The tax isn't to compensate the music industry for downloads, it's to compensate the french government (seriously) for taxes the music industry isn't paying.
I don't know how you use company resources to make a twitter account, and there's no real indication that he used company time either. He used their name as a way to distinguish himself from the guy who had @Noah already, but this was in the early days of twitter so there was no company policy on twitter. There was basically "no rule against it". There's a difference beween saying "personal projects" belong to your employer, and saying "Everything you do belongs to us". If he put his employers name in his Facebook profile, would they have rights to that?
I think part of your perspective is that you're assuming the reason he got so many followers is because he presented himself as "Phonedog Noah" instead of just "Noah Kravitz" and therefore attracted people looking for "Phonedog". However this doesn't seem to be the case, as he's added another 4,000 followers since leaving Phonedog and changing his twitter handle. By all accounts, this is his personal twitter account and the only thing linking it to his former employer is simply the fact that he identified with them enough to have originally included their name as part of his handle.
Especially since they were repeatedly warned that they were misreporting files and refused to stop and it just so happens they had a financial motive in acting improperly given that the page generated by using the removal tool had links to purchase the alleged infringing work legally--free page views on free advertisements, effectively.
The 'free health care' in jail is no better than what you already have. You can in fact, go to the emergancy room and get health care right this instant, its not even a little bit hard. You can in fact, tell them you have absolutely no intention of paying them... and they'll help you anyway! Now they aren't going to give you braces for your snaggly teeth, but neither will the prison doctors, so you must be rather fucking stupid to think going to jail is an upgrade to your existence. Any 'good' free thing you can get in jail, you can also get... for free... outside of jail... at better quality levels, even the bleeding asshole that goes with the gang raping you'll get.
Not unless he shoots himself in the gut first. Without a genuine emergency, they are not obligated to treat you and will not. And emergencies aren't things that will kill you, just things that will kill you immediately. If you have cancer they don't have to do anything until you collapse on the brink of death, and by then anything they do will be too late to matter.
And whether you intend to pay for not, you almost certainly will--unless you have no assets and never plan to work again. I guess you're off the hook if you die--which is a real possibility. People can and do die all the time in this country simply because they have no health insurance--many of whom would gladly pay for it if the insurance companies would allow them to. Much as you may wish to scoff at the idea, going to jail could save your life if you are one of those people. Your non-emergency pre-existing condition can be treated BEFORE it reaches the point where it's a untreatable life-threatening emergency.
Not to mention I don't have a Facebook account and don't plan to get one. You've just told me, and probably many others, "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't want your contributions."
Allegedly? There are quite fisherman out of work because of of the algae blooms they cause. What's great for some parts of nature is very bad for other parts. How about we just agree to classify pollutants in economics terms: Any emission which creates a negative externality for another person is a pollutant. If someone ELSE has to bare the cost for YOUR actions, then you are polluting.
Your raw sewage leaks into the river, lowering downstream property values? Well you just polluted there, buddy. Fisherman are struggling because of nitrates that run off of farms? Well then those nitrates are a pollutant. Sulfur Dioxide from coal burning reduces crop yields for local farmers by way of acid rain? Well then its a pollutant.
I think a pretty solid case can be made for carbon dioxide emissions creating some financial losses around the world. Of course, we are all emitters to one degree or another, but clearly some more than others. So those who emit MORE than their fair share are polluters.
I just don't see what's unreasonable about asking people to bare the burden for their OWN actions. d
. . . Over the last 20 years or so. And yes, internet usage, interestingly enough, has increased over the same time period.
Here's a list of other things you can correlate to the rise in autism diagnoses:
1) Cell Phone usage 2) Rap Music 3) Movies starring Keanu Reeves. 4) The Simpsons 5) Baby names that start with the letter "J" 6) The number of different flavors of Mountain Dew 7) The decline of the fax machine
Clearly, we as a country, need to use fax machines more and name all of our children "Cody" from now on.
You're an outlier. The algorithm caters to the majority. You can be the search engine that most often delivers relevant results while always giving poor results for people who search for odd things.
I was just fixing an issue on my mother's computer and I noticed that a program she had installed had switched her default search engine to Bing. I asked her about it and she said "Yes! Please switch it back! I don't know why it keeps putting me on that website!"
When I updated my bit-torrent client (Vuze), it tried to pull the same stunt. They get you in the habit of clicking "yes" by popping up a series EULA's that nobody reads, then hopes you won't notice when the last one is a Bing Bar that will change your default search engine. You don't even have a choice between yes/or, just "continue". If you didn't uncheck the "please install this for me" box before you hit continue, then you get a lovely piece of junkware at no cost and Microsoft writes another check.
They famously bought Yahoo's customers, and now they're in negotiations to buy Firefox's customers when Google's deal runs out. In short, Bing bleeds money left and right, as Microsoft continues to buy market share. I can't help but wonder, however, what's the point? Is this really a long-term viable strategy? At some point, shouldn't Bing actaully *make* money rather than costing money? I guess every dollar Microsoft flushes down the toilet is one less dollar for Google to earn, but this doesn't seem like a very smart business strategy in the long run.
Like any other gold rush, the first people in make a ton and everyone who follows them goes broke trying to match it. Unless you just have an amazing idea that hasn't been done before by anyone and doesn't require you to run a server to make the app work--I'd think twice about diving in with both feet this late in the game.
There can be significant costs in acquiring/licensing art/music assets for games for a start. But perhaps even more insidious is that all of the most useful apps I can think of have some sort of cloud component--which means that someone, somewhere, has to have a server to support to the app. That means monthly bandwidth/hosting cost obligations into the foreseeable future. If your app sells, great. If not . . . you're kinda screwed. And then, of course, there's the fact that you're only allowed to develop on a Mac, so your start-up costs might not be insignificant either.
I'm pretty skeptical that people are unnecessarily going to college simply because student loans are available. A student loan, after all, is still a loan. At the current ridiculously low interest rates, I think you'd have a hard time even arguing that it it's a subsidy by way of interest owed reduction.
I have no doubt, however, that many people who go to college probably could have done just as well in their chosen career without it. Not everybody needs to go to college, and yet we have been repeatedly stating the opposite to young people on the verge of making that sort of large life decision.
Besides, education is what economists call a positive externality--even in instances where it's not a factor in your chosen career. As with any positive externality, a subsidy is one of the correct and proper ways to help correct for market undervaluation. Even if student loans did constitute a subsidy, that wouldn't be a bad thing. There are quite a few free market fanatics who seem to have cultivated a false sense of the governments role (or to their way of thinking, lack thereof) in regulating a free market. The Free Market is not a unicorn. It needs more than rainbows to function optimally.
Why not? Ebay paid 3.1 billion for Skype (was initially to be as much as 4.1 billion, based on performance goals which ultimately were not met) and they bought it "just before the recession". It was a disaster for them, by most people's accounting (even though the ridiculous amount Microsoft paid for eBay made the deal ultimately profitable for them even though they only had a 30% stake by the time MS bought it). Some people would argue that buying ebay for 1/3 of what Microsoft paid for it was the "mistake" that pretty much cost Meg Whitman her job as CEO at eBay. I really can't imagine why Microsoft would want those damaged goods so badly as to pay 3x as much and I can only conclude that we're in the midst of a second tech bubble (see Groupon's valuation and the recent LinkedIN IPO for more examples).
Microsoft dodged that bullet, and then ran full steam into Skype. Ebay was mocked for buying Skype at nearly 25% of what Microsoft paid for it just a couple of years later. Skype is not worthless, but come on-- Microsoft seriously overpaid. Probably by roughly the same margin as they would have been overpaying for Yahoo, had that deal gone through.
Flickr is a loss leader, though. Yes, it's used by many, many people--and each one of them costs Yahoo money. Somebody may be able to monetize it, but Yahoo hasn't managed it.
In fairness, I don't really think anybody could have predicted Apple's return from the brink of death into an unstoppable juggernaut. It probably exceeded the fantasies of even the most dedicated fanboy.
"Users" is a tricky metric, particularly since it gets defined by the companies themselves. If "users" means unique account logins over the course of a 90 day period, that's a very different thing than if it means "number accounts" or even "number of accounts that have received mail". Keep in mind, that unlike gmail, Yahoo Mail was around back in the per-captcha days, and spam bots could create new accounts with no real barriers to stop them. And, of course, most gmail users all still have Yahoo Mail accounts, though at best they simply forward them to another account and at worse they don't use them at all.
I'm not suggesting that Yahoo (and Hotmail, for that matter) don't still have tons of active users but I'm guessing the number is far lower, by any reasonable metric, than they choose to report. Ultimately, when you're in the business of selling ads, quality matters more than than quantity, and I'd be shocked if Google wasn't making way more money off Gmail (yes, even though way more of them use POP3/IMAP and get served no ads at all) than Yahoo makes of Yahoo Mail.
Find some pictures of the actual event, and tell me what was on the signs. Look for some interviews. People were protesting "taxes", or at least most of them seemed to think they were.
Actually, the Tea Party started out protesting non-existent tax increases. Hence the name. Telling them that nobody had proposed, suggested or even hinted any new taxes at the time did no good, as none of them really had any sort of actual political awareness or cohesion until the HMO's got them organized against the healthcare build and started busing them around the country.
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The tax isn't to compensate the music industry for downloads, it's to compensate the french government (seriously) for taxes the music industry isn't paying.
I don't know how you use company resources to make a twitter account, and there's no real indication that he used company time either. He used their name as a way to distinguish himself from the guy who had @Noah already, but this was in the early days of twitter so there was no company policy on twitter. There was basically "no rule against it". There's a difference beween saying "personal projects" belong to your employer, and saying "Everything you do belongs to us". If he put his employers name in his Facebook profile, would they have rights to that?
I think part of your perspective is that you're assuming the reason he got so many followers is because he presented himself as "Phonedog Noah" instead of just "Noah Kravitz" and therefore attracted people looking for "Phonedog". However this doesn't seem to be the case, as he's added another 4,000 followers since leaving Phonedog and changing his twitter handle. By all accounts, this is his personal twitter account and the only thing linking it to his former employer is simply the fact that he identified with them enough to have originally included their name as part of his handle.
Especially since they were repeatedly warned that they were misreporting files and refused to stop and it just so happens they had a financial motive in acting improperly given that the page generated by using the removal tool had links to purchase the alleged infringing work legally--free page views on free advertisements, effectively.
The 'free health care' in jail is no better than what you already have. You can in fact, go to the emergancy room and get health care right this instant, its not even a little bit hard. You can in fact, tell them you have absolutely no intention of paying them ... and they'll help you anyway! Now they aren't going to give you braces for your snaggly teeth, but neither will the prison doctors, so you must be rather fucking stupid to think going to jail is an upgrade to your existence. Any 'good' free thing you can get in jail, you can also get ... for free ... outside of jail ... at better quality levels, even the bleeding asshole that goes with the gang raping you'll get.
Not unless he shoots himself in the gut first. Without a genuine emergency, they are not obligated to treat you and will not. And emergencies aren't things that will kill you, just things that will kill you immediately. If you have cancer they don't have to do anything until you collapse on the brink of death, and by then anything they do will be too late to matter.
And whether you intend to pay for not, you almost certainly will--unless you have no assets and never plan to work again. I guess you're off the hook if you die--which is a real possibility. People can and do die all the time in this country simply because they have no health insurance--many of whom would gladly pay for it if the insurance companies would allow them to. Much as you may wish to scoff at the idea, going to jail could save your life if you are one of those people. Your non-emergency pre-existing condition can be treated BEFORE it reaches the point where it's a untreatable life-threatening emergency.
Well, let's start with the fact that PSN intrusion was just one of 23 separate incidents for Sony within a time frame of just a couple of months.
Not to mention I don't have a Facebook account and don't plan to get one. You've just told me, and probably many others, "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't want your contributions."
Allegedly? There are quite fisherman out of work because of of the algae blooms they cause. What's great for some parts of nature is very bad for other parts. How about we just agree to classify pollutants in economics terms: Any emission which creates a negative externality for another person is a pollutant. If someone ELSE has to bare the cost for YOUR actions, then you are polluting.
Your raw sewage leaks into the river, lowering downstream property values? Well you just polluted there, buddy.
Fisherman are struggling because of nitrates that run off of farms? Well then those nitrates are a pollutant.
Sulfur Dioxide from coal burning reduces crop yields for local farmers by way of acid rain? Well then its a pollutant.
I think a pretty solid case can be made for carbon dioxide emissions creating some financial losses around the world. Of course, we are all emitters to one degree or another, but clearly some more than others. So those who emit MORE than their fair share are polluters.
I just don't see what's unreasonable about asking people to bare the burden for their OWN actions. d
More like Gaming "Unfair", amirite folks?
So is shit, but try dumping a few hundred tons of that a year in your local river and see if they call it pollution.
If we run out of oil, I'd imagine we'd just start running our cars on liquefied coal.
. . . Over the last 20 years or so. And yes, internet usage, interestingly enough, has increased over the same time period.
Here's a list of other things you can correlate to the rise in autism diagnoses:
1) Cell Phone usage
2) Rap Music
3) Movies starring Keanu Reeves.
4) The Simpsons
5) Baby names that start with the letter "J"
6) The number of different flavors of Mountain Dew
7) The decline of the fax machine
Clearly, we as a country, need to use fax machines more and name all of our children "Cody" from now on.
You're an outlier. The algorithm caters to the majority. You can be the search engine that most often delivers relevant results while always giving poor results for people who search for odd things.
I was just fixing an issue on my mother's computer and I noticed that a program she had installed had switched her default search engine to Bing. I asked her about it and she said "Yes! Please switch it back! I don't know why it keeps putting me on that website!"
When I updated my bit-torrent client (Vuze), it tried to pull the same stunt. They get you in the habit of clicking "yes" by popping up a series EULA's that nobody reads, then hopes you won't notice when the last one is a Bing Bar that will change your default search engine. You don't even have a choice between yes/or, just "continue". If you didn't uncheck the "please install this for me" box before you hit continue, then you get a lovely piece of junkware at no cost and Microsoft writes another check.
They famously bought Yahoo's customers, and now they're in negotiations to buy Firefox's customers when Google's deal runs out. In short, Bing bleeds money left and right, as Microsoft continues to buy market share. I can't help but wonder, however, what's the point? Is this really a long-term viable strategy? At some point, shouldn't Bing actaully *make* money rather than costing money? I guess every dollar Microsoft flushes down the toilet is one less dollar for Google to earn, but this doesn't seem like a very smart business strategy in the long run.
Like any other gold rush, the first people in make a ton and everyone who follows them goes broke trying to match it. Unless you just have an amazing idea that hasn't been done before by anyone and doesn't require you to run a server to make the app work--I'd think twice about diving in with both feet this late in the game.
There can be significant costs in acquiring/licensing art/music assets for games for a start. But perhaps even more insidious is that all of the most useful apps I can think of have some sort of cloud component--which means that someone, somewhere, has to have a server to support to the app. That means monthly bandwidth/hosting cost obligations into the foreseeable future. If your app sells, great. If not . . . you're kinda screwed. And then, of course, there's the fact that you're only allowed to develop on a Mac, so your start-up costs might not be insignificant either.
I'm pretty skeptical that people are unnecessarily going to college simply because student loans are available. A student loan, after all, is still a loan. At the current ridiculously low interest rates, I think you'd have a hard time even arguing that it it's a subsidy by way of interest owed reduction.
I have no doubt, however, that many people who go to college probably could have done just as well in their chosen career without it. Not everybody needs to go to college, and yet we have been repeatedly stating the opposite to young people on the verge of making that sort of large life decision.
Besides, education is what economists call a positive externality--even in instances where it's not a factor in your chosen career. As with any positive externality, a subsidy is one of the correct and proper ways to help correct for market undervaluation. Even if student loans did constitute a subsidy, that wouldn't be a bad thing. There are quite a few free market fanatics who seem to have cultivated a false sense of the governments role (or to their way of thinking, lack thereof) in regulating a free market. The Free Market is not a unicorn. It needs more than rainbows to function optimally.
Why not? Ebay paid 3.1 billion for Skype (was initially to be as much as 4.1 billion, based on performance goals which ultimately were not met) and they bought it "just before the recession". It was a disaster for them, by most people's accounting (even though the ridiculous amount Microsoft paid for eBay made the deal ultimately profitable for them even though they only had a 30% stake by the time MS bought it). Some people would argue that buying ebay for 1/3 of what Microsoft paid for it was the "mistake" that pretty much cost Meg Whitman her job as CEO at eBay. I really can't imagine why Microsoft would want those damaged goods so badly as to pay 3x as much and I can only conclude that we're in the midst of a second tech bubble (see Groupon's valuation and the recent LinkedIN IPO for more examples).
Microsoft dodged that bullet, and then ran full steam into Skype. Ebay was mocked for buying Skype at nearly 25% of what Microsoft paid for it just a couple of years later. Skype is not worthless, but come on-- Microsoft seriously overpaid. Probably by roughly the same margin as they would have been overpaying for Yahoo, had that deal gone through.
Flickr is a loss leader, though. Yes, it's used by many, many people--and each one of them costs Yahoo money. Somebody may be able to monetize it, but Yahoo hasn't managed it.
In fairness, I don't really think anybody could have predicted Apple's return from the brink of death into an unstoppable juggernaut. It probably exceeded the fantasies of even the most dedicated fanboy.
Yeah, Yahoo did that back when there were like 12 sites on the internet. Not such a workable proposition anymore, I'm afraid.
"Users" is a tricky metric, particularly since it gets defined by the companies themselves. If "users" means unique account logins over the course of a 90 day period, that's a very different thing than if it means "number accounts" or even "number of accounts that have received mail". Keep in mind, that unlike gmail, Yahoo Mail was around back in the per-captcha days, and spam bots could create new accounts with no real barriers to stop them. And, of course, most gmail users all still have Yahoo Mail accounts, though at best they simply forward them to another account and at worse they don't use them at all.
I'm not suggesting that Yahoo (and Hotmail, for that matter) don't still have tons of active users but I'm guessing the number is far lower, by any reasonable metric, than they choose to report. Ultimately, when you're in the business of selling ads, quality matters more than than quantity, and I'd be shocked if Google wasn't making way more money off Gmail (yes, even though way more of them use POP3/IMAP and get served no ads at all) than Yahoo makes of Yahoo Mail.
Find some pictures of the actual event, and tell me what was on the signs. Look for some interviews. People were protesting "taxes", or at least most of them seemed to think they were.
Actually, the Tea Party started out protesting non-existent tax increases. Hence the name. Telling them that nobody had proposed, suggested or even hinted any new taxes at the time did no good, as none of them really had any sort of actual political awareness or cohesion until the HMO's got them organized against the healthcare build and started busing them around the country.
I'm glad you know what it's about. I feel like there's really no coherent message or explanation for the whole movement, atm.