The problem here is that if you're buying out of state, or even out of country then you have no voice or vote on the matter. I order stuff from other countries all the time, and the reality is that if they started slapping a tax on my goods, then I have to like it or lump it. My opinion is that taxing stuff is going to have an obvious a chilling effect on internet sales but its up to legislators to realise the consequences.
It does remove a cost, but if support is not free (and in the case of most commercial Linux dists it is more expensive than Windows), then you're removing one cost and getting another one. Yes paid support is optional, but I bet most Red Hat / Novell customers pay for it anyway. Linux always offers the "go it alone" option of course which is great for individuals but the reality for enterprises is they still have to pay somebody to find & build patches and have the technical wherewithal to apply them.
In Colorado there is a county tax that is different in every county. In NJ they have enterprise zones where the tax is half unless your a business in NJ then you need to pay full tax. See, it is unbelievably simple.
I would deeply surprised if there weren't multiple solutions to taxing goods in the US. It's not like its a new problem.
On taxes in general... they have already been paid. The manufacturer paid tax on the raw goods, tax was paid by the distributors, and income tax was collected from the people who work for these organizations. Have I left out anything? Please add it in if so. Do we get any more representation in Congress for the items that have been taxed three or more times? Please, if it is taxed in the EU, let's not do it here.
I expect (any) government's reasoning is that no single tax that can be fairly applied across the spectrum, so therefore multiple overlapping taxes. This is not exclusive to the US. Each government / region sets forth its tax code and its up to any entity which wishes to do business in that jurisdiction to adhere to it. Yes I'd rather not pay tax on goods shipped from internet sales, or failing that at least have a single tax everywhere, but I see no valid technical reason that it couldn't be done.
I don't know why you've been marked a troll because it's broadly true that commercial Linux distributions have very limited official support unless you pay $$$ to get more (e.g. RH Workstation is $179 per year for basic support). It's also true that you can DIY rebuild the kernel (or whatever the afflicted part was) or pay someone to do it no matter what age your dist is so at a pinch you could fix something outside the official channels. However, if we're comparing the "free" support in a commercial Linux distribution compared to Windows that Linux fails pretty hard.
Amazon has to collect taxes in countries where the law makes it mandatory, e.g. in the EU. So it's not so hard.
I believe it would hideously complicated to implement requiring lawyers and accountants to sift through tax laws to figure out what it needs to collect, what it needs to declare to revenue etc. Other smaller retailers manage it, and Amazon themselves manage it in outside the US. So it is lame for them to claim they can't do it from a technical, fiscal or legal standpoint. I can well understand why they wouldn't want to do it from a sales standpoint though.
I suspect the music industry's shift to MP3 had more to do with loosening the stranglehold of Apple than any underlying recognition of the merits or lack thereof in MP3. The irony is Amazon looks like becoming to book publishers what Apple was to the music industry. Unless of course Apple turns up with a tablet device and attempts to steal that market too. That's why its all the more important for the industry to rally around a standard while they still have a chance.
DRM doesn't make any sense on books. No one even has to "crack" it -- it only takes one person with access to type the book into an open format and distribute it. The publishers can either suck it up and realize this, or lose out to the pirates who provide a better, more convenient product for zero cost.
And all one has to do with music is tape it, or with movies camcorder it. You can even do this with encrypted content. The analogue hole means all content can ultimately be copied and usually at an acceptable level of quality. I'm actually surprised no one has hooked up a Kindle to a flatbed scanner and written some page turning software to rip & OCR books that way.
But all this is irrelevant because publishers still want the option of DRM. It may ultimately be futile, but publishers want the option. A determined attacker will find their way around anything but most people are not that determined. Publishers might wish there was unbreakable DRM (fat chance) but failing that they'll settle for one that prevents casual copying and one that makes it easy to identify file sharers.
A single file format and DRM that was common across all vendors and non-intrusive wouldn't even register as an issue with consumers. Far more important would be the price of the content and the ease of obtaining and managing it. Even with P2P networks people still buy video & music from online stores and the same would hold true for books. The biggest impediment is the multitude of incompatible formats. A single format adopted by all major players would see sales skyrocket.
I believe the earlier it happens the better. I do not see any positives for consumers if Amazon becomes the dominant player as might happen a few more years down the road. Anything that helps a more open (as in widely supported) alternative is to be applauded. Sites like Fictionwise is reflective of the complete mess the industry is in - look at the multitude of proprietary formats, DRMs and accompanying readers that books sell in. The sooner a single common format and delivery model that all publishers, sellers and device manufacturers can support appears the better.
Proposing a non DRM solution to publishers is simply not a viable solution. Like it or not, publishers want to protect their content from copying and certain people all too willing to copy their content for nothing. However, any DRM scheme needs to be common to all publishers, all resellers and all reader devices. It must also define reasonable limits that take into account the user's needs and the publisher's needs.
With that in place, consumers will flock to the format and publishers will reap the rewards. Perhaps in the long term the industry discovers (as with MP3), that people are in general fairly honest so there is no need for the DRM. Perhaps the cost of licensing the DRM exceeds the losses of not implementing it. Perhaps passive DRM such as embedding the user's personal information into their copy is sufficient deterrent.
Bing seems like an imitation of Google in most respects. It works, it's fairly accurate but it's also largely redundant. Choice is still a good thing - sometimes routes to Google are slow or I simply don't want them knowing some of my business so I might use Bing or Yahoo.
This Verizon behaviour though... Forcing someone to exactly one search provider is an incredibly shitty thing to do. They could have advertised the new search provider on the default landing page, even automated the process of switching, and of course defaulted the setting to Bing for new phones. But to wipe away people's own choice on existing phones is just evil plain and simple. It is IMO bait and switch, especially as some users may have legitimate reasons for staying with Google.
What strikes me about US telcos / cable is how seemingly unregulated they are. How they are continuously caught trying to foist one heinous condition on their users after another. European telecoms seems so much better regulated. Yes there are terms and conditions but nothing remotely approaching the levels of evilness in the US.
Either, both. C++ can protect against some things that C can't, e.g. auto_ptr protects against objects going out of scope without being freed, but both are still more error prone than virtually all higher level languages for web app development. Even with some kind of web app framework for C++ such as wt it would still be more error prone. I'm not arguing C/C++ are obsolete or any such thing, just that every tool has it's place and C/C++ is best suited for lower level stuff. For example, if my app servers were protected by a pass through server I might well consider using an NSAPI plugin in C++ on that server that handled security, leaving the apps behind to concentrate on functionality.
I think it is fair to say that she is a mediocre singer who can attribute her success on her first appearance. People were shocked that this dowdy, mildly retarded frump could sing and it kind of snowballed from there. She didn't even win the final not that winning means squat anyway. Most of the winners of these shows hurtle off into oblivion soon afterwards.
Not if they're developed by someone who actually knows C++.
Pure baloney. Every C++ programmer in existence has experienced memory leaks, buffer overruns, pointer exceptions, stack overflows, and a raft of other issues that do not exist or exist in a more structured way in other languages. Even defensive programming techniques will not save you from them.
On top of that C++ webapps are almost certainly going to be crashier, leakier and much slower to develop than something written in PHP, Java etc.That's the reason why C++ isn't used much for web apps these days. The latency in most web apps isn't the page anyway, it's reading a file, waiting for a database to return or something else. Changing the language for marginal speed gains while taking a huge hit on reliability, uptime and the constant server recycling simply isn't an option for most companies.
I have long believed that is the American obsession with image and sexuality that has aggravated the problem of obesity. Nearly every 'good' cure to obesity (omitting dangerous diet pills or starvation diets) involves social interaction of some kind. Lampooning people who suffer from obesity only furthers their isolation and in no way is productive towards recovery.
Actually I think the cause is far more obvious. Walk into any US supermarket and note how many aisles are devoted to snack / junk products compared to a European supermarket. Also note the size of packets, and the bullshit "nutrition advice" on the back where the smallest packet of crisps (potato chips) will say 3 servings or similar. Walk into any food court and note the virtual absence of any healthy food. Walk into any restaurant and note the size of the portions. Note the layout of most towns and note that a car is virtually obligatory. The cause is simple - too much fatty, high calorie junk food combined with a sedentary lifestyle.
Europe has fatties too and in no small part its because its going down the same road as the US. I think there is no easy answer to eliminate obesity, but a good start might be to impose maximum fat / calorific limits on certain packaged foodstuffs and force nutrition advice to be for the entire packet and per 100 gram, as per Europe.
Anti-abortion doesn't always mean anti-choice (as strange as it sounds). The MPP probably believe they're helping glaucoma patients. I don't know what the SSDP does.
If that were so, I would expect them to be called pregnancy counselling, and to be non-judgemental and explain all options in an impartial manner. I would expect this reputation to be backed by testimony of people who had used the service. If they are pushing anti-abortion options, not even discussing abortion or otherwise gaming the deck then they are anti-abortion in the political / religious sense.
Any contest where money is donated to charity should exclude "charities" which are basically political or religious fronts. That doesn't mean that the charity cannot be activist or have religious foundations. Indeed some of the best charities in the UK such as Barnardos, Oxfam, Samaritans were started by religious people, and some such as the Terrence Higgins Trust actively campaign but they still act in an impartial, non judgemental manner as befits any respectable well run charity.
People still need to buy a 3D capable TV and I expect for a good while yet they will command a premium for a relatively useless feature. Furthermore, even if the PS3 does support 3D, it will probably do so in non-optimal way. After all, the PS3 doesn't strictly support HDMI 1.4 and is probably bandwidth & chipset constrained. I expect if Sony do offer output might have to output 2D + z buffer or some crappy side by side output, neither of which is optimal. The PS3 might also be able to output anaglyph for people on older TVs (red / cyan).
It's certainly a nice freebie to get in a PS3 and it will certainly accelerate the format, but 3D is still strictly early adopter for a few years yet. There are too many standards to implement (and iron the kinks out of), gen 1 TVs with rudimentary support and a large price, much user confusion and a dearth of content. Once some of these issues are addressed I believe it will become a popular medium.
Subtitles and other graphics sit on a plane above the video content. When you watch a movie in 3D, you want to be able to adjust where that plane "floats" to make it easier to read the focus between the text and the scene.On a regular TV this isn't an issue because the picture and graphic are sitting on the same perpendicular plane to the viewer at a fixed distance.
You can mod me down, but who actually likes 3d video enough to spend extra money on the already expensive blu-ray format?
Blu Ray players can be had for $100-200. They're also backwards meaning you can play DVDs or Blu Rays on them. Blu Ray discs are settling into the DVD discount model and its easy to find recognizable titles from $8 up. That's hardly expensive. When 3D players turn up, they'll probably occupy a higher price slot (as happens with all early adopter stuff) and then they'll come down in time too.
Personally I think 3D has years to hit the mainstream and has many hurdles to overcome, but Blu Ray is here and affordable right now.
until we change our mind. Really, what's to prevent them from waiting until the tech is firmly embraced, then changing the deal?
Well that hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will be. But you're right, they could sue Mono into oblivion or emasculate it some way. Mono / Moonlight is allowed to live on simply because Microsoft can pretend.NET is cross platform without it ever being so. Mono has as much chance of catching up with.NET as someone being dragged behind a car.
Generally speaking the higher the bitrate, the higher the quality, but all encoders are not equal and it's entirely possible that the BBC do get subjectively similar quality from switching to a different vendor. At the same time, there are limits to how low they can go before people start noticing the artifacts. Too many channels, especially paid/commercial channels step way too far over the line and the screen disintegrates into blocky mush when too much is going on. Conversely, pushing the bitrate higher invokes the law of diminishing returns. I realise the BBC are probably starved of bandwidth but at the same time, they need to strike a reasonable balance rather than shoving as many channels in as possible.
I think if the BBC wants to test if their new arrangement is degrading image quality, they should put up some randomized A/B pictures from both setups and ask users to pick. If they honestly believe the new setup is comparable then the results should be 50:50.
What would be the point? You see, I actually have spent some time reading through the leaked data and email. The whole game is rigged.
Bollocks was it. The private emails don't reveal anything astounding, and certainly do not reveal some vast international conspiracy.
More important, you don't need to be a climate scientist to realize these guys aren't practicing science. They suppress debate, suppress the data and the details of the models used to analyze it. Basically they are putting on their Science! priesthood robes and making pronouncements we are expected to accept without question based on their authority.
Bollocks again. It's clear the scientists had issues about supplying their arch opponents with every scrap of raw data requested but there are plenty of understandable human reasons for that. If I were working on something, anything and some asshole kept demanding I drop everything to satisfy some random request which was going to be put online to publicly criticize me, then I might have issues too. And that's what it amounts to. I'm sure the personal emails of scientists involved with 9/11 investigation, or evolution, or air crash investigation or any other "controversial" area of research share similar sentiments.
Should these scientists be more open with their data? Probably. An open and transparent framework for peer review will only make their findings more rigorous. Should that mean they pander to every stupid request made by deniers? Absolutely not.
That's the problem with gaming the system you see, eventually people find out you were playing a game when they thought you were serious.
Except they weren't gaming the system. Nothing in the emails is particularly sinister but that hasn't stopped opponents from quote mining it for all its worth.
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The problem here is that if you're buying out of state, or even out of country then you have no voice or vote on the matter. I order stuff from other countries all the time, and the reality is that if they started slapping a tax on my goods, then I have to like it or lump it. My opinion is that taxing stuff is going to have an obvious a chilling effect on internet sales but its up to legislators to realise the consequences.
It does remove a cost, but if support is not free (and in the case of most commercial Linux dists it is more expensive than Windows), then you're removing one cost and getting another one. Yes paid support is optional, but I bet most Red Hat / Novell customers pay for it anyway. Linux always offers the "go it alone" option of course which is great for individuals but the reality for enterprises is they still have to pay somebody to find & build patches and have the technical wherewithal to apply them.
I would deeply surprised if there weren't multiple solutions to taxing goods in the US. It's not like its a new problem.
On taxes in general... they have already been paid. The manufacturer paid tax on the raw goods, tax was paid by the distributors, and income tax was collected from the people who work for these organizations. Have I left out anything? Please add it in if so. Do we get any more representation in Congress for the items that have been taxed three or more times? Please, if it is taxed in the EU, let's not do it here.
I expect (any) government's reasoning is that no single tax that can be fairly applied across the spectrum, so therefore multiple overlapping taxes. This is not exclusive to the US. Each government / region sets forth its tax code and its up to any entity which wishes to do business in that jurisdiction to adhere to it. Yes I'd rather not pay tax on goods shipped from internet sales, or failing that at least have a single tax everywhere, but I see no valid technical reason that it couldn't be done.
I don't know why you've been marked a troll because it's broadly true that commercial Linux distributions have very limited official support unless you pay $$$ to get more (e.g. RH Workstation is $179 per year for basic support). It's also true that you can DIY rebuild the kernel (or whatever the afflicted part was) or pay someone to do it no matter what age your dist is so at a pinch you could fix something outside the official channels. However, if we're comparing the "free" support in a commercial Linux distribution compared to Windows that Linux fails pretty hard.
I believe it would hideously complicated to implement requiring lawyers and accountants to sift through tax laws to figure out what it needs to collect, what it needs to declare to revenue etc. Other smaller retailers manage it, and Amazon themselves manage it in outside the US. So it is lame for them to claim they can't do it from a technical, fiscal or legal standpoint. I can well understand why they wouldn't want to do it from a sales standpoint though.
I suspect the music industry's shift to MP3 had more to do with loosening the stranglehold of Apple than any underlying recognition of the merits or lack thereof in MP3. The irony is Amazon looks like becoming to book publishers what Apple was to the music industry. Unless of course Apple turns up with a tablet device and attempts to steal that market too. That's why its all the more important for the industry to rally around a standard while they still have a chance.
And all one has to do with music is tape it, or with movies camcorder it. You can even do this with encrypted content. The analogue hole means all content can ultimately be copied and usually at an acceptable level of quality. I'm actually surprised no one has hooked up a Kindle to a flatbed scanner and written some page turning software to rip & OCR books that way.
But all this is irrelevant because publishers still want the option of DRM. It may ultimately be futile, but publishers want the option. A determined attacker will find their way around anything but most people are not that determined. Publishers might wish there was unbreakable DRM (fat chance) but failing that they'll settle for one that prevents casual copying and one that makes it easy to identify file sharers.
A single file format and DRM that was common across all vendors and non-intrusive wouldn't even register as an issue with consumers. Far more important would be the price of the content and the ease of obtaining and managing it. Even with P2P networks people still buy video & music from online stores and the same would hold true for books. The biggest impediment is the multitude of incompatible formats. A single format adopted by all major players would see sales skyrocket.
I believe the earlier it happens the better. I do not see any positives for consumers if Amazon becomes the dominant player as might happen a few more years down the road. Anything that helps a more open (as in widely supported) alternative is to be applauded. Sites like Fictionwise is reflective of the complete mess the industry is in - look at the multitude of proprietary formats, DRMs and accompanying readers that books sell in. The sooner a single common format and delivery model that all publishers, sellers and device manufacturers can support appears the better.
With that in place, consumers will flock to the format and publishers will reap the rewards. Perhaps in the long term the industry discovers (as with MP3), that people are in general fairly honest so there is no need for the DRM. Perhaps the cost of licensing the DRM exceeds the losses of not implementing it. Perhaps passive DRM such as embedding the user's personal information into their copy is sufficient deterrent.
This Verizon behaviour though... Forcing someone to exactly one search provider is an incredibly shitty thing to do. They could have advertised the new search provider on the default landing page, even automated the process of switching, and of course defaulted the setting to Bing for new phones. But to wipe away people's own choice on existing phones is just evil plain and simple. It is IMO bait and switch, especially as some users may have legitimate reasons for staying with Google.
What strikes me about US telcos / cable is how seemingly unregulated they are. How they are continuously caught trying to foist one heinous condition on their users after another. European telecoms seems so much better regulated. Yes there are terms and conditions but nothing remotely approaching the levels of evilness in the US.
Either, both. C++ can protect against some things that C can't, e.g. auto_ptr protects against objects going out of scope without being freed, but both are still more error prone than virtually all higher level languages for web app development. Even with some kind of web app framework for C++ such as wt it would still be more error prone. I'm not arguing C/C++ are obsolete or any such thing, just that every tool has it's place and C/C++ is best suited for lower level stuff. For example, if my app servers were protected by a pass through server I might well consider using an NSAPI plugin in C++ on that server that handled security, leaving the apps behind to concentrate on functionality.
I think it is fair to say that she is a mediocre singer who can attribute her success on her first appearance. People were shocked that this dowdy, mildly retarded frump could sing and it kind of snowballed from there. She didn't even win the final not that winning means squat anyway. Most of the winners of these shows hurtle off into oblivion soon afterwards.
I think by this point the bible can be considered abandonware.
Pure baloney. Every C++ programmer in existence has experienced memory leaks, buffer overruns, pointer exceptions, stack overflows, and a raft of other issues that do not exist or exist in a more structured way in other languages. Even defensive programming techniques will not save you from them.
On top of that C++ webapps are almost certainly going to be crashier, leakier and much slower to develop than something written in PHP, Java etc.That's the reason why C++ isn't used much for web apps these days. The latency in most web apps isn't the page anyway, it's reading a file, waiting for a database to return or something else. Changing the language for marginal speed gains while taking a huge hit on reliability, uptime and the constant server recycling simply isn't an option for most companies.
Actually I think the cause is far more obvious. Walk into any US supermarket and note how many aisles are devoted to snack / junk products compared to a European supermarket. Also note the size of packets, and the bullshit "nutrition advice" on the back where the smallest packet of crisps (potato chips) will say 3 servings or similar. Walk into any food court and note the virtual absence of any healthy food. Walk into any restaurant and note the size of the portions. Note the layout of most towns and note that a car is virtually obligatory. The cause is simple - too much fatty, high calorie junk food combined with a sedentary lifestyle.
Europe has fatties too and in no small part its because its going down the same road as the US. I think there is no easy answer to eliminate obesity, but a good start might be to impose maximum fat / calorific limits on certain packaged foodstuffs and force nutrition advice to be for the entire packet and per 100 gram, as per Europe.
If that were so, I would expect them to be called pregnancy counselling, and to be non-judgemental and explain all options in an impartial manner. I would expect this reputation to be backed by testimony of people who had used the service. If they are pushing anti-abortion options, not even discussing abortion or otherwise gaming the deck then they are anti-abortion in the political / religious sense.
Any contest where money is donated to charity should exclude "charities" which are basically political or religious fronts. That doesn't mean that the charity cannot be activist or have religious foundations. Indeed some of the best charities in the UK such as Barnardos, Oxfam, Samaritans were started by religious people, and some such as the Terrence Higgins Trust actively campaign but they still act in an impartial, non judgemental manner as befits any respectable well run charity.
What about Kurdish fat people?
It's certainly a nice freebie to get in a PS3 and it will certainly accelerate the format, but 3D is still strictly early adopter for a few years yet. There are too many standards to implement (and iron the kinks out of), gen 1 TVs with rudimentary support and a large price, much user confusion and a dearth of content. Once some of these issues are addressed I believe it will become a popular medium.
Subtitles and other graphics sit on a plane above the video content. When you watch a movie in 3D, you want to be able to adjust where that plane "floats" to make it easier to read the focus between the text and the scene.On a regular TV this isn't an issue because the picture and graphic are sitting on the same perpendicular plane to the viewer at a fixed distance.
Blu Ray players can be had for $100-200. They're also backwards meaning you can play DVDs or Blu Rays on them. Blu Ray discs are settling into the DVD discount model and its easy to find recognizable titles from $8 up. That's hardly expensive. When 3D players turn up, they'll probably occupy a higher price slot (as happens with all early adopter stuff) and then they'll come down in time too.
Personally I think 3D has years to hit the mainstream and has many hurdles to overcome, but Blu Ray is here and affordable right now.
Well that hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will be. But you're right, they could sue Mono into oblivion or emasculate it some way. Mono / Moonlight is allowed to live on simply because Microsoft can pretend .NET is cross platform without it ever being so. Mono has as much chance of catching up with .NET as someone being dragged behind a car.
I think if the BBC wants to test if their new arrangement is degrading image quality, they should put up some randomized A/B pictures from both setups and ask users to pick. If they honestly believe the new setup is comparable then the results should be 50:50.
Bollocks was it. The private emails don't reveal anything astounding, and certainly do not reveal some vast international conspiracy.
More important, you don't need to be a climate scientist to realize these guys aren't practicing science. They suppress debate, suppress the data and the details of the models used to analyze it. Basically they are putting on their Science! priesthood robes and making pronouncements we are expected to accept without question based on their authority.
Bollocks again. It's clear the scientists had issues about supplying their arch opponents with every scrap of raw data requested but there are plenty of understandable human reasons for that. If I were working on something, anything and some asshole kept demanding I drop everything to satisfy some random request which was going to be put online to publicly criticize me, then I might have issues too. And that's what it amounts to. I'm sure the personal emails of scientists involved with 9/11 investigation, or evolution, or air crash investigation or any other "controversial" area of research share similar sentiments.
Should these scientists be more open with their data? Probably. An open and transparent framework for peer review will only make their findings more rigorous. Should that mean they pander to every stupid request made by deniers? Absolutely not.
Except they weren't gaming the system. Nothing in the emails is particularly sinister but that hasn't stopped opponents from quote mining it for all its worth.