You don't get it do you? You may very well be able to get away not reporting.
Isn't that *exactly* what I said? Income tax (amoungst others) is largely based on trust. If you misreport your income, you may well get away with it and it would be very difficult for the authorities to prove an offence, but the penalty if you do get caught is pretty high, so most people aren't going to take the risk.
Of course, I have my own business too, and my largest client helpfully sends a form to the IRS reporting the money they've paid me.
This is only true if you deal with businesses. If you contract to private individuals and they pay ion cash then this information will not be reported to the inland revenue by your customers and there is no way for the income to be proved if you misreported it.
Presumably the van can see a satellite mounted on your property..
Yes, the same way as they can also see antennas mounted on people's roofs. But the law says that you're not allowed to receive broadcast TV without a licence, not that you can't have an antenna. I imagine the vast majority of people without a TV also have an antenna or satellite dish since no one is going to bother removing the antenna from their property just because they don't currently have a TV. They would not be able to prosecute or get a search warrant based on this.
If they didn't even have the token force they do, the assumption they're making is that no one would pay the license fee.
You don't get it do you. If I didn't pay my licence fee, there is no way they could make me - they cannot prove whether or not I watch broadcast TV, thus the licence fee operates on trust.
without a serious attempt at enforcement, almost nobody would pay a tax they don't have to.
Except the majority of people do pay their TV licence, and don't lie on their tax return, even though in both cases the chances are that they would get away with it, which seems to disprove your point... Most people want to follow the law, which explains why most people pay for music instead of downloading it all, and don't do various other criminal acts for which they almost certainly won't get caught.
Well I guess in the US the problem is also that phone connections were horribly bad. When I listen to call-in radio shows from the US I'm often shocked to hear how bad phone calls sound.
The rest of the world is used to bit-transparent PCM connections with a delay of just a few samples even on the cheapest providers.
The US uses 8-bit -law G.711 encoding with 8KHz samples, much of the rest of the world uses 8-bit 8KHz A-law G.711. I'd be pretty surprised if you noticed the difference. Sometimes telcos will use G.726 ADPCM, but this is done across the whole world.
That's _way_ better than VoIP or cellular networks.
That statement needs a lot of qualification because in many cases it isn't true. Cellular networks use GSM or AMR-NB codecs, which are indeed lower quality then G.711 (although full rate AMR-NB is only marginally worse than G.711). VoIP, on the other hand, has a much wider choice of codecs, with Speex and AMR-WB, to name just two, providing a much better quality then G.711.
Fuse? Who needs that when the entire house is wired with circuit breakers. Fast enough to save your life if you drop the hairdryer into the bathtub.
Because the circuit breaker won't save the appliance, its flex, or the plug. The master breaker here is 63A, with a 45A the ring main breaker, which will protect the fixed cabling. However, plugs are rated at 13A, so without a 13A fuse in the plug you could easily overload it. And since most appliances don't need anywhere close to 13A, it is usual to use thinner flex (e.g. a computer with a 400W PSU probably comes equipped with a 3A cable, so you need a 3A fuse in the plug to protect it). Then you have to think about the high voltage wiring inside the appliance - if it doesn't have its own internal fuse then the fuse in the plug is going to have to protect this too.
Ya, um no. No one is trusting you to report your income to the government. Your employer reports it, and they will, because they also need to claim your income as a business expense.
Bzzt, try again. I have no employer - I'm self employed. Also, anyone who gets extra income from other sources (e.g. letting out a room in their house, etc.) has to report that income on a tax return.
The fact that they can search you entering the country pretty much means they aren't trusting you..
"Can" is not the same as "will". You can walk through the "nothing to declare" aisle at the airport and the chances are you won't get searched. Similarly, you can import goods with nominal values (under £17) written on the customs forms and the chances are they won't search the boxes and charge you VAT.
We don't have a TV license here. But in Britain, I know that there are ways to drive around and determine from outside a home if there's a TV in there or not.
TV detectors only work in specific cases. They detect the IF oscillator radiating through the antenna - this means that they wouldn't be able to detect my TV because I have no antenna (I use satellite). There is also a strong suggestion that the vast majority of TV detector vans actually don't have any TV detection kit in them and are just driven around to scare people (that said, I have *never* seen a TV detection van, so they clearly aren't that common).
You did know that consumer GPS doesn't have the real height in it, right?
Umm,you're not making sense. GPS gives you your position in 3 dimensions - height is an integral part of the calculation.
it uses an altimiter to guess at your height.
No... no it doesn't. None of my GPSes have a barometric altimeter in them. With a good constellation of at least 4 satellites you can get your 3D position with no external data (your GPS may use external data so as preexisting knowledge of your rough location to speed up the satellite acquisition, but that data is not actually required for the GPS to work). It is true that if you have a poor constellation (e.g. only 3 good satellites) then many GPSes start making assumptions about things like your altitude to fill in the missing data, but if you have a poor constellation then the DOP is going to be insanely bad anyway.
Many GPSes use doppler shift as well as measuring how your position changes over time to calculate your speed, so the accuracy of your position may not be that important either.
Expecting your GPS to be more accurate than your car is folly. your GPS is what? 3 feet? 5 feet? hmm pretty easy to get a 0 speed on that even when walking.
You are making a faulty assumption. You are assuming that if a GPS is "accurate to 2 metres" that you are likely to see a large positional shift between one sample and the next. However, this isn't the case - whilst the position may be 2 metres off, that error is going to be relatively stable over short periods of time. i.e. if you read your position and are told it is 2 metres west of your real location, when you read the position 1 second later it will still be roughly 2 metres west of your real location, it won't suddenly have jumped to 2 metres east. So despite moderate positional errors, the speed can be quite accurate, especially when combined with doppler shift to help filter out sampling errors.
Most people aren't going to be using an outbound proxy, so complaining that everyone needs to configure it is bunk.
a STUN server and/or NAT settings, DMTF protocol,
The defaults are fine for this stuff for the class of user we're talking about.
the codec.
Autonegotiated - leaving this as the default is fine unless you have some specific requirement.
And optionally the port
Again, the class of user we're talking about here will not need to touch this.
of course some umts providers block sip.
Such UMTS providers will no doubt have contractual terms prohibiting *any* VoIP, not just SIP. Also, plenty of UMTS providers block Skype too.
Not to mention that several sip providers lock logins to their fixed ip.
Eh?
SIP is really really great for us techies.
Ok, let me run you through what I did to get Ekiga working on my system: I fired it up, stuck in my user name, password and server address. That's it. Now admittedly, the server happens to be a Callweaver server that I run, but that is irrelevant - it could equally be a commercial SIP server and would have been just as easy to set up in Ekiga.
Similarly, to get SipDroid working on my cellphone, I simply put in my username, password and server address. And to get my F1000G wifi phone working, I did exactly the same (note: the F1000G is an unstable piece of crap, don't buy it).
But i'm pretty sure that at most 5% of my colleagues could configure a softphone.
You must work with some really thick people then. If you can configure your email client, you can configure a SIP phone. There really isn't anything complicated about it. Sure, there are lots of settings you _could_ change for specific situations, but for the users we're talking about here they can pretty much leave everything set to defaults except the username, password and server address.
BMW insists there's nothing wrong with their electronics even though every single one of their cars indicates 4-6 MPH over true speed.
In the UK, at least, the law requires that the speedo is allowed to over-read by up to 10% but never under-read. Consequently, car manufacturers tend to aim for a 5% over-read.
A few years ago, I would've considered "$free_browser gets bigger market share than IE6" to be a great thing. These days it just upsets me to think that so many people are still using IE6...
They will complain bitterly when a site doesn't work though.
I found a solution to that problem a couple of years back. When I first put OpenPisteMap online, I got a lot of complaints from people that it didn't work in IE6. I don't have any Windows machines and I'm not about to buy and install Windows to test it in an 8 year old browser. So I added a note to the website that IE6 users see that basically says "I know it doesn't work in IE6 - if you can fix it, send me a patch". The complaints suddenly stopped. I didn't get sent any patches either, so I guess the IE6 complainers decided that supporting a crappy outdated browser wasn't worth their time either...
It's just that the average person can't install or configure a sip softphone
Really? What makes it so much harder than Skype? The only additional thing the user needs to do is enter the SIP server address - this is akin to configuring an email client, which is something "the average person" has been doing for years.
Its hard to claim someone was evading taxes if they can't prove you've done something that actually is taxable.
You're basically claiming the government can claim you didn't pay your dog tax without proving that you even own a dog.
How does the government ensure that you pay the right amount of income tax? They are trusting that you told the truth on your tax return. If you didn't tell the truth then it may be very difficult to prove this, but the penalties for getting caught are very high so it might not be worth the risk that they somehow manage to prove you evaded the tax.
How does the government ensure that you pay the right amount of duty and VAT on imports? Much or the time they are trusting you to declare what you are importing.
How does the TVLA ensure you pay for your TV licence if you own a TV? They send threatening letters to law abiding citizens and other nasty things like that but at the end of the day they can only trust that you declare that you have a TV and pay for a licence.
See - lots of taxes already exist where proving evasion is hard, this isn't really any different.
You said that you have to pay tax one way or the other, correct?
Yes.
From what you say, it appears to be a choice.
What is the choice?
How does the UK keep track of how the actual taxes are paid, either through the fuel or directly?
No one is going to keep track of whether or not you have filled up at the pump (and therefore paid tax at the point of sale). However, if you are found to have homebrew biodiesel in your tank and you didn't pay any tax directly, it's pretty much proof that you evaded the tax since that biodiesel didn't come from a pump so you didn't pay tax at the point of sale.
As with most taxes, the government is trusting people to obey the law, with pretty hefty fines or jail if you are found not to be. Most people who evade the tax won't be caught, but do you want to take the chance that you will?
So... how exactly do they know how muhc you've produced? Do botched batches that end up down the drain count?
You seem to be making the faulty assumption that the government have to be able to prove you're doing something in order to tax it. They don't. There are many taxes that you pay on things that aren't easily provable. Sure, you can probably get away with evading tax on these things, but the kicker is that if someone does happen to prove you evaded taxes then you're looking at big fines and jail time. So you take your choice - if you feel like breaking the law then you might get away with it, but you shouldn't complain if you don't and end up in jail. Pretty much the same as most other laws, in fact.
Now, if I were to make my own bio-diesel...or other type of fuel, why should I be force to pay tax on it?
Your argument doesn't hold up - you are comparing two completely different laws and expecting them to work in the same way, which is just silly.
What if I could generate enough of my own electricity to fun my own electric car...would they try to bust me for that too if I didn't pay some sort of tax.
No, because electricity isn't covered by the same fuel tax laws, so it isn't taxed as vehicle fuel anyway - you don't pay vehicle fuel taxes on electricity, no matter whether you draw it from the grid or your own windmill. Electricity purchased from the grid is covered by the usual VAT rules (although VAT is charged at a reduced rate).
Now, I dunno how things are different in the UK, but, in the US the only taxes for roads that I know of (in most states at least) are coming off of gasoline and diesel taxes bought at a commercial pump.
In the UK, all taxes go into a central pot, so you can't say that a specific tax pays for the roads. However, there are several taxes associated with running a car, for example: Road Licence Fund (aka the tax disc), vehicle fuel tax (charged on all liquid and gas vehicle fuels at various rates - i.e. petrol, diesel, LPG, biodiesel), VAT (charged on electricity for your electric car, many of the components you need to buy to keep your car running, such as brake pads, oil, etc.).
All of these taxes are governed by different laws. For example, everyone who runs a vehicle on the public highway is required to have a tax disc (the cost depends on things like the vehicle's emissions). Everyone who runs their vehicle on the public highway needs to pay tax on any liquid or gas fuel it runs on (even if you make it yourself) - this tax is charged at a fixed pence-per-litre. VAT, on the other hand, is governed by usual VAT laws, which means that you don't have to pay VAT on anything supplied by businesses that aren't VAT registered, and it is a percentage of the product's price, so if you are producing your own electricity then you are not selling it and therefore don't need to pay VAT on it.
so how do you prove that I'm not buying gas? For that matter, how do you prove that I am?
Since when did you need to be able to prove something in order to be required to pay tax on it? Proving how much income you have is pretty hard (you could be getting paid into offshore accounts, etc.) but you still have to pay income tax on it.
In any case, proving that your car is running on biodiesel is pretty trivial - the authorities just have to put the contents of the fuel tank through a mass spectrometer. If you're running on plain vegetable oil which hasn't been processed into biodiesel then you can even smell it from the exhaust.
link to said guy with said biodiesel and said jailable offense?
I doubt making your own biodiesel and using it is the offence. The offence is not paying a tax you are legally required to pay. In the UK you can run your car on biodiesel if you like, but that doesn't let you avoid paying tax - you have to pay the tax directly rather than it implicitly being included in the fuel price. Think of it as the difference between being employed or self employed - if you are employed then you pay your income tax by PAYE; if you are self employed you don't do PAYE, but this doesn't magically get you out of paying tax, you still have to pay it to the inland revenue at the end of the year.
I don't have enough information at my fingertips to respond to this. Are there any industry standard protocols for this that are already as widely deployed today as Skype?
Yes - SIP is by far the most common industry standard protocol, predates Skype and is used pretty much everywhere. If you have a VoIP system in your office it is almost certainly SIP based, and the PSTN is increasingly using SIP internally.
Skype did for VOIP what Apple did for computers. Made it easier for the average person to be a participant.
Not really. Skype made VoIP more _visible_ because they happened to be pretty good at marketing, but the only thing "easier" about it is the lack of customer choice. Compare:
Skype: Install it and it works. SIP: Choose a service provider, install a client, enter your service provider's address and it works.
So the only real difference here is that with Skype you don't have to pick a service provider, which means that you don't get to choose the one that is going to be most suitable for you. I guess if people are too lazy to shop around for a good deal then they deserve everything they get.
Admittedly, Skype tries to work around people with busted network configurations - in these cases the choice comes down to: SIP - doesn't work at all, Skype - works but the connection is unusably bad.
If they're actually putting the protocol implementation out as a binary-only library, and encouraging open source development on top of that, this enables some freedoms without enabling all freedoms.
Sounds quite dangerous to me - you're needlessly giving a third party the option to pull the plug on your project if they desire whilst also integrating all their security holes, backdoors and downright bad programming into your software.
We could build an IVR Wikipedia tool for the blind with this.
But why would you want to use a proprietary protocol with limited software and hardware support to do this? Seems more sensible to use an industry standard protocol.
So: some freedoms, yes, but certainly not all the freedoms folks might want.
I don't see this as giving people much freedom. I see it as giving people just enough rope to accidentally hang themselves by tempting them into using an inappropriate technology in preference to well supported and proven industry standard technologies.
You can already do this by using an industry standard VoIP protocol. There doesn't really seem to be much benefit in using an undocumented proprietary protocol instead.
A lot of the free VoIP out there isn't quite up to snuff, and requires a lot of end-user mucking around to get to work.
If by "low end mucking about" you mean typing in your chosen service provider's address, like everyone's done with email clients since the dawn of time. Hell, if you enjoy being locked into a single vendor there are a number of service providers that ship locked down SIP clients so you don't even need to do this.
some penniless foss project isn't going to provide servers which can cope with 18,989,413 clients at the same time (number plucked from Skype right now, the peak is probably higher).
It is unlikely that a single project would need to support that many clients at the same time since SIP is a standard protocol which allows servers from many different service providers to interoperate, so the load is spread across many different providers. Additionally, you seem to be limiting yourself to "peniless FOSS projects" but there are a large number of commercial SIP servers out there who are supported by money made from gatewaying calls to/from the PSTN, etc.
By your argument, none of the existing open standard protocols for other services are feasible either. I mean, absolutely no one is going to use SMTP to transfer their email because no single provider is going to provide enough capacity to support all the users. Except you're clearly wrong because SMTP is in wide use precisely _because_ no single provider has to support all the users. Even so, there are plenty of large service providers out there providing this service to a very large number of people (Google Mail, Hotmail, etc).
Because a truly foss voip project requires a server or open ports on at least 1 side.
Plenty of free public SIP servers on the internet...
Skype requires only 2 clients that speak the same protocol, the skype network handles the rest.
I'm unclear on why you think that relying on the existence of a single proprietary network is better than relying on a SIP server (which may or may not be operated by yourself and you can switch to a different independent server if you want).
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get it do you? You may very well be able to get away not reporting.
Isn't that *exactly* what I said? Income tax (amoungst others) is largely based on trust. If you misreport your income, you may well get away with it and it would be very difficult for the authorities to prove an offence, but the penalty if you do get caught is pretty high, so most people aren't going to take the risk.
Of course, I have my own business too, and my largest client helpfully sends a form to the IRS reporting the money they've paid me.
This is only true if you deal with businesses. If you contract to private individuals and they pay ion cash then this information will not be reported to the inland revenue by your customers and there is no way for the income to be proved if you misreported it.
Presumably the van can see a satellite mounted on your property..
Yes, the same way as they can also see antennas mounted on people's roofs. But the law says that you're not allowed to receive broadcast TV without a licence, not that you can't have an antenna. I imagine the vast majority of people without a TV also have an antenna or satellite dish since no one is going to bother removing the antenna from their property just because they don't currently have a TV. They would not be able to prosecute or get a search warrant based on this.
If they didn't even have the token force they do, the assumption they're making is that no one would pay the license fee.
You don't get it do you. If I didn't pay my licence fee, there is no way they could make me - they cannot prove whether or not I watch broadcast TV, thus the licence fee operates on trust.
without a serious attempt at enforcement, almost nobody would pay a tax they don't have to.
Except the majority of people do pay their TV licence, and don't lie on their tax return, even though in both cases the chances are that they would get away with it, which seems to disprove your point... Most people want to follow the law, which explains why most people pay for music instead of downloading it all, and don't do various other criminal acts for which they almost certainly won't get caught.
Well I guess in the US the problem is also that phone connections were horribly bad. When I listen to call-in radio shows from the US I'm often shocked to hear how bad phone calls sound.
The rest of the world is used to bit-transparent PCM connections with a delay of just a few samples even on the cheapest providers.
The US uses 8-bit -law G.711 encoding with 8KHz samples, much of the rest of the world uses 8-bit 8KHz A-law G.711. I'd be pretty surprised if you noticed the difference. Sometimes telcos will use G.726 ADPCM, but this is done across the whole world.
That's _way_ better than VoIP or cellular networks.
That statement needs a lot of qualification because in many cases it isn't true. Cellular networks use GSM or AMR-NB codecs, which are indeed lower quality then G.711 (although full rate AMR-NB is only marginally worse than G.711). VoIP, on the other hand, has a much wider choice of codecs, with Speex and AMR-WB, to name just two, providing a much better quality then G.711.
Fuse? Who needs that when the entire house is wired with circuit breakers. Fast enough to save your life if you drop the hairdryer into the bathtub.
Because the circuit breaker won't save the appliance, its flex, or the plug. The master breaker here is 63A, with a 45A the ring main breaker, which will protect the fixed cabling. However, plugs are rated at 13A, so without a 13A fuse in the plug you could easily overload it. And since most appliances don't need anywhere close to 13A, it is usual to use thinner flex (e.g. a computer with a 400W PSU probably comes equipped with a 3A cable, so you need a 3A fuse in the plug to protect it). Then you have to think about the high voltage wiring inside the appliance - if it doesn't have its own internal fuse then the fuse in the plug is going to have to protect this too.
The same Americans that invented the very computer and AC power that you are using no doubt.
Let's see, what has England ever done?
Umm, you know that the first programmable digital computer was invented in England don't you?
Ya, um no. No one is trusting you to report your income to the government. Your employer reports it, and they will, because they also need to claim your income as a business expense.
Bzzt, try again. I have no employer - I'm self employed. Also, anyone who gets extra income from other sources (e.g. letting out a room in their house, etc.) has to report that income on a tax return.
The fact that they can search you entering the country pretty much means they aren't trusting you..
"Can" is not the same as "will". You can walk through the "nothing to declare" aisle at the airport and the chances are you won't get searched. Similarly, you can import goods with nominal values (under £17) written on the customs forms and the chances are they won't search the boxes and charge you VAT.
We don't have a TV license here. But in Britain, I know that there are ways to drive around and determine from outside a home if there's a TV in there or not.
TV detectors only work in specific cases. They detect the IF oscillator radiating through the antenna - this means that they wouldn't be able to detect my TV because I have no antenna (I use satellite). There is also a strong suggestion that the vast majority of TV detector vans actually don't have any TV detection kit in them and are just driven around to scare people (that said, I have *never* seen a TV detection van, so they clearly aren't that common).
You did know that consumer GPS doesn't have the real height in it, right?
Umm,you're not making sense. GPS gives you your position in 3 dimensions - height is an integral part of the calculation.
it uses an altimiter to guess at your height.
No... no it doesn't. None of my GPSes have a barometric altimeter in them. With a good constellation of at least 4 satellites you can get your 3D position with no external data (your GPS may use external data so as preexisting knowledge of your rough location to speed up the satellite acquisition, but that data is not actually required for the GPS to work). It is true that if you have a poor constellation (e.g. only 3 good satellites) then many GPSes start making assumptions about things like your altitude to fill in the missing data, but if you have a poor constellation then the DOP is going to be insanely bad anyway.
Many GPSes use doppler shift as well as measuring how your position changes over time to calculate your speed, so the accuracy of your position may not be that important either.
Expecting your GPS to be more accurate than your car is folly. your GPS is what? 3 feet? 5 feet? hmm pretty easy to get a 0 speed on that even when walking.
You are making a faulty assumption. You are assuming that if a GPS is "accurate to 2 metres" that you are likely to see a large positional shift between one sample and the next. However, this isn't the case - whilst the position may be 2 metres off, that error is going to be relatively stable over short periods of time. i.e. if you read your position and are told it is 2 metres west of your real location, when you read the position 1 second later it will still be roughly 2 metres west of your real location, it won't suddenly have jumped to 2 metres east. So despite moderate positional errors, the speed can be quite accurate, especially when combined with doppler shift to help filter out sampling errors.
The realm, outbound proxy
Most people aren't going to be using an outbound proxy, so complaining that everyone needs to configure it is bunk.
a STUN server and/or NAT settings, DMTF protocol,
The defaults are fine for this stuff for the class of user we're talking about.
the codec.
Autonegotiated - leaving this as the default is fine unless you have some specific requirement.
And optionally the port
Again, the class of user we're talking about here will not need to touch this.
of course some umts providers block sip.
Such UMTS providers will no doubt have contractual terms prohibiting *any* VoIP, not just SIP. Also, plenty of UMTS providers block Skype too.
Not to mention that several sip providers lock logins to their fixed ip.
Eh?
SIP is really really great for us techies.
Ok, let me run you through what I did to get Ekiga working on my system: I fired it up, stuck in my user name, password and server address. That's it. Now admittedly, the server happens to be a Callweaver server that I run, but that is irrelevant - it could equally be a commercial SIP server and would have been just as easy to set up in Ekiga.
Similarly, to get SipDroid working on my cellphone, I simply put in my username, password and server address. And to get my F1000G wifi phone working, I did exactly the same (note: the F1000G is an unstable piece of crap, don't buy it).
But i'm pretty sure that at most 5% of my colleagues could configure a softphone.
You must work with some really thick people then. If you can configure your email client, you can configure a SIP phone. There really isn't anything complicated about it. Sure, there are lots of settings you _could_ change for specific situations, but for the users we're talking about here they can pretty much leave everything set to defaults except the username, password and server address.
BMW insists there's nothing wrong with their electronics even though every single one of their cars indicates 4-6 MPH over true speed.
In the UK, at least, the law requires that the speedo is allowed to over-read by up to 10% but never under-read. Consequently, car manufacturers tend to aim for a 5% over-read.
A few years ago, I would've considered "$free_browser gets bigger market share than IE6" to be a great thing. These days it just upsets me to think that so many people are still using IE6...
They will complain bitterly when a site doesn't work though.
I found a solution to that problem a couple of years back. When I first put OpenPisteMap online, I got a lot of complaints from people that it didn't work in IE6. I don't have any Windows machines and I'm not about to buy and install Windows to test it in an 8 year old browser. So I added a note to the website that IE6 users see that basically says "I know it doesn't work in IE6 - if you can fix it, send me a patch". The complaints suddenly stopped. I didn't get sent any patches either, so I guess the IE6 complainers decided that supporting a crappy outdated browser wasn't worth their time either...
It's just that the average person can't install or configure a sip softphone
Really? What makes it so much harder than Skype? The only additional thing the user needs to do is enter the SIP server address - this is akin to configuring an email client, which is something "the average person" has been doing for years.
Its hard to claim someone was evading taxes if they can't prove you've done something that actually is taxable.
You're basically claiming the government can claim you didn't pay your dog tax without proving that you even own a dog.
How does the government ensure that you pay the right amount of income tax? They are trusting that you told the truth on your tax return. If you didn't tell the truth then it may be very difficult to prove this, but the penalties for getting caught are very high so it might not be worth the risk that they somehow manage to prove you evaded the tax.
How does the government ensure that you pay the right amount of duty and VAT on imports? Much or the time they are trusting you to declare what you are importing.
How does the TVLA ensure you pay for your TV licence if you own a TV? They send threatening letters to law abiding citizens and other nasty things like that but at the end of the day they can only trust that you declare that you have a TV and pay for a licence.
See - lots of taxes already exist where proving evasion is hard, this isn't really any different.
You said that you have to pay tax one way or the other, correct?
Yes.
From what you say, it appears to be a choice.
What is the choice?
How does the UK keep track of how the actual taxes are paid, either through the fuel or directly?
No one is going to keep track of whether or not you have filled up at the pump (and therefore paid tax at the point of sale). However, if you are found to have homebrew biodiesel in your tank and you didn't pay any tax directly, it's pretty much proof that you evaded the tax since that biodiesel didn't come from a pump so you didn't pay tax at the point of sale.
As with most taxes, the government is trusting people to obey the law, with pretty hefty fines or jail if you are found not to be. Most people who evade the tax won't be caught, but do you want to take the chance that you will?
So... how exactly do they know how muhc you've produced? Do botched batches that end up down the drain count?
You seem to be making the faulty assumption that the government have to be able to prove you're doing something in order to tax it. They don't. There are many taxes that you pay on things that aren't easily provable. Sure, you can probably get away with evading tax on these things, but the kicker is that if someone does happen to prove you evaded taxes then you're looking at big fines and jail time. So you take your choice - if you feel like breaking the law then you might get away with it, but you shouldn't complain if you don't and end up in jail. Pretty much the same as most other laws, in fact.
And yet they wouldn't continue to use it if they didn't find it suitable for their own use.
Did I say it was unsuitable for their own use? No, I did not - I said that they don't get to choose what is the most suitable for them.
I'm not required to pay any tax on beer I make.
Now, if I were to make my own bio-diesel...or other type of fuel, why should I be force to pay tax on it?
Your argument doesn't hold up - you are comparing two completely different laws and expecting them to work in the same way, which is just silly.
What if I could generate enough of my own electricity to fun my own electric car...would they try to bust me for that too if I didn't pay some sort of tax.
No, because electricity isn't covered by the same fuel tax laws, so it isn't taxed as vehicle fuel anyway - you don't pay vehicle fuel taxes on electricity, no matter whether you draw it from the grid or your own windmill. Electricity purchased from the grid is covered by the usual VAT rules (although VAT is charged at a reduced rate).
Now, I dunno how things are different in the UK, but, in the US the only taxes for roads that I know of (in most states at least) are coming off of gasoline and diesel taxes bought at a commercial pump.
In the UK, all taxes go into a central pot, so you can't say that a specific tax pays for the roads. However, there are several taxes associated with running a car, for example: Road Licence Fund (aka the tax disc), vehicle fuel tax (charged on all liquid and gas vehicle fuels at various rates - i.e. petrol, diesel, LPG, biodiesel), VAT (charged on electricity for your electric car, many of the components you need to buy to keep your car running, such as brake pads, oil, etc.).
All of these taxes are governed by different laws. For example, everyone who runs a vehicle on the public highway is required to have a tax disc (the cost depends on things like the vehicle's emissions). Everyone who runs their vehicle on the public highway needs to pay tax on any liquid or gas fuel it runs on (even if you make it yourself) - this tax is charged at a fixed pence-per-litre. VAT, on the other hand, is governed by usual VAT laws, which means that you don't have to pay VAT on anything supplied by businesses that aren't VAT registered, and it is a percentage of the product's price, so if you are producing your own electricity then you are not selling it and therefore don't need to pay VAT on it.
so how do you prove that I'm not buying gas? For that matter, how do you prove that I am?
Since when did you need to be able to prove something in order to be required to pay tax on it? Proving how much income you have is pretty hard (you could be getting paid into offshore accounts, etc.) but you still have to pay income tax on it.
In any case, proving that your car is running on biodiesel is pretty trivial - the authorities just have to put the contents of the fuel tank through a mass spectrometer. If you're running on plain vegetable oil which hasn't been processed into biodiesel then you can even smell it from the exhaust.
link to said guy with said biodiesel and said jailable offense?
I doubt making your own biodiesel and using it is the offence. The offence is not paying a tax you are legally required to pay. In the UK you can run your car on biodiesel if you like, but that doesn't let you avoid paying tax - you have to pay the tax directly rather than it implicitly being included in the fuel price. Think of it as the difference between being employed or self employed - if you are employed then you pay your income tax by PAYE; if you are self employed you don't do PAYE, but this doesn't magically get you out of paying tax, you still have to pay it to the inland revenue at the end of the year.
I'm pretty sure most people installed Skype because they made the determination that it was the most suitable for themselves.
I'm pretty sure they installed Skype because they didn't know there were any alternatives. To a lot of people, Skype and VoIP are synonymous.
I don't have enough information at my fingertips to respond to this. Are there any industry standard protocols for this that are already as widely deployed today as Skype?
Yes - SIP is by far the most common industry standard protocol, predates Skype and is used pretty much everywhere. If you have a VoIP system in your office it is almost certainly SIP based, and the PSTN is increasingly using SIP internally.
Skype did for VOIP what Apple did for computers. Made it easier for the average person to be a participant.
Not really. Skype made VoIP more _visible_ because they happened to be pretty good at marketing, but the only thing "easier" about it is the lack of customer choice. Compare:
Skype: Install it and it works.
SIP: Choose a service provider, install a client, enter your service provider's address and it works.
So the only real difference here is that with Skype you don't have to pick a service provider, which means that you don't get to choose the one that is going to be most suitable for you. I guess if people are too lazy to shop around for a good deal then they deserve everything they get.
Admittedly, Skype tries to work around people with busted network configurations - in these cases the choice comes down to: SIP - doesn't work at all, Skype - works but the connection is unusably bad.
If they're actually putting the protocol implementation out as a binary-only library, and encouraging open source development on top of that, this enables some freedoms without enabling all freedoms.
Sounds quite dangerous to me - you're needlessly giving a third party the option to pull the plug on your project if they desire whilst also integrating all their security holes, backdoors and downright bad programming into your software.
We could build an IVR Wikipedia tool for the blind with this.
But why would you want to use a proprietary protocol with limited software and hardware support to do this? Seems more sensible to use an industry standard protocol.
So: some freedoms, yes, but certainly not all the freedoms folks might want.
I don't see this as giving people much freedom. I see it as giving people just enough rope to accidentally hang themselves by tempting them into using an inappropriate technology in preference to well supported and proven industry standard technologies.
one can VoIP-enable one's own applications
You can already do this by using an industry standard VoIP protocol. There doesn't really seem to be much benefit in using an undocumented proprietary protocol instead.
A lot of the free VoIP out there isn't quite up to snuff, and requires a lot of end-user mucking around to get to work.
If by "low end mucking about" you mean typing in your chosen service provider's address, like everyone's done with email clients since the dawn of time. Hell, if you enjoy being locked into a single vendor there are a number of service providers that ship locked down SIP clients so you don't even need to do this.
some penniless foss project isn't going to provide servers which can cope with 18,989,413 clients at the same time (number plucked from Skype right now, the peak is probably higher).
It is unlikely that a single project would need to support that many clients at the same time since SIP is a standard protocol which allows servers from many different service providers to interoperate, so the load is spread across many different providers. Additionally, you seem to be limiting yourself to "peniless FOSS projects" but there are a large number of commercial SIP servers out there who are supported by money made from gatewaying calls to/from the PSTN, etc.
By your argument, none of the existing open standard protocols for other services are feasible either. I mean, absolutely no one is going to use SMTP to transfer their email because no single provider is going to provide enough capacity to support all the users. Except you're clearly wrong because SMTP is in wide use precisely _because_ no single provider has to support all the users. Even so, there are plenty of large service providers out there providing this service to a very large number of people (Google Mail, Hotmail, etc).
Because a truly foss voip project requires a server or open ports on at least 1 side.
Plenty of free public SIP servers on the internet...
Skype requires only 2 clients that speak the same protocol, the skype network handles the rest.
I'm unclear on why you think that relying on the existence of a single proprietary network is better than relying on a SIP server (which may or may not be operated by yourself and you can switch to a different independent server if you want).