French politicians want to tax tablets for not running Windows

[Bill Cairns]

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).

Does anyone have any recent news on this? Perhaps the French
politicians are still recovering from their revelries?

Bill