Ummm, that depends on who you ask. When Jamie Kellner (TV Exec, at the time was CEO of Turner Broadcasting, looking after a bunch of channels including the Cartoon Network) answered that very question his reply was this: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."
Seriously, you just can't make up quality like that.
Actually, as Kepler is using a transit methodology to find planets, there is nothing conclusive to say that these stars don't have large orbiting bodies. While I do accept that when looking at a large volume of stars, at least some of these should show transits by planets, but given the chances of a transit of a planet at roughly 1 AU is 0.47%, then these 365 superflares should have statistically shown one single transit event. I wouldn't consider that to be conclusive proof by any stretch. I am going to call Occam's razor on this one.
Seals are around 25% fat. A mere 28 grams (that's like a SPOON of it) contains 11% of your recommended daily fat intake.. Feeding them to terrorists might not be such a bad idea. Feed em seal for a month, terrorist dies of a coronary.
Well, when comparing the hardship of having to sit through unskipable crap and having commentary tracks, I'd guess the solution is to scan the PP for the commentary tracks...
I disagree. I don't like the crap that Big Media puts the entertainment that I purchase, but I don't agree that they deserve nothing for their trouble. I wish that they would learn. I appreciate the entertainment that they provide me and I will be happy to pay for it. I don't think that their current accounting models are a great indication of how much I would like to pay for the entertainment, but if they were to drop the whole concept of hollywood accounting and if I can teach them to drop the pointless "Hey! Don't pirate shit - and watch these trailers for shit you aren't interested in!" then I just might get what I want from them - the entertainment that I want, and nothing else. if I want to pay for a show, I want to pay for nothing else. The amusing thing that I find, is that it seems that the really early shows to DVD actually GOT that concept - Babylon 5, straight to menu. BSG, straight to menu. Deadwood, straight to menu. All that other shit that spams me, LISTEN!
With content, it's reverse. If I download it, I can time and medium shift it, I get no ridiculous warnings and unskipable trailers, I can easily cut scenes out of it, collect a few movies on a media server if I please. All that and more is what I do NOT get when I buy it legally.
How backwards is that?
I sort of agree, with most of what you said, but with the following additions: DVD and BRs do actually come with additional value-add content. Most of them have at least one commentary track (director, actors etc). I quite enjoy these. Most DVDs have deleted scenes or featurettes on them as well.
There are many movies and shows that I have bought, and while all the non-skippable crap at the start REALLY pisses me off (no, really you have little idea how much it does), I transcode it to a nice format and pop it on my mediaserver where we can then watch it from a couple of players connected to the TVs. If I really enjoy it, I will include other audio streams as well. Living in Australia, this is legal.
Like I said, I do agree with your post, but I think you are overlooking many of the value-adding things on a DVD/BluRay.
It doesn't end as such. The Mayan had epochs. Sort of like if our dates got to the year 999, then instead of moving to 1000, they moved to 1 again, but called it the millennium of [something].
The first age was where the gods created the world, but the animals and humans could not speak and so were unable to worship the gods. In the second age, the gods created humans out of mud, then in the third, out of wood. The gods were not pleased with either of these, so they wiped them out and started over - in the fourth age where we are now. This whole 2012 thing is simply the end of the fourth epoch of the Mayan calendar.
I think you mean the Buddhas statues in Afghanistan? I know that this is a pathetic troll, but figure I should nip this in the bud right here:
Most muslims were opposed to the action, even high ranking officials in the Taliban.
In July 1999, Mullah Mohammed Omar issued a decree in favor of the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddha's statue. Because Afghanistan's Buddhist population no longer exists, which removed the possibility of the statues being worshiped, he added: "The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors. The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but protected.
According to UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura, a meeting of ambassadors from the 54 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was conducted. All OIC states – including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, three countries that officially recognised the Taliban government – joined the protest to spare the monuments. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates later condemned the destruction as "savage".
Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf sent Moinuddin Haider to Kabul to try to prevent the destruction, by arguing that it was un-Islamic and unprecedented. According to Taliban minister, Abdul Salam Zaeef, UNESCO sent the Taliban government 36 letters objecting to the proposed destruction. He asserted that the Chinese, Japanese and Sri Lankan delegates were the most strident advocates for preserving the Buddhas.
For DVDs, I find that DVD::RIP (Ubuntu) is excellent assuming you set it up to use the cluster. It works fast - I can rip the VOB files in around 5-8 minutes per movie and the encoding takes 6-9 minutes (although I can be ripping another movie at that stage), and is pretty easy to get most DVDs done. If you do want some more features, then Handbrake is probably the best featured tool out there and it supports.mkvs with h.264 which makes for excellent quality and features. If I am doing shows, I generally switch to my Windows laptop and use DVD-Decrypter and AutoGK combination. Although a little slower, it has a much better queue function between the two of them. AutoGK also has an excellent "Show only Forced Subtitles" function which is fantastic for movies where you do want subtitles, but only for a few scenes, and not the entire time.
While certain discs do have exceptionally troublesome protection on them, AnyDVD seems to work a charm and also greatly increases the rip time as the ripping software no longer has to decrypt on the fly, but treats the data as having no encryption.
While I haven't tinkered with BR discs yet, I have read that BR on Ubuntu is tedious at the moment, I will eventually start the process up.
Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.
That sounds like a good plan to me if the goal is to push paying customers away.
Yes and no. I (and I think many/.'ers are similar to me in this regard) do get annoyed by this sort of thing, yet I am also inclined to support the entertainment that I enjoy. As a result, I do in fact go out and buy the shows that I like to watch to send a (I know it is meager) message to the content creators "Hey, this makes you money. Make more of THIS." but I do come home, transcode it to a nice file without all the rubbish advertising and crap "announcements" that they put on the loading sectors of discs. I was quite amused by Startgate SG1 for example, but towards the latter half of the series, each time I inserted a disc, forcing me to watch (I kid you not) A Fox? Studios advertisment, followed by a trailer for Startgate Contimuum, then a trailer for the Stargate video game, then an advertisement for Stargate Altantis, then an anti-piracy message? Give me a break. If I am buying the damned discs, you have made your money and let me enjoy my content already.
So while I do enjoy feeling good about supporting the entertainment that I enjoy, the taste is often more and more bitter. The only upside is that some content providers seem to get the message and skip anything like that. From a pragmatic point of view, I think that actually makes me enjoy that more as I am no longer associating that show with forced advertising.
This is not the first time someone has been prevented from entering a country.
I think the story here isn't that someone got knocked back from entering the UK, but rather the reasons behind it. TFA doesn't mention that he has a criminal record, it doesn't mention anything about hate speech or promoting violence. The guy teaches martial arts and speaks his mind on it. He doesn't come across as someone who will run down the street attacking everyone in sight, he isn't radical and (apart from knowing a lot of martial arts) doesn't seem to be anyone out of the ordinary.
Having said that, I do sort of agree that this isn't all that newsworthy for/. even though I generally do froth at the mouth at personal freedom abuses - which I do think that this falls into.
If he lied on his resume, he won't be parachuting back to earth.
I am pretty sure that most positions of that level have clauses in them around criminal acts and the like. While it may seem a stretch, lying on your CV may be considered fraud, therefore he got into the job by defrauding the company (whether or not they should have picked it up) and that might be enough to show him the door. Having said that, I dare say that Yahoo will no doubt wait till some of this dust has settled then try to usher in a "quiet" passing of the baton to the next CEO.
What about if the Chinese get our codes and hack our defenses like the Cylons from BSG?
Then in an ironic twist, the political powers that be get a number of things they would dearly love - at the price of innocent lives. They have a "credible" threat to pursue - clearly hacking bombers is a clear act of war, they have a population that is deathly scared and willing to give up all manner of personal freedoms in exchange for perceived safety and they have an attack on their soverign soil which will motivate and infuriate the local population. They then get to enact just about every rule, law and practise that they want - all for the mere cost of innocent lives.
"You can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs..." is a lovely expression. The real challenge here is working out whether the eggs are worth the omlette in the end. I dare say that in global politics, there are folks that think it is, and folks that think it isn't.
The US knows that it is getting a lot of bad press worldwide, that a lot of staunch supporters and backing away and that its economy is in some trouble. Historically, one of the ways it sorts some of these problems out is by going to war (whether genuinly or under pretext) but the latest few in the middle east are quickly draining public support and also the coffers. From a propaganda point of view, nothing would be better than having a ligitimate case to present to the public, and be able to cry foul in the UN against the baddies. It is much easier to sell a country as being the "good guys" if they are the ones being attacked by someone else - pushing a "We are doing this for democracy/good/their benefit" is a song that many US citizens are getting very sick of hearing when they keep seeing body bags coming back and their pensions and savings just aren't worth what they should be.
Sorry, but this really smacks of the True Scotsman fallacy. Yes, research can be skewed - but if you are using researched funded by the RIAA or MPAA etc, then it is just as likely to be as skewed as you claim these to be, thereby making the comment redundant in itself. How about posting a few links to legitimate research done by neutral parties with no interest either way, instead of simply dismissing these?
It might be made up of interesting stuff for plants, but it is exceptionally sparse. At surface level (even at the lowest point) it is a mere 0.1675 psi where earth has a sea level pressure of around 14.69 psi. This leads plants to do some funny things. NASA has been experimenting with plants and low pressures for a while now but it isn't going all that well - the plants think there is a drought when the low pressure basically sucks all the moisture from them - even if they are hydrated very well.
Cool events happen all the time, but many of these individual events won't happen again for a long time. Like useless first posts on/. Each one is probably a different person posting, but they happen all the time... Do you see what I did there?
Some simple legislation could clear this up. Firstly of course give offshore tax havens some warning to clean up before zeroing the value of their currency and secondly baring states from acting as tax havens. The tax should be paid where the money is earned, not declared.
You can't just zero a currency - as much as the US would probably love to think it can, but it's not that plausible. What any government CAN however do is impose tarrifs (a wonderful word for taxes on another country, or more importantly the people who choose to work in that country).
Using a simple example, a company makes cars, but then "relocates" headquarters to a small island just off the coast but with different tax laws, this reduces their tax bill by 10%. The government steps in and says "Goods from [small island country] now attract a tarrif of 10%. This of course does only cover the goods coming into the one single country, and this isn't a perfect example with the internet, but it is how governments are bypassing the "lets move offshore to save tax".
With the volume of business going on, on the internet, it is difficult to apply a one-shoe-fits-all rule, for example, if I open a website that sells handmade pandas, would it be reasonable to expect me to collect, pay for and process the taxes according to each state and country that I shipped a panda to? Probably not due to the size of my business, but where do you draw the line to tell a company "You are now big enough to pay your taxes according to customers".
If you're located in a given community (country, state, county, town), pay the damn taxes there, not elsewhere. What's so hard about that?
I think that tax laws, economic rules and regulations are getting to be so complicated that large scale companies are able to find and exploit these rules. What I was saying in my post further above which seems to have been misinterpreted is that I don't think it is bad that there are all sorts of claims that can be made to lessen taxes - after all each one of those breaks was put in to strengthen some group of people/companies. I think it is more of an ethical debate - at which point does lowering taxes become "going too far" compared to "using good accounting" - and I think that debate will have different thresholds for different people. I would personally question setting up a "fake" head office in one state to avoid paying taxes where you really are, others may find that to be perfectly acceptable. I would question setting up a shelf company that employs only me so that I can pay corporate tax rates (which in Australia are considerably lower than the tax rate I am on), but others may find that a perfectly acceptable practise.
I think that this is a debate that can go round in circles ad-infinitum simply because there is no limit to what extent people can go to except that of a moral or ethical one. There is no "check this box if you are an evil corporation to get an extra 5% tax discount".
As for all the "You're just pissed because..." replies: I am not so much pissed that I cannot do it, I am probably more dissapointed in the laws that allow for this to happen. If a state has a lower tax rate to encourage businesses to come to that state - and all they get is a front desk, it's not really the purpose now is it? Sure, they get the benefit of all those millions of dollars of free tax - but the state where all the real work is being done has to pony up for the entire operation without even being able to claim that tax. I am more dissapointed that law makers cannot look at the big picture and try to make the best rules for the country - whether it is the US or Australia - rather than trying to carve out the biggest bit of pie for themselves.
The purpose of a University is to teach, not to make a profit (at least that is the case here in Australia where university fees are still heavily subsidized) while the purpose of a company is to make money.
I certainly expect the university to be paying the taxes it owes to the state, and I would expect that Microsoft does the same.
I think everyone tries to minimize their tax burden. What makes these companies stand out is the vast extent of effort they put into it.
I earn an above average salary and I pay my accountant to do my taxes to ensure that I am able to claim all the deductions that I am entitled to. The difference is that I don't have a shell company set up in a tax haven paying me in some nefarious manner that is done to avoid yet another fee of some sort. These stories wouldn't be stories if MS or Apple simply claimed all that they could on their tax statements, they are stories because of the absurd lengths that they go to. I am absolutely sure that/. and many websites try to claim all that they are entitled to, but I would be exceptionally surprised if the lengths that they went to included offshore tax havens, "Offices" set up in a state to claim a different regional address and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, thanks AC! You just brightened my day back up after reading the first few posts.
Ummm, that depends on who you ask. When Jamie Kellner (TV Exec, at the time was CEO of Turner Broadcasting, looking after a bunch of channels including the Cartoon Network) answered that very question his reply was this: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."
Seriously, you just can't make up quality like that.
Actually, as Kepler is using a transit methodology to find planets, there is nothing conclusive to say that these stars don't have large orbiting bodies. While I do accept that when looking at a large volume of stars, at least some of these should show transits by planets, but given the chances of a transit of a planet at roughly 1 AU is 0.47%, then these 365 superflares should have statistically shown one single transit event. I wouldn't consider that to be conclusive proof by any stretch. I am going to call Occam's razor on this one.
Seals are around 25% fat. A mere 28 grams (that's like a SPOON of it) contains 11% of your recommended daily fat intake.. Feeding them to terrorists might not be such a bad idea. Feed em seal for a month, terrorist dies of a coronary.
If anyone was curious like me for a proper article on these upside-down glasses experiments, here is a link though be warned that it is a PDF.
Well, when comparing the hardship of having to sit through unskipable crap and having commentary tracks, I'd guess the solution is to scan the PP for the commentary tracks...
I disagree. I don't like the crap that Big Media puts the entertainment that I purchase, but I don't agree that they deserve nothing for their trouble. I wish that they would learn. I appreciate the entertainment that they provide me and I will be happy to pay for it. I don't think that their current accounting models are a great indication of how much I would like to pay for the entertainment, but if they were to drop the whole concept of hollywood accounting and if I can teach them to drop the pointless "Hey! Don't pirate shit - and watch these trailers for shit you aren't interested in!" then I just might get what I want from them - the entertainment that I want, and nothing else. if I want to pay for a show, I want to pay for nothing else. The amusing thing that I find, is that it seems that the really early shows to DVD actually GOT that concept - Babylon 5, straight to menu. BSG, straight to menu. Deadwood, straight to menu. All that other shit that spams me, LISTEN!
Thanks! I will look into it this very evening when I get back home from work.
With content, it's reverse. If I download it, I can time and medium shift it, I get no ridiculous warnings and unskipable trailers, I can easily cut scenes out of it, collect a few movies on a media server if I please. All that and more is what I do NOT get when I buy it legally.
How backwards is that?
I sort of agree, with most of what you said, but with the following additions: DVD and BRs do actually come with additional value-add content. Most of them have at least one commentary track (director, actors etc). I quite enjoy these. Most DVDs have deleted scenes or featurettes on them as well.
There are many movies and shows that I have bought, and while all the non-skippable crap at the start REALLY pisses me off (no, really you have little idea how much it does), I transcode it to a nice format and pop it on my mediaserver where we can then watch it from a couple of players connected to the TVs. If I really enjoy it, I will include other audio streams as well. Living in Australia, this is legal.
Like I said, I do agree with your post, but I think you are overlooking many of the value-adding things on a DVD/BluRay.
It doesn't end as such. The Mayan had epochs. Sort of like if our dates got to the year 999, then instead of moving to 1000, they moved to 1 again, but called it the millennium of [something].
The first age was where the gods created the world, but the animals and humans could not speak and so were unable to worship the gods. In the second age, the gods created humans out of mud, then in the third, out of wood. The gods were not pleased with either of these, so they wiped them out and started over - in the fourth age where we are now. This whole 2012 thing is simply the end of the fourth epoch of the Mayan calendar.
I think you mean the Buddhas statues in Afghanistan? I know that this is a pathetic troll, but figure I should nip this in the bud right here:
Most muslims were opposed to the action, even high ranking officials in the Taliban.
In July 1999, Mullah Mohammed Omar issued a decree in favor of the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddha's statue. Because Afghanistan's Buddhist population no longer exists, which removed the possibility of the statues being worshiped, he added: "The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors. The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but protected.
According to UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura, a meeting of ambassadors from the 54 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was conducted. All OIC states – including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, three countries that officially recognised the Taliban government – joined the protest to spare the monuments. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates later condemned the destruction as "savage".
Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf sent Moinuddin Haider to Kabul to try to prevent the destruction, by arguing that it was un-Islamic and unprecedented. According to Taliban minister, Abdul Salam Zaeef, UNESCO sent the Taliban government 36 letters objecting to the proposed destruction. He asserted that the Chinese, Japanese and Sri Lankan delegates were the most strident advocates for preserving the Buddhas.
For DVDs, I find that DVD::RIP (Ubuntu) is excellent assuming you set it up to use the cluster. It works fast - I can rip the VOB files in around 5-8 minutes per movie and the encoding takes 6-9 minutes (although I can be ripping another movie at that stage), and is pretty easy to get most DVDs done. If you do want some more features, then Handbrake is probably the best featured tool out there and it supports .mkvs with h.264 which makes for excellent quality and features. If I am doing shows, I generally switch to my Windows laptop and use DVD-Decrypter and AutoGK combination. Although a little slower, it has a much better queue function between the two of them. AutoGK also has an excellent "Show only Forced Subtitles" function which is fantastic for movies where you do want subtitles, but only for a few scenes, and not the entire time.
While certain discs do have exceptionally troublesome protection on them, AnyDVD seems to work a charm and also greatly increases the rip time as the ripping software no longer has to decrypt on the fly, but treats the data as having no encryption.
While I haven't tinkered with BR discs yet, I have read that BR on Ubuntu is tedious at the moment, I will eventually start the process up.
Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.
That sounds like a good plan to me if the goal is to push paying customers away.
Yes and no. I (and I think many /.'ers are similar to me in this regard) do get annoyed by this sort of thing, yet I am also inclined to support the entertainment that I enjoy. As a result, I do in fact go out and buy the shows that I like to watch to send a (I know it is meager) message to the content creators "Hey, this makes you money. Make more of THIS." but I do come home, transcode it to a nice file without all the rubbish advertising and crap "announcements" that they put on the loading sectors of discs. I was quite amused by Startgate SG1 for example, but towards the latter half of the series, each time I inserted a disc, forcing me to watch (I kid you not) A Fox? Studios advertisment, followed by a trailer for Startgate Contimuum, then a trailer for the Stargate video game, then an advertisement for Stargate Altantis, then an anti-piracy message? Give me a break. If I am buying the damned discs, you have made your money and let me enjoy my content already.
So while I do enjoy feeling good about supporting the entertainment that I enjoy, the taste is often more and more bitter. The only upside is that some content providers seem to get the message and skip anything like that. From a pragmatic point of view, I think that actually makes me enjoy that more as I am no longer associating that show with forced advertising.
This is not the first time someone has been prevented from entering a country.
I think the story here isn't that someone got knocked back from entering the UK, but rather the reasons behind it. TFA doesn't mention that he has a criminal record, it doesn't mention anything about hate speech or promoting violence. The guy teaches martial arts and speaks his mind on it. He doesn't come across as someone who will run down the street attacking everyone in sight, he isn't radical and (apart from knowing a lot of martial arts) doesn't seem to be anyone out of the ordinary.
Having said that, I do sort of agree that this isn't all that newsworthy for /. even though I generally do froth at the mouth at personal freedom abuses - which I do think that this falls into.
If he lied on his resume, he won't be parachuting back to earth.
I am pretty sure that most positions of that level have clauses in them around criminal acts and the like. While it may seem a stretch, lying on your CV may be considered fraud, therefore he got into the job by defrauding the company (whether or not they should have picked it up) and that might be enough to show him the door. Having said that, I dare say that Yahoo will no doubt wait till some of this dust has settled then try to usher in a "quiet" passing of the baton to the next CEO.
What about if the Chinese get our codes and hack our defenses like the Cylons from BSG?
Then in an ironic twist, the political powers that be get a number of things they would dearly love - at the price of innocent lives. They have a "credible" threat to pursue - clearly hacking bombers is a clear act of war, they have a population that is deathly scared and willing to give up all manner of personal freedoms in exchange for perceived safety and they have an attack on their soverign soil which will motivate and infuriate the local population. They then get to enact just about every rule, law and practise that they want - all for the mere cost of innocent lives.
"You can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs..." is a lovely expression. The real challenge here is working out whether the eggs are worth the omlette in the end. I dare say that in global politics, there are folks that think it is, and folks that think it isn't.
The US knows that it is getting a lot of bad press worldwide, that a lot of staunch supporters and backing away and that its economy is in some trouble. Historically, one of the ways it sorts some of these problems out is by going to war (whether genuinly or under pretext) but the latest few in the middle east are quickly draining public support and also the coffers. From a propaganda point of view, nothing would be better than having a ligitimate case to present to the public, and be able to cry foul in the UN against the baddies. It is much easier to sell a country as being the "good guys" if they are the ones being attacked by someone else - pushing a "We are doing this for democracy/good/their benefit" is a song that many US citizens are getting very sick of hearing when they keep seeing body bags coming back and their pensions and savings just aren't worth what they should be.
Cherry-picking sympathetic journals...
Sorry, but this really smacks of the True Scotsman fallacy. Yes, research can be skewed - but if you are using researched funded by the RIAA or MPAA etc, then it is just as likely to be as skewed as you claim these to be, thereby making the comment redundant in itself. How about posting a few links to legitimate research done by neutral parties with no interest either way, instead of simply dismissing these?
Well, that is from 2004, perhaps /. could post it? *snicker*
atmosphere consisting of over 95% carbon dioxide
It might be made up of interesting stuff for plants, but it is exceptionally sparse. At surface level (even at the lowest point) it is a mere 0.1675 psi where earth has a sea level pressure of around 14.69 psi. This leads plants to do some funny things. NASA has been experimenting with plants and low pressures for a while now but it isn't going all that well - the plants think there is a drought when the low pressure basically sucks all the moisture from them - even if they are hydrated very well.
Goodness, that looks like a cheatsheet for that annoying Alchemy game. I think I wasted a whole three hours on that thing.
Cool events happen all the time, but many of these individual events won't happen again for a long time. Like useless first posts on /. Each one is probably a different person posting, but they happen all the time... Do you see what I did there?
In Poland, we call it "Peddling for Pebbles".
Some simple legislation could clear this up. Firstly of course give offshore tax havens some warning to clean up before zeroing the value of their currency and secondly baring states from acting as tax havens. The tax should be paid where the money is earned, not declared.
You can't just zero a currency - as much as the US would probably love to think it can, but it's not that plausible. What any government CAN however do is impose tarrifs (a wonderful word for taxes on another country, or more importantly the people who choose to work in that country).
Using a simple example, a company makes cars, but then "relocates" headquarters to a small island just off the coast but with different tax laws, this reduces their tax bill by 10%. The government steps in and says "Goods from [small island country] now attract a tarrif of 10%. This of course does only cover the goods coming into the one single country, and this isn't a perfect example with the internet, but it is how governments are bypassing the "lets move offshore to save tax".
With the volume of business going on, on the internet, it is difficult to apply a one-shoe-fits-all rule, for example, if I open a website that sells handmade pandas, would it be reasonable to expect me to collect, pay for and process the taxes according to each state and country that I shipped a panda to? Probably not due to the size of my business, but where do you draw the line to tell a company "You are now big enough to pay your taxes according to customers".
If you're located in a given community (country, state, county, town), pay the damn taxes there, not elsewhere. What's so hard about that?
I think that tax laws, economic rules and regulations are getting to be so complicated that large scale companies are able to find and exploit these rules. What I was saying in my post further above which seems to have been misinterpreted is that I don't think it is bad that there are all sorts of claims that can be made to lessen taxes - after all each one of those breaks was put in to strengthen some group of people/companies. I think it is more of an ethical debate - at which point does lowering taxes become "going too far" compared to "using good accounting" - and I think that debate will have different thresholds for different people. I would personally question setting up a "fake" head office in one state to avoid paying taxes where you really are, others may find that to be perfectly acceptable. I would question setting up a shelf company that employs only me so that I can pay corporate tax rates (which in Australia are considerably lower than the tax rate I am on), but others may find that a perfectly acceptable practise.
I think that this is a debate that can go round in circles ad-infinitum simply because there is no limit to what extent people can go to except that of a moral or ethical one. There is no "check this box if you are an evil corporation to get an extra 5% tax discount".
As for all the "You're just pissed because..." replies: I am not so much pissed that I cannot do it, I am probably more dissapointed in the laws that allow for this to happen. If a state has a lower tax rate to encourage businesses to come to that state - and all they get is a front desk, it's not really the purpose now is it? Sure, they get the benefit of all those millions of dollars of free tax - but the state where all the real work is being done has to pony up for the entire operation without even being able to claim that tax. I am more dissapointed that law makers cannot look at the big picture and try to make the best rules for the country - whether it is the US or Australia - rather than trying to carve out the biggest bit of pie for themselves.
The purpose of a University is to teach, not to make a profit (at least that is the case here in Australia where university fees are still heavily subsidized) while the purpose of a company is to make money.
I certainly expect the university to be paying the taxes it owes to the state, and I would expect that Microsoft does the same.
I think everyone tries to minimize their tax burden. What makes these companies stand out is the vast extent of effort they put into it.
I earn an above average salary and I pay my accountant to do my taxes to ensure that I am able to claim all the deductions that I am entitled to. The difference is that I don't have a shell company set up in a tax haven paying me in some nefarious manner that is done to avoid yet another fee of some sort. These stories wouldn't be stories if MS or Apple simply claimed all that they could on their tax statements, they are stories because of the absurd lengths that they go to. I am absolutely sure that /. and many websites try to claim all that they are entitled to, but I would be exceptionally surprised if the lengths that they went to included offshore tax havens, "Offices" set up in a state to claim a different regional address and the like.