jmc

producer

Please! Please! Please! Don't give 'em any ideas!

Jellies -- there's another footwear fashion I don't want to see come back!

trash

This "internet tax" was the subject of an e-mail hoax a few years back. I figured the e-mail in question must have been forwarded to just about everybody with a 'net connection at least a dozen times. I remember it mentioned a (U.S.) Senate bill and gave the number of the bill. As expected the e-mail urged us all to flood Congress with objections. And I'm sure Congress got flooded too! Trouble is, the bill in question was totally ficticious. The number given in the message did not conform to Congressional rules -- any bill originating in the U. S. House will be HR### and any bill originating in the U.S. Senate will be S###. This had some other goofball number entirely and was a dead giveaway that the whole thing was bogus. Not that I would put it past Uncle Sam in his utter arrogance to try to tax the Internet. But I wonder how effective this would be in a technical sense. The Internet is a worldwide phenomenon now and this board is a shining testament to that fact. Uncle Sam, as arrogant and greedy as he is, has absolutely no jurisdiction outside the borders of the United States. So the U.S. government simply cannot levy a tax on anything that goes on outside its borders (you folks on the other side of the big puddle may sing "nyah nyah nyah nyah NYAH nyah" as you see fit. Now we techies know that the Internet is composed of a large number of sub-nets going through all the major population centers of the world. Any information transmitted over the internet is broken up into some number of parts (called "packets") and each packet is routed from the source to the destination. All of the packets that comprise an internet transmission (such as an e-mail message or this very page you are reading now) do not necessarily travel through the same pathways. In fact they may not even arrive in sequence -- the receiver buffers and re-sequences them as it gets them. So if I were to send an e-mail to somebody in California, some of my packets may go through Chicago, some may go through Denver, and some may go through various cities in Canada. If someone in England is downloading a Web page hosted on a Japanese server, packets can literally go around both sides of the globe and through all the intervening nations along the way. So with this theoretical Internet tax, how does Uncle determine which packets are entirely domestic (and therefore taxable), which packets are entirely foreign (and off limits) and which packets come from a foreign server to a domestic server or vice-versa (and may be partially taxable)? I have a feeling that collecting this tax may be more expensive than the revenue it would generate. Which would serve them right! The other option is to tax Internet access, like phone access. And I wouldn't put it past 'em to try that either. I understand that a phone tax dating back to the invention of the telephone network (1800's) was finally eliminated last week. These things take a long time to die. As far as the days of wide-open cyberspace being numbered, that number is zero and has been for several years. With so many Web sites going to fee-based subscription content, the amount of decent, free content on the Web has really dwindled. Which is a shame.

hobo (in heels -- there's an image!)

music

LatE

Maple

directed

Absolutely! Our military keeps us free.

Scuttlebutt

Even worse, ALL the girls and women I've seen wearing them all appear to be wearing 3 sizes too big.

I think they only make 'em 3 sizes too big!

These clog things are hideous! (OK, that wasn't "EEEEEWWWWW"). I have seen a few of them around, they leave me wondering "Why?"

guided

crafted

City

space

exercise

EmbitteR

ExasperatE

speaker

noise

lariats

brick

TeasE