In the US we pay taxes to both federal and state governments. When I lived in France, I never paid anything to the local departement except to register my car, and perhaps the habitation tax. This was so little that it was basically noise. But since France is more centralized than most of the others, maybe I shouldn't overgeneralize.
In my unscientific experience the VAT is just a complicated sales tax. It "works" in that it generates revenue for the government. I'm not convinced that it encourges savings.
I understand the social goal behind the 5.5% TVA, but the results are things like McDonalds having "drive through" windows on sidewalks because "food" is 5.5% and "dining out" is 18.5%. Does this count as "saving and investment"?:-)
I like your point that only honest people pay those taxes. I certainly feel like a schmuck when I fill in that field.
The idea of a VAT (or TVA if you're in France) is that if someone spends $10 on materials and sells it for $100, the VAT is applied to the 90% delta because that is the value you added to those $10 of materials. The idea is to avoid double taxation. In the end it is complicated, and the taxes get passed downstream to the final consumer anyway, so simply tax the whole damn thing at a lower rate and be done with it.
BTW: most european countries have VATs that would blow many American minds. The French lowered the TVA from 20.5% to the rock bottom rate of 18.5% (although it is only 5.5% for "essential items" like food). I prefer my 6.5% sales tax any day of the week.
The national aspect doesn't change much. The US is decentralized, so we pay locally. Europeans are centralized, so they pay nationally. Big whoop.
As for why tolerate the sales tax: well, the government a) needs money and b) is going to take it from you anyway. I'm not as interested in how they take it, but more on how much they take.
For years we've had an item on our income taxes for anything bought out of state and no sales tax was paid. As I understand it, this was put in place because of catalog sales, but they specifically mention online shopping now. The idea is that if you haven't paid anyone sales tax for those good, income tax time is a good time to pay 6.5% (now 7%) to Raleigh.
The kicker is that if you don't have receipts, they estimate your out-of-state purchases at 1% of your gross income.
I hope that this nonsense goes the way of the "intangibles tax" fiasco, but as of last year it was still on the books. I guess I should check this year's forms to see if it still around.
One year is too short. Period. Three years is good, and five years would be better.
The product in question is support. Cutting support off early is dumb. If they really want to discontinue older systems, maybe they should just increase the cost as newer releases become available. 8.x is 1x, 7.x is 2x, 6.x is 3x, and so on.
I imagine the the sport he had in mind was either "mass melee" or "drunken brawl". The only other thing I can think of where shoulder pads and bats would be useful is "calvin ball" and I don't think most pro athletes have the imagination to handle that one.
Ah, the pragmatic approach to government. I like that.
The main problem with this, as pointed out elsewhere, is that the jurisdiction of the court and the ISP might not be the same. In this very article the court was in Minnesota and Yahoo is based in California. Which cops would be eating donughts in Yahoo's lobby? I don't think that ISPs are evenly distributed, so it won't just end up being a wash. The homes of AOL, Yahoo, eBay, MSN, and so on will have a lot more log hits than most other jurisdictions.
Hmm, is there a mechanism for one jurisdiction to pay another? By that, I mean could the California police department that had to send someone to Yahoo bill the Minnesota police department for doing its work?
Are we just talking about regular patrolmen here? If so, what would they do? They would watch the ISP's technicians do the work. How is this holding anyone to a "stricter scrutiny"? While the cop can be confident that the techie is looking at something and not playing quake, what else can he say? Are we talking about specialized training for some cops and only sending them? Cops with video cameras to record the search?
While I agree with your goals and I am all for protecting the 4th amendment, I'm kinda fuzzy on how this would be implemented in a useful fashion.
Why start now? What does this change? If you feel that encryption is the way to go, you should have already been using it. If you don't think that it is worth the effort, what changed your mind? I thought that the article was pretty bland and it surprises me that anyone takes it as a call to arms.
To me, Unix==kernel. Everything else is application space. I agree that many of the standard "low level" applications require/bin/sh to exist and do certain things, but they can all be rewritten without the system being unix.
Unfortunately I have to use Win2k at work, but I live in cygwin as much as possible. This adds a layer that has the same interface as the standard unix interfaces, but this doesn't make my Win2k box unix.
Going the other way, someone could scrap all the standard Unix commands (shells, tools, X, etc) and build a windows-like environment on top of a *nix kernel (think of wine on steroids). It would look like windows, it would smell like windows, but it wouldn't be windows. Even though cmd.exe would be just like on windows, the process model would be different. Signals, UIDs, "everything is a file", process oriented model (not tasks), so on and so forth. Hell, it'd support fork().
With work, you can make one application space look quite a bit like another, but the guts will always be different. Perl is a pretty good example of an application that really tries to be platform agnostic, but it does function differently on different systems.
Isn't this what chillingeffect.org was founded to do? I thought that it was some academic lawyer types who were looking for problems, and google was just helping them out.
All that they had to do was give notice that there was GPL code involved (kinda like intel inside) and there would be no problem. Go look at the first section (it is at www.fsf.org). They are under no obligation to distribute anything (assuming that they didn't make any modifications to GPL'd code), but they cannot hide the GPL-ish ness of the product.
France had some huge storms around Christmas 1999,
and much of the national power grid was down. Of course the big cities were fixed quickly, but the smaller towns were in the dark for a week or more. How long the phone system worked depended on the type of switch serving the town.
IIRC older phone switches had diesel generators and would stay up as long as required as they could be refueled. The newer ones had batteries (cheaper and smaller) and would only run for a three or four days.
Obviously the details will be different, but I'd expect something similar here. Y(M/km)MV
I for one am hooked on it. How serious is your "no violence" restriction? In KoDP there is the "how many warriors do you send" choice and one of the fighting styles is "kill as many as possible", but it is most certainly not a FPS. You don't see any carnage. Mostly it is a "political growth" game where your can tries to form (and control) a tribe, and perhaps an entire kingdom. On top of this there is exploration, religion, trade, and so on.
http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp for the official blurb, and a review is at http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_2592.h tml.
When those french commandos blew up the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand, they were sentenced to 10 years. They served the time back in France. I thought that this was kinda the normal way of handling this. If the countries don't actually hate each other (India & Pakistan, Israel & Syria), ship 'em home.
BTW: IIRC, those french military terrorists were pardonned about 6 months later, so they served basically no time. I guess that is to be expected as they sunk it under orders of some general who is now in the Legion d'Honneur.
Netscape was unusable with lbxproxy the last time I tried (client: RH6.1, server: solaris 2.5.1), which was about a year ago. For me, VNC has been much faster, although it is still not enough for me. I need to look into this Tight VNC thingie, as any thing that makes work-from-home easier is a good thing.
Although they are out of fashion, role playing games might fit your bill. The best known is Dungeons and Dragons, but there are literally hundreds of various games out there. There are even a few that are free for the downloading.
In case you've never played one, they are basically codified versions of "lets pretend". You adopt one or more personas and do things. Although there is often some form of "scoring" (often called "experience") for development purposes, it is not zero-sum. In fact, the group usually does better when they work together. "Entertainment" over "competition".
- doug
PS: I have no idea how well computer RPGs work. The little I've seen hasn't impressed me.
Shameless plug: The only computer game I play is King of Dragon Pass (http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp/), but it is not multi-player, so I don't think it is what you are looking for. But it is a cool game never the less. I just wish there was a Linux version.
I used CVS back in 97-98 (ancient history, no doubt) and I liked it a lot. The basic model of "you get all the files, modify whatever you like and sync them when you're ready" was cool [*]. But I prefer the easy branching and versioning of ClearCase. It blows away everything I have ever seen with CM.
I use ClearCase daily (I do the merges/integration/releases) and I'd hate to use anything else. It supports concurrent development better than anything else I've seen.
The point that you leave out about ClearCase is the learning curve. I work with folks who have used it for years and still don't quite get the differences between branches and views. It is without a doubt the most complicated configuration managemnt philosophy that I've ever seen. But I think it is worth it.
- doug
PS: I agree 100% with you about VSS. It is pure crap.
[*] ClearCase now (since 4.0) has something called a SnapShot View that seems to have the same basic functionality. I've never used it, so I can't say for sure.
A few years ago I needed some IRS forms but they were all self-extracting ZIP files. That sucked. I was running (and still do) Linux at home, and that was an unpleasant surprise. Fortunately there are tools for handling this, but since I had to pay per-minute connection charges (I was in France at the time), I didn't like surfing any more than necessary. Especially when it was because someone made assumptions about what OS/environment citizens would be using.
To keep a long story short, stick to well known formats. Although much of the world is using PCs, not everyone is.
Also, please be responsive to email. Even if it is just "we got it, but to save your tax dollars, we won't contact you directly". I sent several complaints to the IRS feedback address, but never heard a peep from them. Nothing like that to make us citizens love and respect our public servents.
And to a lesser extent, please avoid eye and ear candy. Not everyone has fat broadband access, nor are all connections free/fixed cost.
I moved to France in April 1995 and I was able to get work. If I was willing to do phone support type stuff, I'd have started within a month or two. But I insisted on waiting until I found a development job, so I didn't get an offer until about 4 months after I showed up. From what I saw when I last looked, you should have any problems, at least not in/around Paris.
Getting a visa will be a HUGE problem. The french scheme is (basically)
- the French
- EU citizens
- ex-colonies
- the rest of the world
us USA-types are in that lowest catagory. I spent three days waiting outside a sous-prefecture trying to get the right to stay in the country. I might still be there today if one of the folks didn't see that I was american (I didn't speak a word of french), so bumped me to the front of the line ahead of the Romanians, Indians, etc.
Another issue is the DDTE will need to give you a funky little blue slip of paper so that the Secu will give you the equivalent of a SSN.
One difference between the US and French systems is that for France, the consulate will only give you the right to enter the country. The real work of getting "working papers" will be done at a sous-prefecture in the department where you live (Paris uses a big police station across from Notre Dame). This is unlike the US where all real paper work for visas are done at consulates before you get on the airplane.
To reduce this, look for a job before you go. Get someone there to help you with the paperwork. I have a friend who was just hired by Nortel France to move there and they handled much of the paperwork BS. Read newsgroups like fr.emplois.offres, and check the weekly mag "01 Informatique" for ads. If you speak some French and are willing to learn the rest (it will take more than a few months, trust me), I bet someone will hire you.
Just don't expect anything close to a US salary. There are lots of perks from living in France, but raw cash is not one of them.
I don't know anything about working in Italy, but if you try, you can get into France. Good luck.
I guess I'm just an old fart, but I have had more fun playing rogue/nethack than I did with glitzy FPS (mostly Descent). For old times sake, I ran nethack a few weeks ago and it was still fun, although at this time in my life (two small kids), I don't have too much time to play.
Go find some of the old games and give them a try. Adventure, Xork and the like were king of the hill in its day for a good reason. Most of the Infocom stuff was top notch, even if they didn't have any images. Give the older, less animated stuff a try and back off from the animations.
If you can tolerate still images in this era of animation, and what I consider to be superior game play, try A#'s King of Dragon Pass. IIRC the URL is http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp. It is especially good for a paper-and-pencil RPG like myself. Now if I only had more time to play....
A project I was given in an OS class was to write a simple interpreter, and it was a lot of fun. Don't require any particular syntax, just the ability to launch programs while passing arguements. There are a number of wrinkles to work around, and there is a lot of feedback so it should provide lots of "warm fuzzies". At least it did for me.
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In the US we pay taxes to both federal and state governments. When I lived in France, I never paid anything to the local departement except to register my car, and perhaps the habitation tax. This was so little that it was basically noise. But since France is more centralized than most of the others, maybe I shouldn't overgeneralize.
:-)
In my unscientific experience the VAT is just a complicated sales tax. It "works" in that it generates revenue for the government. I'm not convinced that it encourges savings.
I understand the social goal behind the 5.5% TVA, but the results are things like McDonalds having "drive through" windows on sidewalks because "food" is 5.5% and "dining out" is 18.5%. Does this count as "saving and investment"?
I like your point that only honest people pay those taxes. I certainly feel like a schmuck when I fill in that field.
The idea of a VAT (or TVA if you're in France) is that if someone spends $10 on materials and sells it for $100, the VAT is applied to the 90% delta because that is the value you added to those $10 of materials. The idea is to avoid double taxation. In the end it is complicated, and the taxes get passed downstream to the final consumer anyway, so simply tax the whole damn thing at a lower rate and be done with it.
BTW: most european countries have VATs that would blow many American minds. The French lowered the TVA from 20.5% to the rock bottom rate of 18.5% (although it is only 5.5% for "essential items" like food). I prefer my 6.5% sales tax any day of the week.
The national aspect doesn't change much. The US is decentralized, so we pay locally. Europeans are centralized, so they pay nationally. Big whoop.
As for why tolerate the sales tax: well, the government a) needs money and b) is going to take it from you anyway. I'm not as interested in how they take it, but more on how much they take.
For years we've had an item on our income taxes for anything bought out of state and no sales tax was paid. As I understand it, this was put in place because of catalog sales, but they specifically mention online shopping now. The idea is that if you haven't paid anyone sales tax for those good, income tax time is a good time to pay 6.5% (now 7%) to Raleigh.
The kicker is that if you don't have receipts, they estimate your out-of-state purchases at 1% of your gross income.
I hope that this nonsense goes the way of the "intangibles tax" fiasco, but as of last year it was still on the books. I guess I should check this year's forms to see if it still around.
One year is too short. Period. Three years is good, and five years would be better.
The product in question is support. Cutting support off early is dumb. If they really want to discontinue older systems, maybe they should just increase the cost as newer releases become available. 8.x is 1x, 7.x is 2x, 6.x is 3x, and so on.
I imagine the the sport he had in mind was either "mass melee" or "drunken brawl". The only other thing I can think of where shoulder pads and bats would be useful is "calvin ball" and I don't think most pro athletes have the imagination to handle that one.
How so? What does IM provide that Zephyr didn't back in '94?
Not true. The source just has to be available upon demand. There is no requirement that they are available from the same place.
Ah, the pragmatic approach to government. I like that.
The main problem with this, as pointed out elsewhere, is that the jurisdiction of the court and the ISP might not be the same. In this very article the court was in Minnesota and Yahoo is based in California. Which cops would be eating donughts in Yahoo's lobby? I don't think that ISPs are evenly distributed, so it won't just end up being a wash. The homes of AOL, Yahoo, eBay, MSN, and so on will have a lot more log hits than most other jurisdictions.
Hmm, is there a mechanism for one jurisdiction to pay another? By that, I mean could the California police department that had to send someone to Yahoo bill the Minnesota police department for doing its work?
Are we just talking about regular patrolmen here? If so, what would they do? They would watch the ISP's technicians do the work. How is this holding anyone to a "stricter scrutiny"? While the cop can be confident that the techie is looking at something and not playing quake, what else can he say? Are we talking about specialized training for some cops and only sending them? Cops with video cameras to record the search?
While I agree with your goals and I am all for protecting the 4th amendment, I'm kinda fuzzy on how this would be implemented in a useful fashion.
- doug
Why start now? What does this change? If you feel that encryption is the way to go, you should have already been using it. If you don't think that it is worth the effort, what changed your mind? I thought that the article was pretty bland and it surprises me that anyone takes it as a call to arms.
- doug
To me, Unix==kernel. Everything else is application space. I agree that many of the standard "low level" applications require /bin/sh to exist and do certain things, but they can all be rewritten without the system being unix.
Unfortunately I have to use Win2k at work, but I live in cygwin as much as possible. This adds a layer that has the same interface as the standard unix interfaces, but this doesn't make my Win2k box unix.
Going the other way, someone could scrap all the standard Unix commands (shells, tools, X, etc) and build a windows-like environment on top of a *nix kernel (think of wine on steroids). It would look like windows, it would smell like windows, but it wouldn't be windows. Even though cmd.exe would be just like on windows, the process model would be different. Signals, UIDs, "everything is a file", process oriented model (not tasks), so on and so forth. Hell, it'd support fork().
With work, you can make one application space look quite a bit like another, but the guts will always be different. Perl is a pretty good example of an application that really tries to be platform agnostic, but it does function differently on different systems.
Huh?
Isn't this what chillingeffect.org was founded to do? I thought that it was some academic lawyer types who were looking for problems, and google was just helping them out.
All that they had to do was give notice that there was GPL code involved (kinda like intel inside) and there would be no problem. Go look at the first section (it is at www.fsf.org). They are under no obligation to distribute anything (assuming that they didn't make any modifications to GPL'd code), but they cannot hide the GPL-ish ness of the product.
France had some huge storms around Christmas 1999,
and much of the national power grid was down. Of course the big cities were fixed quickly, but the smaller towns were in the dark for a week or more. How long the phone system worked depended on the type of switch serving the town.
IIRC older phone switches had diesel generators and would stay up as long as required as they could be refueled. The newer ones had batteries (cheaper and smaller) and would only run for a three or four days.
Obviously the details will be different, but I'd expect something similar here. Y(M/km)MV
I for one am hooked on it. How serious is your "no violence" restriction? In KoDP there is the "how many warriors do you send" choice and one of the fighting styles is "kill as many as possible", but it is most certainly not a FPS. You don't see any carnage. Mostly it is a "political growth" game where your can tries to form (and control) a tribe, and perhaps an entire kingdom. On top of this there is exploration, religion, trade, and so on.
h tml.
http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp for the official blurb, and a review is at http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_2592.
When those french commandos blew up the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand, they were sentenced to 10 years. They served the time back in France. I thought that this was kinda the normal way of handling this. If the countries don't actually hate each other (India & Pakistan, Israel & Syria), ship 'em home.
BTW: IIRC, those french military terrorists were pardonned about 6 months later, so they served basically no time. I guess that is to be expected as they sunk it under orders of some general who is now in the Legion d'Honneur.
Netscape was unusable with lbxproxy the last time I tried (client: RH6.1, server: solaris 2.5.1), which was about a year ago. For me, VNC has been much faster, although it is still not enough for me. I need to look into this Tight VNC thingie, as any thing that makes work-from-home easier is a good thing.
Sorry, but it quickly becomes zero-sum. For the first year there is "true growth", but after that the only way to grow is to take.
I believe that there are variations of Diplomacy that allow exploration and growth, but nothing in the core rules allow for it.
- doug
Although they are out of fashion, role playing games might fit your bill. The best known is Dungeons and Dragons, but there are literally hundreds of various games out there. There are even a few that are free for the downloading.
In case you've never played one, they are basically codified versions of "lets pretend". You adopt one or more personas and do things. Although there is often some form of "scoring" (often called "experience") for development purposes, it is not zero-sum. In fact, the group usually does better when they work together. "Entertainment" over "competition".
- doug
PS: I have no idea how well computer RPGs work. The little I've seen hasn't impressed me.
Shameless plug: The only computer game I play is King of Dragon Pass (http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp/), but it is not multi-player, so I don't think it is what you are looking for. But it is a cool game never the less. I just wish there was a Linux version.
I used CVS back in 97-98 (ancient history, no doubt) and I liked it a lot. The basic model of "you get all the files, modify whatever you like and sync them when you're ready" was cool [*]. But I prefer the easy branching and versioning of ClearCase. It blows away everything I have ever seen with CM.
I use ClearCase daily (I do the merges/integration/releases) and I'd hate to use anything else. It supports concurrent development better than anything else I've seen.
The point that you leave out about ClearCase is the learning curve. I work with folks who have used it for years and still don't quite get the differences between branches and views. It is without a doubt the most complicated configuration managemnt philosophy that I've ever seen. But I think it is worth it.
- doug
PS: I agree 100% with you about VSS. It is pure crap.
[*] ClearCase now (since 4.0) has something called a SnapShot View that seems to have the same basic functionality. I've never used it, so I can't say for sure.
I have never seen a source control tool as pathetic as VSS. But then again, I like CVS and prefer ClearCase, so your milage may vary.
A few years ago I needed some IRS forms but they were all self-extracting ZIP files. That sucked. I was running (and still do) Linux at home, and that was an unpleasant surprise. Fortunately there are tools for handling this, but since I had to pay per-minute connection charges (I was in France at the time), I didn't like surfing any more than necessary. Especially when it was because someone made assumptions about what OS/environment citizens would be using.
To keep a long story short, stick to well known formats. Although much of the world is using PCs, not everyone is.
Also, please be responsive to email. Even if it is just "we got it, but to save your tax dollars, we won't contact you directly". I sent several complaints to the IRS feedback address, but never heard a peep from them. Nothing like that to make us citizens love and respect our public servents.
And to a lesser extent, please avoid eye and ear candy. Not everyone has fat broadband access, nor are all connections free/fixed cost.
I moved to France in April 1995 and I was able to get work. If I was willing to do phone support type stuff, I'd have started within a month or two. But I insisted on waiting until I found a development job, so I didn't get an offer until about 4 months after I showed up. From what I saw when I last looked, you should have any problems, at least not in/around Paris.
Getting a visa will be a HUGE problem. The french scheme is (basically)
- the French
- EU citizens
- ex-colonies
- the rest of the world
us USA-types are in that lowest catagory. I spent three days waiting outside a sous-prefecture trying to get the right to stay in the country. I might still be there today if one of the folks didn't see that I was american (I didn't speak a word of french), so bumped me to the front of the line ahead of the Romanians, Indians, etc.
Another issue is the DDTE will need to give you a funky little blue slip of paper so that the Secu will give you the equivalent of a SSN.
One difference between the US and French systems is that for France, the consulate will only give you the right to enter the country. The real work of getting "working papers" will be done at a sous-prefecture in the department where you live (Paris uses a big police station across from Notre Dame). This is unlike the US where all real paper work for visas are done at consulates before you get on the airplane.
To reduce this, look for a job before you go. Get someone there to help you with the paperwork. I have a friend who was just hired by Nortel France to move there and they handled much of the paperwork BS. Read newsgroups like fr.emplois.offres, and check the weekly mag "01 Informatique" for ads. If you speak some French and are willing to learn the rest (it will take more than a few months, trust me), I bet someone will hire you.
Just don't expect anything close to a US salary. There are lots of perks from living in France, but raw cash is not one of them.
I don't know anything about working in Italy, but if you try, you can get into France. Good luck.
- doug
I guess I'm just an old fart, but I have had more fun playing rogue/nethack than I did with glitzy FPS (mostly Descent). For old times sake, I ran nethack a few weeks ago and it was still fun, although at this time in my life (two small kids), I don't have too much time to play.
Go find some of the old games and give them a try. Adventure, Xork and the like were king of the hill in its day for a good reason. Most of the Infocom stuff was top notch, even if they didn't have any images. Give the older, less animated stuff a try and back off from the animations.
If you can tolerate still images in this era of animation, and what I consider to be superior game play, try A#'s King of Dragon Pass. IIRC the URL is http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp. It is especially good for a paper-and-pencil RPG like myself. Now if I only had more time to play....
- doug
Yes, I'm talking about something like /bin/sh.
A project I was given in an OS class was to write a simple interpreter, and it was a lot of fun. Don't require any particular syntax, just the ability to launch programs while passing arguements. There are a number of wrinkles to work around, and there is a lot of feedback so it should provide lots of "warm fuzzies". At least it did for me.