You think they shot missiles at the balloons? Or are you saying that all military communications travel through balloons?
My point, that you missed, was that it will not be as easily defended as ground cabling. If it "blows BT out of the water" and becomes a major part of the communications infrastructure, it will provide a very easy target. The balloons are physically vulnerable; the cable and tether to the ballon are physically vulnerable; the base station is physically vulnerable. All are easy to discover - especially if they are well documented.
The other question is whether they can be jammed or snooped easily. If they're broadcasting all communication over 80km, the encryption will have to be pretty good.
I'm not saying this doesn't have a place in the world, or in the UK. I'm saying that it will not replace other methods that are more secure.
I doubt the military will be using them - it's an awfully easy target. Not open to a pellet gun attack, obviously, but perhaps to air-to-ground missile attack.
I assume that eavesdropping would have to be done at their altitude? Or could you listen in on unencrypted communication from wherever you could stick an antenna?
Perhaps the existing ground level wiring will make a nice backup for customers that want this sort of security.
Please forgive me if this isn't the right place for this question...
How stable is 5.0? I'm planning on installing and using FreeBSD for the first time very soon (on a Walmart Microtel).
Is 5.0 stable enough for me to use for NAT at work? Not as a toy or dev machine, but as a relied-upon part of the network. Or should I stick with 4.8?
thx
I can't wait til there's an over-clocking culture for G cards.
31337 haxors will be rewriting drivers and soldering on old cordless phone antennas and adding fans and paint to their cards. We'll have web pages about how you can increase range with a 9v battery and get maximum speed with a driver mod, ventilated card-case and a pringles can.
I'm learning programing and System Administration on the job after getting a Masters in sculpture. They're really rather similar fields.
First, some notes for those that have an out-dated or tv-inspired understanding of the art world:
Most artists are really very down to earth. Much of what they make is not, but the people themselves are not flaky astrologer hippies. (like most hackers. vs. their television counterparts.)
Many museum and gallery directors are rather flaky. (like your boss.)
Art is largely self-referential. Artists make art knowing art history for people that know art history.
Art is a lot of problem solving - where the artist generates and solves the problem.
Art has been around for centuries and was changed radically by the camera.
When hacking is five hundred years old, it will seem a lot more like art that it does even now. Already, an experienced coder is not impressed by some newbie's new chat program (like mine) that introduces no new functionality to the genre.
But if that chat app made comments on what everyone said, maybe that would be new and interesting. If it added something to the genre of chat apps while commenting on chatting, it would be self referential, new, and interesting. And regular users all over the world would call it elitist, weird and stupid, claiming it was just designed to make them look ignorant.
Right now, programming is already looking a lot like art. New guys mock Cobol programmers the same way new art school students mock figure painters. No one is interested in my chat program for the same reasons I'm not interested in looking at paintings of mountains - I've seen it a million times before, there's nothing new here.
For a while now, I've been thinking that OSes ought to have a couple of different graphics modes.
When you're just sporting around the internet or moving files about trying to look busy, the windows should dance and swoosh and have shadows and transparency. Use up all those extra processor cycles.
When you start rendering your hour long video composition, they should chill out. Window borders should drop down to 256 colors, shadows should disappear, windows should just close, rather than slither away.
It would be nice to have a switch somewhere ( EyeCandy: On/Off ), and even nicer for the OS to flip that switch automatically when the processor load gets really high for more than a few seconds.
My 2 cents.
The most comfortable thing I've sat on for more than two hours were two pieces of railroad ties stacked up. I don't know why it was so damn comfortable - maybe because it was so solid.
The Chair, after countless ages, has probably had all the necessary innovations applied. Maybe this work could be put into something else...
Re:reverse checking on senders address
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"mail from:" addresses are almost always forged.
Your server could easily create a situation in which the forgery is not a random, non-existent address, but is mine, or yours.
I've gotten spam and virii in our office with the 'from' line the same as the 'to' line, or the same as another user in our domain.
That computer looks like an iMac using a painted Commodore 64 keyboard and 2 little arms stuck on the sides. Couldn't they integrate the camera into the screen a little better? And what is that thing hanging off the left side? And why on Earth would it be there? Couldn't that be under the keyboard somewhere?
I know it's a prototype, but isn't this the stage where you make it beautiful - because it doesn't have to work well yet?
This is why MS gets accused of copying more often than anyone else. It's a second class rip off. When you steal from something, you should be able to look at the original and improve upon it. This is just playing catch up.
My Mom is a paralegal and still uses some DOS word processor on an old 286 with a 5" floppy to type letters and legal stuff. She's got a PC running Windows 98 in the same room, but won't use it. She says she can get a letter printed from the DOS app (wish I knew what it was) before she can get Word open.
I've always used Macs, and tried to tell her how much easier the GUI the GUI would make everything. (Though I didn't know how to get all of her old files onto the new PC with that tiny 3.5 floppy.) Then I watched her type the 'old way' once - making selections before the screen finished redrawing, spewing out 80 words a minute and printing in a keystroke - and she convinced me. There is no point in newer software for her.
With the Sims, students can experiment with modelling a different personality or type of interaction with other characters, and formally analyze how you learn about other peoples' wants and/or needs.
This may be a good place to start the lesson. It should be engaging and interest the students. But it will not be a good place to end the lesson. It won't be safe to assume that the Sims is a perfect (or even mediocre) model of real psychology. You, personally, will also need to bridge the gap between the real world and a model in which you can break a personality into five or six areas that you can assign specific numeric values to.
Again, it's a good place to start. But it needs to be connected to the real world - you have to make sure that the subtleties, nuances of actual human interaction aren't forgotten. You have to bridge the gap between the world where you read someone's numbers and the world where you decide to trust someone with your life based on their words and appearance.
I feel that if I had the training to formally analyze social situations, even at the most superficial, it would have made my own social maturation a bit easier from the start.
I whole-heartedly agree that there should be more of this, and I'm glad you're teaching it. I worry that games will be used to replace other important methods and that other teachers will use them to avoid teaching themselves. Like the stereotype of the gym teacher that shows filmstrips (or videos these days, huh?).
It's important to not gloss over how complicated humanity is. Especially now, when television and video games are young people's main inputs. Televison reduces almost everything to a situationin which the right product will save the day. Video games (current non-educational titles) reduce everything to Good vs. Evil situations in which it's unnecessary or impossible to decide for yourself what might be the right thing to do.
Of course it's not impossible to write a video game that has the complexity and insight of the great literature of the world... but we're a long way from anything close.
One of the most important parts of an education is to learn how to learn things on your own. You need to learn to research from available materials and to observe and analyze the real world.
Video games don't teach this way. It would be very difficult to design one that would teach broadly enough to have this sort of benefit. What we have are games that reward hunt-and-peck experimentation like a rat pushing buttons until the food pops out rather than the shock. This teaches small lessons about specific tasks in specific environments. It does not teach how to develop a picture of the world at large. What we need is the (obviously beyond our means) world-reactive book in Stephenson's Diamond Age.
The SimCity example is interesting. That game doesn't translate nicely into real life because you can't click on actual people to get a summary of how happy they are or what they want. You can't even get accurate information by asking most people. You get that information from observation, empathy and an understanding of the 'human condition' which is learned from literature, history and art.
I can see children taught this way being utterly helpless when they can't find the video game that will teach them C++ or how to question their cell phone bill. They'll be looking for Divorce Master v2. They'll be small-task based and utterly manipulatable. Throw an image on the TV and their trigger fingers will start clicking with no idea what the long term might bring.
Assumably this sort of teaching would augment rather than replace teachers. However, the trend in education has been toward employable task learning recently. Unless this remains balanced by broad focussed lessons, our society will be about as useful as its credit limit.
I like to lump things that computers should do into two categories - communication/entertainment and mindless tasks. My crystal ball says there's still a lot to be explored in both of these areas.
As far as mindless tasks go, there are plenty of applications for computing all around us: automating our work, controlling our living environments, checking what's in the fridge. A lot of this will be networked microchip stuff that will tie into a central computer somewhere to visualize them. A lot of it will be robotic. Some of it will be applications on computers that do things you do over and over at work. There are still many, many mindless repetitive tasks that can be computerized.
The other realm is entertainment and communication, which have been revolutionized recently by the internet and digital copying. This will continue to develop, and a lot of the development will concentrate on distributing content and managing access rights. Managing communication should also be handled - there is a need for a way to connect your many telephone numbers and email, etc into one portable device that won't ring in the movie theatre. Video games and porn will branch out from the computer into the real world with wearable interactive gear.
And while I'm sort of on the subject... It used to be that you could look to sex (esp. porn) for innovation. It helped drive the adoption of VCRs and video content on the Internet. It's developed profitable methods of internet content distribution. I think it's time as a big innovator may be ending though. Most of it's influence has been in getting life like sex content to people in as anonymous a way as possible. The VCR and internet push in porn was all about anonymity - not having to drive somewhere and walk into a theatre or book store in front of someone. That's pretty much taken care of with the Internet. The only area left is to make the content more life-like. Which is also a concern for gamers. Porn and gaming will be coming together in more and more new ( and potentially socially dangerous) ways.
Thank you for concern, and by all means meet those impulsive neads.
My math perhaps doesn't represent my point well at all:)
Part of the thought back there was that if only a tenth of the people that want OS X enough to pay for it for a PC bought a Mac instead, Apple comes out ahead. Such that if instead of 10 copies of OSX they sell a single Computer, their revenue is higher.
Revenue does not equal profit, as the other poster posted. But selling a computer also has longer term benefits, like the 3 or 4 major OS upgrades that owner will buy for that box.
Actually I believe that the complete opposite is true. Apples market share could go up 10x overnight if they released Mac OSX for x86. Hardware is a tough place to make money, the hardware COSTS money. Lost of it, profit margins are slim.
Market share != Profit; 10 * $129 < $1500;// 10* OSX cost < average Mac price
Hardware is a tough place for Windows PC makers to make money. Apple has been doing pretty well there. Dell and Gateway have problems and losses because they're in competition with each other and with your cousin who makes PCs in his garage. Your suggestion that Apple would make more money by competing with Dell and your cousin is strange.
I worked as a freelance designer for a couple of years out of my house. There were no zoning issues here (New Orleans) because it was just me and clients didn't visit me, I visited them.
But, my advice, based on my experiences (good and bad) is this: Get a lawyer and ask him/her. Also, get an accountant. Talk with them both before you start. The cost will be more than offset. It's not about how smart you are or whether you Could figure it out. You need experts for these things the same way they need experts to write their software, create their websites and build their cars. Cause you've got other stuff to do.
You want to worry about your business - the parts you know and love, right? You want to worry about software. You'll need to worry about your clients. You don't want to worry about zoning and taxes. The last thing you want is to find out that you're in deep shit with the police, the IRS or immigration or whatever because you were working on a big job that month. Get your experts in order and make sure they handle this stuff for you.
I remember reading about a study a few years ago that found that participants reading computer monitors retained less information than people reading print outs. As in: the computer readers remembered fewer details about what they read after a few hours than paper readers.
Has anyone else seen or heard this? Anyone know where I could find out more? Seems like an important thing to me.
I work for a newspaper. As the other poster pointed out, it's ad sales - display and classified - that pay for everything. The rest of the paper is just there to bring eyes to the ads. There's a catch phrase about media being the business of providing viewers to advertisers.
The sales price of a newspaper might cover distribution costs. And maybe it even covers the cost of tracking and getting the money. It almost never covers printing costs. It's there for a number of other reasons. The store selling the paper gets a cut, and therefore an incentive to put the paper out every day. More importantly, advertisers think more highly of paying viewers. the idea seems to be that if you pay for a newspaper you're going to look at it more thoroughly than the free weekly you leaf through and throw away. For some publications, there are postal regulations that make paid publications cheaper to distribute than freebies.
I think you're missing my point. Probably because I didn't make it well.
What I'm suggesting is that there are content providers online other than the RIAA and Hollywood. Me for instance. Am I afforded the same rights (and royalties) as large record companies under this scheme? Put me in any category you want: I'm a band with mp3s, I'm a small film maker with a movie online, I'm a photographer with images online, I wrote the book you're talking about and put it online to sell ad space.
What if someone downloads my song/film/image and violates my copyright? Is it still illegal if they paid the tax? If I want a cut can I get my royalties the same way the RIAA would for a Backstreet Boys song?
Does this tax scheme scale to this level? I don't think it can. It think it will protect and serve the big guys by taxing me. Unless there's a way to sign up all content to be tracked for fees to be paid. And then, obviously, you've got to take into account how to make sure that I'm not claiming to have recorded a song by someone else.
How do you do it? Do you limit copyright protection to large companies? That's ridiculous. Do you extend this scheme to everyone putting content online? That's also ridiculous.
If I design some nice web graphics and you download them an view them as part of visiting my website, do I get a chunk of this tax? You just downloaded and distributed my copyrighted material, right? What if it's Flash instead of graphics? What about the text on my site? That's my copyright.
What about this post? If you download this page and get this post on your screen, then I want my royalties.
The only sane thing to do is to patent your exploits before you announce them.:)
Then you have precedence for publishing them, or you just point to the online patent info.
As a bonus, you can sue the companies that fix the holes you're supporting because they've broken that "shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work" line. After all, your exploit controls access, right? Opening a door is controlling access as much as locking it is.
I worked as an S-Corp for two years, and I whole-heartedly agree: get an accountant.
The IRS will give you incorrect information. Their forms, and booklets, and other books (and tax software) on the market all assume that you know what you must declare and what you can write off. Can you write off paper clips? Can you write off your phone bill? Gasoline? Last year's taxes? They won't tell you. If you're not absolutely-bet-your-business-on-it positive, get an accountant. Mine charged about $200.00 to do my business and personal taxes. Some of the best money I've ever spent.
I don't know why taxes have to be so freaking difficult, but they are. It's very hard to get correct, complete information, especially if your situation is at all unusual - like you made $0.00.
Slashdot Mirror
You think they shot missiles at the balloons?
Or are you saying that all military communications travel through balloons?
My point, that you missed, was that it will not be as easily defended as ground cabling. If it "blows BT out of the water" and becomes a major part of the communications infrastructure, it will provide a very easy target. The balloons are physically vulnerable; the cable and tether to the ballon are physically vulnerable; the base station is physically vulnerable. All are easy to discover - especially if they are well documented.
The other question is whether they can be jammed or snooped easily. If they're broadcasting all communication over 80km, the encryption will have to be pretty good.
I'm not saying this doesn't have a place in the world, or in the UK. I'm saying that it will not replace other methods that are more secure.
I doubt the military will be using them - it's an awfully easy target. Not open to a pellet gun attack, obviously, but perhaps to air-to-ground missile attack.
I assume that eavesdropping would have to be done at their altitude? Or could you listen in on unencrypted communication from wherever you could stick an antenna?
Perhaps the existing ground level wiring will make a nice backup for customers that want this sort of security.
Please forgive me if this isn't the right place for this question... How stable is 5.0? I'm planning on installing and using FreeBSD for the first time very soon (on a Walmart Microtel). Is 5.0 stable enough for me to use for NAT at work? Not as a toy or dev machine, but as a relied-upon part of the network. Or should I stick with 4.8? thx
I can't wait til there's an over-clocking culture for G cards.
31337 haxors will be rewriting drivers and soldering on old cordless phone antennas and adding fans and paint to their cards. We'll have web pages about how you can increase range with a 9v battery and get maximum speed with a driver mod, ventilated card-case and a pringles can.
this is gonna rock.
I'm learning programing and System Administration on the job after getting a Masters in sculpture. They're really rather similar fields.
First, some notes for those that have an out-dated or tv-inspired understanding of the art world:
Most artists are really very down to earth. Much of what they make is not, but the people themselves are not flaky astrologer hippies. (like most hackers. vs. their television counterparts.)
Many museum and gallery directors are rather flaky. (like your boss.)
Art is largely self-referential. Artists make art knowing art history for people that know art history.
Art is a lot of problem solving - where the artist generates and solves the problem.
Art has been around for centuries and was changed radically by the camera.
When hacking is five hundred years old, it will seem a lot more like art that it does even now. Already, an experienced coder is not impressed by some newbie's new chat program (like mine) that introduces no new functionality to the genre.
But if that chat app made comments on what everyone said, maybe that would be new and interesting. If it added something to the genre of chat apps while commenting on chatting, it would be self referential, new, and interesting. And regular users all over the world would call it elitist, weird and stupid, claiming it was just designed to make them look ignorant.
Right now, programming is already looking a lot like art. New guys mock Cobol programmers the same way new art school students mock figure painters. No one is interested in my chat program for the same reasons I'm not interested in looking at paintings of mountains - I've seen it a million times before, there's nothing new here.
For a while now, I've been thinking that OSes ought to have a couple of different graphics modes. When you're just sporting around the internet or moving files about trying to look busy, the windows should dance and swoosh and have shadows and transparency. Use up all those extra processor cycles. When you start rendering your hour long video composition, they should chill out. Window borders should drop down to 256 colors, shadows should disappear, windows should just close, rather than slither away. It would be nice to have a switch somewhere ( EyeCandy: On/Off ), and even nicer for the OS to flip that switch automatically when the processor load gets really high for more than a few seconds. My 2 cents.
The most comfortable thing I've sat on for more than two hours were two pieces of railroad ties stacked up. I don't know why it was so damn comfortable - maybe because it was so solid.
The Chair, after countless ages, has probably had all the necessary innovations applied. Maybe this work could be put into something else...
"mail from:" addresses are almost always forged.
Your server could easily create a situation in which the forgery is not a random, non-existent address, but is mine, or yours.
I've gotten spam and virii in our office with the 'from' line the same as the 'to' line, or the same as another user in our domain.
That computer looks like an iMac using a painted Commodore 64 keyboard and 2 little arms stuck on the sides. Couldn't they integrate the camera into the screen a little better? And what is that thing hanging off the left side? And why on Earth would it be there? Couldn't that be under the keyboard somewhere?
I know it's a prototype, but isn't this the stage where you make it beautiful - because it doesn't have to work well yet?
This is why MS gets accused of copying more often than anyone else. It's a second class rip off. When you steal from something, you should be able to look at the original and improve upon it. This is just playing catch up.
They're just selling the case, though, right?
The cardboard case isn't producing any EMI or RFI.
My Mom is a paralegal and still uses some DOS word processor on an old 286 with a 5" floppy to type letters and legal stuff. She's got a PC running Windows 98 in the same room, but won't use it. She says she can get a letter printed from the DOS app (wish I knew what it was) before she can get Word open.
I've always used Macs, and tried to tell her how much easier the GUI the GUI would make everything. (Though I didn't know how to get all of her old files onto the new PC with that tiny 3.5 floppy.) Then I watched her type the 'old way' once - making selections before the screen finished redrawing, spewing out 80 words a minute and printing in a keystroke - and she convinced me. There is no point in newer software for her.
With the Sims, students can experiment with modelling a different personality or type of interaction with other characters, and formally analyze how you learn about other peoples' wants and/or needs.
This may be a good place to start the lesson. It should be engaging and interest the students. But it will not be a good place to end the lesson. It won't be safe to assume that the Sims is a perfect (or even mediocre) model of real psychology. You, personally, will also need to bridge the gap between the real world and a model in which you can break a personality into five or six areas that you can assign specific numeric values to.
Again, it's a good place to start. But it needs to be connected to the real world - you have to make sure that the subtleties, nuances of actual human interaction aren't forgotten. You have to bridge the gap between the world where you read someone's numbers and the world where you decide to trust someone with your life based on their words and appearance.
I feel that if I had the training to formally analyze social situations, even at the most superficial, it would have made my own social maturation a bit easier from the start.
I whole-heartedly agree that there should be more of this, and I'm glad you're teaching it. I worry that games will be used to replace other important methods and that other teachers will use them to avoid teaching themselves. Like the stereotype of the gym teacher that shows filmstrips (or videos these days, huh?).
It's important to not gloss over how complicated humanity is. Especially now, when television and video games are young people's main inputs. Televison reduces almost everything to a situationin which the right product will save the day. Video games (current non-educational titles) reduce everything to Good vs. Evil situations in which it's unnecessary or impossible to decide for yourself what might be the right thing to do.
Of course it's not impossible to write a video game that has the complexity and insight of the great literature of the world... but we're a long way from anything close.
One of the most important parts of an education is to learn how to learn things on your own. You need to learn to research from available materials and to observe and analyze the real world.
Video games don't teach this way. It would be very difficult to design one that would teach broadly enough to have this sort of benefit. What we have are games that reward hunt-and-peck experimentation like a rat pushing buttons until the food pops out rather than the shock. This teaches small lessons about specific tasks in specific environments. It does not teach how to develop a picture of the world at large. What we need is the (obviously beyond our means) world-reactive book in Stephenson's Diamond Age.
The SimCity example is interesting. That game doesn't translate nicely into real life because you can't click on actual people to get a summary of how happy they are or what they want. You can't even get accurate information by asking most people. You get that information from observation, empathy and an understanding of the 'human condition' which is learned from literature, history and art.
I can see children taught this way being utterly helpless when they can't find the video game that will teach them C++ or how to question their cell phone bill. They'll be looking for Divorce Master v2. They'll be small-task based and utterly manipulatable. Throw an image on the TV and their trigger fingers will start clicking with no idea what the long term might bring.
Assumably this sort of teaching would augment rather than replace teachers. However, the trend in education has been toward employable task learning recently. Unless this remains balanced by broad focussed lessons, our society will be about as useful as its credit limit.
I like to lump things that computers should do into two categories - communication/entertainment and mindless tasks. My crystal ball says there's still a lot to be explored in both of these areas.
As far as mindless tasks go, there are plenty of applications for computing all around us: automating our work, controlling our living environments, checking what's in the fridge. A lot of this will be networked microchip stuff that will tie into a central computer somewhere to visualize them. A lot of it will be robotic. Some of it will be applications on computers that do things you do over and over at work. There are still many, many mindless repetitive tasks that can be computerized.
The other realm is entertainment and communication, which have been revolutionized recently by the internet and digital copying. This will continue to develop, and a lot of the development will concentrate on distributing content and managing access rights. Managing communication should also be handled - there is a need for a way to connect your many telephone numbers and email, etc into one portable device that won't ring in the movie theatre. Video games and porn will branch out from the computer into the real world with wearable interactive gear.
And while I'm sort of on the subject... It used to be that you could look to sex (esp. porn) for innovation. It helped drive the adoption of VCRs and video content on the Internet. It's developed profitable methods of internet content distribution. I think it's time as a big innovator may be ending though. Most of it's influence has been in getting life like sex content to people in as anonymous a way as possible. The VCR and internet push in porn was all about anonymity - not having to drive somewhere and walk into a theatre or book store in front of someone. That's pretty much taken care of with the Internet. The only area left is to make the content more life-like. Which is also a concern for gamers. Porn and gaming will be coming together in more and more new ( and potentially socially dangerous) ways.
Thank you for concern, and by all means meet those impulsive neads.
:)
My math perhaps doesn't represent my point well at all
Part of the thought back there was that if only a tenth of the people that want OS X enough to pay for it for a PC bought a Mac instead, Apple comes out ahead. Such that if instead of 10 copies of OSX they sell a single Computer, their revenue is higher.
Revenue does not equal profit, as the other poster posted. But selling a computer also has longer term benefits, like the 3 or 4 major OS upgrades that owner will buy for that box.
Hardware is a tough place for Windows PC makers to make money. Apple has been doing pretty well there. Dell and Gateway have problems and losses because they're in competition with each other and with your cousin who makes PCs in his garage. Your suggestion that Apple would make more money by competing with Dell and your cousin is strange.
I worked as a freelance designer for a couple of years out of my house. There were no zoning issues here (New Orleans) because it was just me and clients didn't visit me, I visited them.
But, my advice, based on my experiences (good and bad) is this: Get a lawyer and ask him/her. Also, get an accountant. Talk with them both before you start. The cost will be more than offset. It's not about how smart you are or whether you Could figure it out. You need experts for these things the same way they need experts to write their software, create their websites and build their cars. Cause you've got other stuff to do.
You want to worry about your business - the parts you know and love, right? You want to worry about software. You'll need to worry about your clients. You don't want to worry about zoning and taxes. The last thing you want is to find out that you're in deep shit with the police, the IRS or immigration or whatever because you were working on a big job that month. Get your experts in order and make sure they handle this stuff for you.
That's my advice. two or three cents.
I'll never drive a Mercedes until they lower their hardware costs.
Those fascists.
I remember reading about a study a few years ago that found that participants reading computer monitors retained less information than people reading print outs. As in: the computer readers remembered fewer details about what they read after a few hours than paper readers. Has anyone else seen or heard this? Anyone know where I could find out more? Seems like an important thing to me.
I work for a newspaper. As the other poster pointed out, it's ad sales - display and classified - that pay for everything. The rest of the paper is just there to bring eyes to the ads. There's a catch phrase about media being the business of providing viewers to advertisers.
The sales price of a newspaper might cover distribution costs. And maybe it even covers the cost of tracking and getting the money. It almost never covers printing costs. It's there for a number of other reasons. The store selling the paper gets a cut, and therefore an incentive to put the paper out every day. More importantly, advertisers think more highly of paying viewers. the idea seems to be that if you pay for a newspaper you're going to look at it more thoroughly than the free weekly you leaf through and throw away. For some publications, there are postal regulations that make paid publications cheaper to distribute than freebies.
I think you're missing my point. Probably because I didn't make it well.
What I'm suggesting is that there are content providers online other than the RIAA and Hollywood. Me for instance. Am I afforded the same rights (and royalties) as large record companies under this scheme? Put me in any category you want: I'm a band with mp3s, I'm a small film maker with a movie online, I'm a photographer with images online, I wrote the book you're talking about and put it online to sell ad space.
What if someone downloads my song/film/image and violates my copyright? Is it still illegal if they paid the tax? If I want a cut can I get my royalties the same way the RIAA would for a Backstreet Boys song?
Does this tax scheme scale to this level? I don't think it can. It think it will protect and serve the big guys by taxing me. Unless there's a way to sign up all content to be tracked for fees to be paid. And then, obviously, you've got to take into account how to make sure that I'm not claiming to have recorded a song by someone else.
How do you do it? Do you limit copyright protection to large companies? That's ridiculous. Do you extend this scheme to everyone putting content online? That's also ridiculous.
This idea seems to have slippery-slope issues.
If I design some nice web graphics and you download them an view them as part of visiting my website, do I get a chunk of this tax? You just downloaded and distributed my copyrighted material, right? What if it's Flash instead of graphics? What about the text on my site? That's my copyright.
What about this post? If you download this page and get this post on your screen, then I want my royalties.
This whole presidency is like opposite day.
The only sane thing to do is to patent your exploits before you announce them. :)
Then you have precedence for publishing them, or you just point to the online patent info.
As a bonus, you can sue the companies that fix the holes you're supporting because they've broken that "shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work" line. After all, your exploit controls access, right? Opening a door is controlling access as much as locking it is.
I worked as an S-Corp for two years, and I whole-heartedly agree: get an accountant.
The IRS will give you incorrect information. Their forms, and booklets, and other books (and tax software) on the market all assume that you know what you must declare and what you can write off. Can you write off paper clips? Can you write off your phone bill? Gasoline? Last year's taxes? They won't tell you. If you're not absolutely-bet-your-business-on-it positive, get an accountant. Mine charged about $200.00 to do my business and personal taxes. Some of the best money I've ever spent.
I don't know why taxes have to be so freaking difficult, but they are. It's very hard to get correct, complete information, especially if your situation is at all unusual - like you made $0.00.