The only state where foreign shoppers can get sales tax refunds is Louisiana. However, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon have no sales tax at all.
Really? I looked at their website, and it appears that they do allow ACH (automated clearinghouse) withdrawals. Do they refuse PayPal withdrawals for all their customers, or do you have to ask for PayPal protection specially?
In Massachusetts (where I am), all you have to do is point your web browser at the state licensing board and you can find out if there have been any malpractice judgements or settlements, or any disciplinary action against a phyisician licenced in Massachusetts. A few other states also offer this service. If your state doesn't, start complaining to your state representatives.
Of course, the fact that the vast majority of people will benefit from free trade does not negate the real pain of those dislocated by it. I'm all for transitional assistance for workers affected by new trade agreements.
What I'm not for is building a wall around some preferred industries to give them temporary protection against the inevitable force of economic and technological change. That's political pandering of the worst kind.
Free trade does work out well, but the problem is that it does involve both winners and losers, in the short term. The short-term losers know exactly what to blame: free trade. The winners, by and large, are diffused through the entire economy and over the course of many years: they benefit enormously from free trade, but they don't know it.
For centuries, protectionists have traded on this asymmetry. They point to the real, obvious, and acute problems caused by trade, and deny any theoretical 'ivory-tower' benefits because they are in the unknown future. This is the thinking that resulted in the Smoot-Hawley Act in the US, and similar measures throughout the world, contributing to the profound and lasting slump through all of the 1930's.
Today's protectionists, of course, say that they aren't like that, and that they only want to stop 'bad' trade. But what is 'bad' trade? In the end it still boils down to what it has always been: 'bad' trade is trade that adversely impacts politically powerful groups (such as farmers, steelworkers, perhaps now programmers), regardless of the damage such trade restrictions cause to the economy as a whole.
What was true 200 years ago is still true today: protectionism ends up leaving us all poorer.
No, there really isn't an incentive to write shoddy code. Shoddy code isn't likely to be widely adopted, so there will be little market for supporting it.
As for a 'completely usable and straightforward app', in my experience, no non-trivial app remains completely usable and straightforward when applied to the real world and real business. Even if your app is perfect in many situations, other users will be different and will need or want support or modifications. The key, however, is to have something useful that addresses a need in the marketplace to start with.
While it's quite true that if you're just getting inspiration from copyrighted code, you are not violating copyright. The problem comes when the copyright holder sues you or your employer, claiming that you (intentionally or not) copied parts of their code into yours. You might have subconsciously reproduced something you saw earlier and forgot at a conscious level. While it might be unlikely that you would actually do this, it is not so unlikely that you would be accused of doing it.
While at the end of an excruciatingly long and fabulously expensive trial, your rights to your own code may be upheld (if the court doesn't make a mistake), it is much better to avoid the problem by using a clean-room process that makes the whole question moot.
No this is not true. Now that IBM has answered SCO's complaint, SCO cannot withdraw its case without the court's permission (see FRCP 41). In any case, even if SCO's case were dismissed, IBM's countersuit would continue it's relentless path toward SCO's destruction.
The electoral college system is democratic. If the electoral college had turned out to be the independent, deliberative body that the Framers envisioned, that might not have been the case, but in reality it is nothing more than an administrative way of conveying the results of the popular election in each state.
The electoral college system is democratic , but combined with state laws providing that the winner in that state gets all of the electoral votes, it weights the votes in each state differently. Voters in heavily Democratic or Republican states are virtually powerless, while voters in swing states like Florida wield enormous influence.
We will never know if Gore would have won the presidency on the popular vote, because a popular-vote election would have been fought in a completely different manner, and maybe even with different candidates. To assume that the results of a popular-vote election would have been the same as those of the real (electoral-college based) election is the height of folly.
Actually, the GPL is 100% reliable. The reason it has not been challenged in court is that it is so reliable that, until SCO, every violator has caved in before trial. SCO has not advanced one single argument against the GPL that could possibly hold water.
Go ahead, keep your faith in the infallible research that SCOX stockholders must be relying on. I'll believe it when I see it; all of SCO's actions up to this point indicate that they are completely out of their depth.
Not only that, but a number of people got severely burned by shorting internet stocks. They were absolutely 100% correct that the stocks would crash and become worthless, but the stocks took too long to crash, the shorts had to cover, and they got their asses handed to them.
SCO's stock price is a conundrum. By all rights it should have dropped precipitously after its recent legal and financial setbacks, but it hasn't. My best guess is that certain well-heeled parties want the stock price to stay high, so they are manipulating the market to that end. They would do this top encourage precisely the sort of reasoning in Ed Almos' comment:
Hey, SCOX stock is going through the roof, so they must be lead-pipe cinch to win billions in their lawsuit. Better get on board!
The ordinary investor's brain hurts when it has to think about complex legal issues, so it relies on simple numbers instead: stock price and P/E ratio. The underlying fundamentals, the quality of the earnings, the actual prospects for the company, or even any research at all beyond a sunny article in a financial magazine, or a breathless endorsement from an 'analyst' are all superfluous.
Such a thing has already been implemented. 'Controlled Flight into Terrain' (CFIT) has been a known human-factors problem for some time. In direct response to CFIT accidents, the GPWS (Ground Proximity Warning System) was developed and is now widely deployed in airliners. It incorporates just such a database as you describe. However, all it does is warn the pilot (loudly and irritatingly) that the plane is about to run into the ground. The GPWS does not take over the plane.
The system being discussed here would take ultimate control of the plane away from the pilot. In the century of powered flight we have just completed, such ideas have have always turned out to be the Wrong Thing.
If we could always trust the flight computers and control systems, we wouldn't even need pilots: today's jetliners are smart enough to fly themselves. The problem is that the systems are just not reliable enough, and the system designers are not prescient enough, to handle every eventuality.
For ages, the question has been
'
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' (Who will watch the watchers?)
While a do-not-e-mail registry that included individual e-mail addresses would simply be a magnet for unscrupulous spammers hungry for 'live' addresses, a different type of registry has a chance of working.
If instead of listing full e-mail addresses, the registry included only e-mail domains, it would be easy to administer, easy to comply with, and not susceptible to abuse by spammers. For example, if AOL submitted aol.com to the registry, if would cover all of its subscribers at a stroke. All by itself, this would be a fair and workable system, but the DMA would scream bloody murder because it would sign up some recipients without an explicit action on their part. (Of course, they could change to a UCE-friendly mail service that did not sign up for the registry, but that would hardly satisfy the DMA.)
A refinement of this system would create a workable do-not-e-mail registry, without requiring a cumbersome, expensive, and perhaps ineffective secret govenment database. It would work as follows:
a domain owner lists its domain in the registry (e.g. aol.com)
the domain owner must also publish a companion domain name to which it is legal to send spam (e.g., aol-allmail.com)
by default, all mail to the companion domain is forwarded to the main domain, (e.g. user@aol-allmail.com is forwarded to user@aol.com), but by explicit request the user can turn off the mail forwarding
someone who wants to send UCE to a domain on the list will send it to the alternative domain instead, and if the user has turned off forwarding (or if the user does not exist) the sender will get an error response.
This scheme divides up the do-not-e-mail registry and puts each part in its appropriate place: the public part (the domain names) is managed by the government, while the private part (the usernames) is managed by the ISP's. The best thing is that the new law requires the FTC to study the feasibility of a do-not-mail list, and authorizes it to put the list into effect nine months from now. We need to make sure that the FTC knows that it is possible to create a workable do-not-e-mail database by just adding a little design creativity.
I'm afraid that you don't understand the definition. While paragraph (A) is pretty restrictive, paragraph (B) manages to include pretty much every computer in the USA, as well as every computer on Earth that communicates with the USA, directly or indirectly.
This is a standard dodge that Congress uses to make a law under its power to regulate "interstate and foreign commerce". While nominally restricting the law's reach, it actually restricts it not at all.
The problem is different in the US. If we had a system where the fundamental question was: "who do you wish to represent you in Congress?", then paper and pencil would suffice.
For better or worse, US elections tend to involve choices for many different offices (local, state, and/or federal), and often include multiple referendum questions as well, making for a complex ballot. Even worse, in many places the ballots must be available in multiple languages.
All this makes management and counting of the ballots much more challenging and expensive than the relatively straightforward elections in some other countries. The fundamental advantages of electronic voting are that multiple versions of ballots (different localities and/or different languages) do not need to be securely printed, stockpiled, transported, and accounted for, that large and complex ballots can be presented in a more tractable format, and that counting is both faster and cheaper. While the paper audit trails from electronic voting systems would have to be protected, they would presumably be blank (general-purpose) forms only printed "on-demand" in the machine at the time the voter casts his vote.
The right question is not whether cycles are that cheap, but rather will you gain more cycles from spam reduction than you will expend in checksum calculation? Given the rising tide of spam, you don't need to reduce it much in order to make mail-signing a worthwhile proposition.
As to interoperability: during the adoption period, one would have to accept both signed and unsigned mail, but as soon as it becomes obvious that mail-signing is a way to get legitimate mail past ever-stricter automatic mail filters, and to the eyes of less and less patient mail recipients, I think you will see adoption of the new scheme take off. At some point it will be clear that if you want someone to take your mail seriously (or to even see it in the first place), it will have to be signed. That point will come when the major e-mail service providers start giving their subscribers the option of discarding unsigned mail automatically.
Microsoft rightly sees Linux as an imminent threat to its monopoly, and therefore to its monopoly profits. They are therefore going to do everything they can to stop it. With their sock-puppet SCO, they are planting the seed of doubt that it's legally safe to use Linux. SCO's case against is laughably weak, and against end-users it's weaker still, but it's enough to get people thinking.
After SCO is pounded to dust, then Microsoft pulls out the big guns: lawsuits against Linux users for patent infringement. Unlike the SCO fiasco, this could be a real claim with legal weight behind it. While it would be easy enough to change Linux to work around the patent, this would break compatibility with industry standards and diminish Linux's usefulness. More to the point, real lawsuits with real damages would do a lot more to impede Linux adoption in big business, which is Microsoft's biggest fear.
The major impediment to this is antitrust. We've already seen Microsoft's ability to purchase antitrust immunity in the USA. With suitably large additional campaign contributions, they may well be able to get away with anything they want. The EC may be a little more of a problem, but judging from their recent adoption of software patents, we can expect them to start conforming to their place in the New World Order for Business.
The terrorists' most important tool wasn't box knives, or knowledge of gaps in airline security. Their most important tool was surprise. Up until 9/11 it was standard operating procedure to do whatever a hijacker wanted, under the theory (justified until that time) that so doing would minimize the loss of life. This policy wasn't a secret; it had been publicized in the aviation community for decades. Given that policy, hardened cockpit doors would have been useless.
The 9/11 terrorists succeeded for the same reason the Japanese succeeded in their attack on Pearl Harbor: they mounted an attack that their opponents thought would never happen.
Actually, it would be just fine if SCO's suit against IBM were thrown out. IBM's countersuit against SCO would still stand, and its successful conclusion would deliver the precedent you desire.
That's all wrong. Every state has now passed a speed limit. Also, the official drinking age in Lousiana is 21. (The de-facto drinking age may be another matter.)
It's certain that states like Wyoming wouldn't have imposed a speed limit, and Lousiana wouldn't have raised the drinking age, without heavy pressure from Congress.
Uh, the Buchanan problem was due to a ballot designed by DEMOCRATIC election supervisors. Besides that, the flawed ballot design was not the issue in the big court battle: the counting method (or lack of one) was.
The modern US constitution has really precious little protection against the federal government usurping powers that nominally belong to the states.
While the several states are indeed responsible for conducting federal elections. Congress could essentially mandate a uniform ballot standard by appropriating substantial aid to support the states' election functions, but only for those states that adhered to the federal standard. In that way, each state could theoretically conduct elections in its own way, but as a practical matter every state would have to implement the federal standard. (This is exactly the method used to compel the states to pass traffic laws that conform to what Congress wants.)
The only way a do-not-spam list will be effective is if it includes whole domains. For example, if AOL could specify that any address in aol.com is to be considered on the do-not-spam list, then the list would be worth something. This would make the list easy to deal with, since you wouldn't need to keep it secret.
The previous version of the bill didn't specify whether entire domains would be included, but apparently left it to the FCC to decide. Of course, the DMA and their pet congressmen want the bill as weak as possible, so the latest draft of the bill might have been changed to prohibit inclusion of entire domains.
No, it is a certainty that Microsoft is funding SCO. Just check out SCO's SEC filings, and you'll find in excess of $10M of funds flowing from Microsoft to SCO.
The funding is hidden by a figleaf of IP licensing, but I challenge anyone to come up with another example of Microsoft paying that much for a licence to a little company for rights to exceedingly questionable IP. We all know with absolute certaintly that 'services rendered' in attacking Linux have something to do with the continuing big payouts to SCO.
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The only state where foreign shoppers can get sales tax refunds is Louisiana. However, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon have no sales tax at all.
Really? I looked at their website, and it appears that they do allow ACH (automated clearinghouse) withdrawals. Do they refuse PayPal withdrawals for all their customers, or do you have to ask for PayPal protection specially?
In Massachusetts (where I am), all you have to do is point your web browser at the state licensing board and you can find out if there have been any malpractice judgements or settlements, or any disciplinary action against a phyisician licenced in Massachusetts. A few other states also offer this service. If your state doesn't, start complaining to your state representatives.
Of course, the fact that the vast majority of people will benefit from free trade does not negate the real pain of those dislocated by it. I'm all for transitional assistance for workers affected by new trade agreements.
What I'm not for is building a wall around some preferred industries to give them temporary protection against the inevitable force of economic and technological change. That's political pandering of the worst kind.
Free trade does work out well, but the problem is that it does involve both winners and losers, in the short term. The short-term losers know exactly what to blame: free trade. The winners, by and large, are diffused through the entire economy and over the course of many years: they benefit enormously from free trade, but they don't know it.
For centuries, protectionists have traded on this asymmetry. They point to the real, obvious, and acute problems caused by trade, and deny any theoretical 'ivory-tower' benefits because they are in the unknown future. This is the thinking that resulted in the Smoot-Hawley Act in the US, and similar measures throughout the world, contributing to the profound and lasting slump through all of the 1930's.
Today's protectionists, of course, say that they aren't like that, and that they only want to stop 'bad' trade. But what is 'bad' trade? In the end it still boils down to what it has always been: 'bad' trade is trade that adversely impacts politically powerful groups (such as farmers, steelworkers, perhaps now programmers), regardless of the damage such trade restrictions cause to the economy as a whole.
What was true 200 years ago is still true today: protectionism ends up leaving us all poorer.
No, there really isn't an incentive to write shoddy code. Shoddy code isn't likely to be widely adopted, so there will be little market for supporting it.
As for a 'completely usable and straightforward app', in my experience, no non-trivial app remains completely usable and straightforward when applied to the real world and real business. Even if your app is perfect in many situations, other users will be different and will need or want support or modifications. The key, however, is to have something useful that addresses a need in the marketplace to start with.
While it's quite true that if you're just getting inspiration from copyrighted code, you are not violating copyright. The problem comes when the copyright holder sues you or your employer, claiming that you (intentionally or not) copied parts of their code into yours. You might have subconsciously reproduced something you saw earlier and forgot at a conscious level. While it might be unlikely that you would actually do this, it is not so unlikely that you would be accused of doing it.
While at the end of an excruciatingly long and fabulously expensive trial, your rights to your own code may be upheld (if the court doesn't make a mistake), it is much better to avoid the problem by using a clean-room process that makes the whole question moot.
No this is not true. Now that IBM has answered SCO's complaint, SCO cannot withdraw its case without the court's permission (see FRCP 41). In any case, even if SCO's case were dismissed, IBM's countersuit would continue it's relentless path toward SCO's destruction.
The electoral college system is democratic. If the electoral college had turned out to be the independent, deliberative body that the Framers envisioned, that might not have been the case, but in reality it is nothing more than an administrative way of conveying the results of the popular election in each state.
The electoral college system is democratic , but combined with state laws providing that the winner in that state gets all of the electoral votes, it weights the votes in each state differently. Voters in heavily Democratic or Republican states are virtually powerless, while voters in swing states like Florida wield enormous influence.
We will never know if Gore would have won the presidency on the popular vote, because a popular-vote election would have been fought in a completely different manner, and maybe even with different candidates. To assume that the results of a popular-vote election would have been the same as those of the real (electoral-college based) election is the height of folly.
Actually, the GPL is 100% reliable. The reason it has not been challenged in court is that it is so reliable that, until SCO, every violator has caved in before trial. SCO has not advanced one single argument against the GPL that could possibly hold water.
Go ahead, keep your faith in the infallible research that SCOX stockholders must be relying on. I'll believe it when I see it; all of SCO's actions up to this point indicate that they are completely out of their depth.
SCO's stock price is a conundrum. By all rights it should have dropped precipitously after its recent legal and financial setbacks, but it hasn't. My best guess is that certain well-heeled parties want the stock price to stay high, so they are manipulating the market to that end. They would do this top encourage precisely the sort of reasoning in Ed Almos' comment:
The ordinary investor's brain hurts when it has to think about complex legal issues, so it relies on simple numbers instead: stock price and P/E ratio. The underlying fundamentals, the quality of the earnings, the actual prospects for the company, or even any research at all beyond a sunny article in a financial magazine, or a breathless endorsement from an 'analyst' are all superfluous.The system being discussed here would take ultimate control of the plane away from the pilot. In the century of powered flight we have just completed, such ideas have have always turned out to be the Wrong Thing.
If we could always trust the flight computers and control systems, we wouldn't even need pilots: today's jetliners are smart enough to fly themselves. The problem is that the systems are just not reliable enough, and the system designers are not prescient enough, to handle every eventuality.
For ages, the question has been A modern corollary might be:
If instead of listing full e-mail addresses, the registry included only e-mail domains, it would be easy to administer, easy to comply with, and not susceptible to abuse by spammers. For example, if AOL submitted aol.com to the registry, if would cover all of its subscribers at a stroke. All by itself, this would be a fair and workable system, but the DMA would scream bloody murder because it would sign up some recipients without an explicit action on their part. (Of course, they could change to a UCE-friendly mail service that did not sign up for the registry, but that would hardly satisfy the DMA.)
A refinement of this system would create a workable do-not-e-mail registry, without requiring a cumbersome, expensive, and perhaps ineffective secret govenment database. It would work as follows:
This scheme divides up the do-not-e-mail registry and puts each part in its appropriate place: the public part (the domain names) is managed by the government, while the private part (the usernames) is managed by the ISP's. The best thing is that the new law requires the FTC to study the feasibility of a do-not-mail list, and authorizes it to put the list into effect nine months from now. We need to make sure that the FTC knows that it is possible to create a workable do-not-e-mail database by just adding a little design creativity.
I'm afraid that you don't understand the definition. While paragraph (A) is pretty restrictive, paragraph (B) manages to include pretty much every computer in the USA, as well as every computer on Earth that communicates with the USA, directly or indirectly.
This is a standard dodge that Congress uses to make a law under its power to regulate "interstate and foreign commerce". While nominally restricting the law's reach, it actually restricts it not at all.
The problem is different in the US. If we had a system where the fundamental question was: "who do you wish to represent you in Congress?", then paper and pencil would suffice.
For better or worse, US elections tend to involve choices for many different offices (local, state, and/or federal), and often include multiple referendum questions as well, making for a complex ballot. Even worse, in many places the ballots must be available in multiple languages.
All this makes management and counting of the ballots much more challenging and expensive than the relatively straightforward elections in some other countries. The fundamental advantages of electronic voting are that multiple versions of ballots (different localities and/or different languages) do not need to be securely printed, stockpiled, transported, and accounted for, that large and complex ballots can be presented in a more tractable format, and that counting is both faster and cheaper. While the paper audit trails from electronic voting systems would have to be protected, they would presumably be blank (general-purpose) forms only printed "on-demand" in the machine at the time the voter casts his vote.
The right question is not whether cycles are that cheap, but rather will you gain more cycles from spam reduction than you will expend in checksum calculation? Given the rising tide of spam, you don't need to reduce it much in order to make mail-signing a worthwhile proposition.
As to interoperability: during the adoption period, one would have to accept both signed and unsigned mail, but as soon as it becomes obvious that mail-signing is a way to get legitimate mail past ever-stricter automatic mail filters, and to the eyes of less and less patient mail recipients, I think you will see adoption of the new scheme take off. At some point it will be clear that if you want someone to take your mail seriously (or to even see it in the first place), it will have to be signed. That point will come when the major e-mail service providers start giving their subscribers the option of discarding unsigned mail automatically.
Microsoft rightly sees Linux as an imminent threat to its monopoly, and therefore to its monopoly profits. They are therefore going to do everything they can to stop it. With their sock-puppet SCO, they are planting the seed of doubt that it's legally safe to use Linux. SCO's case against is laughably weak, and against end-users it's weaker still, but it's enough to get people thinking.
After SCO is pounded to dust, then Microsoft pulls out the big guns: lawsuits against Linux users for patent infringement. Unlike the SCO fiasco, this could be a real claim with legal weight behind it. While it would be easy enough to change Linux to work around the patent, this would break compatibility with industry standards and diminish Linux's usefulness. More to the point, real lawsuits with real damages would do a lot more to impede Linux adoption in big business, which is Microsoft's biggest fear.
The major impediment to this is antitrust. We've already seen Microsoft's ability to purchase antitrust immunity in the USA. With suitably large additional campaign contributions, they may well be able to get away with anything they want. The EC may be a little more of a problem, but judging from their recent adoption of software patents, we can expect them to start conforming to their place in the New World Order for Business.
Quite right.
Trade libel, tortious interference, copyright infringement, and stock fraud: yes.
Barratry: not yet.
The terrorists' most important tool wasn't box knives, or knowledge of gaps in airline security. Their most important tool was surprise. Up until 9/11 it was standard operating procedure to do whatever a hijacker wanted, under the theory (justified until that time) that so doing would minimize the loss of life. This policy wasn't a secret; it had been publicized in the aviation community for decades. Given that policy, hardened cockpit doors would have been useless.
The 9/11 terrorists succeeded for the same reason the Japanese succeeded in their attack on Pearl Harbor: they mounted an attack that their opponents thought would never happen.
Actually, it would be just fine if SCO's suit against IBM were thrown out. IBM's countersuit against SCO would still stand, and its successful conclusion would deliver the precedent you desire.
That's all wrong. Every state has now passed a speed limit. Also, the official drinking age in Lousiana is 21. (The de-facto drinking age may be another matter.)
It's certain that states like Wyoming wouldn't have imposed a speed limit, and Lousiana wouldn't have raised the drinking age, without heavy pressure from Congress.
Uh, the Buchanan problem was due to a ballot designed by DEMOCRATIC election supervisors. Besides that, the flawed ballot design was not the issue in the big court battle: the counting method (or lack of one) was.
The modern US constitution has really precious little protection against the federal government usurping powers that nominally belong to the states.
While the several states are indeed responsible for conducting federal elections. Congress could essentially mandate a uniform ballot standard by appropriating substantial aid to support the states' election functions, but only for those states that adhered to the federal standard. In that way, each state could theoretically conduct elections in its own way, but as a practical matter every state would have to implement the federal standard. (This is exactly the method used to compel the states to pass traffic laws that conform to what Congress wants.)
The only way a do-not-spam list will be effective is if it includes whole domains. For example, if AOL could specify that any address in aol.com is to be considered on the do-not-spam list, then the list would be worth something. This would make the list easy to deal with, since you wouldn't need to keep it secret.
The previous version of the bill didn't specify whether entire domains would be included, but apparently left it to the FCC to decide. Of course, the DMA and their pet congressmen want the bill as weak as possible, so the latest draft of the bill might have been changed to prohibit inclusion of entire domains.
No, it is a certainty that Microsoft is funding SCO. Just check out SCO's SEC filings, and you'll find in excess of $10M of funds flowing from Microsoft to SCO.
The funding is hidden by a figleaf of IP licensing, but I challenge anyone to come up with another example of Microsoft paying that much for a licence to a little company for rights to exceedingly questionable IP. We all know with absolute certaintly that 'services rendered' in attacking Linux have something to do with the continuing big payouts to SCO.