First of all, there is a huge amount of variety when it comes to bricks, rope and tiles. Nails aren't entirely homogenous either.
Second, patents last a maximum of 20 years. A patent granted on a brick in the First World War would have expired before the Second World War. History wouldn't really look all that different.
The problem with your approach is that you're relying on the government to decide what items are necessities. In the UK, politicians seem to think that it's not necessary to wash, because most personal hygiene products are subject to the full 20% VAT rate (although they concede that it's more difficult to avoid menstruation, as 'feminine hygiene' products are subject to the reduced 5% rate). You can't buy these items second-hand. Likewise for other domestic cleaning products, and almost any consumable that isn't for human consumption.
Do you regard electricity as one of life's necessities? How about gas or oil for heating? 5% VAT. The government thinks that heating your home during the winter is somewhat optional. You can't buy energy second-hand.
Second-hand purchases are a solution, but only if you buy from people you know. eBay? That's a long way for a shortcut, seeing as you need a computer and an internet connection (both subject to 20% VAT). Second hand store? They're have to charge VAT on the items they sell. And if you buy from a man on a street corner, you're not going to receive any kind of warranty, so you could end up out-of-pocket further down the line.
One of the mantras you hear regularly from libertarian types on Slashdot is, "I know how to spend my own money better than the government does". I think the same applies here. Poor people know what the necessities are, far better than the government does. If you scrap VAT, raise the personal allowance to £10,000 (as the Lib Dems recently proposed) and raise the standard and higher rates of income tax, you can ensure that the poorest people have what they need to live a normal life, while still giving an incentive to earn more.
Many genuinely rich people don't pay any income tax at all, as they have no income (on paper).
I'm fine with not taxing people who are living off a big pot of savings. Income tax should already have been paid on that money.
If you're referring to the various ways that rich people with expensive accountants can avoid paying tax, then yes I acknowledge that problem. I would rather that the government invested time and effort into closing those loopholes (which they have an incentive to do), rather than attempting to overhaul the tax system in the way that you are proposing, where the government is incentivised to fiddle with the 'necessities' list in a way that impacts the poorest.
It sounds to me like you want a truly fair taxation system, without inequalities. If you want to do that sort of system, there is another that would be better than an income tax and would be very simple. Take the total government budget for the year and divide by number of people in the country. Children's taxes must be paid by the parents. It's only $11,370 per person. Seems very affordable to me.
Now you're just being obtuse. What you describe is a regressive tax, and is the most unfair method of taxation in existence because it isn't linked with a person's ability to pay.
You're not the only person who has described such a system as 'fair' before. Margaret Thatcher did. It was called the Community Charge, but more commonly known as the Poll Tax.
When it was introduced in Scotland (a year earlier than in the rest of the UK), it led to mass non-payment and civil disobedience. It's one of the reasons that the Conservatives are now almost unelectable in Scotland, and 'Thatcher' is a dirty word here. The fact that the Scottish wing of the party (what is left of it) is debating whether or not to split from the UK party and undergo a massive rebranding exercise is in part a legacy of the Poll Tax.
And finally...
Heck, I'm not poor, but I have over $100k in student loans to pay off with my meager earnings after the government takes over 50%
To use your argument against you, a university education is an optional purchase.
The problem with that idea is that you're going to end up with a system that raises taxes for the poorest people and lowers them for the richest. That won't go down well with the majority of the population.
You can't explain it away with exemptions for 'necessities'. You'll end up in a situation where the food you buy is deemed a necessity, but the oven in which to cook it and the the plates off of which to eat it are not. The strictest definition of a necessity, which is the definition that a tax system would use, does not cover the necessities of modern life.
I would argue exactly the opposite. All taxes are bad, but an income tax is perhaps the worst type as it is an outright presumption of slavery, that the government owns the fruits of our labor, and thus owns us... Allowing us to keep whatever percentage of our income. Income tax needs to end entirely.
What utter nonsense. The government is going to take its percentage at some point anyway, unless you're thinking of being buried with your money. It might as well be done in a way that lets the percentage taken be proportional to the amount that you earn.
Stallman's problem, in my opinion, is that he's looking at things in terms of good and evil, when really they are just two different ways of doing things... and I think he's just a bit pissed off that Jobs' way of doing things has been both successful and different than his. Stallman seems very intolerant of opinions that are different than his own.
He wasn't hateful towards Job's himself
It doesn't matter how you say it or how you qualify it - saying "I'm glad he's gone" immediately after someone has died is a horrible thing to do.
The correct time to make these remarks would have been after he resigned his post as CEO of Apple in August, or perhaps after he went on medical leave back in January. If he'd said it then, it would have been in the context of Jobs leaving the company, and in that case I'd respect his opinion even if I didn't agree with it.
But saying it now is just disgusting, and Stallman's credibility as a spokesperson has to take another huge knock for this.
But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like... Charles Babbage seems... very wrong.
Charles Babbage never really accomplished anything. His designs were revolutionary, but no revolution happened because the entire project was a financial disaster. Today's computers have no direct relation to Babbage's designs, and we would be at the exact same technological level even if he had never existed.
Babbage's work is a historical curiosity, and a window into a world that might have been. Nothing more.
The transition from Facebook to The Next Big Thing isn't going to happen in the same way as such transition's have happened before (LiveJournal/Bebo/MySpace to Facebook/Twitter). The social networks of the past were largely populated by people of a certain age and/or with a certain level of technological literacy. This isn't the case with Facebook. Facebook is populated by many people for whom Facebook is their first and only social network. The sheer number of Facebook users alone makes it hard for any move to another platform to happen, and the entrenchment of the first-time social network users makes it virtually impossible.
Much as I love G+, time won't help it, because the social network churn will no longer take place. The only thing that will stop Facebook is when people eventually tire of the concept.
Have you tried using Google's 'switch account' feature? I'm using it at the moment, since my main account is an Apps account. It's still a bit of a faff to switch accounts whenever I want to use G+, but it's only four clicks, as opposed to logging out of one account and then logging in to the other.
Now, decision makers don't think twice about firing thousands of workers when the numbers take a temporary dip
I want to quote a part of the summary that is being missed by a lot of people who are putting forward an argument similar to yours (emphasis mine):
As a senior developer for a small IT company
Small companies won't fire thousands of employees at a time, because they don't have thousands of employees to fire. They certainly won't fire employees based on a brief downturn in numbers - it costs a small business a huge amount of resources in order to train somebody up, so they tend to hold on to people during dips so that they can cope when things pick up.
And the directors don't usually have to justify themselves to shareholders, because they are the shareholders.
I think "practically outside my front door" is awfully close. You'd have to be very careful that your work life doesn't encroach on your home life with that kind of proximity.
I would also make sure to get out enough. Get out of the office and go home for lunch, now that you can. And make sure to get out of the immediate area sometimes, preferably by walking or cycling. Aside from the physical exercise, it helps to move around a bit to avoid cabin fever setting in.
Actually I think the example of the ThinkPad X60 used by another commenter was more salient, as it referred to an actual product for sale, as opposed to a concept in an academic environment. I'm assuming of course that the UoT never commercialised it.
Multi-touch devices have been in existence longer than Apple has been around.
That's irrelevant, as we're talking about a trademark, not a patent. The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.
And obviously, the fact that it's generic, which is what the ruling came down to.
I have a problem with this. Programming is not science, so 'computer science' is a complete misnomer. 'Information technology' more accurately describes what a programmer actually does.
Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up for me. I was basing my assumption on the text of the licence, which at no point mentions 'linking to'. Here is how it defines a derivative work:
The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)
However, if the prevailing interpretation is that linking must occur, and if that's an interpretation that the copyright holders are happy with, then fair enough.
It's not irrelevant, it's the core tenet of the GPL.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Emphasis mine. Android's Apache-licensed sections are not being distributed as separate works.
What I'm curious about is, do the current limits of NFC payment systems apply to this?
I have a Visa PayWave debit card, and I can't make purchases with the NFC portion of it if the total is greater than £15. That's fine for the card, because it also works as a Chip&PIN card. But that's not possible with a phone.
To cut a long story short, unless/until the £15 limit goes away, you're still going to have to carry a regular card in a regular wallet.
It's one project, but the Linux sources are separate from the rest, so the licences need not be compatible. There are no stipulations in the GPL or Apache licenses that say that you need to keep the source code separate from code with other licenses.
Define 'separate'. They're certainly not separate when you download the Android development environment, which includes an Android emulator. It's shipped as one cohesive product. Whatever separation is kept in Google's development labs is irrelevant - they are being distributed as one product, and the GPL is a licence that is concerned with distribution.
I'm pretty sure that if there were any incompatibilities, someone would've noticed it before. It's not like this is an obscure project someone created last week.
Here's what I think. I think that the people who would normally be up in arms about this are also heavily invested in Android, both financially and emotionally. They own Android devices and love them. They are not about to point out the elephant in the room.
I'm also sure that Google has a lawyer or two on their payrole.
Precisely my point. Who is going to go up against Google's lawyers over a GPL violation?
Like I said, the Linux kernel specifically allows anyone to run whatever they want in the user space (without that provision, you would only be able to run GPL compatible code on your system, which would be too limiting, even for the FSF).
That's not quite accurate, because the GPL doesn't limit what you can or can't run on a Linux system. What it does limit is what you can distribute.
I understand that the Apache licence on its own allows this, but it's irrelevant because that licence is not being used in isolation. The GPL imposes its restrictions on all the source code of a derivative work, so even the code that was originally Apache licensed needs to comply with the terms of the GPL.
After doing a bit more reading, I'm now even more confused, because the FSF considers the GPLv2 and the Apache licence to be mutually incompatible. So with its current licensing, Google shouldn't be able to ship Android at all.
What I don't understand is, how can they get away with not publishing the 3.0 source code now? It's software built on Linux, which is GPLv2, and it's being shipped as a complete product, so surely they're required by the terms of the kernel licence to license everything under the GPL?
I've never heard a satisfactory answer to this, other than "It's Google, who's going to stop them?"
The point about USB on tablets (not just the iPad, but also the majority of Android tablets) isn't that there is no point in having it. It's that, on balance, it doesn't make sense to include it because it means making trade-offs in other areas. Either the tablet has to become larger to accomodate the port and chipset, or the battery has to become smaller.
I'm assuming, of course, that we're talking about the full-size USB-A port. If they were to do things properly, tablets with USB would use the Micro-USB-A port, but cables with this connector are extremely rare, and most people wouldn't realise that it wasn't a proprietary port.
The wonders of the market mean that you can get a tablet with a USB-A port (or at least you will be able to in the near future). I'm pretty sure Toshiba is coming out with one soon. But you have to accept that your needs might not be the same as those of the market as a whole.
We're coming close to the point where USB won't be necessary for most things anyway. Keyboards and mice have been wireless for a while now, and wireless printers are now available. Wireless storage solutions exist. Personally, the only thing I use USB for any more is charging my phone. Oh, and copying photos off my camera - again, something that can be done wirelessly these days if you have the right kit.
[Solar plants] probably wouldn't work all that great in the UK either; that island is famous for its fog and clouds and generally nasty weather.
Cloudy, yes. But the UK's reputation for being foggy comes from the 19th century when our cities were heavily polluted, due to coal-fired steam power being the primary source of energy. Fogs were frequent because they would form around the soot particles produced. It's not the case today.
Besides, we have a long coastline for our land area compared to the US, a bunch of strong tidal races, plenty of opportunity for wave energy, and in Shetland we have the most efficient wind farms in the world. Solar isn't even on our radar.
I think the same is true in the UK - you can get the bog standard set free from the NHS, or you can pay out of your own pocket for a more expensive set.
The problem for my mum is that for her, that's not an optional upgrade. She needs the background noise filtering functions in her expensive hearing aids in order to hear.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, there is a huge amount of variety when it comes to bricks, rope and tiles. Nails aren't entirely homogenous either.
Second, patents last a maximum of 20 years. A patent granted on a brick in the First World War would have expired before the Second World War. History wouldn't really look all that different.
The problem with your approach is that you're relying on the government to decide what items are necessities. In the UK, politicians seem to think that it's not necessary to wash, because most personal hygiene products are subject to the full 20% VAT rate (although they concede that it's more difficult to avoid menstruation, as 'feminine hygiene' products are subject to the reduced 5% rate). You can't buy these items second-hand. Likewise for other domestic cleaning products, and almost any consumable that isn't for human consumption.
Do you regard electricity as one of life's necessities? How about gas or oil for heating? 5% VAT. The government thinks that heating your home during the winter is somewhat optional. You can't buy energy second-hand.
Second-hand purchases are a solution, but only if you buy from people you know. eBay? That's a long way for a shortcut, seeing as you need a computer and an internet connection (both subject to 20% VAT). Second hand store? They're have to charge VAT on the items they sell. And if you buy from a man on a street corner, you're not going to receive any kind of warranty, so you could end up out-of-pocket further down the line.
One of the mantras you hear regularly from libertarian types on Slashdot is, "I know how to spend my own money better than the government does". I think the same applies here. Poor people know what the necessities are, far better than the government does. If you scrap VAT, raise the personal allowance to £10,000 (as the Lib Dems recently proposed) and raise the standard and higher rates of income tax, you can ensure that the poorest people have what they need to live a normal life, while still giving an incentive to earn more.
I'm fine with not taxing people who are living off a big pot of savings. Income tax should already have been paid on that money.
If you're referring to the various ways that rich people with expensive accountants can avoid paying tax, then yes I acknowledge that problem. I would rather that the government invested time and effort into closing those loopholes (which they have an incentive to do), rather than attempting to overhaul the tax system in the way that you are proposing, where the government is incentivised to fiddle with the 'necessities' list in a way that impacts the poorest.
Now you're just being obtuse. What you describe is a regressive tax, and is the most unfair method of taxation in existence because it isn't linked with a person's ability to pay.
You're not the only person who has described such a system as 'fair' before. Margaret Thatcher did. It was called the Community Charge, but more commonly known as the Poll Tax.
When it was introduced in Scotland (a year earlier than in the rest of the UK), it led to mass non-payment and civil disobedience. It's one of the reasons that the Conservatives are now almost unelectable in Scotland, and 'Thatcher' is a dirty word here. The fact that the Scottish wing of the party (what is left of it) is debating whether or not to split from the UK party and undergo a massive rebranding exercise is in part a legacy of the Poll Tax.
And finally...
To use your argument against you, a university education is an optional purchase.
The problem with that idea is that you're going to end up with a system that raises taxes for the poorest people and lowers them for the richest. That won't go down well with the majority of the population.
You can't explain it away with exemptions for 'necessities'. You'll end up in a situation where the food you buy is deemed a necessity, but the oven in which to cook it and the the plates off of which to eat it are not. The strictest definition of a necessity, which is the definition that a tax system would use, does not cover the necessities of modern life.
What utter nonsense. The government is going to take its percentage at some point anyway, unless you're thinking of being buried with your money. It might as well be done in a way that lets the percentage taken be proportional to the amount that you earn.
Stallman's problem, in my opinion, is that he's looking at things in terms of good and evil, when really they are just two different ways of doing things... and I think he's just a bit pissed off that Jobs' way of doing things has been both successful and different than his. Stallman seems very intolerant of opinions that are different than his own.
It doesn't matter how you say it or how you qualify it - saying "I'm glad he's gone" immediately after someone has died is a horrible thing to do.
The correct time to make these remarks would have been after he resigned his post as CEO of Apple in August, or perhaps after he went on medical leave back in January. If he'd said it then, it would have been in the context of Jobs leaving the company, and in that case I'd respect his opinion even if I didn't agree with it.
But saying it now is just disgusting, and Stallman's credibility as a spokesperson has to take another huge knock for this.
Charles Babbage never really accomplished anything. His designs were revolutionary, but no revolution happened because the entire project was a financial disaster. Today's computers have no direct relation to Babbage's designs, and we would be at the exact same technological level even if he had never existed.
Babbage's work is a historical curiosity, and a window into a world that might have been. Nothing more.
The transition from Facebook to The Next Big Thing isn't going to happen in the same way as such transition's have happened before (LiveJournal/Bebo/MySpace to Facebook/Twitter). The social networks of the past were largely populated by people of a certain age and/or with a certain level of technological literacy. This isn't the case with Facebook. Facebook is populated by many people for whom Facebook is their first and only social network. The sheer number of Facebook users alone makes it hard for any move to another platform to happen, and the entrenchment of the first-time social network users makes it virtually impossible.
Much as I love G+, time won't help it, because the social network churn will no longer take place. The only thing that will stop Facebook is when people eventually tire of the concept.
Have you tried using Google's 'switch account' feature? I'm using it at the moment, since my main account is an Apps account. It's still a bit of a faff to switch accounts whenever I want to use G+, but it's only four clicks, as opposed to logging out of one account and then logging in to the other.
I want to quote a part of the summary that is being missed by a lot of people who are putting forward an argument similar to yours (emphasis mine):
Small companies won't fire thousands of employees at a time, because they don't have thousands of employees to fire. They certainly won't fire employees based on a brief downturn in numbers - it costs a small business a huge amount of resources in order to train somebody up, so they tend to hold on to people during dips so that they can cope when things pick up.
And the directors don't usually have to justify themselves to shareholders, because they are the shareholders.
I think "practically outside my front door" is awfully close. You'd have to be very careful that your work life doesn't encroach on your home life with that kind of proximity.
I would also make sure to get out enough. Get out of the office and go home for lunch, now that you can. And make sure to get out of the immediate area sometimes, preferably by walking or cycling. Aside from the physical exercise, it helps to move around a bit to avoid cabin fever setting in.
Actually I think the example of the ThinkPad X60 used by another commenter was more salient, as it referred to an actual product for sale, as opposed to a concept in an academic environment. I'm assuming of course that the UoT never commercialised it.
That's irrelevant, as we're talking about a trademark, not a patent. The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.
And obviously, the fact that it's generic, which is what the ruling came down to.
I have a problem with this. Programming is not science, so 'computer science' is a complete misnomer. 'Information technology' more accurately describes what a programmer actually does.
What if the parachute catches the hot air in the crater, and gets pushed back out again? (I don't know if this is possible, but I like the idea.)
In any case, I wouldn't want to descend gently into a pit of lava. I'd want to hit it as fast as I possible could.
Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up for me. I was basing my assumption on the text of the licence, which at no point mentions 'linking to'. Here is how it defines a derivative work:
However, if the prevailing interpretation is that linking must occur, and if that's an interpretation that the copyright holders are happy with, then fair enough.
It's not irrelevant, it's the core tenet of the GPL.
Emphasis mine. Android's Apache-licensed sections are not being distributed as separate works.
What I'm curious about is, do the current limits of NFC payment systems apply to this?
I have a Visa PayWave debit card, and I can't make purchases with the NFC portion of it if the total is greater than £15. That's fine for the card, because it also works as a Chip&PIN card. But that's not possible with a phone.
To cut a long story short, unless/until the £15 limit goes away, you're still going to have to carry a regular card in a regular wallet.
Define 'separate'. They're certainly not separate when you download the Android development environment, which includes an Android emulator. It's shipped as one cohesive product. Whatever separation is kept in Google's development labs is irrelevant - they are being distributed as one product, and the GPL is a licence that is concerned with distribution.
Here's what I think. I think that the people who would normally be up in arms about this are also heavily invested in Android, both financially and emotionally. They own Android devices and love them. They are not about to point out the elephant in the room.
Precisely my point. Who is going to go up against Google's lawyers over a GPL violation?
That's not quite accurate, because the GPL doesn't limit what you can or can't run on a Linux system. What it does limit is what you can distribute.
I understand that the Apache licence on its own allows this, but it's irrelevant because that licence is not being used in isolation. The GPL imposes its restrictions on all the source code of a derivative work, so even the code that was originally Apache licensed needs to comply with the terms of the GPL.
After doing a bit more reading, I'm now even more confused, because the FSF considers the GPLv2 and the Apache licence to be mutually incompatible. So with its current licensing, Google shouldn't be able to ship Android at all.
What I don't understand is, how can they get away with not publishing the 3.0 source code now? It's software built on Linux, which is GPLv2, and it's being shipped as a complete product, so surely they're required by the terms of the kernel licence to license everything under the GPL?
I've never heard a satisfactory answer to this, other than "It's Google, who's going to stop them?"
The point about USB on tablets (not just the iPad, but also the majority of Android tablets) isn't that there is no point in having it. It's that, on balance, it doesn't make sense to include it because it means making trade-offs in other areas. Either the tablet has to become larger to accomodate the port and chipset, or the battery has to become smaller.
I'm assuming, of course, that we're talking about the full-size USB-A port. If they were to do things properly, tablets with USB would use the Micro-USB-A port, but cables with this connector are extremely rare, and most people wouldn't realise that it wasn't a proprietary port.
The wonders of the market mean that you can get a tablet with a USB-A port (or at least you will be able to in the near future). I'm pretty sure Toshiba is coming out with one soon. But you have to accept that your needs might not be the same as those of the market as a whole.
We're coming close to the point where USB won't be necessary for most things anyway. Keyboards and mice have been wireless for a while now, and wireless printers are now available. Wireless storage solutions exist. Personally, the only thing I use USB for any more is charging my phone. Oh, and copying photos off my camera - again, something that can be done wirelessly these days if you have the right kit.
Cloudy, yes. But the UK's reputation for being foggy comes from the 19th century when our cities were heavily polluted, due to coal-fired steam power being the primary source of energy. Fogs were frequent because they would form around the soot particles produced. It's not the case today.
Besides, we have a long coastline for our land area compared to the US, a bunch of strong tidal races, plenty of opportunity for wave energy, and in Shetland we have the most efficient wind farms in the world. Solar isn't even on our radar.
I think the same is true in the UK - you can get the bog standard set free from the NHS, or you can pay out of your own pocket for a more expensive set.
The problem for my mum is that for her, that's not an optional upgrade. She needs the background noise filtering functions in her expensive hearing aids in order to hear.
No. I download all my Kindle books using Kindle for Mac (KfPC would also do the job) and back up those files myself. Amazon can't touch them.
Impractical, and you know it.
Does Slashdot have anything other than a front page? I thought all articles were listed in chronological order.