I honestly don't think Microsoft are this stupid. Getting into the hardware game will give them absolutely no advantage. If anything, it will isolate them from their strongest allies who will definitely begin to step up a unified Linux agenda if MS were to make such a mistake.
This is not speculation. Maybe you've heard of the Zune HD? The Zune HD is using a new Nvidia Tegra chip and is designed to be a competitor for iPod touch and iPhone. One of the things Microsoft is advertising is "the full internet experience." Just like Apple is going to use iPhone OS and ARM chips for their tablet, Microsoft will probably use Nvidia Tegra, which is mostly a couple ARM cores with some Video and Audio processing cores as their platform for future computing products.
Apple and Microsoft have both realized that people do not need desktop power in a portable computing device. As long as it can do decent web browsing, run javascript apps, listen to music, watch video, and read email, what more do people need to do?
Had Apple won the PC wars of the 80's they'd be a far greater satan than Microsoft ever tried to be.
Bollocks. Apple has a near monopoly on the iPod market, and has not abused it to enter other markets. You haven't seen Apple force iTunes to only run on Macs, have you? And yet, that's exactly what Microsoft does with every single one of their products: force Windows lock-in.
You can hypothesize that they would be more evil than Microsoft, but face facts, I'd rather have a monopoly that "just works" and doesn't abuse other markets than a monopoly that has shitty products and abuses their monopoly to gain other monopolies.
So unless Starcraft has suddenly become a client server game then your bandwidth is unaffected.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. Blizzard said they were moving the new battle.net to a client/server model (similar to WoW) to cut down on cheating, but it also has the side effect of guaranteeing zero piracy and possibly subscription fees. I don't think they'd build all that extra server infrastructure just to provide an "improved customer experience", so what they're really building it for is to protect their game. Blizzard has now officially sold out.
nothing like a good arms race to get juices flowing all around.
You don't know how right you are. Remember those great durable goods numbers that had Wall Street rallying yesterday? Turns out durable goods orders are down, but military weapons orders have picked up the slack. This is typical, the economy sucks, so we need to spend $trillions on defense budgets and start a war with some country to get the economy back on track. I wonder who it will be? Iran? North Korea? Burma?
I've just spoken to American Express Australia and have been told that I have no grounds to dispute this. Apparently, digitally distributed content is considered a service and not a product, so the same protections don't apply.
Moreover, I was told that unless I had - in writing - something that stated that no advertising would be introduced, I can't raise a complaint. Incredulous, I asked the support person if that mean that unless I had written evidence they wouldn't include hard core pornography in my game, I'd have no grounds for complaining about them introducing it. She replied that with services, this was indeed the case.
Unfortunately, this is probably correct. I successfully disputed a lifetime subscription to the game Hellgate: London, by phoning my bank, sending them a printout of the web page advertising the features of the lifetime subscription service and indicating which features were never delivered. If a company advertises a service as containing features and doesn't deliver those features, you can get your money back through a chargeback.
In this case, unless one of the features advertised was "advertisement free content", you probably don't have a case to dispute the charge.
You might try another tactic though: First call Sony and ask for a refund, then when they refuse, dispute the charge based on the fact that the reseller refused to refund your money. Most credit card companies have a clause in their merchant agreement that says the customer has a right to a refund within 90 days, no questions asked. Although they routinely try to violate this for media purchases, if you make a big enough stink about it, they have to give your money back.
AT&T was most likely the cause of the removal of google voice. Apple probably has their hands tied by servicing agreements, so the only way they can get google voice (which would be great for the iphone platform) is through government intervention. I imagine there were some discussions between Apple and Google about how to make this work. Somebody fIling a complaint with the FCC is a good way for Apple to cover its contractual ass and for google to get their software on the iPhone.
Or, it could be that Steve Jobs got really fucking pissed when Google announced Chrome OS for Netbooks, which would directly compete against any future Apple tablet designed to capture the low-end network attached computing market.
Steve Jobs has been known to have a bad temper when things don't go his way. He has also been known to punish severely employees and partners that leak information. I don't think it's too hard to connect the dots between the Chrome OS announcement, Google Voice app denial, and now Eric Schmidt being asked to leave the Apple board.
Most people don't "avoid" Bing (except maybe people like on slashdot, which aren't a consumer majority, by a longshot). People do not use Bing because most people have already used Yahoo! and Google for years, most people won't know the difference that much except maybe "hmm it looks a little bit different".
Most people use Bing without even knowing it because Microsoft browsers "search-jack" and default to Bing. Seriously, how many times have you seen the majority of clueless web users using IE and typing search strings into the default upper-right hand search pane, which defaults to Bing...
This seems like a really bone-headed move to me. I'm writing this post from an iPhone at a Cablevision wifi ap right now. Cablevision has consistently improved their service recently to compete with Fios. I just subscribe to basic cable modem, which is your standard $50 a month. Recently they increased the bandwidth to 20 Meg down, 2 Meg up. I really appreciate having good upstream bandwidth. For $10 more a month, if you really want, they'll bump you up to something like 30/5.
I get free wifi all over the tri-state area and it works with any device. It basically just uses an open AP with an ssl user/pw prompt, so it will work with any device.
I think once the novelty of "hey I'm getting fiber in my house" wears off you realize that you're stuck in a contract with verizon, and meanwhile your neighbors are getting just as much bandwidth over copper...
This combined with the fact that a lot of games don't seem to scale up the user interface very well when using standard definition. Combing SD with a small UI is bad enough, once you reduce the TV size below 27" things get even worse.
What really irks me is that every UI in console games now has to be in HUGE TEXT just so that it will be readable on an SD screen. Why must HD users suffer because people need to be able to play at low resolutions?
To make matters worse, a lot of PC games are now ported from console games, which means even us PC gamers must suffer through HUGE BLOCKY TEXT in our UI, and pages of information, when we could have much more efficient display of information that utilized PC resolutions better.
See Oblivion for a perfect example of this. The PC version was hobbled with a user interface designed for Xbox running on an SD television. I'm sorry, but I game at 1920 x 1080. I don't want an interface designed for a 640 x 480 television.
6) a suggestion that the customer's Eastern European niece was a real nice girl and I should e-mail her, maybe start a relationship,
Turn in your geek card now! You turned down an offer for the hottest sex of your life with an eastern european woman? Most of us geeks merely dream of this happening...
you need the server to run the apps inhouse rather than out of your control.
Some things should be mentioned here for those that aren't familiar with Sharepoint.
I work for a Fortune 15 company and we are required to use Sharepoint, instead of a simple file server, to store all of our Office documents already. Sharepoint is a terribly, terribly flawed "workplace collaboration" software. It's basically a glorified WebDAV server that supports versioning, and also allows people to post little "widgets" like calendars that integrate with Outlook.
Sharepoint is Microsoft's answer to Mediawiki and other real media sharing web services. In fact, for 99% of all companies, Mediawiki running on an internal server would be much better than Sharepoint, and provide much more functionality, without requiring a copy of MS Office to be installed on everyone's client PC. But, corporate america, in their infinite wisdom, only trusts Microsoft products, so we get stuck with Sharepoint.
I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document, and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package, then check it back in to a Microsoft proprietary server. This solution is the most difficult to use, from a usability standpoint, workflow point of view solution I have ever used before. Mediawiki would be a better solution for 99% of these purposes. I like the ability to just click "Edit" and start editing a page. Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document. It's a terrible solution, rooted in an outdated "document centric" methodology.
SharePoint (not 2010, i mean the current version) actually works well with Firefox. I have yet to noticed any different when browsing it with Firefox/IE7.
Actually, Sharepoint works terrible with Firefox. All of the advanced directory and file browsing features are disabled, since Firefox doesn't support the "Internet Explorer is your file browser" functionality that IE does. Sharepoint is basically just a glorified WebDAV server, but trust Microsoft to use proprietary IE only protocols instead of standard WebDAV, which would have worked with any standards compliant browser.
Everyone seems to have forgotten about M4, an extremely handy standard Unix tool when you need a text file with some parts changed on a regular basis. I'm a developer and I used M4 in my projects.
Excuse me, but I'd rather gouge my eyeballs out of their sockets with a rusty spoon than try to read someone else's M4 macros. M4 fails at being readable, unlike other config generating tools like Cfengine, which has code that tells even a non-programmer exactly what it does. Have you ever tried to read sendmail.mc? If you have you'll know what I'm talking about.
Does this mean we won't have it for Diablo III as well? Plz noooooooo.
I can pretty much guarantee LAN play won't be allowed for Diablo III either. They will dress it up as eliminating cheating/hacking/bots, and it does help those things, but in the end it's really about eliminating piracy. They wouldn't spend the money to code Battle.net support and run all of the servers if they didn't think it would increase their profits.
Given that Blizzard has basically dominated the market why do they continue to stray from their roots...
Remember when they were acquired by Vivendi, then Activision acquired Vivendi after that? They are now bought and owned by corporate overlords. Their CEO has blatantly stated that he only wants to publish titles like Guitar Hero and Warcraft that can be endlessly exploited on many platforms with many sequels for maximum profit. Hell, check out their SEC filing, they say it right there:
Activision plans to continue to exploit other revenue sources, including downloadable content and in-game advertising for its console games.
(emphasis mine)
Blizzard once was a really cool, creative company. Now they've become another cash cow with exploitable franchises:
Further, as many of our intellectual property licenses extend for multiple products over multiple years, we also assess the recoverability of capitalized intellectual property license costs based on certain qualitative factors, such as the success of other products and/or entertainment vehicles utilizing the intellectual property, whether there are any future planned theatrical releases or television series based on the intellectual property, and the rights holder's continued promotion and exploitation of the intellectual property.
Actually, it's been falling since the election, and it went negative last week. It's not a steady drop, but the trend is down as people realize that he's not going to deliver on his promises.
How does an approval rating go negative? Dead people don't like him too?
In his interpretation, "unreasonable searches" do not exist. Every search has a reason and the 4th amendment is therefore null and void.
Clarence Thomas is a douche. It always amazes me how a black man, who must have faced a ton of discrimination achieving the position of a supreme court justice, can so cavalierly disregard basic human rights.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
I, too, spent many years working as a developer and IT administrator. While there are certainly some technical problems--security, privacy, and especially finding a sufficiently expressive standardized vocabulary--the primary issue in implementing computer systems in hospitals is cultural and behavioral. Doctors are accustomed to a great deal of autonomy, and many do not care for the structure that systems impose. The VA has been more successful than most organizations because they can impose systems by fiat. Doctors are often subject to intense time pressure and will resist anything that slows them down. In the short term, it is much faster to scribble a prescription on a piece of paper than to navigate the widgets of any order entry system. Many don't care about the long-term problems that this creates. While administrators are more likely to be aware of the long-term benefits, there is generally little they can do when doctors threaten that babies will die if doctors have to change their ways.
You hit the nail right on the head. I work in Healthcare IT as well and I found that the biggest barrier to adoption of new EMR systems is usually the nurses and doctors. To give you an example, one of our largest products is a dictionary of medical codes that is shipped in huge, hardbound volumes. The nurses and doctors love this product, have used it for decades, and they write all kinds of notes in the margins of their books, dog-ear pages, etc. We discussed turning the product into an electronic book, or electronically formatted online resource, and met great resistance. People get accustomed to using the hardbound book to look up everything, and they DO NOT WANT to change.
I think that over the next few decades as doctors and nurses that grew up using the web and electronic media enter the field, this will change, but for now, we're stuck with the doctors and nurses that we have. And there is a pretty good argument to be made for the hardbound book. After all, it will never fail, have to be rebooted, or crash. Your data will never be lost unless there is a fire, and those little notes you scrawled in the margins while working at 3:00 am won't be lost the next day...
He can invest the savings on electricity each year and substantially increase his ROR.
Or, he could just invest the original $36K and make a LOT more. Investing the few thousand dollars he saves every month is like spending $50K on a sports car and investing the money you would have spent on bus fare in a savings account instead...
That makes my barely-out-of warranty PowerBook G4 end of line as far as Apple is concerned. I'm not alone in this--I don't know how many million PPC Macs are still running, but Apple was selling them new three years ago.
Actually, that's not correct. Apple stopped selling all G4 Macs in January 2006, when the transition to Intel was complete across all product lines. They have done everything they promised they would do, including provide compatibility with all new OS releases for 3 years. By the time Snow Leopard is released next January, you will have had 4 years of compatibility with all new OS releases, which is even more than they promised.
What's more, you can continue to run Leopard on your Mac for years to come, and will still receive all security and compatibility updates. Apple is not making your old machine obsolete, even though the processor speed and performance of your old machine quite assuredly is (I had a PowerBook G4 from 2003 and it was getting quite long in the tooth).
In short, you'll get 3-4 years of solid use out of your portable computer anyway. 5-6 years if Leopard works fine for you. Why are you complaining? How many PC laptops from 2006 are still usable and are even capable of running Vista or Windows 7?
The only Jobs presentation I've been to was for the unveiling of the NeXT and it already was like that (adjust for Windows/DOS versions). Since then I've never managed to look at one of those things in whole. It just looks too much like a cultist rally or something.
To be fair, it's not that hard to find a whole lot of things about Vista to bash...
I give you, though, that closed-mindedness is treated like a virtue here. Else our right wing populists wouldn't be so insanely successful. It kinda saddens me to see a party historically backed by large corporations and big money managed to become the spokesperson for the proverbial "little guy"... or rather, that they managed to tell the little guy that they were, and he belived it.
Great, it's good to know that even in Europe they've assimilated the worst parts of American pop culture...[/sarcasm]
It's "hip" to be stupid in every part of our popular culture, from country western (look at Larry the Cable Guy: "Git-r-done...") to urban. Hip-hop artists loudly proclaim "I'm from the streets, bitch!" as if it's cool to be a low-life thug that dropped out of the education system and grew up on the streets.
Welcome to American pop culture, where being stupid is considered "cool" and getting a proper education is looked down upon. I fear for the future of society in general...
We pay either way. The government requires money to meet its many obligations, and it's going to collect that money through taxes of one sort or the other.
Good point. I would argue that corporate taxes are more fair than individual taxes, because I can choose what products or goods and services I want to buy. A progressive individual income tax system as we have now doesn't let me choose how much I want to pay.
Why do so many conservatives argue against corporate taxes, and then argue for a flat sales tax on goods and services? If corporate taxes really are passed along to the consumer directly, as so many conservatives argue, then they truly are the closest thing we can get to a flat sales tax on goods and services.
To play devils advocate for a moment, why not completely eliminate all individual income taxes and just institute corporate taxes? That way we can choose how much we want to pay in taxes based on our actual use and consumption of resources. Of course this would never work in practice, but it's a good mental exercise to think for a moment about what our individual contribution to society as a whole should be.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not speculation. Maybe you've heard of the Zune HD? The Zune HD is using a new Nvidia Tegra chip and is designed to be a competitor for iPod touch and iPhone. One of the things Microsoft is advertising is "the full internet experience." Just like Apple is going to use iPhone OS and ARM chips for their tablet, Microsoft will probably use Nvidia Tegra, which is mostly a couple ARM cores with some Video and Audio processing cores as their platform for future computing products.
Apple and Microsoft have both realized that people do not need desktop power in a portable computing device. As long as it can do decent web browsing, run javascript apps, listen to music, watch video, and read email, what more do people need to do?
Fixed that one for ya...
Bollocks. Apple has a near monopoly on the iPod market, and has not abused it to enter other markets. You haven't seen Apple force iTunes to only run on Macs, have you? And yet, that's exactly what Microsoft does with every single one of their products: force Windows lock-in.
You can hypothesize that they would be more evil than Microsoft, but face facts, I'd rather have a monopoly that "just works" and doesn't abuse other markets than a monopoly that has shitty products and abuses their monopoly to gain other monopolies.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. Blizzard said they were moving the new battle.net to a client/server model (similar to WoW) to cut down on cheating, but it also has the side effect of guaranteeing zero piracy and possibly subscription fees. I don't think they'd build all that extra server infrastructure just to provide an "improved customer experience", so what they're really building it for is to protect their game. Blizzard has now officially sold out.
You don't know how right you are. Remember those great durable goods numbers that had Wall Street rallying yesterday? Turns out durable goods orders are down, but military weapons orders have picked up the slack. This is typical, the economy sucks, so we need to spend $trillions on defense budgets and start a war with some country to get the economy back on track. I wonder who it will be? Iran? North Korea? Burma?
Unfortunately, this is probably correct. I successfully disputed a lifetime subscription to the game Hellgate: London, by phoning my bank, sending them a printout of the web page advertising the features of the lifetime subscription service and indicating which features were never delivered. If a company advertises a service as containing features and doesn't deliver those features, you can get your money back through a chargeback.
In this case, unless one of the features advertised was "advertisement free content", you probably don't have a case to dispute the charge.
You might try another tactic though: First call Sony and ask for a refund, then when they refuse, dispute the charge based on the fact that the reseller refused to refund your money. Most credit card companies have a clause in their merchant agreement that says the customer has a right to a refund within 90 days, no questions asked. Although they routinely try to violate this for media purchases, if you make a big enough stink about it, they have to give your money back.
Or, it could be that Steve Jobs got really fucking pissed when Google announced Chrome OS for Netbooks, which would directly compete against any future Apple tablet designed to capture the low-end network attached computing market.
Steve Jobs has been known to have a bad temper when things don't go his way. He has also been known to punish severely employees and partners that leak information. I don't think it's too hard to connect the dots between the Chrome OS announcement, Google Voice app denial, and now Eric Schmidt being asked to leave the Apple board.
Most people use Bing without even knowing it because Microsoft browsers "search-jack" and default to Bing. Seriously, how many times have you seen the majority of clueless web users using IE and typing search strings into the default upper-right hand search pane, which defaults to Bing...
This seems like a really bone-headed move to me. I'm writing this post from an iPhone at a Cablevision wifi ap right now. Cablevision has consistently improved their service recently to compete with Fios. I just subscribe to basic cable modem, which is your standard $50 a month. Recently they increased the bandwidth to 20 Meg down, 2 Meg up. I really appreciate having good upstream bandwidth. For $10 more a month, if you really want, they'll bump you up to something like 30/5.
I get free wifi all over the tri-state area and it works with any device. It basically just uses an open AP with an ssl user/pw prompt, so it will work with any device.
I think once the novelty of "hey I'm getting fiber in my house" wears off you realize that you're stuck in a contract with verizon, and meanwhile your neighbors are getting just as much bandwidth over copper...
What really irks me is that every UI in console games now has to be in HUGE TEXT just so that it will be readable on an SD screen. Why must HD users suffer because people need to be able to play at low resolutions?
To make matters worse, a lot of PC games are now ported from console games, which means even us PC gamers must suffer through HUGE BLOCKY TEXT in our UI, and pages of information, when we could have much more efficient display of information that utilized PC resolutions better.
See Oblivion for a perfect example of this. The PC version was hobbled with a user interface designed for Xbox running on an SD television. I'm sorry, but I game at 1920 x 1080. I don't want an interface designed for a 640 x 480 television.
Turn in your geek card now! You turned down an offer for the hottest sex of your life with an eastern european woman? Most of us geeks merely dream of this happening...
Some things should be mentioned here for those that aren't familiar with Sharepoint.
I work for a Fortune 15 company and we are required to use Sharepoint, instead of a simple file server, to store all of our Office documents already. Sharepoint is a terribly, terribly flawed "workplace collaboration" software. It's basically a glorified WebDAV server that supports versioning, and also allows people to post little "widgets" like calendars that integrate with Outlook.
Sharepoint is Microsoft's answer to Mediawiki and other real media sharing web services. In fact, for 99% of all companies, Mediawiki running on an internal server would be much better than Sharepoint, and provide much more functionality, without requiring a copy of MS Office to be installed on everyone's client PC. But, corporate america, in their infinite wisdom, only trusts Microsoft products, so we get stuck with Sharepoint.
I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document, and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package, then check it back in to a Microsoft proprietary server. This solution is the most difficult to use, from a usability standpoint, workflow point of view solution I have ever used before. Mediawiki would be a better solution for 99% of these purposes. I like the ability to just click "Edit" and start editing a page. Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document. It's a terrible solution, rooted in an outdated "document centric" methodology.
Actually, Sharepoint works terrible with Firefox. All of the advanced directory and file browsing features are disabled, since Firefox doesn't support the "Internet Explorer is your file browser" functionality that IE does. Sharepoint is basically just a glorified WebDAV server, but trust Microsoft to use proprietary IE only protocols instead of standard WebDAV, which would have worked with any standards compliant browser.
Excuse me, but I'd rather gouge my eyeballs out of their sockets with a rusty spoon than try to read someone else's M4 macros. M4 fails at being readable, unlike other config generating tools like Cfengine, which has code that tells even a non-programmer exactly what it does. Have you ever tried to read sendmail.mc? If you have you'll know what I'm talking about.
I can pretty much guarantee LAN play won't be allowed for Diablo III either. They will dress it up as eliminating cheating/hacking/bots, and it does help those things, but in the end it's really about eliminating piracy. They wouldn't spend the money to code Battle.net support and run all of the servers if they didn't think it would increase their profits.
Remember when they were acquired by Vivendi, then Activision acquired Vivendi after that? They are now bought and owned by corporate overlords. Their CEO has blatantly stated that he only wants to publish titles like Guitar Hero and Warcraft that can be endlessly exploited on many platforms with many sequels for maximum profit.
Hell, check out their SEC filing, they say it right there:
(emphasis mine)
Blizzard once was a really cool, creative company. Now they've become another cash cow with exploitable franchises:
Kinda makes you sick to your stomach doesn't it?
How does an approval rating go negative? Dead people don't like him too?
You forgot to subtract initial $36,000 investment from option B. That makes it much less worthwhile than just investing the money to begin with.
So, he still gets a lot more by investing his money rather than buying a Solar power system.
Clarence Thomas is a douche. It always amazes me how a black man, who must have faced a ton of discrimination achieving the position of a supreme court justice, can so cavalierly disregard basic human rights.
You hit the nail right on the head. I work in Healthcare IT as well and I found that the biggest barrier to adoption of new EMR systems is usually the nurses and doctors. To give you an example, one of our largest products is a dictionary of medical codes that is shipped in huge, hardbound volumes. The nurses and doctors love this product, have used it for decades, and they write all kinds of notes in the margins of their books, dog-ear pages, etc. We discussed turning the product into an electronic book, or electronically formatted online resource, and met great resistance. People get accustomed to using the hardbound book to look up everything, and they DO NOT WANT to change.
I think that over the next few decades as doctors and nurses that grew up using the web and electronic media enter the field, this will change, but for now, we're stuck with the doctors and nurses that we have. And there is a pretty good argument to be made for the hardbound book. After all, it will never fail, have to be rebooted, or crash. Your data will never be lost unless there is a fire, and those little notes you scrawled in the margins while working at 3:00 am won't be lost the next day...
Or, he could just invest the original $36K and make a LOT more. Investing the few thousand dollars he saves every month is like spending $50K on a sports car and investing the money you would have spent on bus fare in a savings account instead...
Actually, that's not correct. Apple stopped selling all G4 Macs in January 2006, when the transition to Intel was complete across all product lines. They have done everything they promised they would do, including provide compatibility with all new OS releases for 3 years. By the time Snow Leopard is released next January, you will have had 4 years of compatibility with all new OS releases, which is even more than they promised.
What's more, you can continue to run Leopard on your Mac for years to come, and will still receive all security and compatibility updates. Apple is not making your old machine obsolete, even though the processor speed and performance of your old machine quite assuredly is (I had a PowerBook G4 from 2003 and it was getting quite long in the tooth).
In short, you'll get 3-4 years of solid use out of your portable computer anyway. 5-6 years if Leopard works fine for you. Why are you complaining? How many PC laptops from 2006 are still usable and are even capable of running Vista or Windows 7?
To be fair, it's not that hard to find a whole lot of things about Vista to bash...
Great, it's good to know that even in Europe they've assimilated the worst parts of American pop culture...[/sarcasm]
It's "hip" to be stupid in every part of our popular culture, from country western (look at Larry the Cable Guy: "Git-r-done...") to urban. Hip-hop artists loudly proclaim "I'm from the streets, bitch!" as if it's cool to be a low-life thug that dropped out of the education system and grew up on the streets.
Welcome to American pop culture, where being stupid is considered "cool" and getting a proper education is looked down upon. I fear for the future of society in general...
Good point. I would argue that corporate taxes are more fair than individual taxes, because I can choose what products or goods and services I want to buy. A progressive individual income tax system as we have now doesn't let me choose how much I want to pay.
Why do so many conservatives argue against corporate taxes, and then argue for a flat sales tax on goods and services? If corporate taxes really are passed along to the consumer directly, as so many conservatives argue, then they truly are the closest thing we can get to a flat sales tax on goods and services.
To play devils advocate for a moment, why not completely eliminate all individual income taxes and just institute corporate taxes? That way we can choose how much we want to pay in taxes based on our actual use and consumption of resources. Of course this would never work in practice, but it's a good mental exercise to think for a moment about what our individual contribution to society as a whole should be.