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Comment Re:Maybe your tax laws ought to be adjusted (Score 1) 592

But how can a company buy assets if it doesn't have any money? Oh, sorry, of course it does, because it has income which is generated from selling things to customers. So why shouldn't it pay income tax on its income? Ah, because it's an abstract entity that should not pay tax (as the post I replied to suggested).

Ultimately, the money is either paid as a salary to someone (in which case they pay income tax), or it is used to purchase something (in which case sales tax is paid).

Alternatively, if companies don't pay taxes, they shouldn't enjoy benefits such as protection of laws or electricity provided by infrastructure that is paid for by taxes.

The company should be paying real estate tax if it owns property. That should pay for infrastructure. If it uses electricity, I'm pretty sure it's paying for it.

Why should the general public pay the salaries of lawmakers if they're going to pass laws in favour of companies that don't pay taxes?

The concept of a corporation was invented to allow a group of people to shift the risk of enterprise into an abstract entity. But just because it's an abstract entity doesn't mean that it's not part of the economy.

It is a part of the economy, but it's an intermediate part. The money is either spent to purchase something (sales tax), or paid to someone (personal income tax).

Now, taxes can be used to incentivize behavior. Perhaps it's in the national interest for companies to spend their money immediately, in which case, it should be taxed, to incentivize companies to spend instead of turning a profit.

Personally, I think some sort of fairly low tax, say maybe 10% of income, would be appropriate, based on employee pay. So if a company had most of its work force in the US but tried to shift the profit to an offshore subsidiary with only a couple people staffing an office, the bulk of it would still be taxable. And if a company tried to maliciously shift its profits to avoid paying taxes, it ought to be punitively taxed, say 50% of profit. Hopefully that would eliminate all the economic waste of the tax avoidance industry.

Comment Re:Just stop indexing them (Score 1) 114

They should go a step further. Stop indexing all German news sites and charge a fee to those who want their articles in the search indexes, since it is additional overhead for Google to make exceptions for them.

Yes Google should do that, thereby totally abusing their near monoly position on the search market in an attempt to blackmail a nation state into legislating in a way that suits Google an action which is guaranteed to instantly get the undivided attention of the EU commission (the same one who handed Microsoft a record $1,4 billon fine).

So in your opinion, Google should be forced to index all of these German publishers and pay for the privilege of having to do this?

Comment Re:Many fingers to point (Score 1) 473

Case number 2... You can't buy stamps in the lobby any longer. The post master at my local office said the vending machines were too problematic and expensive to maintain, so they were removed. Now if you want to buy stamps, you have to get to the post office when they are open. See above for the likelyhood of that. I've received postcards from the USPS that offered to sell me stamps by mail.... with a postage fee added to my purchase. Are you kidding me?

FYI, many grocery stores cell stamps at the checkout counter.

Comment Re:The TSA is still a thing? (Score 1) 134

There are paranoids out there, but even many of them would give a pre-schooler a pass on the security or at least acknowledge that they shouldn't be on the no-fly list.

Hey man, you're just thinking reactively, here. We have to stay one step ahead of the terrorists. Bet you'd feel pretty dumb if we let pre-schoolers on to airplanes without checking them, and then one of them blew up a plane!

Comment Re:This is nothing more than a declaration of inte (Score 1) 817

Wow, and yet Gore STILL got more votes than Bush in Florida, only to have them not counted by a conspiracy between corrupt election officials and corrupt Supreme Court justices.

My thanks go to the Washington Post and other fine newspapers for establishing this fact, so that nobody in the future will ever consider Bush 's first term to be legitimate:

...the study also found that Gore probably would have won, by a range of 42 to 171 votes out of 6 million cast, had there been a broad recount of all disputed ballots statewide...

171 out of 6,000,000? That's almost a whole 0.003%! I imagine that's well within the margin of error.

Comment Re:Isn't it plain and obvious... (Score 1) 216

In the USA, there are plenty of people - millions actually - who have the means to kill anyone wearing a pacemaker quite easily. These people are called "gun owners". Now the number has increased by one - some idiot hacker who figures out how to hack into the pacemaker software. So what has changed?

Don't forget the 10s of millions of car owners.

Comment Re:Hmmm... (Score 1) 946

You are getting muddled. The googVorc case was if oracle could copy right the API (that is, the list of function name, their hierarchy, intput/outputs) and prevent google from doing a clean room implementation that complies with their API. In this case, they are saying NVIDIA can't make an API call _into their code_ and ship proprietary bundles linked against their GPL library. NVIDIA could do a clean-room re-implementation of the kernel if they wanted to, but that is not what is going on here.

If you don't have the constraint that linking is derivative then the whole notion of copy-left is dead, as you can fully use any library in any application. The authors are giving you a license to use their code for free, they can put what ever restrictions on that license they want.

Hmm, so what if NVidia were to create their own GPL clean-room implementation of the API that simply called the kernel API? Then could they link their BLOB to that?

Comment Re:In Xenon/HID headlight bulbs (Score 1) 225

No, Audi and Volkswagen's entire new line has LED headlights on all of their models this year and the A4/A5 have had them for 4-5 years now. But don't think I'm agreeing with Tastecicles, because they're almost wrong. They are only the dipped/low-beam headlights as LEDs are not yet legal in the USA or Europe for full or high-beam use. But as for this usage, even SEAT has them now on some of their models and that's one of VAG's "budget" brands.

These are just Daytime Running Lights. They use a single bi-xenon headlamp for low/high beam.

Comment Re:Do I have the Right? (Score 1) 332

From where do natural rights spring? From being conscious individuals, from having rational faculties. It comes in short from being 'moral agents' - capable of making moral choices. It is only because we are capable of acting morally that we have both rights and the responsibility to allow others their rights. If you are an individual capable of making the choice to shoot or not, then it was murder, but if you are a trained chimp, or a machine, or something else which is not an individual moral agent, then you cannot commit murder, even though you can still kill.

A fertilised egg is quite clearly not an individual, nor a moral agent. It is a biological function of the mothers body - certainly a very unusual and interesting one, but it is only later that it develops individuality and becomes something more - and only in some cases. In fact, eggs are routinely fertilised, malfunction, and are washed out with other debris.

This is why we should turn retards and the senile over to private facilities where rich people can pay to hunt them.

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