Simply put, I doubt you could do the same now. Tuition costs have vastly outpaced costs of living, and wages haven't even kept up with cost of living. Could you have afforded to go to school this way if tuition was over four times higher? Because that's what it is now. Here's something for you to understand: tuition costs have increased twice as quickly as medical costs.
Don't worry, big content corporations are working tirelessly ensure copyright violations are criminal. That way you will almost certainly get your lawyer and your day in court!
The law says "has been" as well as "may be". Someone had to create the CP. That means someone, somewhere has already sexually abused a child. The possessor of the CP is not relevant as far as reporting it's existence, really.
Now, there are still corner cases. It is possible he was only in possession of material created without a child such as digital renderings or drawings (which are still illegal in many jurisdictions) or photography for medical or other legitimate purposes (such as a parent photographing their child taking a bath).
Correct, however, nothing is preventing Blizzard from increasing the number of available items that can be traded once the market for the Guardian Cub is saturated (easily determined by their sales figures for the pet).
Blizzard is going very slowly to test the backlash from the community, so they're starting with one item. Worst case scenario, there's only ever going to be this one pet that can be bought and traded in this way. Minimum possible impact. Blizzard is just playing it safe.
Of course they can. Nevertheless, property owners have limited ability to do anything. Generally, all they can do is ask the photographer to stop, then ask them to leave. At that point all they can do is call the police who can remove the person for trespassing. If the property owner has posted signs that photography is not allowed, then they can more or less skip right to calling the police. Still, there is nothing more severe here than trespassing.
Simply put, shopping malls and stores do not have the same expectation of privacy that a private residence or office would because, well, stores have things like "WELCOME" and "OPEN" plastered all over their shingles. These are invitations, as are things such as posted business hours on the door. You can't be charged with trespassing if you were invited in. That's why they *must* ask you to leave before it's a legal matter. They have to rescind that open invitation.
So, to summarize: he has proven himself to be honest, he has been dedicated to changing government in a good way, even when that view was unpopular, and he is popular. What more do you want?
I'd like him not to be Libertarian so his ideas could be more like sound policy and less idealistic drivel that would drive the country back to the days of the Robber Barons. Seriously, there's a reason so many of his most vocal supporters are 20-something single men.
We have a system here which runs HVAC software. We just "upgraded" the system from Win95 to Win98 SE after the old hardware died. We bought an old refurbished HP Evo d510 and used Win98 SE as that's all we had access to and all we could get drivers for. The software will not run in Windows 2000 or XP, nor will it run under Win98 in a VM due to a hardware dongle on the parallel port (the software installs, but never communicates with the HVAC system itself).
The system has been "scheduled for replacement" for about 6 years, but they keep putting it off.
I have friends in similar situations with legacy systems that only work on Win9x, Win2k, NT 4, and even one who is stuck with an NT 3.51 system.
I know very few things as a fact, because I'm not a doctor, nor a scientist, nor a statesman, nor a professor, nor a soldier, nor a Muslim, nor Chinese, etc. There are many things I am not, and many things I only know because others have done and continue to do the work for me. This is the nature of humanity and the foundation of civilization, society, and justice.
There is one thing I do know as a fact. Your post is FUD. It's designed to sow fear by planting seeds of uncertainty and doubt. Yet you have no facts, either. You only state claims... and then have the balls to accuse others of fallacious arguments in spite of your own appeal to emotion. Do you deny the existence overwhelming amount of scientific study by respected experts that claims CFCs contribute to ozone depletion? Whether you disagree with it or not germane to that question; I'm merely asking if you agree that those studies exist and are generally perceived respectably by their peers.
Skepticism is healthy, but skepticism in the face of expert opinion while simultaneously lacking any facts of your own is lunacy. Yes, an appeal to authority is a fallacy. So what? Logic isn't a tool for revealing falsehood. It's a tool for preserving truth. That's an important distinction. A fallacious argument is not one with a false conclusion. It is merely an argument that is not deductively true as long as all premises are true. It is possible to make a valid (non-fallacious) argument that is un-sound (has a false premise). Such an argument would not have a true conclusion.
I work at a public school district, and I constantly have to explain why wireless sucks to teachers. The buildings keep purchasing laptops instead of desktop computer labs, and the teachers don't understand why 30 people booting and logging in within minutes of each other might cause problems accessing the network.
I've tried dozens of ways of explaining it. The best is to equate it to a classroom. Wireless is like having 30 students all trying to ask questions at once with one teacher for them all. A wire is like having a personal tutor in a quiet room. But many people still don't understand. They don't understand why microwaves kill wireless even when I tell them they use the same frequency at 1000 times the power and no FCC regulation, so it's like putting a candle next to a lighthouse and expecting to see the candle. They don't understand why computer wireless is less reliable than a cellular phone call even though wireless computer networks are less than 15 years old (the original 802.11 standard was ratified in 1997) and cell phones are over 30 (1G cell network is circa 1980).
I've tried analogies. I've tried technical explanations. I've tried those patronizing explanations that belong in For Dummies books. No matter what I do or how I phrase it, they don't understand wireless.
Or maybe they do understand, and just don't understand why administrations still choose to use technologies which they've been told won't work well for what they're doing.
Once the wealth accumulates to the top only, how will the economy survive without spending by the middle and lower classes? Won't a lot of business just shutdown because people don't have money to spend?
My understanding that the tablet interface was basically a separate window manager. Instead of spawning explorer.exe at logon with it's Start menu, task bar, and desktop, it'll spawn shinyTabletUI.exe with it's "I don't need a keyboard because input would be too painful anyways" tablet experience. That means it's really not much different from KDE vs Gnome. or perhaps Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
Essentially, if -- and this is a big if because it's still not completely clear if tablets are an emerging niche market or a disruptive technology in the computer market -- if tablets become popular MS is poised with Windows 8 to have an OS that runs on traditional laptops and desktops as well as the new tablets. How successful it is depends on how portable code is between Windows 8 desktop and Windows 8 tablet, IMO.
I'll say one thing: the prospect of having Microsoft's network management capabilities in lieu of Apple's "I need to have the iTunes app and music store on my computer to register my iPad to myself even though it's owned by the company just so I can use the damn thing and there's no way for you to manage a large scale deployment ha ha ha remember the 80's" nightmare.
I've worked in healthcare IT myself, so I absolutely understand the issues there. Just having to help doctors with supposedly-portable DICOM images on CD was a huge mess. There needs to be a secure data transfer network and protocol, but I'm not sure how to do something like that because there is no inherent trust between two hospitals 5 states away. Nor should there be. It should almost be a situation where a trusted third party issues and validates identity certificates and allows communication between systems with some kind of encrypted protocol, but as the recent DigiNotar scandal reveals third party validation isn't reliable.
The issue is there are secure messages which require validation of the identity of the source, validation of the identity of the recipient, endpoint to endpoint encryption, validation of message integrity, and the message itself must be in a universal data format (strict XML with Base64 encoded content?) to prevent a monopoly of a solution from a single vendor (which would drive costs up, not down). And those are just the computer-side problems. There's a whole mess of issues with the medical data itself due to the fact that different medical systems use different coding and such. It's a tremendous problem that I don't really see being fixed for 20 years if at all, no matter how much governments and executives "mandate" solutions. It's the equivalent of building a data infrastructure on the scale of the national power grid without the benefit of power transformers.
I think more advancements in information science need to be made before we see real progress.
True, but backtraceing phone calls is infinitely easier than backtraceing an email. Yes, it's possible to proxy or zombie a phone line, but it's infinitely easier to proxy IPs or zombie computers. And unless you have a reverse-toll FAX number, long distance numbers are often caller pays per call or per minute, and international rates are always fairly high (another case where the Internet doesn't have a problem). So the phone company itself has a business requirement to document all phone calls just for billing purposes. Heck, even when I had unlimited long distance I still got a call summary in my bill, but that was ages ago.
Network convergence threatens to affect this issue, but even when it does the problem solved by E911 will need to be addressed before the change is complete.
Most FAX machine inboxes nowadays go to email, in my experience. The vast majority of FAX systems today larger than a single office are paperless systems built into leased copiers or multi-function devices which do the raw data transfer and call handling but otherwise input from a printer on a computer OS (or the built-in scanner) and output to the local email server.
Quite honestly, the reason the FAX refuses to die is because people, once they adopt a method, tend not to change. It's the inertia of least effort, aka laziness, aka efficiency of thought. Granted, there are good reasons for this approach. Most people have bad experiences with moving to new systems. How many times have you spoken with someone who blames a new system for slowing productivity, missing features, or for making the effort of using those features far more complex? People therefore tend to distrust new technology, again because in their experience -- and this is correct -- new technology fails and established technology works. The reason for that truth is quite simple: only good technology sticks around to become established; bad technology is abandoned.
Why should someone abandon what works for what doesn't? Or, more accurately, abandon that which fails in a way I have already learned to handle in exchange for something which fails in a way I don't understand -- and maybe can't even tell if it has failed? If I'm going to invest extra effort in something which is not more reliable and does not
So, what does email offer that FAX does not? Is it more reliable? No, not really. Email has inherently unreliable delivery, particularly with spam and malware filters which silently delete suspect emails. Additionally, email is already a primary contact for business, so FAX availability actually offers some communication redundancy. Is email more secure? Absolutely not. Email is unencrypted during transmission unless the message itself is encrypted. Does email guarantee sender identity better than FAX? Quite the opposite. It's often illegal to obfuscate or alter your sending FAX number due to junk FAX laws, while spoofing email is trivial.
Finally, since FAX is established in the business world, it has become something you will often need not because you yourself haven't adopted a better technology, but because your business peers and customers haven't adopted a better technology. Even where it's not wanted, it's a mandatory legacy system to deal with people who MUST use FAX for whatever reason.
So, if everybody has it and email actually isn't better, why change?
So what was his dispute with the management that made him do this?
It doesn't matter what his dispute was. There are no circumstances in which doing the equivalent of burning down your former place of employment is a legitmate move in a dispute.
If your product is based on ostensibly presenting a version of the truth, at some point you must be held accountable for it. This means you must open yourself up to criticism and attack, but it also means you're open for praise. If you cannot be shown to be deceptive, manipulative, or otherwise false, you cannot in any way, shape, or form be expected to shepherd the truth. I do not understand how someone can think they should work in a scholarly capacity and expect anonymity while simultaneously having authority. Authority and anonymity are a recipe that breeds corruption and lies, as anyone who has had contact with a bureaucracy can attest.
To put it simply: Why should we believe anything Wikipedia says is true if they aren't even truthful about their identities?
This is entirely the problem. In order to be smart and usable, Google strips essentially all non-alphabetic characters, and -- increasingly I find -- completely ignores my requests to search for a literal string or phrase. Domain-specific searches (i.e., a search that can identify code, for example) is something that is not well implemented now. It's all general "search everything". It's difficult to find a specific usage of a specific function in a specific way, for example, as code samples often don't have the terms you'd use to describe what you're looking for. Searching for examples of using, say, sed can be difficult. I have to think there's a whole wealth of pages I don't see when I search for that type of thing simply because the content wasn't written with search-ability in mind. That is, the parts that describe the content as what I want are not present in the content.
The other problem is one of general ambiguity. Let's say I want to search for something called a "master record". Let's say that's all I really know about the topic. It's called a "master record". Now, you and I see that and we think: ok, possibly computers (databases, boot sectors), possibly historical records management (health, personnel), possibly music production (a master for an album). Search engines don't let us think that way, even though those are the questions you'd ask if someone came up to you and said "What's a 'master record'?" Why can't a search engine allow me to narrow the topic instead of just puking the most popular results? Why can't it take me to a disambiguation page such as those on Wikipedia? The more meanings a term has, the less likely it is I'm ever going to find what I'm looking for.
In general, I find that search engines work very well when I know what I'm looking for, but they're really quite awful when I'm looking for something I know very little about. In general, I want a search engine that actually knows the topics I'm talking about. Knows what I mean when I ask in a certain way, or knows what questions to ask when I ask it a question it thinks is ambiguous.
It's certainly not an easy task. Categorizing knowledge is very difficult, as separating content from navigation alone is quite difficult. Nevertheless, if it could be done it would vastly improve search. I suspect technologies like Watson are the way we'll end up going to realize this type of advance.
You realize all that would happen then is that the company itself would relocate overseas. It might have very large offices in the US, but they would all be "branch offices". All this tax would do is punish companies that are assholes enough to outsource labor, but not assholes enough to evade taxes by leaving the country.
What do you do then? Require businesses that do business here to be based here? Ultimately, it's a walled garden approach. Someone will root it and break the system.
No, the best option is to let them outsource. Eventually -- and I mean in probably a century -- local economies will realign to the global economy and outsourcing will not save the amounts of money it does today. This is what is happening in China and India. The problem with businesses screwing people over is that people aren't as stupid as business would like them to be. People figure it out, and start demanding silly things like equality and justice, and those are things that governments tend to take an interest in.
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Simply put, I doubt you could do the same now. Tuition costs have vastly outpaced costs of living, and wages haven't even kept up with cost of living. Could you have afforded to go to school this way if tuition was over four times higher? Because that's what it is now. Here's something for you to understand: tuition costs have increased twice as quickly as medical costs.
Don't worry, big content corporations are working tirelessly ensure copyright violations are criminal. That way you will almost certainly get your lawyer and your day in court!
If you're a spam cannon you're not using Office to blast those emails, if you have half a brain.
You've never met a Sales manager at a medium business, have you?
What you have here in your comment, is basic misunderstanding of economics and politics.
Welcome to Slashdot!
Frankly, that seems pretty fair.
The law says "has been" as well as "may be". Someone had to create the CP. That means someone, somewhere has already sexually abused a child. The possessor of the CP is not relevant as far as reporting it's existence, really.
Now, there are still corner cases. It is possible he was only in possession of material created without a child such as digital renderings or drawings (which are still illegal in many jurisdictions) or photography for medical or other legitimate purposes (such as a parent photographing their child taking a bath).
Why aren't parents up in arms about their kids being supervised by a DVD?
Probably because so many children grow up in a home with the exact same babysitter.
Correct, however, nothing is preventing Blizzard from increasing the number of available items that can be traded once the market for the Guardian Cub is saturated (easily determined by their sales figures for the pet).
Blizzard is going very slowly to test the backlash from the community, so they're starting with one item. Worst case scenario, there's only ever going to be this one pet that can be bought and traded in this way. Minimum possible impact. Blizzard is just playing it safe.
The kernel in Windows 9 will be Linux.
...so will we be able to claim that as The Year of the Linux Desktop?
Don't be silly. We still have to wait for SP1 to be released.
Of course they can. Nevertheless, property owners have limited ability to do anything. Generally, all they can do is ask the photographer to stop, then ask them to leave. At that point all they can do is call the police who can remove the person for trespassing. If the property owner has posted signs that photography is not allowed, then they can more or less skip right to calling the police. Still, there is nothing more severe here than trespassing.
Simply put, shopping malls and stores do not have the same expectation of privacy that a private residence or office would because, well, stores have things like "WELCOME" and "OPEN" plastered all over their shingles. These are invitations, as are things such as posted business hours on the door. You can't be charged with trespassing if you were invited in. That's why they *must* ask you to leave before it's a legal matter. They have to rescind that open invitation.
(IANAL)
So, to summarize: he has proven himself to be honest, he has been dedicated to changing government in a good way, even when that view was unpopular, and he is popular. What more do you want?
I'd like him not to be Libertarian so his ideas could be more like sound policy and less idealistic drivel that would drive the country back to the days of the Robber Barons. Seriously, there's a reason so many of his most vocal supporters are 20-something single men.
We have a system here which runs HVAC software. We just "upgraded" the system from Win95 to Win98 SE after the old hardware died. We bought an old refurbished HP Evo d510 and used Win98 SE as that's all we had access to and all we could get drivers for. The software will not run in Windows 2000 or XP, nor will it run under Win98 in a VM due to a hardware dongle on the parallel port (the software installs, but never communicates with the HVAC system itself).
The system has been "scheduled for replacement" for about 6 years, but they keep putting it off.
I have friends in similar situations with legacy systems that only work on Win9x, Win2k, NT 4, and even one who is stuck with an NT 3.51 system.
Welcome to modern IT!
I know very few things as a fact, because I'm not a doctor, nor a scientist, nor a statesman, nor a professor, nor a soldier, nor a Muslim, nor Chinese, etc. There are many things I am not, and many things I only know because others have done and continue to do the work for me. This is the nature of humanity and the foundation of civilization, society, and justice.
There is one thing I do know as a fact. Your post is FUD. It's designed to sow fear by planting seeds of uncertainty and doubt. Yet you have no facts, either. You only state claims... and then have the balls to accuse others of fallacious arguments in spite of your own appeal to emotion. Do you deny the existence overwhelming amount of scientific study by respected experts that claims CFCs contribute to ozone depletion? Whether you disagree with it or not germane to that question; I'm merely asking if you agree that those studies exist and are generally perceived respectably by their peers.
Skepticism is healthy, but skepticism in the face of expert opinion while simultaneously lacking any facts of your own is lunacy. Yes, an appeal to authority is a fallacy. So what? Logic isn't a tool for revealing falsehood. It's a tool for preserving truth. That's an important distinction. A fallacious argument is not one with a false conclusion. It is merely an argument that is not deductively true as long as all premises are true. It is possible to make a valid (non-fallacious) argument that is un-sound (has a false premise). Such an argument would not have a true conclusion.
I work at a public school district, and I constantly have to explain why wireless sucks to teachers. The buildings keep purchasing laptops instead of desktop computer labs, and the teachers don't understand why 30 people booting and logging in within minutes of each other might cause problems accessing the network.
I've tried dozens of ways of explaining it. The best is to equate it to a classroom. Wireless is like having 30 students all trying to ask questions at once with one teacher for them all. A wire is like having a personal tutor in a quiet room. But many people still don't understand. They don't understand why microwaves kill wireless even when I tell them they use the same frequency at 1000 times the power and no FCC regulation, so it's like putting a candle next to a lighthouse and expecting to see the candle. They don't understand why computer wireless is less reliable than a cellular phone call even though wireless computer networks are less than 15 years old (the original 802.11 standard was ratified in 1997) and cell phones are over 30 (1G cell network is circa 1980).
I've tried analogies. I've tried technical explanations. I've tried those patronizing explanations that belong in For Dummies books. No matter what I do or how I phrase it, they don't understand wireless.
Or maybe they do understand, and just don't understand why administrations still choose to use technologies which they've been told won't work well for what they're doing.
Once the wealth accumulates to the top only, how will the economy survive without spending by the middle and lower classes? Won't a lot of business just shutdown because people don't have money to spend?
Let's put it this way: Not the gun stores.
See also France, circa 1790.
My understanding that the tablet interface was basically a separate window manager. Instead of spawning explorer.exe at logon with it's Start menu, task bar, and desktop, it'll spawn shinyTabletUI.exe with it's "I don't need a keyboard because input would be too painful anyways" tablet experience. That means it's really not much different from KDE vs Gnome. or perhaps Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
Essentially, if -- and this is a big if because it's still not completely clear if tablets are an emerging niche market or a disruptive technology in the computer market -- if tablets become popular MS is poised with Windows 8 to have an OS that runs on traditional laptops and desktops as well as the new tablets. How successful it is depends on how portable code is between Windows 8 desktop and Windows 8 tablet, IMO.
I'll say one thing: the prospect of having Microsoft's network management capabilities in lieu of Apple's "I need to have the iTunes app and music store on my computer to register my iPad to myself even though it's owned by the company just so I can use the damn thing and there's no way for you to manage a large scale deployment ha ha ha remember the 80's" nightmare.
I've worked in healthcare IT myself, so I absolutely understand the issues there. Just having to help doctors with supposedly-portable DICOM images on CD was a huge mess. There needs to be a secure data transfer network and protocol, but I'm not sure how to do something like that because there is no inherent trust between two hospitals 5 states away. Nor should there be. It should almost be a situation where a trusted third party issues and validates identity certificates and allows communication between systems with some kind of encrypted protocol, but as the recent DigiNotar scandal reveals third party validation isn't reliable.
The issue is there are secure messages which require validation of the identity of the source, validation of the identity of the recipient, endpoint to endpoint encryption, validation of message integrity, and the message itself must be in a universal data format (strict XML with Base64 encoded content?) to prevent a monopoly of a solution from a single vendor (which would drive costs up, not down). And those are just the computer-side problems. There's a whole mess of issues with the medical data itself due to the fact that different medical systems use different coding and such. It's a tremendous problem that I don't really see being fixed for 20 years if at all, no matter how much governments and executives "mandate" solutions. It's the equivalent of building a data infrastructure on the scale of the national power grid without the benefit of power transformers.
I think more advancements in information science need to be made before we see real progress.
True, but backtraceing phone calls is infinitely easier than backtraceing an email. Yes, it's possible to proxy or zombie a phone line, but it's infinitely easier to proxy IPs or zombie computers. And unless you have a reverse-toll FAX number, long distance numbers are often caller pays per call or per minute, and international rates are always fairly high (another case where the Internet doesn't have a problem). So the phone company itself has a business requirement to document all phone calls just for billing purposes. Heck, even when I had unlimited long distance I still got a call summary in my bill, but that was ages ago.
Network convergence threatens to affect this issue, but even when it does the problem solved by E911 will need to be addressed before the change is complete.
They're robbing us all blind.
And, apparently, robbing some of us deaf.
Most FAX machine inboxes nowadays go to email, in my experience. The vast majority of FAX systems today larger than a single office are paperless systems built into leased copiers or multi-function devices which do the raw data transfer and call handling but otherwise input from a printer on a computer OS (or the built-in scanner) and output to the local email server.
Quite honestly, the reason the FAX refuses to die is because people, once they adopt a method, tend not to change. It's the inertia of least effort, aka laziness, aka efficiency of thought. Granted, there are good reasons for this approach. Most people have bad experiences with moving to new systems. How many times have you spoken with someone who blames a new system for slowing productivity, missing features, or for making the effort of using those features far more complex? People therefore tend to distrust new technology, again because in their experience -- and this is correct -- new technology fails and established technology works. The reason for that truth is quite simple: only good technology sticks around to become established; bad technology is abandoned.
Why should someone abandon what works for what doesn't? Or, more accurately, abandon that which fails in a way I have already learned to handle in exchange for something which fails in a way I don't understand -- and maybe can't even tell if it has failed? If I'm going to invest extra effort in something which is not more reliable and does not
So, what does email offer that FAX does not? Is it more reliable? No, not really. Email has inherently unreliable delivery, particularly with spam and malware filters which silently delete suspect emails. Additionally, email is already a primary contact for business, so FAX availability actually offers some communication redundancy. Is email more secure? Absolutely not. Email is unencrypted during transmission unless the message itself is encrypted. Does email guarantee sender identity better than FAX? Quite the opposite. It's often illegal to obfuscate or alter your sending FAX number due to junk FAX laws, while spoofing email is trivial.
Finally, since FAX is established in the business world, it has become something you will often need not because you yourself haven't adopted a better technology, but because your business peers and customers haven't adopted a better technology. Even where it's not wanted, it's a mandatory legacy system to deal with people who MUST use FAX for whatever reason.
So, if everybody has it and email actually isn't better, why change?
So what was his dispute with the management that made him do this?
It doesn't matter what his dispute was. There are no circumstances in which doing the equivalent of burning down your former place of employment is a legitmate move in a dispute.
Maybe they took his stapler.
If your product is based on ostensibly presenting a version of the truth, at some point you must be held accountable for it. This means you must open yourself up to criticism and attack, but it also means you're open for praise. If you cannot be shown to be deceptive, manipulative, or otherwise false, you cannot in any way, shape, or form be expected to shepherd the truth. I do not understand how someone can think they should work in a scholarly capacity and expect anonymity while simultaneously having authority. Authority and anonymity are a recipe that breeds corruption and lies, as anyone who has had contact with a bureaucracy can attest.
To put it simply: Why should we believe anything Wikipedia says is true if they aren't even truthful about their identities?
Or more apropos: [citation needed, bitch]
This is entirely the problem. In order to be smart and usable, Google strips essentially all non-alphabetic characters, and -- increasingly I find -- completely ignores my requests to search for a literal string or phrase. Domain-specific searches (i.e., a search that can identify code, for example) is something that is not well implemented now. It's all general "search everything". It's difficult to find a specific usage of a specific function in a specific way, for example, as code samples often don't have the terms you'd use to describe what you're looking for. Searching for examples of using, say, sed can be difficult. I have to think there's a whole wealth of pages I don't see when I search for that type of thing simply because the content wasn't written with search-ability in mind. That is, the parts that describe the content as what I want are not present in the content.
The other problem is one of general ambiguity. Let's say I want to search for something called a "master record". Let's say that's all I really know about the topic. It's called a "master record". Now, you and I see that and we think: ok, possibly computers (databases, boot sectors), possibly historical records management (health, personnel), possibly music production (a master for an album). Search engines don't let us think that way, even though those are the questions you'd ask if someone came up to you and said "What's a 'master record'?" Why can't a search engine allow me to narrow the topic instead of just puking the most popular results? Why can't it take me to a disambiguation page such as those on Wikipedia? The more meanings a term has, the less likely it is I'm ever going to find what I'm looking for.
In general, I find that search engines work very well when I know what I'm looking for, but they're really quite awful when I'm looking for something I know very little about. In general, I want a search engine that actually knows the topics I'm talking about. Knows what I mean when I ask in a certain way, or knows what questions to ask when I ask it a question it thinks is ambiguous.
It's certainly not an easy task. Categorizing knowledge is very difficult, as separating content from navigation alone is quite difficult. Nevertheless, if it could be done it would vastly improve search. I suspect technologies like Watson are the way we'll end up going to realize this type of advance.
You realize all that would happen then is that the company itself would relocate overseas. It might have very large offices in the US, but they would all be "branch offices". All this tax would do is punish companies that are assholes enough to outsource labor, but not assholes enough to evade taxes by leaving the country.
What do you do then? Require businesses that do business here to be based here? Ultimately, it's a walled garden approach. Someone will root it and break the system.
No, the best option is to let them outsource. Eventually -- and I mean in probably a century -- local economies will realign to the global economy and outsourcing will not save the amounts of money it does today. This is what is happening in China and India. The problem with businesses screwing people over is that people aren't as stupid as business would like them to be. People figure it out, and start demanding silly things like equality and justice, and those are things that governments tend to take an interest in.
More than that. Proof of concept of a draft standard which no browser currently implements completely, consistently, or correctly.