Well, I would be very interested in learning about this "extra" tax you speak about - I certainly can't find any reference to it anywhere. I have been ordering a fair bit of computer hardware over the past few years, and have never been charged anything by the government other than PST and GST for any of that - NAFTA seems to have eliminated any import taxes on the items that I have purchased (books, computer hardware, clothing). Please dig up your forms for your most recent shipment and let me know exactly what this tax is called so I can learn more about it.
One place to save is in the customs brokerage fees - if you are in a city with a customs house (Montreal or Vancouver for instance) you can do the brokerage yourself and not pay anything - I would imagine that CCRA has info on that somewhere. Another option is to use the postal system since Canada Post does the brokerage for $5.
Canada's obscenity restrictions have been around for much longer than our current PM.
When someone sends stuff through the mail from the US to Canada (or visa versa) they have to fill out a little customs form provided by the post office. Then when it gets delivered the postal person can collect taxes, duty, and handling fees ("brokerage fees") from the recipient. In practice, most items under about $20 are not charged anything, but I frequently pay GST and PST plus $5 brokerage to Canada Post when receiving stuff from the USA. Note that other methods of delivery (UPS, FedEx, etc.) can have varrying brokerage fees, some of them are pretty huge, which is why I stick to the postal system when possible.
While it is possible to design sales tax systems that are more "progressive" and it is possible to design income tax systems that are more "regressive", in most (all?) of the standard implementations of those systems, the sales taxes hit the poorer people harder than the income taxes.
If you are spending pretty much everythign that you earn on the necessities of life, having a sales tax rate of 7% is pretty much equivalent to having an income tax rate of 7% for you. I am not aware of any state that has an income tax rate this high for low income earners (or for almost any earners for that matter according to http://www.homefair.com/homefair/readart.html?art= ataxes).
Interestingly, Tennessee does seem to tax investment income at 6%.
In any case, since sales taxes are the same for every purchaser, and the poorer sections of the population must spend a larger fraction of their money than the richer sections of the population, sales taxes typically hurt the poor to a greater extent than the rich, when compared to an income tax. Yes the taxes on a yatch can be a lot of money, but presumably that is less of a necessity than the items being taxed that the poor need to buy.
Of course whether or not you favour one system over the other would be influenced in how fair you feel it is to tax different people different amounts of money and how fair you feel it is to tax people different rates.
If they use virtually no local resources, why is it they should pay local taxes of any sort?
Retailers do not pay sales taxes, the customers do. The customers live, work, and play in the region, and thus do use and benifit and have representation for local resources.
Currently the customers legally HAVE to pay use taxes for stuff bought from outside the local region. These types of proposals are just ways to making it easier to actually collect such taxes.
Imagine a very simple world, with only one local retailer and one out-of-state retailer. Assuming that you are going to impose a sales tax, does it make any sense to only impose it on the local retailer? The local business can't compete and goes bankrupt, and everyone is still happy because they can buy from the out-of-state place. Only now there is no local tax basis at all, so the roads and buildings and fire services have to be cut. Where is the logic in that? It makes more sense to tax only the out-of-state purchases, but people relized that this type of protectionism wasn't desired so they made that illegal to do under inter-state-commerce legislation. But taxing all purchases equally is surely a fair system.
Canada has very little in the way of duty or import fees for products from the USA.
Now what they do have are fairly significant taxes (PST and GST combine to about 15%) and many (but not all) shippers charge huge brokerage fees. I think UPS charges a minimum of $25 while the postal service chages a flat $5 for customs brokerage.
$200 US is about $300 CDN which would generate about $45 in taxes. What other charges were you hit with, $50 shipping and $50 brokerage?
While one can certainly complain about high sales taxes, it really is not a specific problem with importing stuff, and you cannot really blame the PM for the shipper's charges.
This type of thing would be treated as either come sort of capitol gains or more likely as some type of self employed income. In either case, it is not taxable until converted into real-world money (or goods I guess - barter stuff is taxable).
So in the year that you sell your items, you would have to declare the income on your taxes, in whatever countries you might be subject to taxes. I imagine that you could probably get away with deducting some of your "business" expenses which might include your game subscription costs, hardware and software costs, and ISP costs, maybe some "home office" expenses, etc. The funny thing is that when you actually include these sorts of expenses in your calculations, many people might find that they were actually not making much money at this type of thing.
I think that there are also some rules about "hobby businesses" that prevent people from taking paper losses year after year while they play with their beany babies or other hobby type activities that they claim are businesses. In cases such as those, you can probably get away without having to pay taxes on any "business" income you might generate as long as you document sufficient expenses, but I think you are prevented from continually claiming losses against other earned income.
Of course none of the above should be treated as legal or tax advice. Consult a professional. Don't sue me.
Is there any verification that the apple switchers aren't just made up names?
At least a few of the people are slightly "famous" such as local DJ's or artists. There have also been a few stories of how they were selected (from solicited letters of recent buyers I think) and how some of the film shots went - people being flown in from their home towns, etc.
I think there would be some very bad PR is the Apple people were found to be fakes, and I have seen no reports that anyone has claimed that they are fakes.
I also think it would have been real stupit for MS to have faked their switcher. And MS never does stupid stuff, eh?
To be fair, the use of "our" in a piece such as this often signifies "the person this piece is about". When a writer says "our hero", she usually is not claiming ownership.
You know, true randomness does not happen, in theory. If we had perfect knowledge of all subatomic particles since the universe began then we would be able to predict anything. So, in theory, everything, including randomness, can be fully determined. Yet the likelihood of this happening in our lifetime is slim to none.
Actually, the current "best theory" of physics is all based on quantum ideas that incoroprate true randomness. If you had perfect knowledge of all subatiomc particles that still would not allow you to predict much, because all of the quantum effects are probabilistic.
Most "true" random generators that I know of do something like take a hunk of radioactive material and measure the decay events. Each event is theoretically random, though conformin to a known statistical range.
GPL incompatability is based on the single requirement that people who "deploy" modified code in an organization must release that code. The GPL allows one to refrain from releasing the source code until you release the modified program. Of course the GPL is pretty vauge on what it means to release the modified program.
But according to your own link, the only problem with the most recent version of the ASPL according to the GNU folk is that "any modified version 'deployed' in an organization must be published". The "specificially" you point out has been addressed to the GNU's satisfaction in ASPL 1.2.
While I can understand viewing that this is a shortcoming, it seems like a fairly small one. The other "problems" mentioned in the link above have been "fixed", as they mention. Since the GPL already causes changes to be released (that's the whole point, eh?) whenever modified programs are "released" (without a good definition of what that means), the ASPL doesn't seem a whole lot different.
I don't really understand why the GNU people have this large web page picking apart the old ASPL when the new one is so much closer to their ideal. It does seem to cause more confusion of the issues than it clears up. I think they should state their problems with the current ASPL and forget the history lesson, or at least put clearer disclaimers that it is a bit of history.
My understanding is that like AppleTalk, the broadcasting only occurs when a device or service first becomes active, not something like every 3 seconds. I think AppleTalk got a bad reputation when some router implementations did this sort of constant broadcasting. Not a problem with the protocol, but a problem with some vendors' products.
I suppose that some zeroconf implementations could be needlessly "chatty", but that would be a problem of the particular program, not the protocol itself.
I think that "Please add me to your do-not-call list" is more precisely what you want to use. They probably result in the same thing, but you never know.
Re:article talks about an unsolicited mailed book
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 2
He would still be bound by whatever is in that shrinkwrap license
I don't think so. Someone cannot send you something in the mail that then requires you to do something in a specific manner. The license requires that if you do not accept it that you return it, and I would think that that requirement at least cannot be imposed upon someone just because they received something in the mail.
The AOL disks are different in that the lisence does not restrict you from using it in the manner you would use it if you bought it in a store. You are allowed to run the programs on the disk. And for that matter you are allowed to toss the disk in the trash or hang it from your christmas tree if you want.
article talks about an unsolicited mailed book
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 2
I think thta in this particular instance there is some conflict with the postal laws and the shrink wrap license. Unsolicited mail sent to a person is considered a gift and as such is the property of the recipient. If you own the book, wraper, paper, etc. I wonder how it could be argued that you are subject to any shrink wrap license terms? Just because the paperwork claims that the book is owned by someone else does not make it so.
It is a challenge to get dimensional lumber out of hemp however. The steel instustry might be happy with going to steel framing systems, but most housing in the USA and Canada is still built with lumber.
I think you missinterpret. I think that the paragraph tag is an opening tag which should use a closing tag with a slash, but most browsers will not complain if you never close it.
I think that studies have also shown that citronella based repellents are also pretty shitty. Basically the most effective thing is DEET based, and DEET can be a pretty nasty chemical. Citronella smells good though...
I seem to recall that a research group puts a bunch of voulenteers out in the woods need Winnipeg each year coated in various products and using various candles, sound devices, and other such products. Each year they find pretty much the same thing - DEET repells them, thick coatings (bear grease, hand soap, etc.) forms a physical barrier that prevents bites, and pretty much everything else does diddley squat.
I do recall that Discover once reported that mosquitos prefer pigs to humans, so keeping one of them around as a pet might be effective. Sleep with your pig and prevent malaria/west nile virus infections!
Sure, going closed source is an option, but it isn't much of an answer to the question of how to manage an open source project, now is it?
With closed source (even if the source is viewable by others) one is much less likely to get major contributions from others - why would they want to help if there is little guarantee that their work will be available to others in the future?
Similar arguements can be raised against releasing under a unique lisence rather than one of the well known ones (GNU, BSD, etc.) that people are more likely to be familiar with.
Slashdot Mirror
One place to save is in the customs brokerage fees - if you are in a city with a customs house (Montreal or Vancouver for instance) you can do the brokerage yourself and not pay anything - I would imagine that CCRA has info on that somewhere. Another option is to use the postal system since Canada Post does the brokerage for $5.
Canada's obscenity restrictions have been around for much longer than our current PM.
When someone sends stuff through the mail from the US to Canada (or visa versa) they have to fill out a little customs form provided by the post office. Then when it gets delivered the postal person can collect taxes, duty, and handling fees ("brokerage fees") from the recipient. In practice, most items under about $20 are not charged anything, but I frequently pay GST and PST plus $5 brokerage to Canada Post when receiving stuff from the USA. Note that other methods of delivery (UPS, FedEx, etc.) can have varrying brokerage fees, some of them are pretty huge, which is why I stick to the postal system when possible.
In any case, since sales taxes are the same for every purchaser, and the poorer sections of the population must spend a larger fraction of their money than the richer sections of the population, sales taxes typically hurt the poor to a greater extent than the rich, when compared to an income tax. Yes the taxes on a yatch can be a lot of money, but presumably that is less of a necessity than the items being taxed that the poor need to buy.
Of course whether or not you favour one system over the other would be influenced in how fair you feel it is to tax different people different amounts of money and how fair you feel it is to tax people different rates.
Retailers do not pay sales taxes, the customers do. The customers live, work, and play in the region, and thus do use and benifit and have representation for local resources.
Currently the customers legally HAVE to pay use taxes for stuff bought from outside the local region. These types of proposals are just ways to making it easier to actually collect such taxes.
Imagine a very simple world, with only one local retailer and one out-of-state retailer. Assuming that you are going to impose a sales tax, does it make any sense to only impose it on the local retailer? The local business can't compete and goes bankrupt, and everyone is still happy because they can buy from the out-of-state place. Only now there is no local tax basis at all, so the roads and buildings and fire services have to be cut. Where is the logic in that? It makes more sense to tax only the out-of-state purchases, but people relized that this type of protectionism wasn't desired so they made that illegal to do under inter-state-commerce legislation. But taxing all purchases equally is surely a fair system.
Now what they do have are fairly significant taxes (PST and GST combine to about 15%) and many (but not all) shippers charge huge brokerage fees. I think UPS charges a minimum of $25 while the postal service chages a flat $5 for customs brokerage.
$200 US is about $300 CDN which would generate about $45 in taxes. What other charges were you hit with, $50 shipping and $50 brokerage?
While one can certainly complain about high sales taxes, it really is not a specific problem with importing stuff, and you cannot really blame the PM for the shipper's charges.
So in the year that you sell your items, you would have to declare the income on your taxes, in whatever countries you might be subject to taxes. I imagine that you could probably get away with deducting some of your "business" expenses which might include your game subscription costs, hardware and software costs, and ISP costs, maybe some "home office" expenses, etc. The funny thing is that when you actually include these sorts of expenses in your calculations, many people might find that they were actually not making much money at this type of thing.
I think that there are also some rules about "hobby businesses" that prevent people from taking paper losses year after year while they play with their beany babies or other hobby type activities that they claim are businesses. In cases such as those, you can probably get away without having to pay taxes on any "business" income you might generate as long as you document sufficient expenses, but I think you are prevented from continually claiming losses against other earned income.
Of course none of the above should be treated as legal or tax advice. Consult a professional. Don't sue me.
At least a few of the people are slightly "famous" such as local DJ's or artists. There have also been a few stories of how they were selected (from solicited letters of recent buyers I think) and how some of the film shots went - people being flown in from their home towns, etc.
I think there would be some very bad PR is the Apple people were found to be fakes, and I have seen no reports that anyone has claimed that they are fakes.
I also think it would have been real stupit for MS to have faked their switcher. And MS never does stupid stuff, eh?
To be fair, the use of "our" in a piece such as this often signifies "the person this piece is about". When a writer says "our hero", she usually is not claiming ownership.
The Canadian and the UK books are from Doubleday UK while the US one is from HarperCollins.
Actually, the current "best theory" of physics is all based on quantum ideas that incoroprate true randomness. If you had perfect knowledge of all subatiomc particles that still would not allow you to predict much, because all of the quantum effects are probabilistic.
Most "true" random generators that I know of do something like take a hunk of radioactive material and measure the decay events. Each event is theoretically random, though conformin to a known statistical range.
Not for the current Apple license I don't think.
GPL incompatability is based on the single requirement that people who "deploy" modified code in an organization must release that code. The GPL allows one to refrain from releasing the source code until you release the modified program. Of course the GPL is pretty vauge on what it means to release the modified program.
This is explained at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html.
I understand why they want to pick apart licenses, but not why they bother doing their complaining about old versions.
While I can understand viewing that this is a shortcoming, it seems like a fairly small one. The other "problems" mentioned in the link above have been "fixed", as they mention. Since the GPL already causes changes to be released (that's the whole point, eh?) whenever modified programs are "released" (without a good definition of what that means), the ASPL doesn't seem a whole lot different.
I don't really understand why the GNU people have this large web page picking apart the old ASPL when the new one is so much closer to their ideal. It does seem to cause more confusion of the issues than it clears up. I think they should state their problems with the current ASPL and forget the history lesson, or at least put clearer disclaimers that it is a bit of history.
Does quicktime for Java address this at all?
I suppose that some zeroconf implementations could be needlessly "chatty", but that would be a problem of the particular program, not the protocol itself.
I don't think so. Someone cannot send you something in the mail that then requires you to do something in a specific manner. The license requires that if you do not accept it that you return it, and I would think that that requirement at least cannot be imposed upon someone just because they received something in the mail.
The AOL disks are different in that the lisence does not restrict you from using it in the manner you would use it if you bought it in a store. You are allowed to run the programs on the disk. And for that matter you are allowed to toss the disk in the trash or hang it from your christmas tree if you want.
I think thta in this particular instance there is some conflict with the postal laws and the shrink wrap license. Unsolicited mail sent to a person is considered a gift and as such is the property of the recipient. If you own the book, wraper, paper, etc. I wonder how it could be argued that you are subject to any shrink wrap license terms? Just because the paperwork claims that the book is owned by someone else does not make it so.
It is a challenge to get dimensional lumber out of hemp however. The steel instustry might be happy with going to steel framing systems, but most housing in the USA and Canada is still built with lumber.
I think you missinterpret. I think that the paragraph tag is an opening tag which should use a closing tag with a slash, but most browsers will not complain if you never close it.
Wanna buy a bridge?
Or rather, they still work as well as they always did, which seems to be not at all.
http://www.acponline.org/journals/annals/01jun98/m osquito.htm.
I seem to recall that a research group puts a bunch of voulenteers out in the woods need Winnipeg each year coated in various products and using various candles, sound devices, and other such products. Each year they find pretty much the same thing - DEET repells them, thick coatings (bear grease, hand soap, etc.) forms a physical barrier that prevents bites, and pretty much everything else does diddley squat.
I do recall that Discover once reported that mosquitos prefer pigs to humans, so keeping one of them around as a pet might be effective. Sleep with your pig and prevent malaria/west nile virus infections!
With closed source (even if the source is viewable by others) one is much less likely to get major contributions from others - why would they want to help if there is little guarantee that their work will be available to others in the future?
Similar arguements can be raised against releasing under a unique lisence rather than one of the well known ones (GNU, BSD, etc.) that people are more likely to be familiar with.