France Planning Non-Windows Tablet Tax? 227
An anonymous reader writes "Lots of countries around the world have private copying 'levies,' which are effectively taxes on products that store data, which is put into a pool to be handed out to copyright holders, as a sort of payment for the 'copying' that individuals do. This was quite popular with blank CDRs, for example, but has been expanded in certain countries to cover hard drives, iPods and other such devices. Over in France, they're looking to expand the levy to tablet computers, but apparently if that tablet computer is running Microsoft Windows, it will be exempted from the tax. iPads and Android-powered tablets will have the tax. Why? Well, the argument is that if a tablet is running Windows, it's really a 'computer.' But if it's running one of those 'mobile' operating systems, suddenly it's a brand new category. Not surprisingly, makers of Android tablets — including the French company Archos — are not at all happy about this."
Re:Those cheese eating surrender monkeys fail agai (Score:4, Informative)
And what the hell does a "clean operating system" mean?
It means you're relying too heavily on a shitty machine translation that just picked the first meaning of "propre" it could find.
Re:Those cheese eating surrender monkeys fail agai (Score:3, Informative)
In the french text it says "d’un système d’exploitation propre". In this context "propre" means "of it's own". So if it has an operating system for mobile devices or it has it's own operating system (so develloped with the touchpaddevice in mind) it is taxable. Since windows seven is develloped for personal computers this supposedly does not apply.
Re:"Planing?" (Score:5, Informative)
As a real linguist, I feel I should point out that there are dialects of American English which have a “need Verb-ed” construction which is approximated by “need to be Verb-ed” elsewhere. Thus one can say “the dishes need washed” or “the dog needs walked” rather than “the dishes need to be washed“ or “the dog needs to be walked”. This construction is perfectly grammatical in such dialects, and is possibly spreading so that it will become grammatical throughout much of North America in the next few generations. There’s no semantic difference apparently, it’s a purely syntactic distinction.
It *is* however dialectal at this point, and hence should be avoided in most written contexts.