I don't think this is legal under the constitution. The sales are made outside WA and therefore cannot be taxed by the WA government. A lot of governors have tried this crap, I don't think any have succeeded though
It is legal, according to the Supreme Court. The main case in this area is Complete Auto Transit vs. Brady.
The state is not taxing the out-of-state sales. Rather, it is imposing an excise tax on possession or use of the items by residents of the state (this kind of tax is usually called a "use tax", and I'll call it that in the rest of this comment). A common example of this kind of thing is taxes on luxury items such as boats. If a state has such a tax, you generally will have to pay it when you register the boat, even if you bought the boat out of state. The same power that allows the state to tax that boat that you are using in-state regardless of where you bought it is what allows them to tax, say, your mail-order books or computers or viagra.
The main limits on this, due to the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution, are that they cannot force merchants in another state to collect the tax for them (but see below), and the tax cannot unduly burden out-of-state purchases. The Court has decided that this means that the total tax on an out-of-state purchase (sales taxes in the state of sale plus the use tax in the buyer's state) cannot exceed what the tax would have been had the item been purchased in-state.
As far as collection goes, a state does not have the power, in general, to tell a merchant in another state to collect this use tax for the state. What I mean by "in general" is that an arbitrary merchant, in another state, that does not have some connection with the buyer's state other than selling items to them, could not be forced to collect for the state. However, if that merchant has some relationship with the state that does give the state power over it (such as it having offices or stores in the buyer's state), then they state may have power over it. This is why major national merchants collect taxes on mail-order purchases, even if their mail-order operation is out of the purchaser's state--they have retail stores in the purchaser's state, and so the state can tell them to collect the tax.
For items where the merchant does not have to, and does not voluntarily decide to, collect the use tax, the state has generally only actually collected on items like cars and boats, that have a registration requirement. But most states do have a (widely ignored and in most cases largely unknown) requirement that you pay your use tax.
Oh, one more thing. I don't remember what case it was in, but I believe the Court has also decided that Congress does have the power to require merchants to collect use taxes when they sell mail-order, even if they do not have a sufficient present in the buyer's state to give that state authority to compel such collection.
The problem with Microsoft's "standard" is that in many places it says things like "do what Word 5.0.3 does in when in double-line-spaced mode" without saying just what that means
Isn't that just for use when converting documents from Word 5.0.3 format? New documents won't use that tag.
Compare to ODF, where key formatting parameters are left up to the application, so that if you had two completely independent ODF implementations, written just from the "standard", documents produced by one would would probably look quite different when read by the other.
A lot of people seem to think that something that would NOT be OK in the real world is just automatically OK if you do it using the internet. This sounds like one of those cases.
Someone allegedly said in writing things that were libelous toward someone else.
That should be all we need to know. The fact that it took place on the internet is simply not relevant.
This is kind of ridiculous. More calls could indicate that some things are being broken down into more fine-grained, simpler, subproblems, or that more use is being made of existing libraries as opposed to writing new code. Both of those would tend to lead to better security.
In other words, number of system calls tells us nothing useful about security.
Are you referring to Malcom in the Middle?[...] god did it suck
It did have some pretty good stories now and then. It kind of makes me think of what you'd get if you cross-bred the writers of The Adventures of Pete and Pete with sane people. (When I say the writers of APP were not sane, I mean that in a good way).
I hate sports as much as the next dork but seriously, if you were a network executive and you had to choose between a guaranteed ratings grabber like FOOTBALL!! or a moderately successful science fiction cartoon which way would you go?
Well, I'd consider that the deal with the NFL is finite, and next time it is up for negotiation, it might move to another network. And then I'd consider the ton of money that The Simpsons has made for the network, and continues to make after almost two decades, and realize that Futurama at least has good potential to be in that ballpark. And then I'd moveFuturama to a time slot that wouldn't conflict with football.
Oh, and I'd have done the same with Firefly, for similar reasons. It was from people with an excellent track record, and had a good shot at being one of those shows that grows into a very lucrative long-term franchise (e.g., it could have been Fox's Star Trek).
And for the slot that gets stomped on by football? A couple things come to mind. One would be to develop a skit-based comedy or variety show. Skits each episode would be independent, so that the show could quickly be cut to fit when football goes over, with the cut material usable next week. Or just take the easy way out, and fill any odd times between football's end and the next half-hour boundary with bonus material from the current season of American Idol.
Uhm...if Google maps gets you to the right intersection, and then you can't take over from there and figure out which of the four corners has the Taco Bell, you shouldn't be going out for food on your own in the first place.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that most people with DLP TVs (or other big TVs) aren't using the TV for sound. The sound is coming from their stereo system. So, the TV going off due to its sleep timer would not stop the sound.
the only way I can see to burn out a DLP fast is via video games, Sports buffs and movie junkies (I don't need to watch Dan Rather in HD, but the latest action flick is probably worth it)
I usually get home from work around 4 or 5 PM, and the TV goes on. I have it on the news for a couple hours, while I make dinner, relax on the computer, etc. I'll watch a couple programs later on National Geographic or Discover or the History Channel, and watch a Simpsons or two from the DVR. When I'm not actually sitting in front of the TV watching, I'll have something interesting on from one of the aforementioned channels (and with the DVR, if I'm surfing the web, but hear something interesting from the TV, I can easily rewind to catch it). I'll often watch a Simpsons or South Park from the DVR as I am falling asleep, or will turn to the Music Choice channels for some music. When listening to music, I want the TV on, so I can see the information about the current song. So, it's pretty easy to end up with the set on all night.
Basically, TV is the new radio. It is often on as background entertainment while doing other things.
Net result: it is easy to get 8 hours a day with the TV on, and if I fall asleep with it on, 16 hours. I've on average gotten about 12-14 months out of my $250 6000 hour DLP bulbs.
You do not have to have in iPod to use songs purchased from iTunes. You can use a Mac or a Windows PC. You only need an iPod if you want to use the songs on a small portable player.
Keep in mind too that all 150,000 people who bought add on HD-DVD players made an optional decision to buy that drive
We can make a stronger statement than that, since the XBox360 HD-DVD drive is not used at all by games. So, all of those were bought for watching movies.
So, the numbers break down as follows: 25k definitely bought Blu-ray players for movies. 270k definitely bought HD-DVD players for movies.
Of the 400k PS3, certainly some were bought for movies, or will be used for movies in addition to games, but how many? Note that many of the PS3s went to people who camped for them at launch. I think it is a good bet that these were gamers, not movie buffs. People that eager for a movie player would already have been in the 25k who bought stand-alone players.
It seems pretty clear that HD-DVD is trouncing Blu-ray among movie buffs, which is the audience the movie studios care about.
Bidding on the 20GB on Ebay dropped off first as well - why would buy the 20GB when for $100 more you get a 60GB with the wireless, card readers, and the extra disk space?
I've seen some auctions on eBay for the 60GB end with the winning bid below retail. I saw one where the winning bid plus shipping was still below retail. It's not just the 20GB that is experience a big drop in demand.
It took my local BestBuy a week for six of the 60GB units to sell last week.
You may already know about this, but here is how to un-DRM your songs: simply burn them to an audio CD, then re-import them from the CD's. Sure, you theoretically lose sound quality this way, but I cannot tell the difference, and I'll bet if I blindfolded you, you couldn't either.
I'm surprised no one has made an AAC encoder specifically designed for this situation. Consider how lossy audio compression works. The 30000 ft overview would be that you simplify the input by throwing away some of it (hopefully, some of it that is inaudible), resulting in something that can be losslessly compressed.
When you take a lossy compressed song and expand that (e.g., burn to an audio CD), and want to compress that again, you don't need to throw any of it away to get something that will compress well, if you are trying to compress using the same compression system that was originally used. (If you were expanding an AAC file, and then wanted to compress with, say MP3, that would have to have some degradation, because AAC and MP3 would have different ideas of what needs to be thrown away). What this means is that it should be possible to design an AAC encoder that can take advantage of the knowledge that the input is the result of expanding a 128 kbit/second stereo AAC file, and compress back to something that matches that original AAC file.
Ok, HTML Emails are appalling. They're hideous, unnecessary, garish and trite. They should be blocked, banned, their purveyors and designers blacklisted.
But.. I've done it. I've manually encoded html with embedded images for sending to a client that used HTML emails internally, impressed the client and got some benefit from that.
I think it is time for us old farts to give up this fight, and admit we lost--and that we lost because we were actually on the wrong side.
Consider regular mail. The kind you put on paper and send in an envelope via the post office. If I were sending someone a regular mail asking them, say, about a strange spike in bandwidth usage last Tuesday, I would, naturally, include a graph showing bandwidth usage for the week. And if I also mentioned that the new server rack was in place, I might include a photo, either separately in the envelope, or inline in the letter.
Now let's imagine email had never been invented, and we just came up with the idea. How would we design an email system? I think we'd think it obvious that we have to make it at least as capable as regular mail, and would probably come up with an HTML body plus attachments as the format (for portability, as opposed to word processor formats). I think there is zero chance we'd say "wait a minute...we'd better make this plain text only, because 25 years ago, many computers did not have graphical displays".
They are sitting on the shelves at my local Target and Walmart. Gamestop is reporting having them in stock at a large number of their stores, too. Best Buy has them online.
Looks like the shortage has ended. If you want a PS3, they are now easy to obtain.
Numerous times, I've seen people who were considering Linux ask whether they would still be able to play their media files from Windows or Mac. And they are usually told "Yes! Linux can handle them! It's easy...just get mplayer and install the right codecs...they are easy to find, and you'll be watching your video in no time".
But whenever we see some site choose to make new content available in those very same Windows formats, many of the same people who were telling potential new users that all these things were easy on Linux suddenly switch and say that Linux users are locked out.
If we want to get people to use Linux, we have to get our story straight as to what Linux can do!
The potential of the cell processor architecture is significant. Once developers figure out how to make optimal use of it it could potentially take games to a new level (think realistic physics, better AI, a better online experience, etc..)
How will the Cell processor help with AI? AI works better on a general-purpose processor. The 360 has the advantage here, with three general purpose cores, each with two hardware threads. The Cell has one general purpose core, with two threads.
There is no difference. There is no such thing as a 'deep link', a URL is a URL is a URL.
Yet if you take 100 URLs, and ask a bunch of random webmasters which are "deep links" and which are not, they will generally almost all classify the same subset as "deep links". If your theory were correct, this would not be so.
Multimedia playback, internet capability via the web browser/keyboard/mouse, linux, and blu-ray built in have the PS3 off to a good start. The 360 doesn't have HD-DVD yet and the only way it's going to be available in the near future is via external add-on so I really think that will come into play as well
First, you are wrong about HD-DVD. It is readily available for the 360.
As far as media playback, web browsing etc., go, I doubt those will be that appealing. If they were, people would be leaping all over the small systems from companies like AOpen, and the Mac Mini, to hook to their TVs. It's not like the PS3 is providing something new here.
General purpose computing in the living room is just not that appealing. Who wants to read their email on a screen where the rest of the family can see everything? Would any teenager want to IM with Mom and Dad watching? And what about conflicts with TV viewing: "you can't watch the 'American Idol' finale tonight, dear...I want to research my report for work tomorrow". That ain't gonna fly.
Because of these problems, the PS3 cannot REPLACE a regular computer. Which means its appeal is mostly limited to being a supplimental computer. It's pretty damned expensive for that. (Well, I've seen some Linux dreamers say people will get multiple PS3s--one for the living room, and one for the home office, and one for the kids to use for their computing. Nice fantasy).
And if you get into home office type use, it gets worse, because the PS3 is not very fast compared to a mid-line Dell. It's Cell processor basically consists of one general-purpose core (about equivalent to a G5) plus 7 things that are essentially DSPs. Those do not have direct access to system memory. To do anything with them, you have to use their DMA controller to transfer the data to them, and then run your program on them. When it finishes, you DMA the data back to system memory. This is not something that current or reasonably upcoming compilers can automate. You need to specifically develop your software for this architecture to use the SPEs. Things like spreadsheets and word processors won't benefit from them at all. They will only be using the G5-like processor (and there is only 256 MB of RAM, which will also hurt). Any recent Intel or AMD system with 512 MB will smoke the PS3 here.
Of course, in real life there are very subtle points about salinity to take into question
Another subtle real life point to take into account is that if the artic ice is melting, then probably the same thing is happening to antartic ice. Much of the antartic ice is on land, not water, and so is not currently displacing water. It will add to the ocean's level when it melts.
Slashdot Mirror
It is legal, according to the Supreme Court. The main case in this area is Complete Auto Transit vs. Brady.
The state is not taxing the out-of-state sales. Rather, it is imposing an excise tax on possession or use of the items by residents of the state (this kind of tax is usually called a "use tax", and I'll call it that in the rest of this comment). A common example of this kind of thing is taxes on luxury items such as boats. If a state has such a tax, you generally will have to pay it when you register the boat, even if you bought the boat out of state. The same power that allows the state to tax that boat that you are using in-state regardless of where you bought it is what allows them to tax, say, your mail-order books or computers or viagra.
The main limits on this, due to the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution, are that they cannot force merchants in another state to collect the tax for them (but see below), and the tax cannot unduly burden out-of-state purchases. The Court has decided that this means that the total tax on an out-of-state purchase (sales taxes in the state of sale plus the use tax in the buyer's state) cannot exceed what the tax would have been had the item been purchased in-state.
As far as collection goes, a state does not have the power, in general, to tell a merchant in another state to collect this use tax for the state. What I mean by "in general" is that an arbitrary merchant, in another state, that does not have some connection with the buyer's state other than selling items to them, could not be forced to collect for the state. However, if that merchant has some relationship with the state that does give the state power over it (such as it having offices or stores in the buyer's state), then they state may have power over it. This is why major national merchants collect taxes on mail-order purchases, even if their mail-order operation is out of the purchaser's state--they have retail stores in the purchaser's state, and so the state can tell them to collect the tax.
For items where the merchant does not have to, and does not voluntarily decide to, collect the use tax, the state has generally only actually collected on items like cars and boats, that have a registration requirement. But most states do have a (widely ignored and in most cases largely unknown) requirement that you pay your use tax.
Oh, one more thing. I don't remember what case it was in, but I believe the Court has also decided that Congress does have the power to require merchants to collect use taxes when they sell mail-order, even if they do not have a sufficient present in the buyer's state to give that state authority to compel such collection.
Isn't that just for use when converting documents from Word 5.0.3 format? New documents won't use that tag.
Compare to ODF, where key formatting parameters are left up to the application, so that if you had two completely independent ODF implementations, written just from the "standard", documents produced by one would would probably look quite different when read by the other.
...and if so, are you willing to change that?
Someone allegedly said in writing things that were libelous toward someone else.
That should be all we need to know. The fact that it took place on the internet is simply not relevant.
Because that violates Wikipedia's rules?
In other words, number of system calls tells us nothing useful about security.
It did have some pretty good stories now and then. It kind of makes me think of what you'd get if you cross-bred the writers of The Adventures of Pete and Pete with sane people. (When I say the writers of APP were not sane, I mean that in a good way).
Well, I'd consider that the deal with the NFL is finite, and next time it is up for negotiation, it might move to another network. And then I'd consider the ton of money that The Simpsons has made for the network, and continues to make after almost two decades, and realize that Futurama at least has good potential to be in that ballpark. And then I'd move Futurama to a time slot that wouldn't conflict with football.
Oh, and I'd have done the same with Firefly, for similar reasons. It was from people with an excellent track record, and had a good shot at being one of those shows that grows into a very lucrative long-term franchise (e.g., it could have been Fox's Star Trek).
And for the slot that gets stomped on by football? A couple things come to mind. One would be to develop a skit-based comedy or variety show. Skits each episode would be independent, so that the show could quickly be cut to fit when football goes over, with the cut material usable next week. Or just take the easy way out, and fill any odd times between football's end and the next half-hour boundary with bonus material from the current season of American Idol.
Uhm...if Google maps gets you to the right intersection, and then you can't take over from there and figure out which of the four corners has the Taco Bell, you shouldn't be going out for food on your own in the first place.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that most people with DLP TVs (or other big TVs) aren't using the TV for sound. The sound is coming from their stereo system. So, the TV going off due to its sleep timer would not stop the sound.
I usually get home from work around 4 or 5 PM, and the TV goes on. I have it on the news for a couple hours, while I make dinner, relax on the computer, etc. I'll watch a couple programs later on National Geographic or Discover or the History Channel, and watch a Simpsons or two from the DVR. When I'm not actually sitting in front of the TV watching, I'll have something interesting on from one of the aforementioned channels (and with the DVR, if I'm surfing the web, but hear something interesting from the TV, I can easily rewind to catch it). I'll often watch a Simpsons or South Park from the DVR as I am falling asleep, or will turn to the Music Choice channels for some music. When listening to music, I want the TV on, so I can see the information about the current song. So, it's pretty easy to end up with the set on all night.
Basically, TV is the new radio. It is often on as background entertainment while doing other things.
Net result: it is easy to get 8 hours a day with the TV on, and if I fall asleep with it on, 16 hours. I've on average gotten about 12-14 months out of my $250 6000 hour DLP bulbs.
You do not have to have in iPod to use songs purchased from iTunes. You can use a Mac or a Windows PC. You only need an iPod if you want to use the songs on a small portable player.
We can make a stronger statement than that, since the XBox360 HD-DVD drive is not used at all by games. So, all of those were bought for watching movies.
So, the numbers break down as follows: 25k definitely bought Blu-ray players for movies. 270k definitely bought HD-DVD players for movies.
Of the 400k PS3, certainly some were bought for movies, or will be used for movies in addition to games, but how many? Note that many of the PS3s went to people who camped for them at launch. I think it is a good bet that these were gamers, not movie buffs. People that eager for a movie player would already have been in the 25k who bought stand-alone players.
It seems pretty clear that HD-DVD is trouncing Blu-ray among movie buffs, which is the audience the movie studios care about.
I've seen some auctions on eBay for the 60GB end with the winning bid below retail. I saw one where the winning bid plus shipping was still below retail. It's not just the 20GB that is experience a big drop in demand.
It took my local BestBuy a week for six of the 60GB units to sell last week.
I'm surprised no one has made an AAC encoder specifically designed for this situation. Consider how lossy audio compression works. The 30000 ft overview would be that you simplify the input by throwing away some of it (hopefully, some of it that is inaudible), resulting in something that can be losslessly compressed.
When you take a lossy compressed song and expand that (e.g., burn to an audio CD), and want to compress that again, you don't need to throw any of it away to get something that will compress well, if you are trying to compress using the same compression system that was originally used. (If you were expanding an AAC file, and then wanted to compress with, say MP3, that would have to have some degradation, because AAC and MP3 would have different ideas of what needs to be thrown away). What this means is that it should be possible to design an AAC encoder that can take advantage of the knowledge that the input is the result of expanding a 128 kbit/second stereo AAC file, and compress back to something that matches that original AAC file.
One of the reasons I'm learning Spanish is to have more words for variable names in my programs.
I think it is time for us old farts to give up this fight, and admit we lost--and that we lost because we were actually on the wrong side.
Consider regular mail. The kind you put on paper and send in an envelope via the post office. If I were sending someone a regular mail asking them, say, about a strange spike in bandwidth usage last Tuesday, I would, naturally, include a graph showing bandwidth usage for the week. And if I also mentioned that the new server rack was in place, I might include a photo, either separately in the envelope, or inline in the letter.
Now let's imagine email had never been invented, and we just came up with the idea. How would we design an email system? I think we'd think it obvious that we have to make it at least as capable as regular mail, and would probably come up with an HTML body plus attachments as the format (for portability, as opposed to word processor formats). I think there is zero chance we'd say "wait a minute...we'd better make this plain text only, because 25 years ago, many computers did not have graphical displays".
RTFA. Try a dozen studios, at least.
Looks like the shortage has ended. If you want a PS3, they are now easy to obtain.
But whenever we see some site choose to make new content available in those very same Windows formats, many of the same people who were telling potential new users that all these things were easy on Linux suddenly switch and say that Linux users are locked out.
If we want to get people to use Linux, we have to get our story straight as to what Linux can do!
How will the Cell processor help with AI? AI works better on a general-purpose processor. The 360 has the advantage here, with three general purpose cores, each with two hardware threads. The Cell has one general purpose core, with two threads.
Yet if you take 100 URLs, and ask a bunch of random webmasters which are "deep links" and which are not, they will generally almost all classify the same subset as "deep links". If your theory were correct, this would not be so.
First, you are wrong about HD-DVD. It is readily available for the 360.
As far as media playback, web browsing etc., go, I doubt those will be that appealing. If they were, people would be leaping all over the small systems from companies like AOpen, and the Mac Mini, to hook to their TVs. It's not like the PS3 is providing something new here.
General purpose computing in the living room is just not that appealing. Who wants to read their email on a screen where the rest of the family can see everything? Would any teenager want to IM with Mom and Dad watching? And what about conflicts with TV viewing: "you can't watch the 'American Idol' finale tonight, dear...I want to research my report for work tomorrow". That ain't gonna fly.
Because of these problems, the PS3 cannot REPLACE a regular computer. Which means its appeal is mostly limited to being a supplimental computer. It's pretty damned expensive for that. (Well, I've seen some Linux dreamers say people will get multiple PS3s--one for the living room, and one for the home office, and one for the kids to use for their computing. Nice fantasy).
And if you get into home office type use, it gets worse, because the PS3 is not very fast compared to a mid-line Dell. It's Cell processor basically consists of one general-purpose core (about equivalent to a G5) plus 7 things that are essentially DSPs. Those do not have direct access to system memory. To do anything with them, you have to use their DMA controller to transfer the data to them, and then run your program on them. When it finishes, you DMA the data back to system memory. This is not something that current or reasonably upcoming compilers can automate. You need to specifically develop your software for this architecture to use the SPEs. Things like spreadsheets and word processors won't benefit from them at all. They will only be using the G5-like processor (and there is only 256 MB of RAM, which will also hurt). Any recent Intel or AMD system with 512 MB will smoke the PS3 here.
It was milk for me. The disturbing part is that I wasn't drinking at the time.
Another subtle real life point to take into account is that if the artic ice is melting, then probably the same thing is happening to antartic ice. Much of the antartic ice is on land, not water, and so is not currently displacing water. It will add to the ocean's level when it melts.