French politicians want to tax tablets for not running Windows

[Christopher Chan]

On Friday, January 07, 2011 02:54 PM, Bill Cairns wrote:
> It would be interesting if we could stop the political name calling
> for a bit and hear what is happening in France.
>
> As I understand it, there is a proposal on the table in France to tax
> Tablet PCs because (so the theory goes) these are being used to pirate
> music and DVDs. In France, MP3 players are already subject to a
> special tax for that reason. If that proposal was not daft enough, it
> seems that Windows Tablets are to be exempt from this tax - Windows
> being a proper OS means that Windows Tablets are computers; Android
> and other Linux systems are not proper OSs and therefore the Tablets
> that run them are not proper computers.
>
> There is an old political maxim that says: when you have a choice in
> believing that something was caused by a conspiracy designed by the
> dark forces of evil, or perhaps that it is a result of a monumental
> cock-up by incompetent idiots, go for the cock-up theory. (A corollary
> to Occam's Razor I suppose).
>

History would seem to support the first. The charges laid against 
members of the former government after the French Revolution ended were 
nothing short of outright lies to support the victors' conspiracy. Or at 
least, conspirators making good use of incompetent idiots.