The problem is mass surveillance and data mining.

There hasn't been an administration in this country for the past 63 years that I would have any level of trust with that kind of information.

LK

Copyright law does not permit fair use. It is a valid defense against liability in court against a claim of infringement; in such a case, the user admits infringement but claims no liability due to fair use.

I'm not sure who came up with this line of bullshit, Jack Valenti's lawyers maybe, but it's not true. And no, it doesn't matter that Nolo press says so. Fair use is an exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law; if it is fair use it is not infringement. Establishing a claim of fair use is a complete defense to infringement.

17 USC 107, which codifies fair use, could not be clearer: "... the fair use of a copyrighted work... is not an infringement of copyright."

The ACLU doesn't work to ban guns but they don't oppose the idea, either.

If you read the above link, they even take the unprecedented step of saying that in essence, the ACLU thinks that the SCOTUS is wrong and that the Constitution doesn't say what the SCOTUS says that it says.

LK

I'm not sure if you're trolling or serious.

Would you mind clarifying?

LK

The ACLU's motivation was stopping mass surveillance and not the preservation of Americans' second amendment rights.

Sure, the ACLU may have been the source of this information but it will be the NRA, SAF, CCRKBA, JPFO and similar groups that actually use it.

LK

And with good reason; this story is yet another confirmation that they are out to get us. I wish everyone would be as paranoid as "gun nuts."

So now you have no benefits that aren't costing you tax from your salary too. So the value of the benefits plummets and thus people just demand a higher salary instead. Which, believe it or not, costs you more - the point of the incentives is that the person couldn't just earn that amount of money extra and get that incentive themselves anyway, it works by having expensive one-offs that mortals couldn't afford, and them remaining company property, etc.

You can't make outsourcing illegal. It's just a legal minefield and there's always a way around it. It would also cripple any modern economy overnight. This is truly a stupid suggestion in its own right.

End visas? No problem. But there aren't many countries in the world that have put a block on visas because they already have enough in-house talent. Believe it or not, this will make immigration drop which, again, will cost you all money.

The numbers may look bigger on the balance sheet, but the costs go up as well and may not be immediately noticeable.

The stock/futures things? Too complicated for me to tell what would happen, to be honest. Chances are there's a way to scam it to make enormous profit and not pay tax on it.

However, if you just tax the companies properly - a fixed portion of their income earned or brought into the country, and a definition of income that excludes any kind of "pay your own subsidiary" shenanigans - the prices for the consumer may well go up. But equally consumers will go elsewhere.

And maybe, just maybe, like Starbucks UK, you'll find that the prices have gone up because NOW they have to pay the right amount of tax. And if that means they can't be profitable, then their competitors who HAVE been paying the right amount of tax all along will win (e.g. Costa Coffee in the UK), because they can compete on a level playing field finally.

Tax isn't complicated. A fixed portion of what you earn. It's that simple. The problem is that to get their own 10% the lawmakers and accountants make things incredibly complicated to define exactly what you've earned. And they wrap it up in a thousand tiny taxes rather than one big tax.

Can someone explain why it wouldn't be better to have a "personal income tax" and a "corporate income tax" and scrap everything else? It's used for disincentives (e.g. tax on smoking in the UK) but, honestly, is that really worth it compared to just banning it or letting the markets speak?

It took 40 years to get to the point where smoking costs us more as a country than it makes in tax, and now we have a huge legacy of health problems ahead of us and STILL we haven't properly banned it but pissed away money on disincentives like plain packaging, hiding them away in the store, stopping their advertising, removing their capability to sponsor, etc.

I can't help but think that just the simplicity of "half what you earned" (which is about right for most first-world countries) would cut out so much red tape, confusion, administration and difficult enforcement that it would actually get you back MORE than all this complicated mess of exclusions and kickbacks that are in place now.

I pay road tax (road fund licence, technically, but it's a tax on road use the proceeds of which go to road maintenance - no different to taxing road use and the government having to maintain the roads generally), income tax, national insurance (healthcare tax), VAT (sales tax), a specific tax on petrol, a tax on pensions, a tax on insurances, a tax on bank interest and god-knows what else.

"How much money did you make from all sources last year? Give me half" seems to be pretty much the same as we have now, but without all this mess of shit to fall foul of and allow companies to scam.

"Untaxed" foreign earnings. Does that mean not taxed at all, or not taxed by the US? (They may well have been taxed in the foreign country they were earned in. If they weren't, I'm sure those foreign countries would love to know about it given that it was earned there and then shipped out of the country.)

What you have here is a problem of a global economy trying to deal with local taxation, and maybe even an attempt to double-tax.

If you're a large company that deals internationally, you have two options. Set up a company in each country and have them pay the tax of the local country, or set up one company and then pay the tax in EITHER those foreign countries or the home country of the company, depending on how you declare it.

For a company to have foreign earnings that are untaxed, they either have a home country that's not being paid tax (Why not? What kind of stupid taxation system is that if they're clearly based there, wherever they do business?), or they're not paying proper taxes in the foreign country (same parenthesised comment applies here).

I'm sure there are a lot of companies not paying proper tax. Starbucks weren't paying millions in tax in the UK because all their profits went to their US division as "payment for intellectual property rights" (i.e. Starbucks US let Starbucks UK use the Starbucks name for the small price of 100% of their profit, thus making them a zero-profit entity in the UK and not liable to UK tax, which is obviously a scam and should be legislated against).

But if you have to do a one-off tax to make things right, that means your everyday tax is slowly cocking things up ALL the time. And how long because the next "one-off" tax?

Having had a long interest in pottery, I've looked at some of the history of pottery in Japan. Interestingly, in the late 1500s, Japan invaded Korea and while they didn't get much territory-wise, they rounded up a lot of potters and forced them give up their knowledge in Japan. Pottery was high technology in those days. Anyway, kidnapping knowledgable workers is a time honored tradition.

The example I reference is usually called the Pottery Wars, rather than "Ceramic Wars" but there's a short synopsis here: The Ceramic Wars: Hideyoshi's Japan Kidnaps Korean Artisans

re-aim the camera at closing time to aim at the door. What's so hard about that?

It's an ice cream shop. If it's like my favorite ice cream shop, that menu can change 3 times in one hour as the ice cream as ice cream is used up and new ice cream taken out for use, or as some of their dozens of flavors run out near the end of the business day.

This takes time and is prone to forgetting. It also requires keyboard space somewhere unlikely to wind up covered with product. That counter space is _expensive_, every foot not in use for real service is lost to profit.

The GOP corporatists want a "repatriation holiday"

So does Obama. This is the SAME THING as that. Using your original This and That.

It's not corporatist to simply want to provide motivation for companies to bring money back into the U.S. economy.

> ou are forgetting that the default for SSH is to abort during a MITM

With stolen hostkeys on the same IP address? Or by presenting a new host IP in DNS with their own MITM keys, connecting to an unencrypted login transaction logger, and recording the user login attempt and passwords, then using them next time to connect to forward the connection to the relevant upstream host? Or any of a dozen other MITM approaches?

I've been through just such an attack. Fortunately, the person doing the attack gave themselves away by failing to deal with 'ssh-agent' based connections, which is when I got called: key based access to the attacked server stopped working.

It's not a problem to use big data to try to figure out where to focus. But you have to subject the results to some sanity checking, and before you actually impact someone's life, perhaps even some common sense. Shocking idea, I know, and the reason why it's still a problem.