The government (well the AU government anyway) doesn't want to apply tax to money you've earned that you give to charities.
In AU (and possibly other places), a "tax write off" doesn't really directly reduce your tax at all. What it does is reduces your taxable income, IOW, the income that tax is calculated against. For example, if, before tax, you've earned $30 000, and you donate $2000 to a charity, your taxable income then becomes $28 000. The government is being charitable itself, in saying that they don't want a tax slice of the $2000 you've donated.
Another way to look at it is that your taxable salary is your "profit" for working - you're allowed to make tax deductions on things necessary to generate that salary "profit". For example, being in IT, I can claim Internet access, IT Books etc. All these tax deductions are not reducing my tax, they are reducing the portion of my salary that I'll pay tax on.
So, if you want to pay no tax, give away all of your salary to a Charity until your taxable salary is below the taxable salary threshold eg. in AU, $6000 p.a.
I'm fairly sure that companies have the same general options - if they donate part of their profit to charity, they don't pay tax on their donations. Of course, they could give away all of their profit to a charity, pay no tax, but also not pay the shareholders any increase in their investment (dividend, increased stock price via stock buy back).
I'm not accountant so I could be somewhat wrong about the above. I am fairly sure about the concept of tax deductions not "directly reducing" your tax though - I used to think that way, as I think a lot of other people do. It's all about reducing your taxable income.
ten million dollars in the proper kind of accounts, you can live on the interest.
Where did the ten million come from in the first place ? If it came from a stock sale, then they paid tax on it. The ten million is after tax, so they might have had to sell $15 to
$20 million worth of stock to have $10 million after paying tax.
Governments aren't that stupid. Such an obvious loophole as a way to "avoid" paying tax that is typically applied to salaries would have been plugged many years ago.
And people also seem to think getting for example, $1M in stock is the same as getting $1M in cash salary. Of course it is not, because stock needs to be sold before it has any actual, spendable value, and it is during the conversion from stock to cash that the government will stick their nose it to tax it.
The Google guys will probably need to periodically sell stock so that they can "live" - a salary of $1 p.a. isn't going to pay many bills.
Because, if they are only getting a salary of $1 p.a., that is the only cash they'll have available to buy food with. I suppose they could eat their Google stock certificates.
Of course, the stock certificates are probably a bit tasteless, so if they need money to buy food etc., they'll need to sell some of their Google stock. Then the government has a tax go at the gains from those profits made on the stock sales.
This is the third time I'm making this point in this thread. It surprises me that a lot of Slashdotters don't seem to understand even the fundamentals of what stock are, what a salary is, and why having a very low salary and a lot of stock doesn't magically mean that (a) you have money in your pocket to live off of and (b) that stock isn't money in the bank - you have to sell your stock (which means reduce your ownership of the company) to convert the stock into cash.
They'll only get "income" if and when they sell Google stock they own. As they're only getting $1 p.a. as a salary, that'll probably be pretty soon (or rather, I think I read they each sold some a while back.
If they are only getting $1 p.a. salary, then the only way they're going to be able to afford to eat is to sell stock. Assuming the US tax system is similar enough to how Australia works, I'd think that the proceeds of the stock sales would be taxed very similarly to the way salary income would is, and therefore would be paying for the same government services that anybody else would be. IOW, I'd doubt they are avoiding tax at all.
What you are worth, and what money you have available to spend are two different things. For example, Bill Gates might be worth $60B, however, the only way he could spend that (assuming he actually could), is to sell off his major ownership of Microsoft. Quite obviously (or maybe it isn't to most slashdotters?), he wouldn't have $60B cash sitting in his bank account, waiting for him to hit the ATM.
Cringely, in his book, "Accidental Empires" talks about this. Although industry history wise it is starting to get quite dated, I think there is a lot of value in the general, timeless observations he makes.
He classifies R&D to have the fundamental purpose of researching and developing products that will be marketable in the relatively near future, for example 2 to 3 years. All companies do this, how "future" oriented they are about it would be where there are differences. Apple would be more future oriented than Dell, however, they are still both doing R&D.
He then defines "pure research" as research into things that won't necessarily have a near term pay off and may not ever evolve into a product. He says that pure research may add to the company's bottom line in something like 10 to 20 years. The main, immediate product of pure research is "intellectual" capital - having a group of people in the organisation with an advanced level of knowledge, and a patent portfolio, so that, although the rest of the industry may benefit and maybe moved forward by the research, the original company that paid for it can recoop some of their costs. In pure research, finding out something doesn't work is just as valuable as finding out something does.
Very few companies can afford to do pure research, because it costs a lot, and, in the short term, doesn't produce any profit. It may never directly produce a profit at all. Very few organisations can make enough profit that they can through money at pure research and yet still have their investors happy with the profits they produce. Governments can also support pure research, as they don't have to produce a profit at all.
Examples of companies that have performed pure research are fairly easy to identify - they have huge patent libraries. The canonical example is, of course, IBM. Lucent is another, although as a company they are declining, and it is likely that they'll stop doing pure research soon, if they already haven't. The author of this article suggests HP was another, although making inkjet printers smaller really isn't pure research, although not having a defined timeline doesn't quite make it R&D either. Finally, in recent years, Microsoft has created a pure research group.
Right now, I consider 2.6 not stable enough for my own use. If I cannot compile and boot a Linus kernel on a simple install of GNU/Linux (whether SuSE or Debian) without major headaches and/or chasing down patches, well, that's not stable enough for me. YMMV.
I have the same philosophy regarding kernel stability, yet I've been running comping and installing 2.6, in the manner you describe, since 2.6.0, and have had no issues at all. No patches, purely the major 2.6 releases.
If you aren't running it, and aren't even trying to, what criteria are you using to judge that 2.6 isn't stable enough for you ?
truck driver or collector for the paper that has to be "securely" destroyed.
If the security measures implemented by the secure destruction company e.g., background checks, are weaker than those of the organisation that is paying the secure destruction company, then there is a weak point in the security that can be exploited. We commonly hear that security guard jobs etc., are relatively low paid, so the background checks aren't very thorough, or rather, as thorough as they need to be for what they're being trusted with or to do.
Or, if the information is worth enough to them, the social engineer might hire a shed in an industrial area for a day, and then convince the drivers of the secure destruction facility to use it for a day, because the main facility supposedly has a plausable fault of some kind, and can't be used.
I consider The Art of Deception to be up there with Bruce Schneier's two books, Secrets and Lies, and Beyond Fear. It is a real eye-opener on the techniques a social engineer can use, and should be mandatory reading for anybody entering the infosec field. You can be pretty sure that he has used all the techniques described, just that the names, places and times have been changed to protect the innocent.
If you choose to get it, look for the "lost" Chapter 1 on the Internet.
I've also noticed that his new book, The Art of Intrusion has just been released. I'm sure I'll get it in the near future.
So lets ban them. All I ever hear on the news is people getting shot. I'm aware that some people might not use guns to shoot other people, however, I never hear of them on the news, so 99% of the use of guns must be to shoot people.
Of course, the 99% figure I'm assuming is probably wrong. You don't hear on the news that people aren't using guns to shoot people, because it isn't news worthy. There are plenty of farmers here in Australia who have guns, and use them to shoot vermin, including kangaroos (with appropriate permission).
My point is this; just because you hear about P2P being used a lot for IP violation, doesn't necessarily mean that it is being used substancially for that purpose, or that it should be banned. It may only be that you are hearing only one part of the figures. Don't extended those figures to represent the whole use.
If you want legal software you can go to sourceforge or download.com or wherever it is distributed. If you want legal music there are places for that.
What if you don't want to host your project on one of those sites, because you don't want to abide by their terms and conditions ? Say your software is really popular. How are you going to afford the bandwidth needed to distribute it ? An OC3 from an ISP is many, many thousands of dollars per month. What alternative have you got to share you software. Oh, that's right, peer to peer file sharing software. Too bad that in the future, you might be banned from using it, completely preventing you from sharing your software with anybody at all.
The design of the Internet is of a peer to peer nature because every device assigned an IP address was assumed to have an equal capability to send an IP packet to other IP nodes as receive them. If every device can equally send and receive to every other device, then the devices are equal, or peers.
The only difference between these peers is the bandwidth of their attachments to the network. However, that difference occurs at the link layer, not the network layer or IP layer. A the IP layer they are peers.
Technologies such as NAT have broken this design assumption. People now have to put the "peer to peer" nature back by coming up with work arounds, such as port forwarding etc. Sadly, this work on work arounds takes programmer time away from adding extra useful features, or fixing bugs. NAT is a cost that public address space and a standard firewall can avoid.
One of the reasons why IPv6 is important is that it will restore the peer to peer nature of the Internet, as NAT work arounds won't be necessary.
It's going to look like I changed my Slashdot signature just because of this story. Actually, I realised the design of the Internet was peer to peer a while ago, and changed my signature to reflect that, also a while ago. Here's something I wrote with it as my email signature last Sunday.
There are only two reasons why they would still be using their 1999 hardware, and I'm curious which one it is
Their capacity needs haven't grown since 1999, so the machine they bought then is also exactly the right size for today.
They were taken for a ride by their Sun rep, and bought hardware that had excess capacity, even for today.
I suppose 2. above is OK, 1999 was around the middle of the Internet boom, money was burning holes in peoples' pockets.
Or is your point that the hardware is very reliable ? Suns should be, for the price you pay, however I wouldn't think that property is unique to Sun. I have old Western Digital (SMC) 1992 ethernet cards that still work today.
I've also seen some unreliable Sun hardware. A few years ago in a team I worked with, they bought a number of Ultra 5s and Ultra 450s. I remember on certainly more than one occasion the sysadmin sending the box back to Sun because the CPU (or one of in the 450) had died./p.
I'm sure the government is now trying to work out how to get the voice telcos to report that their voice networks can be used to arrange child abductions by groups of pedophiles too.
award them for creating the TCP layer, which breaks down massively under (non-congestion related) packet loss?
The greatest majority of traffic on the Internet is TCP acknowledgments (35%), meaning that TCP is the most used transport layer protocol of the few other alternatives. If it is as bad as you say it is, why is everybody using it ?
If you're such an expert, spend time fixing the problems you think exist, by contributing to the IETF, rather than running an IRC server, and complaining anonymously about DDoS attacks on slashdot.
General design philosophy is that "core" anything shouldn't have ACLs, as they inhibit performance.
ACLs on a core device is usually a sign that a non-optimal design is being used. Push the ACLs to towards the edge if you can, so traffic is dropped as early as possible. It also distributes the ACL processing load across many more devices, by distributing subsets of the network ACL set to those devices, rather than concentrating the network ACL set on a more central device.
Slashdot Mirror
Although you might not find what the Slashdot option you are looking for.
Thanks.
The government (well the AU government anyway) doesn't want to apply tax to money you've earned that you give to charities.
In AU (and possibly other places), a "tax write off" doesn't really directly reduce your tax at all. What it does is reduces your taxable income, IOW, the income that tax is calculated against. For example, if, before tax, you've earned $30 000, and you donate $2000 to a charity, your taxable income then becomes $28 000. The government is being charitable itself, in saying that they don't want a tax slice of the $2000 you've donated.
Another way to look at it is that your taxable salary is your "profit" for working - you're allowed to make tax deductions on things necessary to generate that salary "profit". For example, being in IT, I can claim Internet access, IT Books etc. All these tax deductions are not reducing my tax, they are reducing the portion of my salary that I'll pay tax on.
So, if you want to pay no tax, give away all of your salary to a Charity until your taxable salary is below the taxable salary threshold eg. in AU, $6000 p.a.
I'm fairly sure that companies have the same general options - if they donate part of their profit to charity, they don't pay tax on their donations. Of course, they could give away all of their profit to a charity, pay no tax, but also not pay the shareholders any increase in their investment (dividend, increased stock price via stock buy back).
I'm not accountant so I could be somewhat wrong about the above. I am fairly sure about the concept of tax deductions not "directly reducing" your tax though - I used to think that way, as I think a lot of other people do. It's all about reducing your taxable income.
ten million dollars in the proper kind of accounts, you can live on the interest.
Where did the ten million come from in the first place ? If it came from a stock sale, then they paid tax on it. The ten million is after tax, so they might have had to sell $15 to $20 million worth of stock to have $10 million after paying tax.
Governments aren't that stupid. Such an obvious loophole as a way to "avoid" paying tax that is typically applied to salaries would have been plugged many years ago.
And people also seem to think getting for example, $1M in stock is the same as getting $1M in cash salary. Of course it is not, because stock needs to be sold before it has any actual, spendable value, and it is during the conversion from stock to cash that the government will stick their nose it to tax it.
The Google guys will probably need to periodically sell stock so that they can "live" - a salary of $1 p.a. isn't going to pay many bills.
Because, if they are only getting a salary of $1 p.a., that is the only cash they'll have available to buy food with. I suppose they could eat their Google stock certificates.
Of course, the stock certificates are probably a bit tasteless, so if they need money to buy food etc., they'll need to sell some of their Google stock. Then the government has a tax go at the gains from those profits made on the stock sales.
This is the third time I'm making this point in this thread. It surprises me that a lot of Slashdotters don't seem to understand even the fundamentals of what stock are, what a salary is, and why having a very low salary and a lot of stock doesn't magically mean that (a) you have money in your pocket to live off of and (b) that stock isn't money in the bank - you have to sell your stock (which means reduce your ownership of the company) to convert the stock into cash.
They'll only get "income" if and when they sell Google stock they own. As they're only getting $1 p.a. as a salary, that'll probably be pretty soon (or rather, I think I read they each sold some a while back.
If they are only getting $1 p.a. salary, then the only way they're going to be able to afford to eat is to sell stock. Assuming the US tax system is similar enough to how Australia works, I'd think that the proceeds of the stock sales would be taxed very similarly to the way salary income would is, and therefore would be paying for the same government services that anybody else would be. IOW, I'd doubt they are avoiding tax at all.
What you are worth, and what money you have available to spend are two different things. For example, Bill Gates might be worth $60B, however, the only way he could spend that (assuming he actually could), is to sell off his major ownership of Microsoft. Quite obviously (or maybe it isn't to most slashdotters?), he wouldn't have $60B cash sitting in his bank account, waiting for him to hit the ATM.
Are they scared to say what they say and put their actual pseudonym or even their name to it ?
It certainly wasn't the Chinese !
I'm certainly not saying the Chinese are perfect, however, you post reads like you consider that the US is.
Because Jeff knows what he is talking about. He can't afford not to :-)
Cringely, in his book, "Accidental Empires" talks about this. Although industry history wise it is starting to get quite dated, I think there is a lot of value in the general, timeless observations he makes.
He classifies R&D to have the fundamental purpose of researching and developing products that will be marketable in the relatively near future, for example 2 to 3 years. All companies do this, how "future" oriented they are about it would be where there are differences. Apple would be more future oriented than Dell, however, they are still both doing R&D.
He then defines "pure research" as research into things that won't necessarily have a near term pay off and may not ever evolve into a product. He says that pure research may add to the company's bottom line in something like 10 to 20 years. The main, immediate product of pure research is "intellectual" capital - having a group of people in the organisation with an advanced level of knowledge, and a patent portfolio, so that, although the rest of the industry may benefit and maybe moved forward by the research, the original company that paid for it can recoop some of their costs. In pure research, finding out something doesn't work is just as valuable as finding out something does.
Very few companies can afford to do pure research, because it costs a lot, and, in the short term, doesn't produce any profit. It may never directly produce a profit at all. Very few organisations can make enough profit that they can through money at pure research and yet still have their investors happy with the profits they produce. Governments can also support pure research, as they don't have to produce a profit at all.
Examples of companies that have performed pure research are fairly easy to identify - they have huge patent libraries. The canonical example is, of course, IBM. Lucent is another, although as a company they are declining, and it is likely that they'll stop doing pure research soon, if they already haven't. The author of this article suggests HP was another, although making inkjet printers smaller really isn't pure research, although not having a defined timeline doesn't quite make it R&D either. Finally, in recent years, Microsoft has created a pure research group.
Right now, I consider 2.6 not stable enough for my own use. If I cannot compile and boot a Linus kernel on a simple install of GNU/Linux (whether SuSE or Debian) without major headaches and/or chasing down patches, well, that's not stable enough for me. YMMV.
I have the same philosophy regarding kernel stability, yet I've been running comping and installing 2.6, in the manner you describe, since 2.6.0, and have had no issues at all. No patches, purely the major 2.6 releases.
If you aren't running it, and aren't even trying to, what criteria are you using to judge that 2.6 isn't stable enough for you ?
truck driver or collector for the paper that has to be "securely" destroyed.
If the security measures implemented by the secure destruction company e.g., background checks, are weaker than those of the organisation that is paying the secure destruction company, then there is a weak point in the security that can be exploited. We commonly hear that security guard jobs etc., are relatively low paid, so the background checks aren't very thorough, or rather, as thorough as they need to be for what they're being trusted with or to do.
Or, if the information is worth enough to them, the social engineer might hire a shed in an industrial area for a day, and then convince the drivers of the secure destruction facility to use it for a day, because the main facility supposedly has a plausable fault of some kind, and can't be used.
I consider The Art of Deception to be up there with Bruce Schneier's two books, Secrets and Lies, and Beyond Fear. It is a real eye-opener on the techniques a social engineer can use, and should be mandatory reading for anybody entering the infosec field. You can be pretty sure that he has used all the techniques described, just that the names, places and times have been changed to protect the innocent.
If you choose to get it, look for the "lost" Chapter 1 on the Internet.
I've also noticed that his new book, The Art of Intrusion has just been released. I'm sure I'll get it in the near future.
So lets ban them. All I ever hear on the news is people getting shot. I'm aware that some people might not use guns to shoot other people, however, I never hear of them on the news, so 99% of the use of guns must be to shoot people.
Of course, the 99% figure I'm assuming is probably wrong. You don't hear on the news that people aren't using guns to shoot people, because it isn't news worthy. There are plenty of farmers here in Australia who have guns, and use them to shoot vermin, including kangaroos (with appropriate permission).
My point is this; just because you hear about P2P being used a lot for IP violation, doesn't necessarily mean that it is being used substancially for that purpose, or that it should be banned. It may only be that you are hearing only one part of the figures. Don't extended those figures to represent the whole use.
If you want legal software you can go to sourceforge or download.com or wherever it is distributed. If you want legal music there are places for that.
What if you don't want to host your project on one of those sites, because you don't want to abide by their terms and conditions ? Say your software is really popular. How are you going to afford the bandwidth needed to distribute it ? An OC3 from an ISP is many, many thousands of dollars per month. What alternative have you got to share you software. Oh, that's right, peer to peer file sharing software. Too bad that in the future, you might be banned from using it, completely preventing you from sharing your software with anybody at all.
The design of the Internet is of a peer to peer nature because every device assigned an IP address was assumed to have an equal capability to send an IP packet to other IP nodes as receive them. If every device can equally send and receive to every other device, then the devices are equal, or peers.
The only difference between these peers is the bandwidth of their attachments to the network. However, that difference occurs at the link layer, not the network layer or IP layer. A the IP layer they are peers.
Technologies such as NAT have broken this design assumption. People now have to put the "peer to peer" nature back by coming up with work arounds, such as port forwarding etc. Sadly, this work on work arounds takes programmer time away from adding extra useful features, or fixing bugs. NAT is a cost that public address space and a standard firewall can avoid.
One of the reasons why IPv6 is important is that it will restore the peer to peer nature of the Internet, as NAT work arounds won't be necessary.
It's going to look like I changed my Slashdot signature just because of this story. Actually, I realised the design of the Internet was peer to peer a while ago, and changed my signature to reflect that, also a while ago. Here's something I wrote with it as my email signature last Sunday.
I figured he might be. Does that mean I trolled a troll ?
Cause I think you're a Solaris addict !
There are only two reasons why they would still be using their 1999 hardware, and I'm curious which one it is
Their capacity needs haven't grown since 1999, so the machine they bought then is also exactly the right size for today.
They were taken for a ride by their Sun rep, and bought hardware that had excess capacity, even for today.
I suppose 2. above is OK, 1999 was around the middle of the Internet boom, money was burning holes in peoples' pockets.
Or is your point that the hardware is very reliable ? Suns should be, for the price you pay, however I wouldn't think that property is unique to Sun. I have old Western Digital (SMC) 1992 ethernet cards that still work today.
I've also seen some unreliable Sun hardware. A few years ago in a team I worked with, they bought a number of Ultra 5s and Ultra 450s. I remember on certainly more than one occasion the sysadmin sending the box back to Sun because the CPU (or one of in the 450) had died./p.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I'm sure the government is now trying to work out how to get the voice telcos to report that their voice networks can be used to arrange child abductions by groups of pedophiles too.
OSI copied IP, according to Dr Radia Perlman in Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols, 2nd Edition. And if you don't know who she is, I'd suggest you spend some time finding out.
award them for creating the TCP layer, which breaks down massively under (non-congestion related) packet loss?
The greatest majority of traffic on the Internet is TCP acknowledgments (35%), meaning that TCP is the most used transport layer protocol of the few other alternatives. If it is as bad as you say it is, why is everybody using it ?
If you're such an expert, spend time fixing the problems you think exist, by contributing to the IETF, rather than running an IRC server, and complaining anonymously about DDoS attacks on slashdot.
General design philosophy is that "core" anything shouldn't have ACLs, as they inhibit performance.
ACLs on a core device is usually a sign that a non-optimal design is being used. Push the ACLs to towards the edge if you can, so traffic is dropped as early as possible. It also distributes the ACL processing load across many more devices, by distributing subsets of the network ACL set to those devices, rather than concentrating the network ACL set on a more central device.
This is a backhoe !