We've learned the hard way (Gordon Bell at DEC once gave GaAs semiconductors as an example) that if the US Government funds research and doesn't have a plan for American companies to commercialize it, foreign companies will take the free research and commercialize it to their advantage and American companies' disadvantage. If it is commercially useful, either have a plan to use it, or don't fund it. (Of course there is other research which is nowhere near commercially useful, and that's another story.) As a counter example, the shift from Ge semiconductors to Si semiconductors was caused by the US Government wanting to actually buy a very large number of Si transistors for use in missile guidance systems due to Si's better performance at high temperatures.
I really wouldn't like it if anybody could buy my house for the value which provides the basis for my property taxes unless I'd actually offered it for sale... and at that price.
Note that (in the US) real estate isn't the only property which is subject to a form of property tax or excise tax. In at least some states, such as Massachusetts and "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire, you have to pay a property tax to your city or town on each vehicle that you own, each year. It's based on an independent average value (e.g. "Blue Book value") of that made, model, year, and option set. The fact that it's a percentage of the value is what makes it a tax (vs. the fixed registration fee is paid separately to the state) and it's deductable on federal income taxes just like the real estate property tax.
In some states, I believe that certain other forms of very expensive personal property are taxed, but I have no direct experience with this.
It would make sense to have IP Assessors who audit the company's books and determinte the value of the IP. If the IP is sold, the assessed value is reexamined in light of the sale price.
New Hampshire doesn't have an income tax on wages, but they do have income taxes in the form of an interest and dividends tax, a business profits tax, a business enterprise tax, a timber tax, a gravel tax, etc. And a fair number of people who live in NH work in MA or ME where they do have an income tax on wages.
http://www.nh.gov/revenue/gti-rev.htm
Why did MS-DOS use / for switches? Because CPM used / because old DEC operating systems used /... Ever wonder why they are called "switches"? Because some programs didn't even have a command line, and you had to flip switches on the front panel to tell the program what you wanted to do. (I remember using them to tell the PDP-8 assembler, PAL III, which pass you were doing [read the source once to generate the symbol table, read the source again to generate a binary tape, read the source again to generate a listing) among other things.)
>>A significant portion of the US constitution describes how to properly replace it when, not if, we need to overthrow an overly oppressive government.
[Art.] 10. [Right of Revolution.] Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
I saw a lot more satellite TV dishes while driving through northern New Hampshire (taller hills/mountains and fewer people) than I see in southern New Hampshire and the Boston suburbs, and at an agriculture fair, a satellite TV and radio dealer had a booth set up.
Boston has some great radio stations but some of them just don't get much past Rt. 128. When I started a new job and was spending 3/4 of an hour to an hour and a half or more each way, depending on the traffic, I got XM. (And the car's AM/FM radio antenna motor broke, so I had to do something.) I don't need the traffic reports to know that traffic is bad. I really don't want to listen to commercials. XM makes the daily drive tollerable.
I think my reaons for choosing XM over Sirius were the Delphi receiver's nice display and 10 preset/station entry buttons instead of 6 on the nearest Sirius equipment (I don't know why anyone would only put 6 buttons on a receiver instead of 10 -- does someone out there really use hex? -- I don't mean hexadecimal!), the cost (I think there was a bigger price gap at the time), and that it appeared that if only one survived it would be XM.
I forget which had a folk channel first but now they both do. (One of them originally called theirs "alt country" IIRC.)
One of the shows on XM has the slogan "Fewer hits, less often." I like that.
Yeah, yet another/. review spoils the book and tells us what happens. How to extract video, how to record the nightly news while at a football game: the big surprises are now gone. What a shame.:-)
Right. And once there is a patch for the fault in the front passenger's side door lock, the manufacturer shouldn't be able to claim ignorance when someone exploits the same fault in the rear driver's side door lock.
When a cracker allegedly gained access to the VAX/VMS source pool, DEC did a line by line review looking for trojans. Microsoft has had quite enough time to do the same thing to their code base to look for buffer overrun problems and issue patches for them without any strings attached (new license terms, new technology they want you to have but you might not want, etc.)
Well, it just raises the question, "Which company is more Mchiavellian, Microsoft or IBM?" I'd have to say Microsoft. I don't think that IBM would ever have created a fake grass roots campaign like Microsoft tried to do. Back when IBM dominated the computer business, it certainly used FUD, but it knew its position in the universe and I believe that it went about its market domination tactics openly and under its own name.
Denver CO Aug 1 - Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a leading expert in voting machine security, had her conference credentials revoked by the president of the International Association of Clerks, Records, Election Officials, and Treasurers (IACREOT), Marianne Rickenbach. The annual IACREOT Conference and Trade Show, which showcases election systems to elections officials, is being held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Denver all this week.
Mercuri believes that her credentials were revoked because of her position in favor of voter-verified paper ballots for computerized election systems. "I guess in a very troubling way it makes sense that an organization like IACREOT, that supports paperless computerized voting systems, which are secret by their very design, would not want computer experts who disagree with that position at their meetings."
Dr. Mercuri said that her credentials were approved for the first three days of the conference. She attended meetings of other groups and visited the exhibitors hall. But it was only on Thursday as she sat down to attend her first meeting at the IACREOT that President Marianne Rickenbach took Mercuri out of the room and told her that her credentials were being revoked. Rickenbach said that Mercuri had not filled out the forms correctly. Mercuri protested, but was refused reinstatement.
David Chaum, the inventor of eCash and a member of Mercuri's 'voter-verified paper ballot' group, had his credentials revoked on the first day of the conference. On the second day his credentials were partially restored. Chaum was allowed to visit the exhibitors hall, but not attend the IACREOT meetings.
Rickenbach was unavailable for comment as of this report. Mercuri can be reached at the Adam's Mark Hotel through Saturday.
Once upon a time, DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) offered occasional seminars teaching the "relaxation response" technique for stress relief. It was essentially a guided meditation.
If you're just looking at the bottom line (and I'm not saying that's all you should look at), encouraging this would probably reduce health care costs for the company.
Seriously, besides the hardware being cheap, I believe that one of the keys to Microsoft's success was that the product quality was so low that an enormous industry had to be created to help users handle the problems. If DOS was as easy to use as the MacOS, "DOS for Dummies" would never have been written and a publishing empire never born. The next step was the potential business user saying "Wow, look at all of the support I can get for Microsoft products: lots of books in every bookstore and consultants on every street corner. There isn't much support for MacOS except for some unprofessional user groups." So they joined the Microsoft bandwagon. *sigh*
Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I have no idea why McGraw-Hill renewed the copyright on the following book, but they did:
Computer Handbook
edited by Harry D. Huskey and Granino A. Korn
1962
It has lots of good, historic stuff about vacuum tube digital and analog computers, and there are some people in the world who would like to get a copy of it, but not very many, and surely not enough to make it worth McGraw-Hill's time and money to reprint it. There are none currently available on Amazon.com (ASIN: 0070314772). (I'd love to know what the last one listed there sold for, if one was ever listed there.) At Amazon.com Sales Rank 2,063,362 it is a parsec away from the best-seller class, but McGraw-Hill bothered to renew the copyright on it.
The May, 2001
editorial in American Heritage magazine confirmed my fears that,
as bad as Microsoft's bundling of software may be, that infamous Harvard drop-out's use of their desktop operating system monopoly to gain control over content is a far bigger threat. They can restrict content so that it can only be used from their platform by only licensing it for use in their propietary formats. They can prohibit further reproduction of historic journalistic content for their own political ends and for the political ends of the party they choose to support. Perhaps famous photographs of the poverty of the Great Depression will disappear from textbooks, since they might elicit sympathy for a Democratic agenda. Perhaps any encyclopedia competing with Encarta will have to settle for 2nd-rate photographs. Perhaps photographs of Pres. Bush I barfing at a state dinner may never be reprinted again. What Microsoft has done to the software world infuriates me as a software engineer; what Bill Gates is doing to the publishing world and the press infuriates me as a citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
We've learned the hard way (Gordon Bell at DEC once gave GaAs semiconductors as an example) that if the US Government funds research and doesn't have a plan for American companies to commercialize it, foreign companies will take the free research and commercialize it to their advantage and American companies' disadvantage. If it is commercially useful, either have a plan to use it, or don't fund it. (Of course there is other research which is nowhere near commercially useful, and that's another story.) As a counter example, the shift from Ge semiconductors to Si semiconductors was caused by the US Government wanting to actually buy a very large number of Si transistors for use in missile guidance systems due to Si's better performance at high temperatures.
Since it's open source, how long do we have until it forks? :-)
Note that (in the US) real estate isn't the only property which is subject to a form of property tax or excise tax. In at least some states, such as Massachusetts and "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire, you have to pay a property tax to your city or town on each vehicle that you own, each year. It's based on an independent average value (e.g. "Blue Book value") of that made, model, year, and option set. The fact that it's a percentage of the value is what makes it a tax (vs. the fixed registration fee is paid separately to the state) and it's deductable on federal income taxes just like the real estate property tax.
In some states, I believe that certain other forms of very expensive personal property are taxed, but I have no direct experience with this.
It would make sense to have IP Assessors who audit the company's books and determinte the value of the IP. If the IP is sold, the assessed value is reexamined in light of the sale price.
It is a good example of the Microsoft strategy of embrace-extend-suffocate.
New Hampshire doesn't have an income tax on wages, but they do have income taxes in the form of an interest and dividends tax, a business profits tax, a business enterprise tax, a timber tax, a gravel tax, etc. And a fair number of people who live in NH work in MA or ME where they do have an income tax on wages. http://www.nh.gov/revenue/gti-rev.htm
CALL exit
Why did MS-DOS use / for switches? Because CPM used / because old DEC operating systems used / ... Ever wonder why they are called "switches"? Because some programs didn't even have a command line, and you had to flip switches on the front panel to tell the program what you wanted to do. (I remember using them to tell the PDP-8 assembler, PAL III, which pass you were doing [read the source once to generate the symbol table, read the source again to generate a binary tape, read the source again to generate a listing) among other things.)
>Wrong.
I'm not saying it is very practical, but the Bill of Rights of the New Hampshire State Constitution does provide for this.
[Art.] 10. [Right of Revolution.] Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
Boston has some great radio stations but some of them just don't get much past Rt. 128. When I started a new job and was spending 3/4 of an hour to an hour and a half or more each way, depending on the traffic, I got XM. (And the car's AM/FM radio antenna motor broke, so I had to do something.) I don't need the traffic reports to know that traffic is bad. I really don't want to listen to commercials. XM makes the daily drive tollerable.
I think my reaons for choosing XM over Sirius were the Delphi receiver's nice display and 10 preset/station entry buttons instead of 6 on the nearest Sirius equipment (I don't know why anyone would only put 6 buttons on a receiver instead of 10 -- does someone out there really use hex? -- I don't mean hexadecimal!), the cost (I think there was a bigger price gap at the time), and that it appeared that if only one survived it would be XM.
I forget which had a folk channel first but now they both do. (One of them originally called theirs "alt country" IIRC.)
One of the shows on XM has the slogan "Fewer hits, less often." I like that.
Yeah, yet another /. review spoils the book and tells us what happens. How to extract video, how to record the nightly news while at a football game: the big surprises are now gone. What a shame. :-)
Right. And once there is a patch for the fault in the front passenger's side door lock, the manufacturer shouldn't be able to claim ignorance when someone exploits the same fault in the rear driver's side door lock. When a cracker allegedly gained access to the VAX/VMS source pool, DEC did a line by line review looking for trojans. Microsoft has had quite enough time to do the same thing to their code base to look for buffer overrun problems and issue patches for them without any strings attached (new license terms, new technology they want you to have but you might not want, etc.)
Well, it just raises the question, "Which company is more Mchiavellian, Microsoft or IBM?" I'd have to say Microsoft. I don't think that IBM would ever have created a fake grass roots campaign like Microsoft tried to do. Back when IBM dominated the computer business, it certainly used FUD, but it knew its position in the universe and I believe that it went about its market domination tactics openly and under its own name.
When are they announcing that Haliburton has purchsed Diebold?
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00014 .htm
Computer Voting Expert Ousted From Elections Conference
Lynn Landes
freelance journalist
www.EcoTalk.org
Denver CO Aug 1 - Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a leading expert in voting machine security, had her conference credentials revoked by the president of the International Association of Clerks, Records, Election Officials, and Treasurers (IACREOT), Marianne Rickenbach. The annual IACREOT Conference and Trade Show, which showcases election systems to elections officials, is being held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Denver all this week.
Mercuri believes that her credentials were revoked because of her position in favor of voter-verified paper ballots for computerized election systems. "I guess in a very troubling way it makes sense that an organization like IACREOT, that supports paperless computerized voting systems, which are secret by their very design, would not want computer experts who disagree with that position at their meetings."
Dr. Mercuri said that her credentials were approved for the first three days of the conference. She attended meetings of other groups and visited the exhibitors hall. But it was only on Thursday as she sat down to attend her first meeting at the IACREOT that President Marianne Rickenbach took Mercuri out of the room and told her that her credentials were being revoked. Rickenbach said that Mercuri had not filled out the forms correctly. Mercuri protested, but was refused reinstatement.
David Chaum, the inventor of eCash and a member of Mercuri's 'voter-verified paper ballot' group, had his credentials revoked on the first day of the conference. On the second day his credentials were partially restored. Chaum was allowed to visit the exhibitors hall, but not attend the IACREOT meetings.
Rickenbach was unavailable for comment as of this report. Mercuri can be reached at the Adam's Mark Hotel through Saturday.
Once upon a time, DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) offered occasional seminars teaching the "relaxation response" technique for stress relief. It was essentially a guided meditation. If you're just looking at the bottom line (and I'm not saying that's all you should look at), encouraging this would probably reduce health care costs for the company.
Seriously, besides the hardware being cheap, I believe that one of the keys to Microsoft's success was that the product quality was so low that an enormous industry had to be created to help users handle the problems. If DOS was as easy to use as the MacOS, "DOS for Dummies" would never have been written and a publishing empire never born. The next step was the potential business user saying "Wow, look at all of the support I can get for Microsoft products: lots of books in every bookstore and consultants on every street corner. There isn't much support for MacOS except for some unprofessional user groups." So they joined the Microsoft bandwagon. *sigh*
Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I have no idea why McGraw-Hill renewed the copyright on the following book, but they did:
Computer Handbook
edited by Harry D. Huskey and Granino A. Korn
1962
It has lots of good, historic stuff about vacuum tube digital and analog computers, and there are some people in the world who would like to get a copy of it, but not very many, and surely not enough to make it worth McGraw-Hill's time and money to reprint it. There are none currently available on Amazon.com (ASIN: 0070314772). (I'd love to know what the last one listed there sold for, if one was ever listed there.) At Amazon.com Sales Rank 2,063,362 it is a parsec away from the best-seller class, but McGraw-Hill bothered to renew the copyright on it.
The May, 2001 editorial in American Heritage magazine confirmed my fears that, as bad as Microsoft's bundling of software may be, that infamous Harvard drop-out's use of their desktop operating system monopoly to gain control over content is a far bigger threat. They can restrict content so that it can only be used from their platform by only licensing it for use in their propietary formats. They can prohibit further reproduction of historic journalistic content for their own political ends and for the political ends of the party they choose to support. Perhaps famous photographs of the poverty of the Great Depression will disappear from textbooks, since they might elicit sympathy for a Democratic agenda. Perhaps any encyclopedia competing with Encarta will have to settle for 2nd-rate photographs. Perhaps photographs of Pres. Bush I barfing at a state dinner may never be reprinted again. What Microsoft has done to the software world infuriates me as a software engineer; what Bill Gates is doing to the publishing world and the press infuriates me as a citizen.