you're correct, I was thinking that sales taxes mainly applied to goods, not services. Thank you for the correction. Since that is the case though it should also apply to groceries, utilities, banking services, business to business transactions, wholesalers, and all other transactions where money moves and a good and/or service is applied if we're going to be 'fair' about it.
The other aspect of this is that it will make outsourcing very expensive. Anyone hiring out contracters to do thier programming will suddenly pay a lot more. So small businesses will be hurt a lot more by this tax than larger ones will be. Yeah, that's fair. Let the larger companies with the resources to have in-house programming teams pay less in taxes than the small businesses and individuals who need to contract the work out. If we really wanted to make it 'fair' then shouldn't the in-house programmers have to pay sales tax on their salary? After all they're still charging for a service. The fact that they entered into a private contract to be an employee should let them escape paying sales tax on the services they provide when someone else doing the same work as a contracter or a small business has to charge thier customer an extra 6% sales tax for the same work? I don't see how that is 'fair'. Seems to single out the self employed programmer and software houses for hire to me. Given that the self employed already also pay more in other taxes such as social security, it seems that sales taxes are just another way to help create a situation that favors large corporations.
If the tax is being applied to services like computer programming, then it is no longer a 'sales' tax. It's effectively a income tax. No goods changed hands here, this is work for hire and services. What next for MD? 'Sales' taxes on mechanics and plumbers?
To sum up, less attractive to business, higher cost of living, more of the economy goes underground and out of the tax system, precident of selecting specific service industries to be taxed at special rates and the corruption that will engender, and overall economic damage to MD. Brilliant.
The message is more than just 'nothing'. It's an active statement that "We feel that telecommuting is bad and we don't use it". I certainly wouldn't buy from a seller who doesn't believe in his own product. I'd hate to be an AT&T sales rep who gets asked the question "Why should I buy your product when your own company does not feel it is worthwhile?".
You don't get it. This AT&T is a telecommunications company. This hurts them in special ways.
First, if they try to sell their telecommunications systems to a company, and the CEO / buyer asks the AT&T rep "even your own company doesn't believe in or use your own products, why should we?", they're going to have a hard time answering that question. I certainly would never buy from a seller who doesn't believe in their own product.
Second, since they won't be using their own systems in-house, they'll become more divorced from them. They'll lose a competitive edge. When you don't use your own products you lose touch. Over time this will degrade their own products.
Third, not everyone is shiftless and lazy. Simply because you think everyone is like that doesn't make it so. Also, there are lots of jobs where objective benchmarks will tell you if someone is doing thier job. People who want to kill time / be lazy will do that regardless if they are at the office or not. You think standing around the water cooler or going on another smoke break is worse than walking your dog?
Anyway, if you can't tell if someone is providing enough benefit to justify their salary / pay if they aren't in the office then the job they're doing probably isn't necessary anyway. If you can tell or have an objective marker for their productivity then it shouldn't matter if they telecommute or not.
I agree. They also should not read fiction, literature, philosophy, watch plays, listen to music, watch TV or movies, use the internet or computers in most any form, or engage in any other activity that involves distraction from concrete reality.
Sarcasm aside, I think I know what you're trying to say. Don't let your kids become couch potatoes who never do anything but play video games. But there is good evidence that video games have a lot of benefits, especially in developing cognitive and problem solving skills. Totally banning video games as opposed to regulating the quantity, quality, and nature of video game playing is just an silly as the above sarcastic statement. Woe rather than weal is the likely outcome of such an approach.
I don't know who it reflects more poorly on, Microsoft's disingenuousness (word?), or the public's collective willingness to be fooled again and again.
The Zune isn't exactly winning the media player wars you know. No one is being fooled, unless it's Microsoft fooling itself. They keep producing trash media players and no one buys them. The iPod line totally dominates over everybody else, Zune included. Microsoft is almost a no-show in that market.
I think this attempt is doomed to failure, at least in terms of growing their readership and fan base. Charging a monthy access fee? Who do they think will pay this? You want to hook new readers on to your stuff, but tell them "hey, it's great, trust me. Pay up and you'll see how great it is!"? That's not going to fly.
Successful web comics have the same formula. The comic is free online, of decent quality, has a decent archive / mass to it, and is updated regularly. Money is made from merchandise related to the comic and/or advertising. Given their huge amount of material, Marvel could have went this route and not only made a killing off the merchandise, but massively increased their fan base. By charging for access they've pretty much guaranteed that most of the readers will be old guard comic fans who want to read all of this stuff. They'll make money from this, but it will amout to more effecient mining of their existing market share, not building or growing their market, which should have been of much higher priority to them. It would not only have made them a lot more money, it would have given them much better long-term viability to survive as a company.
You're too kind. The Supreme Court isn't applying the any kind of possible reasonable interpretation. If you knew nothing about this country and read the Constitution as an outsider and then were told that the U.S. Federal Government was using that commerce clause to spy on all communications in the country you would instantly know that willful corruption or Nihilsm and decadance was in play. No person who actually applies reason free of major cognitive dissonance can come up with the judgements the Supreme Court has. What really happened is that the Supreme Court began striking down the New Deal legislation, so Theodore Roosevelt gave the Supreme Court a little ultamatum. It amounted to telling them to do what I say or be destroyed. Since then the Supreme Court ceased to be a real check on Executive or Legislative power, and has been more or less co-opted into helping to destroy the freedoms of the country.
If these guys got upset over what was obviously either a gag or a bad translation then not only are they stupid, but they're incompetent and humourless as well. They also are generating bad press for their country, and it wasn't even people in official capacity that sent the offending letter. The Dutch Foreign Ministry sounds like they could use some serious downsizing.
Your example is so extreme that it destroys your argument. In fact it makes the opposite point. Your example gives one wrong (stealing) and links a qualitatively different wrong (murder / violence). On the other hand the issue of changing your grades either by breaking and entering physically and forging documents or breaking and entering via computer hacking are qualitatively much more similiar than your example and should carry similar penalties. It would be more like saying someone who broke into a store to rob it using a brick should get three years, but if they break into the store using a hammer they should get twenty years because they method they used was different. What should matter most is the violence and harm done. Saying it's about procedural aspects of how the crime commited is a road that leads to totalitarianism.
Okay, yes it would be a specific distribution that would have to be vetted, not Linux itself. Sorry for not being specific in my statements.
I didn't know about Apple being dragged to court. That's interesting to know. Thanks for the info. In the end I think it will turn into a windfall for them however.
As for Redhat's size, it has a market cap of $4 billion. Apple is $163 billion, Microsoft is $347 billion, IBM is $158 billion. Redhat is not a small company, but it isn't even close to playing in the really big leages yet. Even Sun is 5x larger at $20 billion. Let's say you're Wal-Mart with a market cap of $180 billion. Redhat is probably smaller as a company than your own IT division is. You're going to have faith that they can provide support, training, and service to your enterprise needs when they're such a tiny fraction of your size and you're not their only customer? You might in the end, but you'll have to think hard about it.
You sound like a Positivist and think the law of the land defines what is moral. America was build on the philosophy of Natural Law and by that philosophy what the German government is doing is evil, no matter if it is made into law or even how many people want it. In other words it doesn't matter if the Constitution applies to the German people. What matters is that every human being has intrinsic rights and the German government is deciding to destroy those rights.
Much better GUI, it is vetted as official UNIX while Linux is not, and enterprise customers may have more faith in Apple as opposed to a much smaller company like RedHat to be able to support a massive service agreement. Furthermore Apple is also beginning to come out with integrated, enterprise level software. That makes Apple a more integrated enterprise solution going forward than Linux is.
Your best bet is milk. It uptakes the ligends from the receptors on your tongue. In other words, rather than just covering up the problem or giving you short-term relief, it actually helps reduce it.
Funny. Most of your comments would also have applied to arcade games with their big, high resolution screens and excellent large, responsive, customized controllers vs. PC's with their small monitors and generic keyboard/mouse controls. They still lost out to the PC because over time the PC surpassed them.
Everybody things change will never happen until the day after the change seemed inevitable.
I agree with the analysts on this one. I'm generally of the opinion that analysts and anal cysts are pretty similar sounding terms for a reason. But I think they're right. PC gaming is dying because the PC is dying. The fact that there are so many awesome PC games coming out right now has nothing to do with it. I'm old enough to have lived through the video arcade boom. Arcade games were at their best and the video game parlors were everywhere right before the collapse of the whole industry.
Fact is, consoles are powerful enough now to run powerful games. That didn't used to be the case. People are switching to laptops, PDA, game consoles, and a host of other appliance type hardware devices. Even the silly flash games (like vector attack) are starting to get good.
So, I'll have to go against Zonk on this one. PC gaming is losing steam, mainly because gaming is becoming spread around into so many avenues that the PC isn't needed any more to play cool games.
First, This articlepoints out that "First and foremost, all of Radiohead's previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second". I take that to mean that Radiohead had already established a standard of expectation of 320 kbps with their previous behavior. Providing the album 'for 'free' but then changing the bitrate from what they had historically provided for downloadable material is what makes it look duplicitus to me.
Second is this quote from this article. "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing,' Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK's industry magazine."
That is a flat-out admission that the only point of the downloadable album concept was to push the CD sales, not any real expectation to make money off the actual download or to use it as part of a new business model that Radiohead was given credit for.
It's these two aspects together that made me think it wasn't an innocent oversight. Even if many won't know, care, or tell the difference, some will and Radiohead certainly wasn't thinking of the download as anything other than a promotion for the CD sales. In other words even if most people are okay with it, I think Radiohead intended for the bitrate to be a little too low and that it would encourage the CD sales instead of being a replacement for them.
Hmmm. So if you needed a part for your Toyota and I sold you a replacement part and installed it for you and told you it was a genuine, new part when it was in reality a after-market used part then I didn't dupe you so long as you never found out or cared? I'll have to disagree with you that duping someone doesn't count if they can't tell that they were duped.
It was a mean spewing rant. Lots of fuck, shit, shut up, and other name calling spewing from you. I'll say it again. I was never going to download the album. I was going to buy the boxed set. The only reasons I cared about the bitrate of the album download is because Radiohead told people that they could download the album and took money and pre-orders. They didn't let people know, even those who had paid, that the bitrate was 160 kbps until AFTER Radiohead got their money. They knew that this was a little too low in quality and that people would be expecting a higher bitrate if they actually paid for 'the album'. Their own manager stated that the download was only a promotion to sell the CD. They put it out at 160 kbps because they WANTED it to be just a hair off from being good enough. THAT is what annoyed me and made me change my mind. Want to put out a lower quality mp3 of the album for free to sell the CD? I got no problem wit that, it's a good strategy. Want to offer the album at high or full quality for free download and say 'pay what you feel is fair'? Fabulous, I'm ready to support those artists on principle if they're any good, which Radiohead is. Combine the two approaches and let people pay for 'the album' and don't let them know you consider it just a promotion and that the bitrate is a little low? Not cool.
Also, it's not like I'm all that upset about it. I just decided to not give them $80 bucks or so of my money, as did a couple of friends. I didn't pirate or even download for free their music. I didn't take a single thing away from Radiohead. I just chose not to support them because I feel they weren't totally on the up and up about the whole thing. I'm also saying that only doing 160 kbps cost them money. That was just low enough to piss off some of their fans, and it accomplished nothing. A higher quality version was bound to be pirated and it was. So Radiohead not only did something a little shady, they did it for no purpose because they still have enough of the old mindset to think that they had something to gain by doing this.
Well, I'm sure a lot more people will flame me now with vitriol and four letter words rather than merely disagreeing with me and saying why. To them I say ahead of time that there are many decaffeinated coffees on the market and they taste just as good as the regular ones. Cheers.
...crushed when they didn't live up to expectation!
Annoyed, yes. Crushed, no. I had no expectations because before the stories, I'd only heard of Radiohead briefly anyway.
"most ignorant people will assume that"
I expect basic fairness in advertising. Guess that makes me naive, and you a fan of Caveot Emptor. I know that CDs are already compressed. But when they say 'the album' without any qualifiers, the CD is obviously the standard to apply that term to for most people. They lied, at least my omission, so I didn't send them money.
*sigh* I guess I wasn't very clear in my first post. I'm not even a huge Radiohead fan. Their music is OK. I didn't and won't download their album for free either. I and my friends were going to buy their boxed sets to support what they were doing. Only one of us is even a fan of theirs. I was going to wear their t-shirt everywhere to show my support for their awesomeness as pioneers, helping to promote freedom for artists everywhere. However by saying they were going to offer 'the album' for free download and allowing people to even pre-pay if they wanted, I feel they duped their fans. News stories abounded about how 'the album' was going to be available for free download. That term, 'the album', without any other qualifications, really leads you to think you can get the music in an identical manner at least in terms of quality, to the CD. That is new and could change how music is sold.
What they really did was allow you to download a lower-quality version. If they had said, "you can download a lower quality version of the music for free to see if you want to buy the CD", they would not have gotten much press at all. Others have done that already. They might not have inteded to dupe everybody at first, but after the news firestorm started they sure didn't run out and try to fix the misconeptions. They took lots of money, including pre-orders, waited until it was discovered and then claimed innocence over the whole thing. That not decent behavior IMO.
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The other aspect of this is that it will make outsourcing very expensive. Anyone hiring out contracters to do thier programming will suddenly pay a lot more. So small businesses will be hurt a lot more by this tax than larger ones will be. Yeah, that's fair. Let the larger companies with the resources to have in-house programming teams pay less in taxes than the small businesses and individuals who need to contract the work out. If we really wanted to make it 'fair' then shouldn't the in-house programmers have to pay sales tax on their salary? After all they're still charging for a service. The fact that they entered into a private contract to be an employee should let them escape paying sales tax on the services they provide when someone else doing the same work as a contracter or a small business has to charge thier customer an extra 6% sales tax for the same work? I don't see how that is 'fair'. Seems to single out the self employed programmer and software houses for hire to me. Given that the self employed already also pay more in other taxes such as social security, it seems that sales taxes are just another way to help create a situation that favors large corporations.
To sum up, less attractive to business, higher cost of living, more of the economy goes underground and out of the tax system, precident of selecting specific service industries to be taxed at special rates and the corruption that will engender, and overall economic damage to MD. Brilliant.
The message is more than just 'nothing'. It's an active statement that "We feel that telecommuting is bad and we don't use it". I certainly wouldn't buy from a seller who doesn't believe in his own product. I'd hate to be an AT&T sales rep who gets asked the question "Why should I buy your product when your own company does not feel it is worthwhile?".
First, if they try to sell their telecommunications systems to a company, and the CEO / buyer asks the AT&T rep "even your own company doesn't believe in or use your own products, why should we?", they're going to have a hard time answering that question. I certainly would never buy from a seller who doesn't believe in their own product.
Second, since they won't be using their own systems in-house, they'll become more divorced from them. They'll lose a competitive edge. When you don't use your own products you lose touch. Over time this will degrade their own products.
Third, not everyone is shiftless and lazy. Simply because you think everyone is like that doesn't make it so. Also, there are lots of jobs where objective benchmarks will tell you if someone is doing thier job. People who want to kill time / be lazy will do that regardless if they are at the office or not. You think standing around the water cooler or going on another smoke break is worse than walking your dog?
Anyway, if you can't tell if someone is providing enough benefit to justify their salary / pay if they aren't in the office then the job they're doing probably isn't necessary anyway. If you can tell or have an objective marker for their productivity then it shouldn't matter if they telecommute or not.
Sarcasm aside, I think I know what you're trying to say. Don't let your kids become couch potatoes who never do anything but play video games. But there is good evidence that video games have a lot of benefits, especially in developing cognitive and problem solving skills. Totally banning video games as opposed to regulating the quantity, quality, and nature of video game playing is just an silly as the above sarcastic statement. Woe rather than weal is the likely outcome of such an approach.
The Zune isn't exactly winning the media player wars you know. No one is being fooled, unless it's Microsoft fooling itself. They keep producing trash media players and no one buys them. The iPod line totally dominates over everybody else, Zune included. Microsoft is almost a no-show in that market.
Successful web comics have the same formula. The comic is free online, of decent quality, has a decent archive / mass to it, and is updated regularly. Money is made from merchandise related to the comic and/or advertising. Given their huge amount of material, Marvel could have went this route and not only made a killing off the merchandise, but massively increased their fan base. By charging for access they've pretty much guaranteed that most of the readers will be old guard comic fans who want to read all of this stuff. They'll make money from this, but it will amout to more effecient mining of their existing market share, not building or growing their market, which should have been of much higher priority to them. It would not only have made them a lot more money, it would have given them much better long-term viability to survive as a company.
You're too kind. The Supreme Court isn't applying the any kind of possible reasonable interpretation. If you knew nothing about this country and read the Constitution as an outsider and then were told that the U.S. Federal Government was using that commerce clause to spy on all communications in the country you would instantly know that willful corruption or Nihilsm and decadance was in play. No person who actually applies reason free of major cognitive dissonance can come up with the judgements the Supreme Court has. What really happened is that the Supreme Court began striking down the New Deal legislation, so Theodore Roosevelt gave the Supreme Court a little ultamatum. It amounted to telling them to do what I say or be destroyed. Since then the Supreme Court ceased to be a real check on Executive or Legislative power, and has been more or less co-opted into helping to destroy the freedoms of the country.
If these guys got upset over what was obviously either a gag or a bad translation then not only are they stupid, but they're incompetent and humourless as well. They also are generating bad press for their country, and it wasn't even people in official capacity that sent the offending letter. The Dutch Foreign Ministry sounds like they could use some serious downsizing.
Absolutely. I'm not kidding. The guy is a genius at being wrong. I don't know why you got +5 Funny. It should have been +5 Insightful.
I disagree. He is so totally wrong most of the time that he is a great reverse technology predictor.
Or how about 'putz'. I think that works.
I nominate the term 'dumbo'.
Your example is so extreme that it destroys your argument. In fact it makes the opposite point. Your example gives one wrong (stealing) and links a qualitatively different wrong (murder / violence). On the other hand the issue of changing your grades either by breaking and entering physically and forging documents or breaking and entering via computer hacking are qualitatively much more similiar than your example and should carry similar penalties. It would be more like saying someone who broke into a store to rob it using a brick should get three years, but if they break into the store using a hammer they should get twenty years because they method they used was different. What should matter most is the violence and harm done. Saying it's about procedural aspects of how the crime commited is a road that leads to totalitarianism.
I didn't know about Apple being dragged to court. That's interesting to know. Thanks for the info. In the end I think it will turn into a windfall for them however.
As for Redhat's size, it has a market cap of $4 billion. Apple is $163 billion, Microsoft is $347 billion, IBM is $158 billion. Redhat is not a small company, but it isn't even close to playing in the really big leages yet. Even Sun is 5x larger at $20 billion. Let's say you're Wal-Mart with a market cap of $180 billion. Redhat is probably smaller as a company than your own IT division is. You're going to have faith that they can provide support, training, and service to your enterprise needs when they're such a tiny fraction of your size and you're not their only customer? You might in the end, but you'll have to think hard about it.
You sound like a Positivist and think the law of the land defines what is moral. America was build on the philosophy of Natural Law and by that philosophy what the German government is doing is evil, no matter if it is made into law or even how many people want it. In other words it doesn't matter if the Constitution applies to the German people. What matters is that every human being has intrinsic rights and the German government is deciding to destroy those rights.
Much better GUI, it is vetted as official UNIX while Linux is not, and enterprise customers may have more faith in Apple as opposed to a much smaller company like RedHat to be able to support a massive service agreement. Furthermore Apple is also beginning to come out with integrated, enterprise level software. That makes Apple a more integrated enterprise solution going forward than Linux is.
Your best bet is milk. It uptakes the ligends from the receptors on your tongue. In other words, rather than just covering up the problem or giving you short-term relief, it actually helps reduce it.
Everybody things change will never happen until the day after the change seemed inevitable.
Fact is, consoles are powerful enough now to run powerful games. That didn't used to be the case. People are switching to laptops, PDA, game consoles, and a host of other appliance type hardware devices. Even the silly flash games (like vector attack) are starting to get good.
So, I'll have to go against Zonk on this one. PC gaming is losing steam, mainly because gaming is becoming spread around into so many avenues that the PC isn't needed any more to play cool games.
First, This articlepoints out that "First and foremost, all of Radiohead's previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second". I take that to mean that Radiohead had already established a standard of expectation of 320 kbps with their previous behavior. Providing the album 'for 'free' but then changing the bitrate from what they had historically provided for downloadable material is what makes it look duplicitus to me.
Second is this quote from this article. "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing,' Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK's industry magazine."
That is a flat-out admission that the only point of the downloadable album concept was to push the CD sales, not any real expectation to make money off the actual download or to use it as part of a new business model that Radiohead was given credit for.
It's these two aspects together that made me think it wasn't an innocent oversight. Even if many won't know, care, or tell the difference, some will and Radiohead certainly wasn't thinking of the download as anything other than a promotion for the CD sales. In other words even if most people are okay with it, I think Radiohead intended for the bitrate to be a little too low and that it would encourage the CD sales instead of being a replacement for them.
Hmmm. So if you needed a part for your Toyota and I sold you a replacement part and installed it for you and told you it was a genuine, new part when it was in reality a after-market used part then I didn't dupe you so long as you never found out or cared? I'll have to disagree with you that duping someone doesn't count if they can't tell that they were duped.
Also, it's not like I'm all that upset about it. I just decided to not give them $80 bucks or so of my money, as did a couple of friends. I didn't pirate or even download for free their music. I didn't take a single thing away from Radiohead. I just chose not to support them because I feel they weren't totally on the up and up about the whole thing. I'm also saying that only doing 160 kbps cost them money. That was just low enough to piss off some of their fans, and it accomplished nothing. A higher quality version was bound to be pirated and it was. So Radiohead not only did something a little shady, they did it for no purpose because they still have enough of the old mindset to think that they had something to gain by doing this.
Well, I'm sure a lot more people will flame me now with vitriol and four letter words rather than merely disagreeing with me and saying why. To them I say ahead of time that there are many decaffeinated coffees on the market and they taste just as good as the regular ones. Cheers.
Annoyed, yes. Crushed, no. I had no expectations because before the stories, I'd only heard of Radiohead briefly anyway.
"most ignorant people will assume that"
I expect basic fairness in advertising. Guess that makes me naive, and you a fan of Caveot Emptor. I know that CDs are already compressed. But when they say 'the album' without any qualifiers, the CD is obviously the standard to apply that term to for most people. They lied, at least my omission, so I didn't send them money.
What they really did was allow you to download a lower-quality version. If they had said, "you can download a lower quality version of the music for free to see if you want to buy the CD", they would not have gotten much press at all. Others have done that already. They might not have inteded to dupe everybody at first, but after the news firestorm started they sure didn't run out and try to fix the misconeptions. They took lots of money, including pre-orders, waited until it was discovered and then claimed innocence over the whole thing. That not decent behavior IMO.