You may think you can skate on sales taxes by buying from abroad, but you'd be wrong. Two reason: other nations' taxes, and the US Customs Service.
Other than Hong Kong and a smattering of other holes in the wall, most nations selling anything you're interested in have a VAT that hits even harder than just about anything Stateside. If that doesn't deter you, it'll be the wait while your package sits in Customs. Collecting duty on imports is the oldest form of taxation on the books.
Ok folks, click click, I know you can do it. Read the first couple of paragraphs of the bill. What will you see? SMALL BUSINESS EXEMPTION: businesses grossing less than $5mil/year, or any business doing less than $100K of online sales is EXEMPT.
So, grandma's pie site, my dad's cd-rom site, the guy down the hall selling Kava... unless they are wildly sucessful, they Don't Have To Play. No extra recordkeeping, no lost revenue.
If you're worried about the camel's nose under the tent flap, that's another discussion, but it doesn't look like most of the posters are thinking that far.
A recent Groklaw article (you saw it here on/.) claims that SCO foresaw taking a lot of GPL'd code private, and packaging various cherry-picked apps with the existing Linux personality codes for Sys V. Linux itself? Too bad, just more roadkill on the highway to SCO's profitability.
(What I hope is) the problem with this scenario is the overhead even a tailored.NET layer would add to an embedded device. WinCE hasn't seen a lot of take up because of licensing costs, perceived lack of reliability, and even with the device-specific tailoring, thirst for resources.
TRON is unlicensed, reliable, and light weight. A.NET layer is going to have to be hidieously slimmed down to fit in most devices TRON is used in.
The only reasons I can see a vendor using.NET would be a perception that some development time might be cut in graphics front ends and networking stacks. There are already network and graphics libraries in play in the embedded world, and unless.NET can prove very nearly as tightly coded, who'll want to pay to support the overhead?
The cost driver in most mass consumper electronics isn't the software developer, it's the bits and pieces making up the device. Is Samsung gonna want to increase the OEM cost of a phone by, say, $10/unit to support some neato Microsoft hardware abstraction?
Yep, there are a number of large corporations and organizations that standardized on NS4 for their intranet years ago, coding their pages and webapps for it. A lot of inertia from that original investment in manhours.
Fortunately, my huge employer doesn't code to reject non-NS4, and those of us not using B****g supplied equipment can surf the company web quite nicely.
For my homebrew stuff, I finally said screw it, and just make sure it doesn't hang NS4.
Ok kids, this discussion is moving way off topic, but I just can't let more of this "farm out all work overseas" crap go unanswered.
Let's cut to the root of the argument: "If it can be imported for less, we should import it, and spend the extra money on the stuff only Americans can do."I see two flaming fallacies with this POV, which are
There are techniques/products/services which only Americans can offer
There is no reason to maintain a means of production within national borders, if it costs more.
In the first instance, there is now a cadre of engineers, scientists, entrepeneurs, and financiers - outside not only the US, but the entire OECD - with the ability to create and market anything, and do it cheaper than within the US, given the will to do so. Also, given the relatively free mobility of labor into the US, there is no position, job, career, or business endeavor that can't be performed with a better ROI than what each and every one of *you* are doing right now.
Addressing the second point, there is real economic value in maintaining and cultivating the ability to create goods within a nation. The most obvious example is that providing the tools of national defense requires a heavy industrial base. However, hanging on to national sovereignty, the very freedom and ability to act within your own country without the consent of another nation requires more. Technologies, products, and services have been and will be witheld from the US market to meet other nations ends. Up 'til now, you probably haven't noticed, because either these goods weren't critical, or an alternate source of supply was available. When it does become noticeable, it may be too late to react to, for a variety of reasons.
I realize it's fun to play the troll and playact as Adam Smith, preaching the dogma of free markets, and in a/. post you're not doing much harm. But, I fear that the plethora of these opinions may also show that some of you aren't even trying to think the thing through. Perhaps your own ox hasn't yet been gored.
I agree with MrLint that only living breathing people should have rights. Unfortunately, a pro-business Supreme Court held a slightly different opinion back in 1886. The writing of the opinion has a minor twist, but from a legal standpoint, it became precident.
Fortunately, since then the rights of corporations have been scaled back a bit (a rich man can spend whatever he wants to get elected, but a rich corp can't), but it'd be nice to have a nice tidy upper court decision to clear this bizarre legal theory off the books.
After years of reading about asteroids in "the New Yorker", Congress appropriated about $50 mil to try and take most of the guesswork out of the impact game. The University of Hawaii IfA'sPanSTARRS Project has the task of putting together a telescope array backed by a large parallel computing system to detect and plot orbits for at least 90% of the Near Earth Objects of diameter 1km or larger that are estimated to be out there.
Barring any glitches, it should be churning out production data in three years. The observation program will then proceed over three to five years, depending on funding. Given the short cycle time between individual observations, PanSTARRS should usually be able to accurately calculate an object's orbit by the time a science editor gets wind of it. It beats a sharp stick in the eye.
Other projects intended to detect objects down to several hundred meters are still in the planning stage.
I appreciate the truth of your comment regarding states' freedom of action. If they didn't suck at the federal teat, and if the Federal courts hadn't ruled in certain ways...
However, people now identify with the nation more than a home state as a direct result of the Civil War. Giving one from every eight adult males to hold it together had that effect. You can't count on New Yorkers or South Carolinians to maintain a union, only Americans.
You seem to be tottering on the edge of class awareness, so you might as well go all the way and look at which side of the fence you're on. You, sir, are working class. The people whining around you are working class. They live by their labors. They aren't looking at how the average Rwandan or Bangladeshi are doing, they are looking at how they are doing. They are looking at how the people who are "doing it to them" are doing: upper management, executives, stockholders.
You're telling your working peers that they're on the rich side of the fence. I'm telling you we're on the "poor" side, and the only thing keeping us off of a dirt floor is luck, hard work, and a lot of pissing and moaning. Part of that luck is being American. Being a "citizen of the world" is the luxury of first world college students and intellectuals, while all around them are a sea of citizens, tribes, coreligionists. Belonging to a nation-state that provides so richly is a gift. I'll be damned if I'm going to take it in the ass quietly just because I'm lucky enough that I don't have to sleep among livestock.
Since you are a university student, I'll presume that you've studied - at least in passing - the roots of unionism and socialist movements. That you've seemingly overlooked our own past when commenting on the current American *labor* market shocks me.
Microfinancing has been shit-hot, and puts the capital right where it's needed. I'm aware of Bangladeshi experience, in particular. Go for it.
What? You asking for Father "Randy" Pudge to supervise you? Seriously, if you need a starting place for technical info, surf to the Apple Developer Connection and sign up. The basic membership is free, and gives you access to the downloads and all documentation. There are plenty of tutorials to get you going.
I've noticed several folks coming into these conversations with roughly the same line: you IT workers are the US autoworkers of the '00s. You deserved it, get used to it and find a new skill.
Ok, fair enough... so what do "you" do? And not just the previous poster 'thefinite', but all the rest of you parroting this line over the last few months? Garans ballbearins, whatever it is you do, in the current business climate the entire labor pool subset you currently inhabit can be replaced, unless it requires a US security clearance.
And, I don't just mean market segments where the skills are available and cheap overseas. I include segments where the worker or erstwhile entrepreneur can be imported, which includes virtually the entire service sector. Even if you're self-employed. If we're not the agro or heavy manufacturing economy anymore, and non-citizens handle whole swaths of the service economy, what economy do you propose citizens retrain for or compete in? What would you propose when it came time for 'why' 'oh' 'you'?
At what point do you decide that it's not just economic dogma and cheaper consumer goods anymore, and you start wanting to bitch-slap your elected representitives into protecting some benefits of citizenship?
On a tangent, I'm reminded of an amusing short story from Analog Magazine's 'Probability Zero' column. A Gingrich-like congressional rep reviews the results from a society simulator of a poor neighborhood where all taxpayer-supported services are removed. Good news: a major rise in employment and economy activity. Bad news: it's mostly pimping, whoring, narcotics, and loan sharking.
I've flown an X10-based rocket using the description and photos at the Vidroc website. Hanging my ass on the line for no good reason, the maiden flight was during a school science fair. I got in a hurry and forgot to feed the video into a VCR, but the parents and kids watching the live feed of the rocket-eye view on a monitor in a nearby classroom said it looked great.
The X10 hardware turns out to be pretty rugged, as I found out when the carrier rocket took a 200' death plunge into a nearby field. All of the wire leads broke, but they resolder easily, and the short bit of harder to fix coax was fine.
I graduated from an international school in Iran, so my sphincter starts to quiver when someone mixes up Mideastern capitals. Otherwise, the poster is correct. For years you could (and probably still can) buy reprints of classified US documents at bookstores in Tehran.
A very cute comment that I'd make sure to moderate as "Funny" if I weren't posting a rebuttal. As a previous poster said, the "bring back" capability wasn't used many times, but was a useful technique. In the case of the LDEF, it doesn't make sense to put 'er up unless you bring it back down to see what 6 years in orbit does to materials X, Y, Z.
The point being that there's nothing inevitable about Taiwan rejoining China, and the PRC leadership's "historical claims" to the island are bullshit. If they want to back up their bullshit with a war, as it stands now they'll lose, even without US involvement.
...and during those 5000+ years, most of what is *now* China hasn't been a part of China. If you want to get a hard-on about the ageless motherland, you're limiting yourself to the Yellow River Basin. Don't bother to poke at the relative youth of the USA. We're not the ones trying to drag the unwilling into our Union. Anyway, the Revolution was supposed to wash away the bad old days, eh? A fresh start. Or, are we finally admitting that 1949 was just the start of a new dynasty for the Middle Country?
Putting Chinese history into an American context, Taiwan is their Puerto Rico, if not their Canal Zone.
As for superpower of the future, maybe. Possible stumbles along the way include: - the (post?) Party apparatus dragging down the economy with endemic graft. - the one-child policy, while a success in throttling the population explosion, is causing a massive geriatric surge. A (still) primarily agricultural nation is headed for the gray demographics of Japan.
I have only my own annecdote to go by. Our iMac DV/SE ran just fine since new in '99, powered on 24x7, until the power supply threw a rod last year. My fault, I left it on an UPS while on vacation, and it drew the battery all the way down during a blackout.
Within a week of coming back from the shop, the video crapped out. Fortunately, they took the fall and fixed it no charge. After upgrading from X.1 to X.2, the video got weird again, but an Apple firmware patch fixed it.
Odd, the 'Kihei' codename. What's next, 'Lahaina'?
I'm as happy to keep fully-depreciated stone-age systems cranking as the next person (Q605, OS7.6, SIMS mail server). However, as nice as MachTen was in it's day, nowadays it's a toy that Tenon should be embarrassed to sell for a buck more than $30.
I didn't find the application particularly stable, the X server was a dog on a G4, and the kernel/libs/apps codebase was getting old in '99. There was an OS 9-related patch that year, and nothing since. Out of shear laziness, I'm still on the support maillist. I've gotten maybe 5 emails since '00, most of which asked if "anyone still here?"
If you're trying to argue against American hegemony by example of Rome, you need to pick another example. For all the problems within Roman society, they maintained a trans-Mediterranean empire for 500 years... 1500 if we follow the eastern half. Tributary states? Used them from start to finish.
Metals *would* want to be metallic, if it weren't for that g.d. oxygen trying to react with everything in sight. Gold doesn't have much of an affinity to compound with anything, hence it's usually found in pure form... if you can find it.
After years of schooling in the archania of COBOL, FORTRAN 77, and Pascal, I ended up coding embedded software for missiles in hex. Boy, was I ever in control.
Nowadays it's all web services in Java, and prayer is my debugger.
From the "maybe-it-will-crash-less-than-imovie-does" dept? What the hell, I'll bite. In a year, I haven't had iMovie tank at all. I guess cleaning up my home videos before they hit the CD just ain't working the package over hard enough.
Mr. Huong will do just fine with his book. That the publishers he's contacted won't publish is a roll. I think they just don't want to deal with such a limited printing, and the fear of lawsuit is a good excuse.
While the DMCA makes it easy to shut down a web site, the US Judiciary is VERY leary about restraint of dead tree writing and publishing. IMO, Mr. Huong getting a pro-bono defence would be easy, since any attorney should/would know that a form letter with a law office header is about all that's needed to fend off anything short of a libel suit or national security issues.
For instance, printing and selling a magazine with DeCSS source code is no big deal, but if the same people put links to the electronic version on their web site, it is. As long as the "Anarchist's Cookbook" is still on the shelves, "Hacking the Xbox: an Introduction to Reverse Engineering" hasn't got a problem.
Pacific Biodiesel set up a reprocessing plant next to the Maui County dump a couple of years back. Now the dump gets the equivalent of a few pounds of Nutragena (tm) as processing waste each week, while the rest of the fryer oil powers County trucks, many of the tour boats, and a few intrepid Volkswagen owners.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than Hong Kong and a smattering of other holes in the wall, most nations selling anything you're interested in have a VAT that hits even harder than just about anything Stateside. If that doesn't deter you, it'll be the wait while your package sits in Customs. Collecting duty on imports is the oldest form of taxation on the books.
So, grandma's pie site, my dad's cd-rom site, the guy down the hall selling Kava... unless they are wildly sucessful, they Don't Have To Play. No extra recordkeeping, no lost revenue.
If you're worried about the camel's nose under the tent flap, that's another discussion, but it doesn't look like most of the posters are thinking that far.
A recent Groklaw article (you saw it here on /.) claims that SCO foresaw taking a lot of GPL'd code private, and packaging various cherry-picked apps with the existing Linux personality codes for Sys V. Linux itself? Too bad, just more roadkill on the highway to SCO's profitability.
TRON is unlicensed, reliable, and light weight. A .NET layer is going to have to be hidieously slimmed down to fit in most devices TRON is used in.
The only reasons I can see a vendor using .NET would be a perception that some development time might be cut in graphics front ends and networking stacks. There are already network and graphics libraries in play in the embedded world, and unless .NET can prove very nearly as tightly coded, who'll want to pay to support the overhead?
The cost driver in most mass consumper electronics isn't the software developer, it's the bits and pieces making up the device. Is Samsung gonna want to increase the OEM cost of a phone by, say, $10/unit to support some neato Microsoft hardware abstraction?
I think this will be much ado over nothing.
Fortunately, my huge employer doesn't code to reject non-NS4, and those of us not using B****g supplied equipment can surf the company web quite nicely.
For my homebrew stuff, I finally said screw it, and just make sure it doesn't hang NS4.
Let's cut to the root of the argument: "If it can be imported for less, we should import it, and spend the extra money on the stuff only Americans can do."I see two flaming fallacies with this POV, which are
There are techniques/products/services which only Americans can offer
There is no reason to maintain a means of production within national borders, if it costs more.
In the first instance, there is now a cadre of engineers, scientists, entrepeneurs, and financiers - outside not only the US, but the entire OECD - with the ability to create and market anything, and do it cheaper than within the US, given the will to do so. Also, given the relatively free mobility of labor into the US, there is no position, job, career, or business endeavor that can't be performed with a better ROI than what each and every one of *you* are doing right now.
Addressing the second point, there is real economic value in maintaining and cultivating the ability to create goods within a nation. The most obvious example is that providing the tools of national defense requires a heavy industrial base. However, hanging on to national sovereignty, the very freedom and ability to act within your own country without the consent of another nation requires more. Technologies, products, and services have been and will be witheld from the US market to meet other nations ends. Up 'til now, you probably haven't noticed, because either these goods weren't critical, or an alternate source of supply was available. When it does become noticeable, it may be too late to react to, for a variety of reasons.
I realize it's fun to play the troll and playact as Adam Smith, preaching the dogma of free markets, and in a /. post you're not doing much harm. But, I fear that the plethora of these opinions may also show that some of you aren't even trying to think the thing through. Perhaps your own ox hasn't yet been gored.
I agree with MrLint that only living breathing people should have rights. Unfortunately, a pro-business Supreme Court held a slightly different opinion back in 1886. The writing of the opinion has a minor twist, but from a legal standpoint, it became precident.
Fortunately, since then the rights of corporations have been scaled back a bit (a rich man can spend whatever he wants to get elected, but a rich corp can't), but it'd be nice to have a nice tidy upper court decision to clear this bizarre legal theory off the books.
Barring any glitches, it should be churning out production data in three years. The observation program will then proceed over three to five years, depending on funding. Given the short cycle time between individual observations, PanSTARRS should usually be able to accurately calculate an object's orbit by the time a science editor gets wind of it. It beats a sharp stick in the eye.
Other projects intended to detect objects down to several hundred meters are still in the planning stage.
However, people now identify with the nation more than a home state as a direct result of the Civil War. Giving one from every eight adult males to hold it together had that effect. You can't count on New Yorkers or South Carolinians to maintain a union, only Americans.
You're telling your working peers that they're on the rich side of the fence. I'm telling you we're on the "poor" side, and the only thing keeping us off of a dirt floor is luck, hard work, and a lot of pissing and moaning. Part of that luck is being American. Being a "citizen of the world"
is the luxury of first world college students and intellectuals, while all around them are a sea of citizens, tribes, coreligionists. Belonging to a nation-state that provides so richly is a gift. I'll be damned if I'm going to take it in the ass quietly just because I'm lucky enough that I don't have to sleep among livestock.
Since you are a university student, I'll presume that you've studied - at least in passing - the roots of unionism and socialist movements. That you've seemingly overlooked our own past when commenting on the current American *labor* market shocks me.
Microfinancing has been shit-hot, and puts the capital right where it's needed. I'm aware of Bangladeshi experience, in particular. Go for it.
What? You asking for Father "Randy" Pudge to supervise you? Seriously, if you need a starting place for technical info, surf to the Apple Developer Connection and sign up. The basic membership is free, and gives you access to the downloads and all documentation. There are plenty of tutorials to get you going.
Ok, fair enough... so what do "you" do? And not just the previous poster 'thefinite', but all the rest of you parroting this line over the last few months? Garans ballbearins, whatever it is you do, in the current business climate the entire labor pool subset you currently inhabit can be replaced, unless it requires a US security clearance.
And, I don't just mean market segments where the skills are available and cheap overseas. I include segments where the worker or erstwhile entrepreneur can be imported, which includes virtually the entire service sector. Even if you're self-employed. If we're not the agro or heavy manufacturing economy anymore, and non-citizens handle whole swaths of the service economy, what economy do you propose citizens retrain for or compete in? What would you propose when it came time for 'why' 'oh' 'you'?
At what point do you decide that it's not just economic dogma and cheaper consumer goods anymore, and you start wanting to bitch-slap your elected representitives into protecting some benefits of citizenship?
On a tangent, I'm reminded of an amusing short story from Analog Magazine's 'Probability Zero' column. A Gingrich-like congressional rep reviews the results from a society simulator of a poor neighborhood where all taxpayer-supported services are removed. Good news: a major rise in employment and economy activity. Bad news: it's mostly pimping, whoring, narcotics, and loan sharking.
The X10 hardware turns out to be pretty rugged, as I found out when the carrier rocket took a 200' death plunge into a nearby field. All of the wire leads broke, but they resolder easily, and the short bit of harder to fix coax was fine.
I graduated from an international school in Iran, so my sphincter starts to quiver when someone mixes up Mideastern capitals. Otherwise, the poster is correct. For years you could (and probably still can) buy reprints of classified US documents at bookstores in Tehran.
A very cute comment that I'd make sure to moderate as "Funny" if I weren't posting a rebuttal. As a previous poster said, the "bring back" capability wasn't used many times, but was a useful technique. In the case of the LDEF, it doesn't make sense to put 'er up unless you bring it back down to see what 6 years in orbit does to materials X, Y, Z.
The point being that there's nothing inevitable about Taiwan rejoining China, and the PRC leadership's "historical claims" to the island are bullshit. If they want to back up their bullshit with a war, as it stands now they'll lose, even without US involvement.
...and during those 5000+ years, most of what is *now* China hasn't been a part of China. If you want to get a hard-on about the ageless motherland, you're limiting yourself to the Yellow River Basin. Don't bother to poke at the relative youth of the USA. We're not the ones trying to drag the unwilling into our Union. Anyway, the Revolution was supposed to wash away the bad old days, eh? A fresh start. Or, are we finally admitting that 1949 was just the start of a new dynasty for the Middle Country?
Putting Chinese history into an American context, Taiwan is their Puerto Rico, if not their Canal Zone.
As for superpower of the future, maybe. Possible stumbles along the way include:
- the (post?) Party apparatus dragging down the economy with endemic graft.
- the one-child policy, while a success in throttling the population explosion, is causing a massive geriatric surge. A (still) primarily agricultural nation is headed for the gray demographics of Japan.
Within a week of coming back from the shop, the video crapped out. Fortunately, they took the fall and fixed it no charge. After upgrading from X.1 to X.2, the video got weird again, but an Apple firmware patch fixed it.
Odd, the 'Kihei' codename. What's next, 'Lahaina'?
I didn't find the application particularly stable, the X server was a dog on a G4, and the kernel/libs/apps codebase was getting old in '99. There was an OS 9-related patch that year, and nothing since. Out of shear laziness, I'm still on the support maillist. I've gotten maybe 5 emails since '00, most of which asked if "anyone still here?"
If you're trying to argue against American hegemony by example of Rome, you need to pick another example. For all the problems within Roman society, they maintained a trans-Mediterranean empire for 500 years... 1500 if we follow the eastern half. Tributary states? Used them from start to finish.
Metals *would* want to be metallic, if it weren't for that g.d. oxygen trying to react with everything in sight. Gold doesn't have much of an affinity to compound with anything, hence it's usually found in pure form... if you can find it.
After years of schooling in the archania of COBOL, FORTRAN 77, and Pascal, I ended up coding embedded software for missiles in hex. Boy, was I ever in control.
Nowadays it's all web services in Java, and prayer is my debugger.
From the "maybe-it-will-crash-less-than-imovie-does" dept? What the hell, I'll bite. In a year, I haven't had iMovie tank at all. I guess cleaning up my home videos before they hit the CD just ain't working the package over hard enough.
While the DMCA makes it easy to shut down a web site, the US Judiciary is VERY leary about restraint of dead tree writing and publishing. IMO, Mr. Huong getting a pro-bono defence would be easy, since any attorney should/would know that a form letter with a law office header is about all that's needed to fend off anything short of a libel suit or national security issues.
For instance, printing and selling a magazine with DeCSS source code is no big deal, but if the same people put links to the electronic version on their web site, it is. As long as the "Anarchist's Cookbook" is still on the shelves, "Hacking the Xbox: an Introduction to Reverse Engineering" hasn't got a problem.
Pacific Biodiesel set up a reprocessing plant next to the Maui County dump a couple of years back. Now the dump gets the equivalent of a few pounds of Nutragena (tm) as processing waste each week, while the rest of the fryer oil powers County trucks, many of the tour boats, and a few intrepid Volkswagen owners.