the government fears the establishment of an underground, untaxable economy
What is the difficulty of people doing this with cash? I'm certain that we've all heard (or known) people who got paid for working "under the table" and the government isn't able to tax that transfer or even see it if enough people keep there mouths shut. It will be far easier to carry around big bags of $20s than it will be attempt to hide your transactions online. If you really want high-level encryption you can just download it from some other country that doesn't have export restrictions. When there is a traceable record of communications and money transfers it is far easier for someone to step in and say "you people are doing wrong" than for under the table back-alley transactions that leave no records.
Here's a rather fascinating interview with David Brin (probably picked up from slashdot earlier) that I found a fascinating read. Its about having the light shine both ways.
From Dave Barry: Here is the problem: for many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul Stevens came up with the famous quotation about how he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. So for a while, the court's policy was to have all suspected pornography trucked to Justice Steven's house, where he would look it over. "Nope, this isn't it," he'd say. "Bring some more." This went on until one morning when his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under an enormous mound of rubberized implements and the court had to issue a ruling stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except that it was illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about it because the court was going to take a nap.
Just how binding was Toysmart's promise? Was it a "Above subject to change without notice" or was there an explicit contract between user and Toysmart?
In the former case I doubt that anything will happen, but it will be very exciting if somebody goes down because of this.
PicoBSD is a FreeBSD distribution trimmed down to the bare minimum so it can run on a floppy. You may want to check this out as the most current versions (see the mailing list or the source) are very configurable and run on various types of hardware (floppy, CD, SanDisk, etc).
PicoBSD will run everything FreeBSD will, provided you can get it onto the boot media, including stuff in the ports tree. Stock FreeBSD firewall include ipfw and ipfilter with NAT (IPMasq for you Linux types) and various other options.
FreeBSD has a splash screen/screen saver kernel module that displays an arbitrary bitmap (from a file) to the user. In order to specify the image to load you do something similar to:
Hmm, I wonder if he was joking. Nothing stops a commercial UNIX vendor from reading the softupdates source and reimplementing softupdates themselves. It also kind of defeats the purpose if it is now under BSD license.
Of course I've usually found that Occam's Razor is the best tool for finding truth, so you are probably right.
"...Not a Java competitor..."... "...It kind of mirrors (Java)..."... "C# is the alternative to Java..."
So it has features of Java, is an alternative to java, but its not a competitor to Java. Hmm, that must mean that C# is going to be vapor or a big flop. Otherwise they are only contradicting themselves (which is quite rare to see in a single press release).
Taxes have one major benefit for the people: They fund public projects. Public projects are good, they are things like roads, schools, libraries, busses etc. Without taxes you don't get these things.
In Washington, the state vehicle registration tax was recently reduced to a flat $30 fee. This cut millions of dollars from bus and road funding, forcing Seattle Metro to scale back some bus routes. Various other agencies are also wondering where they are going to come up with the missing cash, all because people are too greedy.
The bit that gets me the most out of this is the horrible traffic situation in the Seattle area. A 40 mile commute takes me an hour and a half, an average speed of 26 mph. With funding for busses (I no longer drive, but ride the bus) and light rail this traffic dissipates, but if you have no money, how do you start?
While I respect the lowly hermit crab for its plight in having to find a new home every time it gets to big for its old one, what does hermit crabs and mp3s have to do with each other?
Mp3 usage seems to have grown explosively, but it hasn't moved out of its old home, so that can't be it...
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
along with this piece of section 4:
This source code must either be included in the distribution or be available for no more than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee, and must be freely redistributable under reasonable conditions.
Show that Kirk probably recieved no money for people using softupdates. I've used it in FreeBSD since 3.0-RELEASE (maybe earlier) and I've never had to contribute any money to Kirk.
The old license was probably in place because Kirk didn't feel that softupdates was proven or ready for widespread use. With this sort of license when you buy a product using softupdates you can examine the source to see if you really trust what softupdates is doing to your disk. It is required. With a BSD license you don't get that protection.
Of course its hard to tell without asking Kirk himself why the old license was in place...
Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on how to obtain complete source code for any accompanying software that uses this software...
In the BSD world, we want businesses to be able to make proprietary products out of our products. (There are reasons for this which I will avoid discussing in this post.) With the old license in place, some company using softupdates would need to provide the source to softupdates, costing them money and time. The old license is not the BSD way.
What's wrong with your mouth? I've used mine to remove dust for years.
In reality, your computer's electronics (not fans, HDDs, CD-ROM or other mechanical devices) will not be fazed by water. You could throw your processor in a bucket of water, let it sit for two weeks, pull it out and let it dry and plug it back in. It'll work just fine. The key here is the drying part, without that you may let out the magic smoke.
Every 6 months to a year you should probably strip it down to parts and dust everything. I'd left mine undusted for far too long and after dusting my temp dropped 20 degrees. I think other than common sense dust will be the biggest problem with your machine.
Radio dramas are rarely heard in the US, in Seattle, WA we had (still have?) a sunday night radio drama show on one station. Its on late at night and I haven't checked for it in quite a while, but it still may be running.
Back in the olde days radio drama was the big thing. There were cool sound effects and good voice actors. The plays were written so you could follow the action only with your imagination.
Nowadays most radio stations are too concerned with providing either the latest new music or up-to-the-date traffic and weather to bother spending money on quality radio drama. Another excellent program that I haven't heard in a long time in the Seattle area is Music with Moscowitz, the last station I heard it on switched formats and dropped it, when it was the highest rated show in its time slot!
Have you ever noticed how just about every box on a store shelf is of a similar size and shape? Not just software, but cans of peas, soup, cereal, crackers, cookies, etc. If you make your package stand out too much, it won't fit properly and the stores will get mad at the manufacturers.
The other problem for software manufacturers is that if you make your packaging too small it won't be noticed as easily (that's the theory anyway). Marketers know that having a shiny box is very important in impulse decisions, same as with books, and if you make it small people won't see it next to el crapo title even if you have the hotest game of the year.
On another note, one of the more sensible packages I've seen lately is for Homeworld. It actually had a good manual in it, just under half an inch thick. Those big boxes started out containing those useful manuals of olde, but no longer...
What I'm waiting for is where I can walk into a grocery store with a big trenchcoat lined with pockets and just stuff myself full of various food products like that guy does in the IBM commercial. (The only problem is frozen products, but then I'll probably get some insulated pockets or something.)
To pay all I have to do is walk through a metal-detector thingy that picks up all of the price codes for everything I bought and automatically charges me. Shopping is made so easy that the man even forgets to pick up his receipt. (In the commercial up to this point you think the shopper is really a shoplifter, and the guard says "Sir!!...You forgot your receipt.")
Early this week RadioShack has announced plans to open five new locations on the moon. The new stores will be selling components to astronauts needing repairs and any visiting extra-terrestrial customers.
RadioShack feels that a location on the moon will better serve interplanetary visitors who may not wish to expend the resources involved in making an earth landing.
A RadioShack spokesman was quoted as saying, "Our interplanetary customers are having too difficult a time both in getting through customs and in finding a suitable method of payment. These new locations will more easily serve these customers by offering our products for purchase in several of the galactic currencies."
The spokesman was unable to comment if Elvis really went home, or if Shaq was really from another planet.
If you make all of your machines identical the amount of problems you will have decreases dramatically. Since we've been creating machines from images rather than by hand the amount of problems we've had has decreased dramatically.
You can use either ghost for NT/95 systems or you can use tar and dd for *NIX. If you have one UNIX box you can use it to make images of HDDs, just plug them into a spare IDE port and dump from disk to image. You can also make a boot floppy and mount the images via NFS. (My personal favorite UNIX is FreeBSD which has its own stripped down version called picobsd although the best place for information is the mailing list (small@freebsd.org) or list archives. Check it out!)
Resource Description Framework (RDF) and some Perl/PHP/scripting language of choice to represent a sitemap. You can autogenerate the RDF file via a script and plug it right into anything you want. You can also use this for a mozilla sidebar panel to have a tree navigation view of your site.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the difficulty of people doing this with cash? I'm certain that we've all heard (or known) people who got paid for working "under the table" and the government isn't able to tax that transfer or even see it if enough people keep there mouths shut. It will be far easier to carry around big bags of $20s than it will be attempt to hide your transactions online. If you really want high-level encryption you can just download it from some other country that doesn't have export restrictions. When there is a traceable record of communications and money transfers it is far easier for someone to step in and say "you people are doing wrong" than for under the table back-alley transactions that leave no records.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Here's a rather fascinating interview with David Brin (probably picked up from slashdot earlier) that I found a fascinating read. Its about having the light shine both ways.
Link is here
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
From Dave Barry:
Here is the problem: for many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul Stevens came up with the famous quotation about how he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. So for a while, the court's policy was to have all suspected pornography trucked to Justice Steven's house, where he would look it over. "Nope, this isn't it," he'd say. "Bring some more." This went on until one morning when his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under an enormous mound of rubberized implements and the court had to issue a ruling stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except that it was illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about it because the court was going to take a nap.
Dave Barry "Pornography"
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Just how binding was Toysmart's promise? Was it a "Above subject to change without notice" or was there an explicit contract between user and Toysmart?
In the former case I doubt that anything will happen, but it will be very exciting if somebody goes down because of this.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
PicoBSD is a FreeBSD distribution trimmed down to the bare minimum so it can run on a floppy. You may want to check this out as the most current versions (see the mailing list or the source) are very configurable and run on various types of hardware (floppy, CD, SanDisk, etc).
There are also several links to other information available from the PicoBSD (small@freebsd.org) mailing list archives here (current) and also here (2000).
PicoBSD will run everything FreeBSD will, provided you can get it onto the boot media, including stuff in the ports tree. Stock FreeBSD firewall include ipfw and ipfilter with NAT (IPMasq for you Linux types) and various other options.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
FreeBSD has a splash screen/screen saver kernel module that displays an arbitrary bitmap (from a file) to the user. In order to specify the image to load you do something similar to:
kldload splash
kldload spash-image.bmp -t splash_image_data
The second line flags the first file as a data item. I don't know if Linux can do the same though, as I've never used it.
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
I've been waiting for this, I don't learn enough on a system that doesn't crash very often.
BRING IT ON!!!
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Hmm, I wonder if he was joking. Nothing stops a commercial UNIX vendor from reading the softupdates source and reimplementing softupdates themselves. It also kind of defeats the purpose if it is now under BSD license.
Of course I've usually found that Occam's Razor is the best tool for finding truth, so you are probably right.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
"...Not a Java competitor..." ... "...It kind of mirrors (Java)..." ... "C# is the alternative to Java..."
So it has features of Java, is an alternative to java, but its not a competitor to Java. Hmm, that must mean that C# is going to be vapor or a big flop. Otherwise they are only contradicting themselves (which is quite rare to see in a single press release).
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Loads at bus speed. (not available on all platforms unfortunately)
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Taxes have one major benefit for the people: They fund public projects. Public projects are good, they are things like roads, schools, libraries, busses etc. Without taxes you don't get these things.
In Washington, the state vehicle registration tax was recently reduced to a flat $30 fee. This cut millions of dollars from bus and road funding, forcing Seattle Metro to scale back some bus routes. Various other agencies are also wondering where they are going to come up with the missing cash, all because people are too greedy.
The bit that gets me the most out of this is the horrible traffic situation in the Seattle area. A 40 mile commute takes me an hour and a half, an average speed of 26 mph. With funding for busses (I no longer drive, but ride the bus) and light rail this traffic dissipates, but if you have no money, how do you start?
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
I think it complements my point.
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
While I respect the lowly hermit crab for its plight in having to find a new home every time it gets to big for its old one, what does hermit crabs and mp3s have to do with each other?
Mp3 usage seems to have grown explosively, but it hasn't moved out of its old home, so that can't be it...
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
I doubt it, from the top of the license:
along with this piece of section 4:
Show that Kirk probably recieved no money for people using softupdates. I've used it in FreeBSD since 3.0-RELEASE (maybe earlier) and I've never had to contribute any money to Kirk.
The old license was probably in place because Kirk didn't feel that softupdates was proven or ready for widespread use. With this sort of license when you buy a product using softupdates you can examine the source to see if you really trust what softupdates is doing to your disk. It is required. With a BSD license you don't get that protection.
Of course its hard to tell without asking Kirk himself why the old license was in place...
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on how to obtain complete source code for any accompanying software that uses this software...
In the BSD world, we want businesses to be able to make proprietary products out of our products. (There are reasons for this which I will avoid discussing in this post.) With the old license in place, some company using softupdates would need to provide the source to softupdates, costing them money and time. The old license is not the BSD way.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
What's wrong with your mouth? I've used mine to remove dust for years.
In reality, your computer's electronics (not fans, HDDs, CD-ROM or other mechanical devices) will not be fazed by water. You could throw your processor in a bucket of water, let it sit for two weeks, pull it out and let it dry and plug it back in. It'll work just fine. The key here is the drying part, without that you may let out the magic smoke.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Every 6 months to a year you should probably strip it down to parts and dust everything. I'd left mine undusted for far too long and after dusting my temp dropped 20 degrees. I think other than common sense dust will be the biggest problem with your machine.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Radio dramas are rarely heard in the US, in Seattle, WA we had (still have?) a sunday night radio drama show on one station. Its on late at night and I haven't checked for it in quite a while, but it still may be running.
Back in the olde days radio drama was the big thing. There were cool sound effects and good voice actors. The plays were written so you could follow the action only with your imagination.
Nowadays most radio stations are too concerned with providing either the latest new music or up-to-the-date traffic and weather to bother spending money on quality radio drama. Another excellent program that I haven't heard in a long time in the Seattle area is Music with Moscowitz, the last station I heard it on switched formats and dropped it, when it was the highest rated show in its time slot!
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Have you ever noticed how just about every box on a store shelf is of a similar size and shape? Not just software, but cans of peas, soup, cereal, crackers, cookies, etc. If you make your package stand out too much, it won't fit properly and the stores will get mad at the manufacturers.
The other problem for software manufacturers is that if you make your packaging too small it won't be noticed as easily (that's the theory anyway). Marketers know that having a shiny box is very important in impulse decisions, same as with books, and if you make it small people won't see it next to el crapo title even if you have the hotest game of the year.
On another note, one of the more sensible packages I've seen lately is for Homeworld. It actually had a good manual in it, just under half an inch thick. Those big boxes started out containing those useful manuals of olde, but no longer...
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
What I'm waiting for is where I can walk into a grocery store with a big trenchcoat lined with pockets and just stuff myself full of various food products like that guy does in the IBM commercial. (The only problem is frozen products, but then I'll probably get some insulated pockets or something.)
To pay all I have to do is walk through a metal-detector thingy that picks up all of the price codes for everything I bought and automatically charges me. Shopping is made so easy that the man even forgets to pick up his receipt. (In the commercial up to this point you think the shopper is really a shoplifter, and the guard says "Sir!! ...You forgot your receipt.")
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Early this week RadioShack has announced plans to open five new locations on the moon. The new stores will be selling components to astronauts needing repairs and any visiting extra-terrestrial customers.
RadioShack feels that a location on the moon will better serve interplanetary visitors who may not wish to expend the resources involved in making an earth landing.
A RadioShack spokesman was quoted as saying, "Our interplanetary customers are having too difficult a time both in getting through customs and in finding a suitable method of payment. These new locations will more easily serve these customers by offering our products for purchase in several of the galactic currencies."
The spokesman was unable to comment if Elvis really went home, or if Shaq was really from another planet.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
There he is sitting at his table scratching away at parchment when you step out of the time portal and hand him a tiny box and headphones...
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
If you make all of your machines identical the amount of problems you will have decreases dramatically. Since we've been creating machines from images rather than by hand the amount of problems we've had has decreased dramatically.
You can use either ghost for NT/95 systems or you can use tar and dd for *NIX. If you have one UNIX box you can use it to make images of HDDs, just plug them into a spare IDE port and dump from disk to image. You can also make a boot floppy and mount the images via NFS. (My personal favorite UNIX is FreeBSD which has its own stripped down version called picobsd although the best place for information is the mailing list (small@freebsd.org) or list archives. Check it out!)
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Resource Description Framework (RDF) and some Perl/PHP/scripting language of choice to represent a sitemap. You can autogenerate the RDF file via a script and plug it right into anything you want. You can also use this for a mozilla sidebar panel to have a tree navigation view of your site.
Links:
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
At least it a: bothers to ask and b: allows you to look at everything it is sending.
Ok, since you can't view the source you don't know EXACTLY what it is sending, but considering a and b, its a hell of a log better than anything else.
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess