Now I am curious, Understand that I am from the states, and consequently have zero intuition as to what a VAT is. But... the hard drive importer is directly using the HDDs and as such is not adding any value to the item, why are they paying a value added tax?
If I had to guess it is probably on the value that could have been added to the item.
It’s just the name for sales tax. Why is there a tax on sales, isn’t a sale a discount? Then is the sales tax negative because it’s the tax on the difference between the full price and the discounted price? You’d probably end up with a refund for buying the thing, unless your state has no sales tax.
Sales tax is actually very different beacuse it is usually either cumulative and added to each part of the chain, or only the last one; whereas VAT is deducted in all but the last part of the chain.
Yea, the idea is that the VAT effectively taxes the added value in each step of the value chain because there's a limit to how much you can charge for an item or service. E. g. a 25 % VAT does not necessarily mean the goods become 25 % more expensive; most of those 25 % would have been profit for the reseller, intermediates and manufacturer if it were not for the VAT. Perhaps a little contra-intuitively, a high VAT keeps prices down and business efficient because every intemediate is indirectly taxed even though the VAT is only charged to the final consumer.
That could be done with a few influential terminal emulators adopting a consensus extension to ISO8613-6, like this: ESC[38:99:‹purpose›m for foreground, ESC[48:99:‹purpose›m for background.
e.g.
Foreground Background Purpose
----------- ----------- -------
ESC[38:99:0m ESC[48:99:0m normal ( same as ESC[39m and ESC[49m )
ESC[38:99:1m ESC[48:99:1m emphasise
ESC[38:99:2m ESC[48:99:2m de-emphasise
ESC[38:99:3m ESC[48:99:3m error
ESC[38:99:4m ESC[48:99:4m warning
ESC[38:99:5m ESC[48:99:5m caution
ESC[38:99:6m ESC[48:99:6m notice
Then people (themes) could easily choose foreground colour or background highlighting for particular roles. Some terminal emulators might also choose to configure other stylistic choices like bold, italic, etc.
(I believe ISO8613-6 defines sub-modes 0 through 5 (te;db), with 2 (rgb) and 5 (256-color indexed) being most widely implemented. But some terminals historically mess up : and ; in CSI sequences, and I know at least one would interpret ESC[38:6:1m as ESC[6;1m (blinking bold!), so here I pick 99 (ECMA-48 defines modes up to 65).)
After thinking about it a bit more, I think the specific details of that (i.e. inventing an extended colour mode) are not ideal.
One alternative: Assign semantics to colour indexes above 256.
Both of those have the disadvantage that they separate foreground and background colour, but a user really wants a combined semantic presentation. For instance, a user might want a warning message to be black text on a yellow background, and not have to rely on the program remembering to set both foreground and background to ‘warning’ colour.
So another possibility is just to invent new SGR numbers, e.g.
Control Purpose
------------ -------
CSI 2 0 0 m normal (undoes any CSI 1 x x m)
CSI 2 0 1 m emphasise
CSI 2 0 2 m de-emphasise
CSI 2 0 3 m error
CSI 2 0 4 m warning
CSI 2 0 5 m caution
CSI 2 0 6 m notice
⋮
Then the user can configure those as they please with any combination of foreground, background, weight, slant, etc.
I'm now thinking about writing up pros and cons of alternatives.
I like this idea, although I think that they should be only one code, which might program both the foreground and background (and font styles if applicable), rather than separate codes for foreground and for background.
They put : ; immediately after the digits because they were considered the least used of the major punctuation, so that they could be replaced by ‘digits’ 10 and 11 where desired.
> by longstanding convention, that port 23/tcp is given to telnetd type login servers
First thing I ever telnetted to was Melvyl, University of California's library catalogue, around 1985. This was “remote user access” (I was a remote user) to “service hosts” (running the catalogue) providing “remote terminal access”. It was not a login.
I remember using MELVYL too, and you're completely right about that.
I would suggest that MELVYL on port 23/tcp was also unnecessarily impinging on the IETF standards. MELVYL could have easily established its own well-known port with the IANA and not conflicted with the TELNET login port.
Before the WWW, there were a multiplicity of search services and indexes. Remember Archie, WAIS, and Gopher? Apparently, WAIS was assigned port 210/tcp, but Archie apparently used TELNET on 23/tcp as well.
I think some of the pioneering Internet services were perceived as not requiring a dedicated port. If MELVYL was the only service running on the mainframe and it wasn't running a Unix telnetd, then why not usurp 23/tcp? The admins there probably perceived it as a virtual "octopus cable" connecting remote "terminal labs", and for sure they had alternate methods of access for OS servicing and configuration purposes. In the beginning of MELVYL they were undecided about which protocol would prevail, and TCP/IP was competing with others, so port numbers may have been afterthoughts for the architects.
The most important thing may have been the principle of not surprising users or confusing them with parameters. "telnetting to a host" was way easier without trying to specify that they needed a port number. Just ask any Unix admin where MUD users try to bang on their telnetd port trying to play the game...
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