Bezos is, shockingly enough, just protective of his ~5% advantage over the B&Ms...
Although that ~5% may be an advantage, it pales compared to the price differences. For example, a 6' HDMI cable:
$2.99 with $5.14 shipping or free shipping on order totals of $25 or more
vs.
$12.99 plus $5.99 shipping regardless of order total
So, that's at least a 60% discount over the B&M's Internet site if you want the item shipped to your home, so the ~5-10% sales tax break is nice, but not really needed to crush the B&M.
They get sales because people say, hey I can save 10 bucks on this just from lack of sales taxes alone!
No, Amazon gets sales because their prices are lower.
Just today, my wife bought something for our dogs from Amazon that she had been ordering from a different place on the Internet. Amazon wanted $2/unit less, and this is a consumable that we go through about 5/month. Both sites have no sales tax in our state and free shipping for the order size we would buy.
Actually, the actual tax rates are more complicated in that everyone pays an additonal 7% on income up to $106,800 (FICA). This means the "x%" column for singles should read more like "17%, 22%, 32%, 35%, 28%, 33%, 35%", with the middle "35%, 28%" being a split of the 4th row at $106,800. You'd end up with the following overall tax rate for the top of each bracket: 17%, 21%, 27%, 29%, 29%, 31%, 35% (assuming infinity for the "top" of this last one, as that's what it would approach).
So, what it means is that somebody earning as much money as you can imagine pays 35%, while those who earn around $100K pay 28%, which is only 7% less.
Their canceling of affiliate programs in states where the rule is enforced would indicate that they acknowledge the underlying legitimacy of the rule,
No, they cancelled the affiliate programs because that was the only straw those states could grasp at to claim a "presence". They did this for two reasons:
it was much cheaper than paying lawyers
the residents of the state who had affiliate accounts will hopefully fight Amazon's battle with the state government.
What the heck sort of media streamer are you using that can decode 1080p30, but not h.254?
An old one.
Seriously, HD video has been around for a long time, but AVC and other modern codecs are relatively recent. Any media streamer over 3 years old would have been designed 4 years ago, and at that point in time hardware H.264 was expensive, while hardware XVID/etc. was relatively cheap. But, HD broadcastin the US would have been 5 years old, so supporting higher resolutions wouldn't have been a big deal.
I can't imagine 1080p30 encoded as 6 mbps MPEG-4 ASP looking anything other than a blocky mess.
I haven't found any 1080p30 Blu-Ray encodings, although there are a few 29.970fps 1080i with pulldown. eac3to will convert these into 23.976fps progressive, just like the majority of Blu-Rays. I suppose that there are some things like the nature HD on Blu-Ray that are 30fps progressive. Anyway, you'd be surprised what a two-pass encoding can do for MPEG-4 ASP. Many static scenes can get by with as little as 500kbps, which allows a large bit pool for tough-to-encode scenes, while still keeping the average bitrate low. It would be nice if XVID had the equivalent of CRF, but I suspect that x264 is one of the few implementations of "constant quality" for H.264. The encodes for most Blu-Ray discs look to be one-pass average bitrate, based on the relatively small differences between the min and max bitrates, as well as the small differences from second to second.
The top 5% of earners (which equates to an average income of $137,056) pay a whopping 57.1% of all federal income taxes. Think of that next time you come across the "rich don't pay their fair share" folks preaching to the sheeple.
There are many places in the country (including the county in which I live) that a total income of $137K for a family is nowhere near "rich". They aren't poor, but they don't have a lot of discretionary income, either.
This is the #1 problem with the tax code...it hasn't taken in to account that what was "rich" 20 years ago is just "middle class" today, and it does mean that the truly rich do not "pay their fair share". It really is a lot easier for someone making $1M/year to afford a 50% tax rate than for someone making $137K to afford a 35% tax rate. The real problem is that although the 35% rate is currently in place for $137K income (if you include the assumed 7% FICA because that person earns wages), while the $1M/year will pay less than 35% (because they likely don't pay income tax, but rather the much less capital gains tax) or would pay around the same 35% even if all their income was wages (because of the cap on FICA, which makes the progressive income tax not really increase the rate between about $200-$500K income).
So, it really isn't fair that the $137K earner gets around $90K to pay for about $60K/year in "keep the family alive" bills, while the $1M earner gets $650K to pay for that same $60K. In addition, if the $137K earner puts most of the leftover into retirement investment, he ends up with about $2M after 30 years (at 5% APY), while the $1M earner can "live it up" by putting only $200K/year into retirement (leaving nearly $400K for discretionary spending) and end up with $14M for their "golden years".
When I bought my house, I only took the mortgage because they promised to keep the paper at the bank and not sell it on the secondary market.
Why does it matter who you write the check to, if the terms stay the same (which they must for a mortgage)?
When I paid the house off 8 years later, they sent me a bottle of champagne and a handwritten note.
Unless you had problems with paying your loan and the local bank was more willing to work with you than some "large" company, you likely paid hundreds of dollars for that bottle of champagne. Being able to sell your loan if necessary will often enable a lender to give you a better rate, and even 0.25% less would amount to a lot of money.
These are all cases where regulation is in some way keeping the company from being "large". Once the company gains the extra market share, it will then push for more regulation to help stay at the top.
Essentially, only "small" companies favor deregulation (where "small" means "not the largest in the specific business area in which they support deregulation").
Some things are just quicker and easier when done from the command line - provided that you happen to know the commands, of course.
You know that Windows has a command line, too? I use a command line in Windows every day, for exactly the reasons you outline. And, like most Unix installs, you also have a fairly wide choice of "shells" (although only a couple are installed by default, and many are not written by Microsoft), including zsh, if you desire.
But something has changed, and now we are told that the pictures are in fact worth much less than the cost of the materials. They are, after all, just information, and according to piracy advocates, the cost of producing the information is limited to the cost of copying it.
An original Van Gogh painting is scarce, and thus would have a price much more than the price of the materials. A copy of a Van Gogh painting (either as another painting, or a photograph) is not nearly as scarce, so is would have a much lower price...maybe more than the cost of the materials, but maybe not. Meanwhile, an image file of a Van Gogh painting has infinite supply and can be reproduced for fractions of a penny, so has a price essentially of zero.
As to "worth", that is a relative term. An image file of a Van Gogh painting might be "worth a lot" to someone studying art, since the original might not be easily accessible.
Well, in My country the constitution states you are grated a limited monopoly, the limited part being time.
What is this "time limit" you speak of? Between copyright, trademark, and patents, it's fairly easy to keep the monopoly on a particular creative work for nearly 200 years.
The reason being, MOST founders reasoned people who create things might like to get paid for their ideas.
Yet another person who has no clue about why there are supposed to be limits on the length of copyright, patents, etc. It's not so that the creators can make money, it's so that they must release the creative content to the public within a reasonable time. In the early 1700's, England had essentially infinite duration copyright, and the men who wrote the US Constitution did not like that. What happens during the limited time of monopoly was really no concern of theirs...they didn't care if the people got paid for their ideas, as long as the idea was eventually released to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Or worse, how many people still encode with xvid for playback on anything other than a 10-year-old handheld player.
My home media streamer doesn't understand anything H.264, so I use plain MPEG-4 (usually XVID). My encodes give me an SSIM of about 99.6% at reasonable bitrates (around 4GB for most movies), so I don't think I'm losing much from my original Blu-Ray source.
I can't count how many posts I've seen on Usenet discussing where to find shiny software that essentially does nothing but "cat file.avi.* > file.avi".
Since what you propose would generate an AVI file with an invalid index, I can see why people would want something that worked correctly.
Airing 10 episodes of SGU then killing it for 6 months then bringing it back and expecting people to care? Yeah, you can't do that.
Well, you could if you planned it correctly.
Most of the TNT original shows have "seasons" of 13-16 episodes, and so that time slot gets two usually related genre shows per year, along with reruns.
Many of these shows are doing very well precisely because of the limited number of episodes (only the best scripts get produced), and the gaps between seasons don't seem to be a problem.
The expense is the current actors all getting SAG rate scale pay. fire the whole crew and replace with non SAG actors and non union writers and crew.
Do you seriously think that less than $3,000/episode per "principle performer" is what makes a TV episode cost a lot? That's the top end of "scale" for a TV show with first run on a basic cable channel.
There are many sub genres within science fiction: alternate reality, alternate history, cyber-punk, bio-punk, etc...just to name a few.
Some shows that maybe would be considered "fantasy" or "superhero" would also fit on a "sci-fi" channel far better than wrestling.
As an example, despite the "legions of fans", shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Supernatural", and "Smallville" all had/have viewing audiences that were tiny by any network standards, but would be fine for a cable channel. In addition, these shows ran at least 6 seasons, so there would be plenty of episodes as reruns. None of these shows are "great sci-fi", but all are decent shows, and SyFy could get into producing their own shows and stick with them long enough to get them to that point, which also would give them DVD/Netflix/etc. revenue.
The way BitTorrent works, as soon as you finish downloading the first block you are sharing it out to someone else.
Many TV shows that I download (which I feel no guilt about, as these are shows that for some reason my recording was screwed up) have me sharing back nothing until long after I have the entire show, even though I haven't blocked uploads in any way.
This happens mostly on shows that are popular, but I don't join the torrent until there are many thousands of seeders, and all the peers are already downloading as fast as they can, so they don't need me.
Any major rental company has found that it has to make contracts with the studios and pay them a percentage of rental income. This is because they could not get the number of copies they needed otherwise. It's not like they can go down to Best Buy and purchase 37,000 copies of The Green Hornet.
You obviously aren't familiar with the "forensic" version of BitTorrent clients which do not seed but only leech.
But, unless they leech the entire movie off from every IP in the lawsuit, how can they prove distribution (which is what is illegal, not the downloading).
Even if they only need a few pieces from a single IP (which shouldn't be enough, as that might be "fair use"), then they still would need proof that each one of those IPs in the lawsuit uploaded to their client, since it's possible that the BitTorrent client at the IP in question was also a "leech-only" version. That would be rude, but it should be a valid defense against distribution, which is the only part of P2P sharing of copyrighted content that violates US copyright law.
Okay, but what happens when the FiOS and DSL outfits do the same thing?
Although Verizon can technically oversell FiOS, it won't happen in reality.
The throughput available to the neighborhood concentrators is such that Verizon would have to have 100% of the homes in the neighborhood subscribe to at least 75Mbps download speeds. At 50% uptake it's impossible for Verizon to oversell FiOS download speeds (with currently available packages).
In addition, Verizon does not offer a package with a fast enough upload speed to oversell uploads even with 100% uptake. In the future, there might be some contention on FiOS, but it wouldn't be until you hit speeds of faster than 50Mbps, which is still better than almost any other provider can guarantee.
But, really, I think if you leave something with acid in it to be "discovered" by these guys you will have likely entered into territory you might live to regret.
Although the name contains "acid", butyric acid isn't a dangerous corrosive acid. It just smells really bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Bezos is, shockingly enough, just protective of his ~5% advantage over the B&Ms...
Although that ~5% may be an advantage, it pales compared to the price differences. For example, a 6' HDMI cable:
$2.99 with $5.14 shipping or free shipping on order totals of $25 or more
vs.
$12.99 plus $5.99 shipping regardless of order total
So, that's at least a 60% discount over the B&M's Internet site if you want the item shipped to your home, so the ~5-10% sales tax break is nice, but not really needed to crush the B&M.
They get sales because people say, hey I can save 10 bucks on this just from lack of sales taxes alone!
No, Amazon gets sales because their prices are lower.
Just today, my wife bought something for our dogs from Amazon that she had been ordering from a different place on the Internet. Amazon wanted $2/unit less, and this is a consumable that we go through about 5/month. Both sites have no sales tax in our state and free shipping for the order size we would buy.
http://www.fairmark.com/reference/2010reference.htm Consult the table. Its %x over $y. People on the top end are paying %10 more than in that bracket.
Actually, the actual tax rates are more complicated in that everyone pays an additonal 7% on income up to $106,800 (FICA). This means the "x%" column for singles should read more like "17%, 22%, 32%, 35%, 28%, 33%, 35%", with the middle "35%, 28%" being a split of the 4th row at $106,800. You'd end up with the following overall tax rate for the top of each bracket: 17%, 21%, 27%, 29%, 29%, 31%, 35% (assuming infinity for the "top" of this last one, as that's what it would approach).
So, what it means is that somebody earning as much money as you can imagine pays 35%, while those who earn around $100K pay 28%, which is only 7% less.
Their canceling of affiliate programs in states where the rule is enforced would indicate that they acknowledge the underlying legitimacy of the rule,
No, they cancelled the affiliate programs because that was the only straw those states could grasp at to claim a "presence". They did this for two reasons:
What the heck sort of media streamer are you using that can decode 1080p30, but not h.254?
An old one.
Seriously, HD video has been around for a long time, but AVC and other modern codecs are relatively recent. Any media streamer over 3 years old would have been designed 4 years ago, and at that point in time hardware H.264 was expensive, while hardware XVID/etc. was relatively cheap. But, HD broadcastin the US would have been 5 years old, so supporting higher resolutions wouldn't have been a big deal.
I can't imagine 1080p30 encoded as 6 mbps MPEG-4 ASP looking anything other than a blocky mess.
I haven't found any 1080p30 Blu-Ray encodings, although there are a few 29.970fps 1080i with pulldown. eac3to will convert these into 23.976fps progressive, just like the majority of Blu-Rays. I suppose that there are some things like the nature HD on Blu-Ray that are 30fps progressive. Anyway, you'd be surprised what a two-pass encoding can do for MPEG-4 ASP. Many static scenes can get by with as little as 500kbps, which allows a large bit pool for tough-to-encode scenes, while still keeping the average bitrate low. It would be nice if XVID had the equivalent of CRF, but I suspect that x264 is one of the few implementations of "constant quality" for H.264. The encodes for most Blu-Ray discs look to be one-pass average bitrate, based on the relatively small differences between the min and max bitrates, as well as the small differences from second to second.
The top 5% of earners (which equates to an average income of $137,056) pay a whopping 57.1% of all federal income taxes. Think of that next time you come across the "rich don't pay their fair share" folks preaching to the sheeple.
There are many places in the country (including the county in which I live) that a total income of $137K for a family is nowhere near "rich". They aren't poor, but they don't have a lot of discretionary income, either.
This is the #1 problem with the tax code...it hasn't taken in to account that what was "rich" 20 years ago is just "middle class" today, and it does mean that the truly rich do not "pay their fair share". It really is a lot easier for someone making $1M/year to afford a 50% tax rate than for someone making $137K to afford a 35% tax rate. The real problem is that although the 35% rate is currently in place for $137K income (if you include the assumed 7% FICA because that person earns wages), while the $1M/year will pay less than 35% (because they likely don't pay income tax, but rather the much less capital gains tax) or would pay around the same 35% even if all their income was wages (because of the cap on FICA, which makes the progressive income tax not really increase the rate between about $200-$500K income).
So, it really isn't fair that the $137K earner gets around $90K to pay for about $60K/year in "keep the family alive" bills, while the $1M earner gets $650K to pay for that same $60K. In addition, if the $137K earner puts most of the leftover into retirement investment, he ends up with about $2M after 30 years (at 5% APY), while the $1M earner can "live it up" by putting only $200K/year into retirement (leaving nearly $400K for discretionary spending) and end up with $14M for their "golden years".
When I bought my house, I only took the mortgage because they promised to keep the paper at the bank and not sell it on the secondary market.
Why does it matter who you write the check to, if the terms stay the same (which they must for a mortgage)?
When I paid the house off 8 years later, they sent me a bottle of champagne and a handwritten note.
Unless you had problems with paying your loan and the local bank was more willing to work with you than some "large" company, you likely paid hundreds of dollars for that bottle of champagne. Being able to sell your loan if necessary will often enable a lender to give you a better rate, and even 0.25% less would amount to a lot of money.
It's trivially easy to find other examples.
These are all cases where regulation is in some way keeping the company from being "large". Once the company gains the extra market share, it will then push for more regulation to help stay at the top.
Essentially, only "small" companies favor deregulation (where "small" means "not the largest in the specific business area in which they support deregulation").
Some things are just quicker and easier when done from the command line - provided that you happen to know the commands, of course.
You know that Windows has a command line, too? I use a command line in Windows every day, for exactly the reasons you outline. And, like most Unix installs, you also have a fairly wide choice of "shells" (although only a couple are installed by default, and many are not written by Microsoft), including zsh, if you desire.
But something has changed, and now we are told that the pictures are in fact worth much less than the cost of the materials. They are, after all, just information, and according to piracy advocates, the cost of producing the information is limited to the cost of copying it.
An original Van Gogh painting is scarce, and thus would have a price much more than the price of the materials. A copy of a Van Gogh painting (either as another painting, or a photograph) is not nearly as scarce, so is would have a much lower price...maybe more than the cost of the materials, but maybe not. Meanwhile, an image file of a Van Gogh painting has infinite supply and can be reproduced for fractions of a penny, so has a price essentially of zero.
As to "worth", that is a relative term. An image file of a Van Gogh painting might be "worth a lot" to someone studying art, since the original might not be easily accessible.
Well, in My country the constitution states you are grated a limited monopoly, the limited part being time.
What is this "time limit" you speak of? Between copyright, trademark, and patents, it's fairly easy to keep the monopoly on a particular creative work for nearly 200 years.
The reason being, MOST founders reasoned people who create things might like to get paid for their ideas.
Yet another person who has no clue about why there are supposed to be limits on the length of copyright, patents, etc. It's not so that the creators can make money, it's so that they must release the creative content to the public within a reasonable time. In the early 1700's, England had essentially infinite duration copyright, and the men who wrote the US Constitution did not like that. What happens during the limited time of monopoly was really no concern of theirs...they didn't care if the people got paid for their ideas, as long as the idea was eventually released to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
So the laser simply asks the cesium what time it is.
...millions of times per second. Sort of like the world's most annoying child:
"What time is it? Are we there yet? What time is it?"
the gas man has keys to most of the houses in her neighborhood.
I call BS. Unless she or her family gave him a key, how did he get it?
You missed this part, right:
She recently moved house
If it's a rental, I can see keeping the same keys, but for a purchase, the first thing you do is change all the locks.
Note that warrants do not require the same burden of proof as conviction at trial, warrants only need "reasonable" cause.
But any judge with half a brain should require more than just "reasonable cause" to approve a no-knock warrant.
OK, so I see the fallacy in my own statement...sorry to take up your time.
Or worse, how many people still encode with xvid for playback on anything other than a 10-year-old handheld player.
My home media streamer doesn't understand anything H.264, so I use plain MPEG-4 (usually XVID). My encodes give me an SSIM of about 99.6% at reasonable bitrates (around 4GB for most movies), so I don't think I'm losing much from my original Blu-Ray source.
I can't count how many posts I've seen on Usenet discussing where to find shiny software that essentially does nothing but "cat file.avi.* > file.avi".
Since what you propose would generate an AVI file with an invalid index, I can see why people would want something that worked correctly.
Airing 10 episodes of SGU then killing it for 6 months then bringing it back and expecting people to care? Yeah, you can't do that.
Well, you could if you planned it correctly.
Most of the TNT original shows have "seasons" of 13-16 episodes, and so that time slot gets two usually related genre shows per year, along with reruns.
Many of these shows are doing very well precisely because of the limited number of episodes (only the best scripts get produced), and the gaps between seasons don't seem to be a problem.
The expense is the current actors all getting SAG rate scale pay. fire the whole crew and replace with non SAG actors and non union writers and crew.
Do you seriously think that less than $3,000/episode per "principle performer" is what makes a TV episode cost a lot? That's the top end of "scale" for a TV show with first run on a basic cable channel.
There are many sub genres within science fiction: alternate reality, alternate history, cyber-punk, bio-punk, etc...just to name a few.
Some shows that maybe would be considered "fantasy" or "superhero" would also fit on a "sci-fi" channel far better than wrestling.
As an example, despite the "legions of fans", shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Supernatural", and "Smallville" all had/have viewing audiences that were tiny by any network standards, but would be fine for a cable channel. In addition, these shows ran at least 6 seasons, so there would be plenty of episodes as reruns. None of these shows are "great sci-fi", but all are decent shows, and SyFy could get into producing their own shows and stick with them long enough to get them to that point, which also would give them DVD/Netflix/etc. revenue.
The way BitTorrent works, as soon as you finish downloading the first block you are sharing it out to someone else.
Many TV shows that I download (which I feel no guilt about, as these are shows that for some reason my recording was screwed up) have me sharing back nothing until long after I have the entire show, even though I haven't blocked uploads in any way.
This happens mostly on shows that are popular, but I don't join the torrent until there are many thousands of seeders, and all the peers are already downloading as fast as they can, so they don't need me.
But....
They aren't paid per rental.
Yes, they are.
Any major rental company has found that it has to make contracts with the studios and pay them a percentage of rental income. This is because they could not get the number of copies they needed otherwise. It's not like they can go down to Best Buy and purchase 37,000 copies of The Green Hornet.
You obviously aren't familiar with the "forensic" version of BitTorrent clients which do not seed but only leech.
But, unless they leech the entire movie off from every IP in the lawsuit, how can they prove distribution (which is what is illegal, not the downloading).
Even if they only need a few pieces from a single IP (which shouldn't be enough, as that might be "fair use"), then they still would need proof that each one of those IPs in the lawsuit uploaded to their client, since it's possible that the BitTorrent client at the IP in question was also a "leech-only" version. That would be rude, but it should be a valid defense against distribution, which is the only part of P2P sharing of copyrighted content that violates US copyright law.
Okay, but what happens when the FiOS and DSL outfits do the same thing?
Although Verizon can technically oversell FiOS, it won't happen in reality.
The throughput available to the neighborhood concentrators is such that Verizon would have to have 100% of the homes in the neighborhood subscribe to at least 75Mbps download speeds. At 50% uptake it's impossible for Verizon to oversell FiOS download speeds (with currently available packages).
In addition, Verizon does not offer a package with a fast enough upload speed to oversell uploads even with 100% uptake. In the future, there might be some contention on FiOS, but it wouldn't be until you hit speeds of faster than 50Mbps, which is still better than almost any other provider can guarantee.
One page print version
But, really, I think if you leave something with acid in it to be "discovered" by these guys you will have likely entered into territory you might live to regret.
Although the name contains "acid", butyric acid isn't a dangerous corrosive acid. It just smells really bad.