Re:It's gonna be a corporate giveaway this session
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HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 2
The cool thing about American government is that nothing is forever. In less than two years from today, the job of President, the entire House of Representatives, and enough Senators to put the majority in play will come up for reeelction.
If the Republicans who are about to take power do not perform to the voters' satisfaction, it is possible we could see a Democratic steamroller installed by January of 2005.
That is what will keep the Republicans in check from running amok with big-business interests ahead of individuals. Yes the balance will swing in that direction, but if they try to stretch it too far it will snap back the other way.
Re:The solution to problems like this...
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HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 5, Informative
That's not an example of line-item veto. The president wouldn't get veto per-ammendment, the veto would be by spending item.
For example, if Congress passed an appropriation bill that's called "The Space Flight and Ketchup Act of 2002" and it went through Congress unammended with $500 million to NASA for the Space Shuttle project, and $100 million to the FDA for research on preserving ketchup better, the president could approve the money for NASA, but veto the FDA's project. Right now, the president would be faced with a double-or-nothing decision.
This would only apply to bills where funds are going to more than one place, it would not allow him to do something like accept a copyright law but eliminate consumer protections.
If you lose your job tomorrow, is it not a financial loss? The paycheck you expected to get 2 weeks from now, and 4 weeks from now would not be coming. You're saying you wouldn't add up the dollars you were expecting to get?
Personal foul... I'm decidedly a Windows user, and I do most of my programming in VB6. What I'm saying is that OSS is the bar that I want Microsoft to stay better than to continue to deserve a $99 tribute paid to them every three years.
For server space, however, OSS catching them. The next server OS had better be good and soon, or I'll convert into an OSS user.
In order for anything Microsoft writes to have value, it must be in some way better than the free programs that do the same thing. Their server OSs hae to beat Linux, ASP has to beat PHP and Perl, IIS has to beat Apache.
With open source software in the state that is is now, is there anything that Microsoft can develop that would make any new server operating system do something open source can't easily replicate?
I've had nothing but positive experiences with Dell's next-day support. The upfront cost may have the bean counters trying to talk you out of it, but it is always cheaper when you factor in the lost work time that occurs whenever a computer goes down and can't be fixed because you're backlogged with more serious issues than one user's PC.
As Linux becomes more popular, the dumber system admins who never patched their Windows systems now have Linux systems. All it takes is a small handful of people to not know there is a wide-open back door, or worse yet know but be too lazy to take the corrective action, and there's enough zombies to cause headaches.
It seems as if companies would gladly screw somebody out of a dollar today even if it costs then two dollars in the future. Why is profit today always being put ahead of the ability to make a profit infinitely into the future?
You can argue the accuracy of that $13 billion estimate, but there has to be some number of loss to the sales tax states.
Almost every e-commerce purchase was going to happen anyway. If this was still the 1970s, you would have bought that thing in a store. The decline of retail in-store sales over the last few years is almost equal to the rise in Internet sales from zero to a major force. Since most of those offline sales were taxable, and most of the online sales aren't, that has to leave a dent in the revenues returned by the sales tax.
The problem is that the Internet has been a growing source of "mail orders" for years now, and this is coming at the expense of transactions that twenty years ago would have been made at a physical store. Sometimes, the motivating factor to buy online is the tax savings.
Clearly there has to be some compensating change in tax laws to recapture money lost. We'd all love to pay less in taxes, but that'd also mean we'd have to cut some government services, and nobody seems able to agree on which ones. If the "tax loophole" of the 'net is left unchecked, some other tax (property tax, income tax, etc.) has to go up.
The fifth amendment will never let an effective use tax law ever work against individuals. There's no way the government can make you tell your state what you bought, and then allow that be used against you to collect taxes. Most people, by not filling out the obscure state use tax form are basically pleading the fifth.
Your home state also can't pry the infomation out of online stores located out of state. They have no ablity to do anything to them if they don't comply, since all of their assets are outside of your state's jurisdiction.
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The cool thing about American government is that nothing is forever. In less than two years from today, the job of President, the entire House of Representatives, and enough Senators to put the majority in play will come up for reeelction.
If the Republicans who are about to take power do not perform to the voters' satisfaction, it is possible we could see a Democratic steamroller installed by January of 2005.
That is what will keep the Republicans in check from running amok with big-business interests ahead of individuals. Yes the balance will swing in that direction, but if they try to stretch it too far it will snap back the other way.
That's not an example of line-item veto. The president wouldn't get veto per-ammendment, the veto would be by spending item. For example, if Congress passed an appropriation bill that's called "The Space Flight and Ketchup Act of 2002" and it went through Congress unammended with $500 million to NASA for the Space Shuttle project, and $100 million to the FDA for research on preserving ketchup better, the president could approve the money for NASA, but veto the FDA's project. Right now, the president would be faced with a double-or-nothing decision. This would only apply to bills where funds are going to more than one place, it would not allow him to do something like accept a copyright law but eliminate consumer protections.
If you lose your job tomorrow, is it not a financial loss? The paycheck you expected to get 2 weeks from now, and 4 weeks from now would not be coming. You're saying you wouldn't add up the dollars you were expecting to get?
Personal foul... I'm decidedly a Windows user, and I do most of my programming in VB6. What I'm saying is that OSS is the bar that I want Microsoft to stay better than to continue to deserve a $99 tribute paid to them every three years.
For server space, however, OSS catching them. The next server OS had better be good and soon, or I'll convert into an OSS user.
In order for anything Microsoft writes to have value, it must be in some way better than the free programs that do the same thing. Their server OSs hae to beat Linux, ASP has to beat PHP and Perl, IIS has to beat Apache.
With open source software in the state that is is now, is there anything that Microsoft can develop that would make any new server operating system do something open source can't easily replicate?
I've had nothing but positive experiences with Dell's next-day support. The upfront cost may have the bean counters trying to talk you out of it, but it is always cheaper when you factor in the lost work time that occurs whenever a computer goes down and can't be fixed because you're backlogged with more serious issues than one user's PC.
As Linux becomes more popular, the dumber system admins who never patched their Windows systems now have Linux systems. All it takes is a small handful of people to not know there is a wide-open back door, or worse yet know but be too lazy to take the corrective action, and there's enough zombies to cause headaches.
It seems as if companies would gladly screw somebody out of a dollar today even if it costs then two dollars in the future. Why is profit today always being put ahead of the ability to make a profit infinitely into the future?
You can argue the accuracy of that $13 billion estimate, but there has to be some number of loss to the sales tax states.
Almost every e-commerce purchase was going to happen anyway. If this was still the 1970s, you would have bought that thing in a store. The decline of retail in-store sales over the last few years is almost equal to the rise in Internet sales from zero to a major force. Since most of those offline sales were taxable, and most of the online sales aren't, that has to leave a dent in the revenues returned by the sales tax.
The problem is that the Internet has been a growing source of "mail orders" for years now, and this is coming at the expense of transactions that twenty years ago would have been made at a physical store. Sometimes, the motivating factor to buy online is the tax savings.
Clearly there has to be some compensating change in tax laws to recapture money lost. We'd all love to pay less in taxes, but that'd also mean we'd have to cut some government services, and nobody seems able to agree on which ones. If the "tax loophole" of the 'net is left unchecked, some other tax (property tax, income tax, etc.) has to go up.
The fifth amendment will never let an effective use tax law ever work against individuals. There's no way the government can make you tell your state what you bought, and then allow that be used against you to collect taxes. Most people, by not filling out the obscure state use tax form are basically pleading the fifth. Your home state also can't pry the infomation out of online stores located out of state. They have no ablity to do anything to them if they don't comply, since all of their assets are outside of your state's jurisdiction.