What part of this is hard for you to understand? Cause it seems to be pretty obvious to everyone else.
I think you need to come down from that high horse before you hurt yourself.
A sunlight readable screen, rugged, and low powered are desirable qualities in a laptop. Thanks to ASUS and others, no one expects to pay a premium for it.
Nice use of westerner stereotypes. So we all know that you're wrong and bigoted.
It turns out the organization had just been spun off the university into its own LLC and moved off campus. When we got to their office, the first thing they wanted from us was an NDA. We called bait-and-switch and asked them if they would mind signing an NDA for the ideas *we* would contribute. "That would defeat the purpose of this meeting," they told us.
So we signed, sat through a presentation of their work, gave no feedback and left. It wasn't that we were paranoid of them stealing our work, it was that we refused to get played like that.
I am not a lawyer:
It would be even better to just leave without signing the NDA. While it didn't seem to bite you, I can see this scenario biting someone else. Chances are they see you performing similar work, and wanted to merge your work with theirs. If you signed their NDA, you'll have to go through the extra step of proving your work doesn't incorporate any of their ideas after the information was disclosed.
Defending their accusations would be easier for a more established project (especially an open source one) that has already published previous work incorporating the contested ideas. However it's not cheap. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Still the NDA will effectively kill any unpublished work that may incorporate similar ideas disclosed (despite being developed in parallel without prior knowledge of information covered by the NDA).
In this day an age, I practice better safe than sorry.
Shipping containers are usually charged by the container, not by the weight.
Not true. Shipping containers are charged by the container, however the rate is set by the commodity being shipped. Weight and handling requirements are considered when quoting a rate.
In addition to the tariff container rate, there are additional fees to consider. Bunker (fuel surcharges), demurrage, and assorted handling and trucking fees are added to the freight bill (most are charged by MT and milage).
I've had ships hit it's mark on weight alone. This is why they have those handy waterlines (marks on the sides of the ship) to determine if we "bottomed out". A shipping company must take container weight in consideration to guarantee enough freight to justify the ship's lease and bunker.
Executive summary: Everybody should be able to work in a clean shop for a decent wage. I see tariffs on goods imported into the US as a solution. I like foreign corporations and have nothing against foreign workers. If it wasn't for foreign corporations (and governments) the US would be in worse shape. Now read on for the details:
What reason do you have to hate the rest of the world so much? If theres someone that can do your job better or cheaper, shouldn't he get it, regardless of what shithole country he is forced to live in?
No. He should get it because he's qualified. He should be making a wage that he can actually live on. He should work in a safe and clean environment. He should be an adult, and if he is a child he should be in school.
I'm not against foreign labor. Instead I'm against US companies who take advantage of the foreign market to bypass labor and safety regulations.
This is why we should tax and tariff the offending companies to compensate for the unfair differences in labor and environmental practices. It's a win-win for everybody.
Here's a secret most US corporations don't want the world to know. It's the quick access to foreign markets and the need to participate in the foreign market/society that drives US corporations to export labor. Not cheap labor. Unfortunately for the US workers, foreign labor is so cheap and the lack of environmental regulations make it cheaper to import the goods back into the US market rather than paying US workers to produce it.
Using my proposed system, the company's goods would be tariffed based on it's labor and environmental practices. A company that manufactures exclusively in China to take advantage of lax regulations would be severely taxed. While a Chinese corporation that pays a living wage to its employees and operate an environmentally friendly plant should be tariffed less.
Problem being that this system would be almost impossible to regulate, and would require human rights organizations and environmental activists to petition the US government to tariff the offending corporations.
My goal is not to punish foreign markets, but rather to eliminate the incentive for US corporations to completely export their labor. The idea being that if the corporation had to pay the expense of paying their employees a fair wage and running a clean shop, the transportation expense would make it less attractive to use foreign labor to produce US goods.
Hopefully corporations will hire more US employees, and produce more goods locally creating jobs, and stabilizing the economy. They will enjoy an advantage of selling goods to a country full of consumers while their US competitors pay the increase fees. Foreign markets will benefit from a more stable US economy.
I know this sounds a bit extreme, but the big difference between Europe and the US is that Europe actually believe that an employed populous is necessary for national security, while the US corporations see exporting labor as a way of increasing their profits.
Also, my seemingly isolationist solution would not create the result most US citizens expect. In fact, the US companies will be rushing to catch up with the Germans, Japanese, French, Australians and even the Chinese who hire American labor in the SouthEastern United States. If it wasn't for these foreign companies, the US would be in a worse economic state.
This is one time where new and shiny beats out old and dull.
But the application space isn't the same. Standing away from a computer to do a presentation does not equal sitting at a desk and performing work. You might as well have used touch-screens that are used at ATMs and grocery checkouts, as an example of the keyboard/mouse combo being replaced. Not to mention, ATMs and kiosks are quite mature and used in a lot of places.
The question you should ask is "Is using gestures or touch better than a laser pointer and a bluetooth remote?" We've been doing presentations quite well with a pedestal holding a keyboard and mouse. I would venture a guess that some people (myself included) get pretty annoyed at the presenter when he stands in front of what he is presenting. Even when we consider a classroom setting, I doubt touch technology would have a huge advantage. The instructor could simply use a keyboard/mouse at his podium and not get in his students way. Not to mention, he could sit rather than stand for the entire class session keeping his fatigue level in check...
Business presentations are not meant to be dynamic. They do turn into one on occasion (eg. Q&A), but most of the time they're designed to present a certain amount of information within the least amount of time. Using an expensive setup like CNN when a cheap bluetooth remote would work just as good doesn't sound like that great of an idea. Of course, we would have to revisit this question when gesture technology becomes as cheap as remotes.
Another question would be "Does the touchscreen or gesture technology increase productivity at the workstation as compared to the traditional keyboard/mouse?" This depends on how much new information is being inputted by the worker. I don't think touch-screens would work well for journalists. Just like a keyboard/mouse would not work well for a grocery store cashier.
The final question would be "Does the touchscreen or gesture technology reduce work related injuries like Carpal tunnel or repetitive injuries when compared to the tradition keyboard/mouse?" This can easily be answered by trying to keep your arms moving around a properly positioned screen for 8 hours. In this case, I see the monitor being located near the traditional location of the keyboard, rather than it current position of being vertical and away from the user. I would suspect that typing would become as painful as using an Atari 400 was back in the 1980's. (The Atari 400 had a hard flat touch keyboard.)
Touch screens have their place in Mobile computing. We give up the keyboard/mouse in exchange for lighter weight and better portability.
I consider the board that CNN used an upgrade to the green screen based system that weathermen have been using for years. Television news, unlike everyday business, spend money on technology that keeps their television personalities intermingled with the news. CNN even took this to the extreme with their "hologram" that eliminated all those pesky news making crowds at the Obama acceptance speech and just showed their news personality as a star wars character...
I also think that Apple's excessive control of the App store and lack of independent app stores are a disincentive for some application developers. However the ability to easily sell to the large number of iPhone and IPod touch owners is more than enough incentive for other developers to navigate the Apple minefield and make some money.
I think the biggest appeal of the App store is that it's designed as a way for software developers to make some extra money without leaving their day jobs.
I also think that your OTA podcasts is a weak example of Apple being the bad guy. Software that does nothing more than add a missing feature to an existing application are often short lived in the market place. Anyway, why wouldn't Apple already have OTA updates in mind for their iPhone?
First of all I was addressing your over simplification of TCP.
Anyway, BT seems to counter your view of congestion mitigation belongs in the app layer. The premise being that since BT moved to UDP, network congestion has actually risen.
TCP was never meant to be a catch-all for all congestion/error free transmission. However if you intend to replace it with UDP, you better at least come up with a better method to manage the connection. Which BT has seemed to fail at doing.
The problem most (if not all) applications is focused at solving is "How do I send my data that suits my needs", where TCP is designed for "How do I send my data reliably AND without using too much of a shared resource". That is a huge different in philosophy. Of course we could simply allow the network mitigate the congestion for us, oh wait that's what BT is trying to circumvent now...
If your network depends on well-defined slow start behavior... well, that's a shame, isn't it. Light up some more fiber and send Cisco some more bucks.
Amateurs throw money at the problem, while the pro's make good use of the resources readily available...
You are not, I assume, trying to claim that Social Security INSURANCE should be paid to the lucky chap that gets to retire at 26....
Why not? If he paid social security, he can start receiving his checks when he reaches 65 years old (or 63).
There are retirement (pension) plans with minimum age requirements, and there are plans based solely on the number of years worked (full-time) at a particular employer (commonly 20 years).
Either way unless your lucky chap started working fulltime at the age of 6, he will be retiring on his own dime.
So true. However the ISP favorite two words are "up to". As in experience data rate up to 6mbps. Technically this makes the range of valid values from 0 to 6mbps.
Telephone companies where very clear that you should go with them because you don't have to share a line.
Marketing half-truth. True you don't share the connection with the ISP with any other customer (thank goodness, the connection is crappy enough), however once it is in the PBX you share the available bandwidth with others in your neighborhood.
So the only difference between cable and telephone (besides the transmission medium) is the point where sharing occurs (cable trunk vs. PBX).
I think you may need to reacquaint yourself with RFC 2581. There are actually four methods being used to mitigate congestion.
Thinking only in terms of retransmitting failed packets is probably why most UDP based applications, using some developer's idea of a better way to send data, actually cause more network congestion.
Except that one of the cool things about UDP is that it doesn't have to get through, so your router can drop all it needs to if it starts saturating your bandwidth. UDP has no guarantee of reliability at all.
Not taking TCP's congestion mitigation in consideration, a TCP packet has an equal chance of being dropped as a UDP packet. The difference being that TCP uses ACKs to see what was the last packet that was successfully received and retransmits as necessary, while UDP leaves the reliability issues up to the application. In most cases where UDP is chosen as the protocol, the application cares more about trying to deliver the current packet than trying to redeliver old packets. The effect being that UDP packets are allowed to quietly die during the delivery attempt.
I think going to UDP would be cool for another reason: there's not all the setup and teardown for connection.
This is where you "hit the nail on the head" so to speak. The lack of connection overhead makes UDP appealing on the application level and why I use UDP a lot in my control programs. However this low overhead comes at a price of flow control. So the issue isn't really how reliable the packet transmission is (remember bittorrent does an adequate job of guarantying that the file makes it to its destination complete, in-order, and without errors), instead it's about congestion control which TCP provides and bittorrent apparently doesn't do well enough.
Not to mention, the economy is turning sour and credit is getting hard for established corporations to get. Just imagine how hard it may be for you to get the needed capital infusion.
One nice thing about being the employee is that your employer absorbs most of the risks:
Software doesn't work for a customer - Employer eats the cost on getting it to work - you still get paid.
Sales are down - Employer must maintain investment in infrastructure - you still get paid (at least for the moment).
Then there's the other thing... A good software developer is often not the same as a good businessman. Different skill set.
In addition, there are potential risks that you are exposing yourself to if it doesn't work out. Like you will now need to find a new job in a downturn economy, and to top it off you have to explain to your future employer how you won't quit him and try to compete with a similar product (after using the employer to learn about the product and it's market). It's not like you quit your last employer to take a break from the programming or to pursue other projects, no you thought you could out smart your employer and beat him at his own game. I know that sounds harsh, but that is how your next employer may see it...
Strictly speaking the Vatican has no chance in hell of fighting off Great Britian
Well technically they have the Pontifical Swiss Guard that protects them, and it is presumed that God is on their side...
As for the Swiss, we've seen how advance their pocket knives are, and we don't want to know what other advance weaponry that may have !
But seriously, Sovereignty is established by international treaty and are usually enforced by allied nations (or nations designated within the treaty).
For the record Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit corporation owned by the Mozilla Foundation. All activities performed by MoCo and all revenues earned by MoCo are subject to the same tax laws as any other for-profit corporations like Google and Microsoft.
They give away the browser and spend all of their revenue on development. So, how much taxable profit did the Mozilla foundation make anyway?
BTW, the usual IANAL or a CPA applies:
Profit is profit, regardless on how it is used.
Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) was formed by the foundation as a for-profit corporation in 2005 to handle the revenue from the Google deal (at least that is how I understand it). Anyway, according to the article even the Mozilla Foundation knew there would be some tax consequences involved with forming the new venture and had already set aside tax reserve fund for the 2004/2005 fiscal year.
In the same article, it states that "Mozilla has a bit of spare cash in its tax reserve - $14,832,000 at the end of 2007." That is a considerable amount of profit for a taxable corporation with only one real product that is basically free to the public. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is unusual and bound to raise more than a couple of eye brows.
In addition to the large profit being made by the corporation, the source of the income has come into question. Mozilla would like the revenue to be considered as royalty payments which may have serious tax advantages for Mozilla. If the IRS disagrees, this may mean that MoCo owes back-taxes and may need to reconsider how it budgets its current (and future) fiscal years.
Not to mention the red flag being raised by the fact that over 80% of the corporation's revenue is from Google. This may cause problems with some type of IRS litmus test used to determine the nature of the Mozilla-Google relationship.
Anyway, an IRS audit is routine for a corporation in Mozilla's situation and everything may turn out OK.
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I think you need to come down from that high horse before you hurt yourself.
A sunlight readable screen, rugged, and low powered are desirable qualities in a laptop. Thanks to ASUS and others, no one expects to pay a premium for it.
Nice use of westerner stereotypes. So we all know that you're wrong and bigoted.
I think after 90 days, your coupon becomes void and the money is used to issue a new coupon.
I am not a lawyer:
It would be even better to just leave without signing the NDA. While it didn't seem to bite you, I can see this scenario biting someone else. Chances are they see you performing similar work, and wanted to merge your work with theirs. If you signed their NDA, you'll have to go through the extra step of proving your work doesn't incorporate any of their ideas after the information was disclosed.
Defending their accusations would be easier for a more established project (especially an open source one) that has already published previous work incorporating the contested ideas. However it's not cheap. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Still the NDA will effectively kill any unpublished work that may incorporate similar ideas disclosed (despite being developed in parallel without prior knowledge of information covered by the NDA).
In this day an age, I practice better safe than sorry.
Not true. Shipping containers are charged by the container, however the rate is set by the commodity being shipped. Weight and handling requirements are considered when quoting a rate.
In addition to the tariff container rate, there are additional fees to consider. Bunker (fuel surcharges), demurrage, and assorted handling and trucking fees are added to the freight bill (most are charged by MT and milage).
I've had ships hit it's mark on weight alone. This is why they have those handy waterlines (marks on the sides of the ship) to determine if we "bottomed out". A shipping company must take container weight in consideration to guarantee enough freight to justify the ship's lease and bunker.
Executive summary: Everybody should be able to work in a clean shop for a decent wage. I see tariffs on goods imported into the US as a solution. I like foreign corporations and have nothing against foreign workers. If it wasn't for foreign corporations (and governments) the US would be in worse shape. Now read on for the details:
No. He should get it because he's qualified. He should be making a wage that he can actually live on. He should work in a safe and clean environment. He should be an adult, and if he is a child he should be in school.
I'm not against foreign labor. Instead I'm against US companies who take advantage of the foreign market to bypass labor and safety regulations.
This is why we should tax and tariff the offending companies to compensate for the unfair differences in labor and environmental practices. It's a win-win for everybody.
Here's a secret most US corporations don't want the world to know. It's the quick access to foreign markets and the need to participate in the foreign market/society that drives US corporations to export labor. Not cheap labor. Unfortunately for the US workers, foreign labor is so cheap and the lack of environmental regulations make it cheaper to import the goods back into the US market rather than paying US workers to produce it.
Using my proposed system, the company's goods would be tariffed based on it's labor and environmental practices. A company that manufactures exclusively in China to take advantage of lax regulations would be severely taxed. While a Chinese corporation that pays a living wage to its employees and operate an environmentally friendly plant should be tariffed less.
Problem being that this system would be almost impossible to regulate, and would require human rights organizations and environmental activists to petition the US government to tariff the offending corporations.
My goal is not to punish foreign markets, but rather to eliminate the incentive for US corporations to completely export their labor. The idea being that if the corporation had to pay the expense of paying their employees a fair wage and running a clean shop, the transportation expense would make it less attractive to use foreign labor to produce US goods.
Hopefully corporations will hire more US employees, and produce more goods locally creating jobs, and stabilizing the economy. They will enjoy an advantage of selling goods to a country full of consumers while their US competitors pay the increase fees. Foreign markets will benefit from a more stable US economy.
I know this sounds a bit extreme, but the big difference between Europe and the US is that Europe actually believe that an employed populous is necessary for national security, while the US corporations see exporting labor as a way of increasing their profits.
Also, my seemingly isolationist solution would not create the result most US citizens expect. In fact, the US companies will be rushing to catch up with the Germans, Japanese, French, Australians and even the Chinese who hire American labor in the SouthEastern United States. If it wasn't for these foreign companies, the US would be in a worse economic state.
OK. Why the anonymous coward? I'm logged in and the post Anonymously is not checked... -Bill_the_Engineer
Just reiterating what someone else pointed out:
The above is from May 2007...
But the application space isn't the same. Standing away from a computer to do a presentation does not equal sitting at a desk and performing work. You might as well have used touch-screens that are used at ATMs and grocery checkouts, as an example of the keyboard/mouse combo being replaced. Not to mention, ATMs and kiosks are quite mature and used in a lot of places.
The question you should ask is "Is using gestures or touch better than a laser pointer and a bluetooth remote?" We've been doing presentations quite well with a pedestal holding a keyboard and mouse. I would venture a guess that some people (myself included) get pretty annoyed at the presenter when he stands in front of what he is presenting. Even when we consider a classroom setting, I doubt touch technology would have a huge advantage. The instructor could simply use a keyboard/mouse at his podium and not get in his students way. Not to mention, he could sit rather than stand for the entire class session keeping his fatigue level in check...
Business presentations are not meant to be dynamic. They do turn into one on occasion (eg. Q&A), but most of the time they're designed to present a certain amount of information within the least amount of time. Using an expensive setup like CNN when a cheap bluetooth remote would work just as good doesn't sound like that great of an idea. Of course, we would have to revisit this question when gesture technology becomes as cheap as remotes.
Another question would be "Does the touchscreen or gesture technology increase productivity at the workstation as compared to the traditional keyboard/mouse?" This depends on how much new information is being inputted by the worker. I don't think touch-screens would work well for journalists. Just like a keyboard/mouse would not work well for a grocery store cashier.
The final question would be "Does the touchscreen or gesture technology reduce work related injuries like Carpal tunnel or repetitive injuries when compared to the tradition keyboard/mouse?" This can easily be answered by trying to keep your arms moving around a properly positioned screen for 8 hours. In this case, I see the monitor being located near the traditional location of the keyboard, rather than it current position of being vertical and away from the user. I would suspect that typing would become as painful as using an Atari 400 was back in the 1980's. (The Atari 400 had a hard flat touch keyboard.)
Touch screens have their place in Mobile computing. We give up the keyboard/mouse in exchange for lighter weight and better portability.
I consider the board that CNN used an upgrade to the green screen based system that weathermen have been using for years. Television news, unlike everyday business, spend money on technology that keeps their television personalities intermingled with the news. CNN even took this to the extreme with their "hologram" that eliminated all those pesky news making crowds at the Obama acceptance speech and just showed their news personality as a star wars character...
I also think that Apple's excessive control of the App store and lack of independent app stores are a disincentive for some application developers. However the ability to easily sell to the large number of iPhone and IPod touch owners is more than enough incentive for other developers to navigate the Apple minefield and make some money.
I think the biggest appeal of the App store is that it's designed as a way for software developers to make some extra money without leaving their day jobs.
I also think that your OTA podcasts is a weak example of Apple being the bad guy. Software that does nothing more than add a missing feature to an existing application are often short lived in the market place. Anyway, why wouldn't Apple already have OTA updates in mind for their iPhone?
Yea, but we get to grind while chatting with old friends and making new friends along the way.
Otherwise, I wouldn't need to be online.
Maybe you are looking at it the wrong way...
How about:
Guns don't rob banks, people use guns to rob banks.
Scripts don't cheat eBay, people use scripts to cheat eBay.
It's not the tool, it's how the tool is used.
First of all I was addressing your over simplification of TCP.
Anyway, BT seems to counter your view of congestion mitigation belongs in the app layer. The premise being that since BT moved to UDP, network congestion has actually risen.
TCP was never meant to be a catch-all for all congestion/error free transmission. However if you intend to replace it with UDP, you better at least come up with a better method to manage the connection. Which BT has seemed to fail at doing.
The problem most (if not all) applications is focused at solving is "How do I send my data that suits my needs", where TCP is designed for "How do I send my data reliably AND without using too much of a shared resource". That is a huge different in philosophy. Of course we could simply allow the network mitigate the congestion for us, oh wait that's what BT is trying to circumvent now...
Amateurs throw money at the problem, while the pro's make good use of the resources readily available...
Forgot about survivor benefits. Cool that's one more area we can make cuts.
The exception being that the widow(er) should be entitled to the retirement benefits paid for by the deceased.
Why not? If he paid social security, he can start receiving his checks when he reaches 65 years old (or 63).
There are retirement (pension) plans with minimum age requirements, and there are plans based solely on the number of years worked (full-time) at a particular employer (commonly 20 years).
Either way unless your lucky chap started working fulltime at the age of 6, he will be retiring on his own dime.
So true. However the ISP favorite two words are "up to". As in experience data rate up to 6mbps. Technically this makes the range of valid values from 0 to 6mbps.
Damn those weasel words...
Wrong. Social Security was always an Old-Age Survivor and Disability program. It also used to cover unemployment benefits.
Now it only covers O.A.S. (Retirement) and Disability. Unemployment is handled elsewhere.
Nice soapbox, too bad it's wrong.
Any person who paid into Social Security should be able to receive the benefits that they paid for when they retire.
Now giving out disability benefits to people not vested in the "insurance" program seems a more fair place to cut..
Marketing half-truth. True you don't share the connection with the ISP with any other customer (thank goodness, the connection is crappy enough), however once it is in the PBX you share the available bandwidth with others in your neighborhood.
So the only difference between cable and telephone (besides the transmission medium) is the point where sharing occurs (cable trunk vs. PBX).
I think you may need to reacquaint yourself with RFC 2581. There are actually four methods being used to mitigate congestion.
Thinking only in terms of retransmitting failed packets is probably why most UDP based applications, using some developer's idea of a better way to send data, actually cause more network congestion.
Not taking TCP's congestion mitigation in consideration, a TCP packet has an equal chance of being dropped as a UDP packet. The difference being that TCP uses ACKs to see what was the last packet that was successfully received and retransmits as necessary, while UDP leaves the reliability issues up to the application. In most cases where UDP is chosen as the protocol, the application cares more about trying to deliver the current packet than trying to redeliver old packets. The effect being that UDP packets are allowed to quietly die during the delivery attempt.
This is where you "hit the nail on the head" so to speak. The lack of connection overhead makes UDP appealing on the application level and why I use UDP a lot in my control programs. However this low overhead comes at a price of flow control. So the issue isn't really how reliable the packet transmission is (remember bittorrent does an adequate job of guarantying that the file makes it to its destination complete, in-order, and without errors), instead it's about congestion control which TCP provides and bittorrent apparently doesn't do well enough.
If we're going to put a lid on government spending, I would look at the entitlement programs, the war, and the economic bail out.
Not to mention, the economy is turning sour and credit is getting hard for established corporations to get. Just imagine how hard it may be for you to get the needed capital infusion.
One nice thing about being the employee is that your employer absorbs most of the risks:
Software doesn't work for a customer - Employer eats the cost on getting it to work - you still get paid.
Sales are down - Employer must maintain investment in infrastructure - you still get paid (at least for the moment).
Then there's the other thing... A good software developer is often not the same as a good businessman. Different skill set.
In addition, there are potential risks that you are exposing yourself to if it doesn't work out. Like you will now need to find a new job in a downturn economy, and to top it off you have to explain to your future employer how you won't quit him and try to compete with a similar product (after using the employer to learn about the product and it's market). It's not like you quit your last employer to take a break from the programming or to pursue other projects, no you thought you could out smart your employer and beat him at his own game. I know that sounds harsh, but that is how your next employer may see it...
Well technically they have the Pontifical Swiss Guard that protects them, and it is presumed that God is on their side...
As for the Swiss, we've seen how advance their pocket knives are, and we don't want to know what other advance weaponry that may have !
But seriously, Sovereignty is established by international treaty and are usually enforced by allied nations (or nations designated within the treaty).
For the record Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit corporation owned by the Mozilla Foundation. All activities performed by MoCo and all revenues earned by MoCo are subject to the same tax laws as any other for-profit corporations like Google and Microsoft.
BTW, the usual IANAL or a CPA applies:
Profit is profit, regardless on how it is used.
Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) was formed by the foundation as a for-profit corporation in 2005 to handle the revenue from the Google deal (at least that is how I understand it). Anyway, according to the article even the Mozilla Foundation knew there would be some tax consequences involved with forming the new venture and had already set aside tax reserve fund for the 2004/2005 fiscal year.
In the same article, it states that "Mozilla has a bit of spare cash in its tax reserve - $14,832,000 at the end of 2007." That is a considerable amount of profit for a taxable corporation with only one real product that is basically free to the public. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is unusual and bound to raise more than a couple of eye brows.
In addition to the large profit being made by the corporation, the source of the income has come into question. Mozilla would like the revenue to be considered as royalty payments which may have serious tax advantages for Mozilla. If the IRS disagrees, this may mean that MoCo owes back-taxes and may need to reconsider how it budgets its current (and future) fiscal years.
Not to mention the red flag being raised by the fact that over 80% of the corporation's revenue is from Google. This may cause problems with some type of IRS litmus test used to determine the nature of the Mozilla-Google relationship.
Anyway, an IRS audit is routine for a corporation in Mozilla's situation and everything may turn out OK.
IDL and MATLAB are the overlords at my office. Mostly IDL...