test your OS -- MS can't possibly test their OS on all configurations of PC that it will run on. That's one of the reasons Windows is so unstable (Win2k upwards have been very stable, in terms of blue screens of death, but it's still easy to have non-fatal problems caused by hardware).
You obviously didn't/couldn't read my post properly (probably due to the poor antialiased fonts on your system, poor thing): I said that "I was let down by some dodgy components and very poor aftersales service" -- i.e. even though I am more than able to build a PC (hell, I can and have designed processors, so don't come over so superior), when you get faulty components and the store won't accept responsibility, the cost of building a PC can go through the roof.
As for building a Mac -- don't hold your breath. Although I've seen 'build your own Mac' instructions on the net, Apple don't want you to do this: they make their money by building hardware. So, by cutting your nose off to spite your face (if you can do such a thing), you're stuck with a PC: poor integration between hardware and software, power-hungry big MHz processors in systems with archaic architectures (floppy drives! an instruction set rooted in a 1970s calculator!) that under-perform.
However, I don't agree with your assertion that the PC you specced is "high-end", or that compared to the PC, the G5 system is 'under-performing'.
This is a matter of opinion, but a high-end system in my mind would have more processing power than just a single P4 (we're talking a dual-Xeon system really, in PC-speak), would have more than 512MB RAM and would have a DVD burner.
As for performance, check out these graphics from Apple: DNA sequence matching performance and Hidden Markov Model performance. The work that I do is *very* similar to these scientific applications -- and the difference in performance is extreme. This is probably due to the 64-bit architecture and high CPU-RAM bandwidth (about 4 times that of a PC).
So, for these systems, which you consider "high spec", the Apple is about £200 more expensive than the PC, but is likely to perform about 5 times better on the type of scientific computation that I do. The £200 doesn't seem so expensive now.
I just specced out two high-spec (my definition) systems, one Apple (dual G5), one PC (dual 3GHz Xeon). The Apple system costs £3,000 and the Dell system costs £3,234 (both include the manufacturers' best warranties). Again, looking at Apple's benchmarks, the G5 system out-performs the dual Xeons by far.
But let's be realistic. A computer is just a tool. Some people will need a PC because of corporate policy, because they need to run Windows-specific software, or one of a hundred other reasons. One just needs to work out what one needs, and then buy the system. Me: I'd go for the Mac at the moment for three main reasons: performance, price and the integration between hardware and software.
If you compare the price of a G5 (or pretty much any Apple system), with an equivalently-specced PC from a reputable supplier (such as Dell) -- if you can in fact find an equivalent (and frequently you can't, Apple now out-perform PCs, and often you get standard features on an Apple that you can't get on a PC) -- then you will find the Dell system to be more expensive than the Apple.
Granted, you will probably be able to build your own system, or buy from a local PC shop, a PC with a decent spec that is cheaper than an Apple system. However, I have had a couple of very bad experiences with small/mid-size PC builders, and a horrible experience building my own system (I'm a qualified electronics engineer, but I was let down by some dodgy components and very poor aftersales service). Others may have better experiences, but I think it's a matter of luck over judgement. So, ever since, I've vowed to only buy from the big boys.
Next we come to software. On an Apple system, OS X is included in the price of the system -- you often have to pay extra on the PC system for Windows (OK, Linux etc. are often cost-free if you want to go that route). Sometimes Apple software is more expensive or unavailable on the Mac -- but in my line of work (statistical modelling), all the software I need is available. For Word document monkeys, you also have MS Office on the Mac (I'm told it's better than the PC version). Games are slower to appear on the Mac -- that's a potential drawback.
I spend almost every working day in front of a computer. If you had to drive around for a living, you'd want a decent vehicle: any extra cost of an Apple system over a PC system, amortised over the time spent using the system, is almost zero. Oftentimes, the Apple system is cheaper anyway.
But here's the real reason to buy a Mac: The integration between the hardware (some of the best-engineered in the industry) and the OS (OS X is probably the best OS around at the moment). "It just works" is something I hear from people who make the 'switch' from PC to Mac, and it's true.
That's my opinion. Maybe I'm an asshole, though.
I know two people who use the 1.42GHz 15" PowerBook, and they say it's comparable to a 2GHz PC. But, you'll be using OS X, so you'll get a *much* better user-experience out of those '2' GHz compared with using a PC-based OS.
Also go for plenty of HD space: iTunes makes ripping your CDs to HD very tempting, and this will fill your HD pretty quicky :-)
The following is an extract of a post I made some time ago. Qualifications revelant to the release of the G5 are in ((double parens))
I am typing this on a 12" iBook, and I'd say that it the best computer I've ever used.
OK, let me qualify that: It isn't the fastest computer I've used, but then I do computationally demanding numerical research and use a beefy PC for that ((I'd go for the G5 now instead)). But in terms of the iBook being a nice computer to use, it is unbeaten in my experience.
Here's what I like about it:
+ It's small -- but not too small. OK, the screen is 12", and a 12" screen on a PC looks shit, but Apple make it look great. The reolution is 1024x768 (the same as on most 14/15" PCs), but because each pixel is smaller, the screen looks better. The superiour anti-aliasing makes fonts look really smooth, almost like a printed page.
+ The integration between the hardware and the OS means that everything just works. The OS comes into its own with the location manager: you can define different locations which have associated network settings, and flip between them as you travel about. WiFi just works. In fact, I'd use the phrase 'It just works' to describe Apple computers in general.
There's so much more I could say, but let me put it this way: While Apple keep up this fantastic work, I'm never going to buy a PC again. All my friends who have seen the iBook and compared it to their PC have told me that they will buy an Apple when they buy their next computer.
As far as which model to buy, I would go for the 12" PowerBook ((This post was originally aimed at someone who wanted to travel with a laptop a great deal -- I'd go with the 15" PowerBook)). This has a better processor ((than the iBook)), it's thinner, and has a slot-loading CD-R/W/DVD drive ((Get a SuperDrive -- it'll make backups smoother)). Go for as much RAM as you can afford (256MB minimum). This is an ideal laptop for travelling with, and an ideal computer in general. If you think that you need a bigger screen, go for the 15" PowerBook, but the 15"-er will be harder to travel with.
Have fun
I don't know what the legal situation is eactly in the US, but in the UK anyone who creates a work that can be copyrighted, automatically gets the copyright assigned to them (i.e. they do not need to write (c) 2003 Joe Blow or register their work anywhere etc.). I imagine that much the same is true in the US.
So, in order for the antihacking laws to be properly circumvented, thus allowing a copyright holder to blow up the computer of anyone breaching their copyright, then everyone who holds a copyright must be made exempt from those antihacking laws.
This will be anyone who has written a story, painted a picture, put up a website, etc. -- i.e. pretty much every US citizen. So, the law would allow anyone to distroy anyone else's computer.
Unless of course, by "compyright holder", what is really meant is "the music and film industries".
This really is a stupid law.
I didn't mean a subtle alteration of current VAT laws, I meant a giant upheaval (e.g. "scrap VAT, we'll levy all tax on yoghurt" -- although, obviously, something more sensible than this).
If I'm a small company (possibly even a one-man company) I've probably never heard of the EU rules.
That's a bit like saying, "I hadn't heard of that law, I can't be guilty of breaking it!". Obviously we have a slightly different situation here, as we're talking about tax laws across territories, but you get my drift.
Hell, OK , you got me! I don't have a solution. Maybe we should be taxing credit/debit card transactions between private individuals and businesses then, and force the card issuers to manage the tax.
On the eBay issue, I don't think you can consider each "seller" to be their own 1-man business. eBay are acting as the middle-man, scraping off a small profit on each sale. That's exactly what the big players like Wal-Mart do: except eBay are being quite smart -- they reduce their overhead to almost zero (they don't need to buy real-estate, they don't need checkout assistants etc.). Everything eBay does has a parallel in terms of real world outlets like Wal-Mart, but somehow they convince people that they are an almost invisible conduit for people to sell their stuff to other people.
If someone from that country sends me money and I mail him a mousetrap you'd have no alternative but to confiscate it at customs.
This pretty much happens at the moment. If I buy a DVD from the US, the post office won't give it me until I pay VAT on it. Under my scheme, there could be some mechanism whereby a bar-code is placed on the packaging that contains a unique and verifiable 'VAT paid ID number' or something, so that it passes straight through the post office.
I agree that trade barriers and protectionism aren't the best idea -- but it's quite difficult to introduce a whole new system of taxation over 15 countries.
However, if I were to live in the US and be poor, then my access to health care would be much worse than it is here. For a country that seemingly advocates equality so strongly, the attitude the US takes to health care provision for the disadvantaged is quite shocking.
Don't belive me? Look here. In the UK, all women are routinely screened for breast cancer between the high risk ages of 40 and 70, free of cost at the point of provision. US citizen and can't afford health insurance? You'd have to rely on charity.
I think it would be better to compel businesses who want to sell products outside their own territory, to register companies in those territories. This would make tax collection easier and more transparent, and also force those companies to obey other laws relating to working practices (e.g. it might prevent an Amazonistanian* company who use child slaves to package up books and DVDs from selling their products in the EU or US).
* This is obviously an invented country, and I'm not implying in any way that amazon uses child slaves.
This isn't true. I know of at least one chain of stores in the UK who have adverts in their store windows that say that non-EU citizens can apply to have the VAT returned to them (or to have it knocked off the price paid at the checkout -- I'm not sure exactly how it works). I presume that the same would count on *all* goods subject to VAT, but it may not be advertised much. I guess the store in question is keen to attract the business of tourists.
The crux of my argument is that it is entirely sensible to make EU citizens pay the taxes that they are supposed to. Buying from abroad, where a different system of taxation exists, in order to get cheaper goods, only reduces the amount of money the government has to spend.
US citizens won't be paying the tax.
It might cost US companies a small amount to adminstrate the collection of EU taxes, and certainly this isn't the best solution, but it won't (or shouldn't) cost US comsumers any money, and it shouldn't cost EU citizens with better services than in the UK (in fact, it will maintain the taxation level of these citizens and will help to ensure their services keep on working).
I don't see the problem.