And (no offense) don't send your kids to school there unless you shop around carefully for a town with a wealthy tax base and can afford the property taxes there, or can afford a private school.
I lived in New Hampshire for about a decade. Lovely state, great job market, wonderful tax system (as long as you're healthy, young, and not a parent, and I met all three qualifications at the time).
But the town I lived in (north of Concord) had a high school that was struggling to regain accreditation (in other words, when kids graduated from that high school, they had to go for a GED in order to have their graduation mean anything). I served on their volunteer IT Committee for a while, and there was absolutely no money for anything.
A subsidiary is not sufficient arms-length for Nexus avoidance. Trust me, I worked for a company that tried that. It did not go well. Thankfully our own lawyers stopped us before the company got too batshit crazy trying it, because it would have hurt. Real bad.
The law may have changed in the intervening decade. But I very much doubt it.
So, wait, I can break the law and not get penalized as long as I pull out of the state the instant I get caught?
Look, the CT case sounds like a raw deal, but I've also worked with a few people who tried to subcontract to CT and ended up not getting paid (the tax-collection department he worked for in CT cancelled all payments to out-of-state contractors that year to balance the budget, just washed the liability off the books and told them to get the fuck out), so I've come to the conclusion that living or doing business in CT is criminally insane anyway.
A DC is enough of a presence to subject them to state law. I'm not saying it's right, but it's how it works.
The DC is subcontracted, but it looks like they didn't really honestly subcontract it, they tried to invent a new division that only distributed product. I don't know the legal term for it, but the technical term is "shenanigans".
I'm still hoping some major shipper will decide that Brunswick Landing (soon-to-be-former BNAS) would be an awesome distribution point. Lots of cheap land, plenty of local labor, relatively easy highway access, low population, and two frakking HUGE runways that aren't going to see a whole lot of use other than General Aviation.
PS I think your Dad was my highschool english teacher.
Nope, but I've heard that one a few times before. I know of a highschool English teacher with the same last name as me, but we're not related.:)
If they have a presence, that would be $4.5 Billion in sales to Texans. Whether the products were shipped from Texas or not is irrelevant. If you have a presence in the state, you need to collect and remit sales tax for ALL sales to residents of that state, regardless of where you shipped it from.
Agreed that the number still seems pretty high, though.
Actually, if Amazon truly contracted Texas-based shipping to a real third party then it might be true that NO ONE owes Texas that money. Amazon (outside Texas) sold the goods, and another company (also outside Texas) shipped the goods to the customer. As long as that Texas distribution center is not owned by or affiliated with Amazon in any way, and never ships any product to any customers in Texas, Amazon might be OK. No single sale to a Texas customer has been fulfilled from anyone affiliated with Amazon who has a presence in Texas.
The company inside Texas is not the seller, so they don't have to collect taxes. Every company I've worked for has done this for some subset of their products - it's usually called a "Direct Ship" arrangement.
However, such "arm's-length" agreements tend to fall apart quickly unless you are having the actual manufacturer of the goods ship for you, or you get competitive bids and can prove that you truly are doing business with a third party distributor. If Amazon happens to be the only customer for that distribution center, and the company that runs the DC happens to be closely associated with Amazon, especially if owned by Amazon or if they have a common parent company, they're probably fucked.
They also have to avoid intrastate shipping like the plague. In many cases, you also have to make sure that your Texas-based DC is not shipping to any Texas-based customers (which is why when I lived in Lexington Kentucky I never had any product shipped from the DC 10 miles from my apartment, but now that I'm in Maine I get stuff from Lexington all the time). If you start shipping within a state, you lose interstate trade protections, because the order was fulfilled at your orders from the same state as the customer resides.
So, as long as the Texas DC was:
1. Only ever used to ship Amazon product to Amazon customers OUTSIDE Texas, and 2. Not owned by Amazon or shares a parent company with Amazon....it may be true that neither company owes Texas jack shit.
IANAL, but I've done a lot of tax programming for major retailers over the years.
While I agree that sales taxes are ridiculous and hard and all that, I feel it's important to point out that Amazon actually has a presence in Texas, and therefore when they sell product to Texans they actually do need to be collecting sales tax and remitting it to the State of Texas. This is commonly known as "nexus" in sales/use tax circles. This is what Texas is asking for - sales/use tax from sales to Texans from Amazon (who has a presence in Texas and is therefore subject to the laws of Texas with regards to their sales in Texas).
If Amazon was being told they needed to collect on behalf of, for example, Maine, they have the absolute right to tell Maine's comptroller to go straight to hell. In fact, as a citizen of Maine, I'd love to be able to listen to that conversation. I'll never be able to tell our comptroller to go to hell, so it'd be great to be able to hear someone else say it.
Amazon has no presence here in Maine, therefore they have no obligation to follow Maine's regulations surrounding sales/use taxes, which are intrastate law, not interstate. The sales/use tax on things I buy from Amazon is my responsibility to track as a Mainer doing business with a company outside the state, and I owe that money to Maine at the end of the year (and we have a system called "Alternative Use Tax" where I pay a small stipend based on income tax to cover any incidental out-of-state purchases I happen to make if I don't want to track them all, which I use).
But Amazon has a presence in Texas. In the same way that the company I currently work for has to start collecting and remitting State sales taxes every time we open our first store in each State (or call center, or warehouse, or business office, or whatever), Amazon really does owe that sales tax to the State of Texas, whether they have been collecting it from their customers or not.
Now, they can certainly choose to pull out of Texas in order to avoid having to collect taxes there, that's within their rights. But they still owe the State of Texas $269 million (plus whatever other sales they make before they finish the pullout), because they were supposed to be collecting that money from their customers who live in Texas for the entire time they've had a presence there.
Note to Amazon: Please come to Maine. We could use the jobs. I'll happily pay sales tax on purchases made from you.
AT&T gets $5 a month for the limited SMS plan that gives you 400 or 500 messages a month. That plan can be used from the dumbest of dumbphones. Dumbphones always have an easy SMS interface built in to the address book.
AT&T gets $15 a month for "Data Unlimited for non-Smartphones". That plan can be used from any phone that supports sending and receiving email. I've had my share of dumbphones, and few of them are really as good at email as they are at SMS.
Sure, if you already are dropping $25+ a month on a data plan it makes sense to use your data and send emails or IMs. But for dumbphone users, it's still cheaper to handle occasional text communication via SMS.
Unfortunately I'm in a two year contract -- yet another aspect that should scare you.
Absolutely.
With phones like the Nokia 5800s going for $250 (unlocked) off Amazon.com and not needing a data plan at all, I'm still amazed anyone wants to get into a multi-year commitment for a phone unless they have some specific need for a platform.
Once you drop the $250 on it, you have something with the call plan pricing of a dumbphone and the capabilities of a smartphone (as long as you're OK with only getting data via WiFi), standalone GPS with voice navigation, music player, and all the other gewgaws you expect on a smartphone.
Hell, even if you want a dumbphone you can get unlocked units in the $40-60 range ($100 less than the dumbphone ETF). And they don't have the stupid "media access" buttons that can be pressed so easily to put a buck on your monthly bill.
I understand the pricing difference is a lot higher for the really-high-end phones, but if you just want some extra capabilities there are tons of decent unlocked phones out there that are quite capable. Plus, of course, there's always the used market if you pick a phone that's locked to the carrier of your choice.
I haven't set it up yet, it's not yet available on my account. So everything I'm about to say comes from reading the manual.
Google appears to be providing you the option of SMS texting you or calling you on a voice line. If you opt for the "landline" option I presume an electronic voice will read off the number for you, so no SMS charges, no need for a cell phone at all. You can use your landline.
Miracle Max: It probably owes you data huh? I'll ask it.
Inigo Montoya: It's bricked. It can't talk.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY bricked. There's a big difference between mostly bricked and all bricked. Mostly bricked is slightly unbricked. With all bricked, well, with all bricked there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through its hard drive and look for loose data.
The problem with phones of any kind is that they are always powered on so a pre-boot authentication scheme does not work for them. Even if you tried to protect the key the device has to have it in memory to decrypt the data so there could be a way to get it.
You can still lock the phone and make the data inaccessible for any practical purpose.
Look at the Blackberry model.
- Filesystem is encrypted by a long key.
- Long key is present on the phone, but key is encrypted by the user's login password.
I have a moderately complex password controlled by a set of rules my company sets, and the phone locks itself after 15 minutes of non-use.
When the phone is locked, the OS still has access to the keyring so it can check my email and stuff, but I have no way of getting at any of that information because the user interface doesn't work until I unlock the phone.
If you try to unlock my phone and mess up the password ten times, the phone overwrites the long decryption key with garbage. It then proceeds to write garbage over the entire filesystem (rendering it indistinguishable from most of my corporate email, but I digress).
Actually, if Apple had even encrypted the keyring decryption key with the passcode of the user, the default of a 4-number passcode means it would take up to 10,000 tries to get to the keyring. Still not terribly secure, but better than leaving the key hanging out of the ignition as things appear to be at the moment.
The key is that, apparently, the iPhone has enough information onboard to decrypt the passwords. This is a huge mistake. It's like leaving the key in the lock on your house. I'm hoping this story is bullshit, or if it's true Apple can resolve this quickly in the next OS release.
Assuming the assertions in the article are true...
I can only compare this to the Blackberry, since I own one and have researched its security model. All information in the filesystem as a whole (including the keyring) is encrypted by a key that is itself encrypted by the passcode you set to log in to the device. The password has strength parameters set in (minimum 8 chars, one number, etc). The phone locks itself after 15 minutes of non-use. My company sets all of these parameters and I can't override them.
I can choose optional portions of the filesystem that can be outside the encryption (all or portions of any SD chips you install, your address book so you can make calls when the phone is locked, etc). But email and passwords and such are protected (unless you're stupid enough to put passwords in your address book and not encrypt the address book, of course).
So if you get your paws on my Blackberry and it's locked you have to figure out the password in order to decrypt the key that allows access to the filesystem and keyring. After 10 bad tries, the phone overwrites the decryption keys with garbage and then starts formatting the filesystem.
That's not to say it's 100% secure - if you pull the SIM the phone can never receive the "wipe" command (so you have 10 tries or you can attempt to copy the contents of internal soldered memory), and of course you can pull the SD chip and copy it so you can decrypt that at your leisure.
All kidding aside, yes, you can move them. The problem is that each bird is generally orbited with a set amount of fuel, usually reserved for small orbital adjustments and/or the final de-orbital burn that causes the satellite to get the hell out of the way and burn up in the atmosphere like a good orbital citizen.
So, either the repositioning is going to take a lot of time (make a small adjustment to nudge the bird out of geosync, allow its new position to catch up with it, and nudge it back), or a lot of fuel (same basic process, but more of a push than a nudge). This fuel expenditure will, by necessity, reduce the satellite's longevity. The owner might decide to use all fuel for orbital corrections, extending the satellite's mission life but turning it into geosync space junk and locking out a useful geosync slot for quite some time.
I doubt any of this is really relevant, honestly. TFA cites an Irridium satellite that went for $23 million on the used market, which was itself considered a bargain because the bird cost $5 billion to orbit. These guys are talking about trying to buy a functional satellite from a bankruptcy auction for less than 1% of that. Their bid will be lost in the initial flurry of lowball attempts that the caller uses to warm his voice up.
It's like going to a popular automotive auction with $200 to spend and finding out the only car there has a bluebook value of $20,000. You're wasting your time. Bidding will start somewhere around 20-30 times your final offer.
On the upside, they've raised some money. Once the satellite goes to someone else, I wonder how many solar-panel-powered WiFi repeaters you can build for a couple hundred grand?
If the grid is strong enough, it'll absorb a certain amount of the momentum of the debris that passes through. I'm no expert on orbital mechanics, but we learned in high school many years ago that an orbit is maintained by maintaining a specific speed, and if you slow down you drop into a lower orbit. I'm assuming this is still true and "new math" hasn't somehow changed this basic bit of orbital mechanics.
So let's say your net is in a geostationary orbit at the equator, going somewhere in the vicinity of 7,000 miles an hour to maintain geosync orbit. Your large net collides with a bit of debris going 7,000 miles an hour in the opposite direction. The object would, of course, puncture your net, but the energy put into making that puncture is "stolen" from the momentum/speed of the object. This means the debris would now slow down. At the very least, it would likely descend to a less desirable orbital slot. Maybe enough to become subject to increased atmospheric friction.
Even if you didn't clear up the area, you've at least cleared some junk out of the most desirable orbits.
Anything broken off your net would be moving at some percentage of the piece of debris that hit it, so newly-introduced debris would seem to have a tendency to de-orbit rather quickly.
1. There was a great deal of publicity and anyone involved in an acceleration-related accident who happened to be driving a Toyota probably tried to blame it on the car instead of themselves.
2. Toyota accounts for a consistent 15% or so of the overall US sales market, and that's AFTER the crisis and drop in their sales figures related to this incident.
In other words, their reporting of a specific problem that they've gotten massively bad press on is "only" double their corresponding sales numbers.
You know, a lot of car manufacturers would give the left testicle of their CEO to only have problem reports double after accusations like this...
I'm not saying their handling of the problem was perfect or that all is fluffy bunnies, but they seem to have done a decent job of investigating the problem, and all the brouhaha seems to have been over mechanical issues (like floor mats, which they recalled and fixed very early on).
I don't own a Toyota (well, technically I guess my Pontiac Vibe sorta qualifies, since it's a Matrix in disguise), but I have several friends who have had Toyotas with issues and Toyota puts a lot of stake in their reputation. One friend had his Tacoma recalled for rust on the frame, and Toyota took his 8-year-old truck and completely rebuilt it around a new frame for him, even fixing some other problems they discovered (new shocks, etc) for free, and gave him a really nice brand-new Lexus for the month it took to do the work. When they were done, they apologized profusely for his inconvenience. He'll be a Toyota driver for life.
Compare that to my repair experiences with Ford on brand-new cars with defects, and it's just no contest.
I take a view that the phone company that happens to be offering my wife's service at the moment is a transitory relationship, and I don't take on contractual obligations I have no intention of fulfilling.
We buy the phone and only buy a SIM and monthly access from them. If one of them pisses her off, they get their SIM back and we move her to a different carrier. The convenience store is full of them. At the moment, AT&T is treating us pretty fairly (they take the correct amount off my credit card every month, and in return my phone's voice circuit works when I want to make a call).
I no longer take advantage of their subsidies because I don't want the hassle of having to bypass their lockdown bullshit or buy extra services from them, legal or no my time isn't worth saving the money on a phone and dealing with having to unlock features I wanted from the get-go. My wife wants a phone with a set of features. We shop on Amazon and find her a phone, then choose a carrier that supports that phone. Done.
Actually, my wife and her parents started out with subsidized phones. My wife then decided that the Blackberry data plan was too expensive, and wanted to switch to a different phone with WiFi. AT&T wouldn't play ball. So we bought her the Nokia and took the data plan off her contract. AT&T lost the entire data contract rather than a portion of it, and my wife ended up with a pretty smart smartphone for $250 that isn't carrier-dependent.
Later, AT&T changed their tower configuration so my wife's parents' phones refused to work. AT&T acknowledged the problem and tried to force them to re-up for 2 additional years in return for free crappy replacement phones.
I mail-ordered them each an inexpensive $40 dumb phone that had more features than their old AT&T ones did (and didn't have the prominent "MediaNet" button right next to the hang-up button that costs a buck when you hit it accidentally) and told them to put their existing SIM chips in them. The new phones work better than the old ones, and they're thrilled that they have phones they can actually back up over USB and get their photos and stuff out of without paying for MMS messages or emails to do so.
The contracts are all up this summer, then they'll go month-to-month plans, and we'll replace phones as they want new phones rather than when AT&T tells them they can have new ones. And the features on the adverts will actually be present in the phones (Verizon Blackberry GPS lockdown, I'm looking at you) and work without extra cost (AT&T Wifi needing a data plan, I'm looking at you).
Still, those restrictions are part of the subsidy and the subsidy is part of your contract, so if you want to try and bypass them don't be surprised if the carrier decides they no longer want your phone to play on their network, and they'd be within their rights to impose an ETF on you and terminate service, or demand that you put their firmware back on in order to use their service.
Honestly, why knowingly put yourself in such a contract when you know the first thing you're going to want to do is violate the terms of it? If you don't like the contract, don't sign the damned thing. Buy a phone that actually meets your needs, rather than one where you are in an antagonistic relationship with the people you bought it from.
I may have taken T-Mobile's discount you mentioned above and mis-attributed it to Sprint. Since we don't get service for either around here, I get them confused occasionally.:)
The real question is, why should we not be allowed to disable their restriction systems and use the computers we buy in any manner we see fit?
It's a condition of the subsidy.
If you choose to have someone else pay for all or part of your telephone, how is it suddenly patently unfair that you have to live by the terms you agreed to when you accepted the subsidy? You had the choice of buying your own phone without the subsidy and the restrictions.
I'm sympathetic to your point of view, but you did accept a discount in return for your vendor-locked phone. The restrictions are part of the package you seem to have agreed to.
That's why my wife's phone is an unlocked one. Sure, it cost us more money up front, but we don't need a data plan for her smartphone (it's got WiFi, and she just uses data only when she's at home). We don't need a navigation plan for her GPS (it's got a GPS and mapping software with downloadable maps, so she doesn't need data to navigate). We only need a voice + SMS plan from AT&T, so that's what we bought. They hand us a SIM, we install the SIM in the phone, we turn off data from that SIM on the phone and tell AT&T to block data from their end, we place a test call, and we sign a month-to-month voice/SMS contract, shake the hand of the AT&T salescritter, and walk out the door with a working phone.
If AT&T pisses us off, we go to someone else and get their SIM installed in my wife's phone instead.
Sure, the phone cost us $250 and we could have gotten it for free. But we get to use ALL of the phone, not just the features that AT&T wants us to use. AT&T is merely providing voice for the phone. There's a second SIM slot so I could go out and buy a pay-per-use data plan if my wife really wanted one.
We'll see, the iPhone doesn't tend to pull "mobile" sites like most other phones do, it pulls the entire real site and renders it down to a smaller screen. Blackberries, for example, tend to load preview versions of images by going through BES or BIS, and this is a lot more gentle on mobile bandwidth. I use my Blackberry 83xx (EDGE) all the time, and I have yet to break an average of about 1-2 megabytes per day. Now, admittedly, I don't use a lot of streaming media (would suck over EDGE anyway), but I use Google Maps, corporate and personal email, Gmail, Facebook, and a decent amount of web browsing. And I have yet to break 40 megabytes in a whole month. My phone does not have WiFi, so every bit it gets comes through the mobile network.
Email is done via IMAP and seems to pull entire emails down, not just the first few kilobytes with a "view more" option like the Blackberry's built in email solution.
The iPhone is, in terms of data usage, a pretty inefficient phone. That's not to say it's a bad phone, in fact it looks pretty cool, but its data usage is more computer-like and less phone-like than many other smartphones. There was also some mention about it turning the radio on and off aggressively, which gave it more frequencies on the tower than it really should have had (but saved battery life). I don't know if that problem has been fixed, or even if it was just some bad rumor, but if true that would have a negative effect on any network it operated on.
Having said all that, in at least one way I agree. Verizon is limiting the iPhone to its 3G network, which does not allow simultaneous voice and data (similar to AT&T's 2G EDGE network, but with faster data). If you make a call, your data connection will be interrupted for the duration. If you send or receive SMS/MMS, your data connection will also be interrupted (though for a very short duration).
Contrast this to AT&T where you can be talking on the phone and surfing the web at the same time, something the iPhone happens to be really good at (and if my Blackberry supported it and 3G speeds, I'd probably be gobbling up a lot more monthly bandwidth than I do today, even with all the BES/BIS compression that goes on).
That means the potential impact to Verizon's network is cut nearly in half, because the VeriPhone can only do one thing at a time, whereas the ATTiPhone can do both at the same time. A single phone will have a much lower impact to a given tower on Verizon, because it can't do as much at the same time.
I still think Verizon is going to see some significant hits once the AT&T iPhone defectors start hitting them in droves. Which is great, because I'm on AT&T. The Verizon network is welcome to 'em.:)
I'm still waiting for the reports from early VeriPhone adopters. Verizon caught a LOT of flack in the 8000-series days (a few years ago) when they announced that they were locking down the GPS radios in all 8000-series Blackberries unless you bought their TeleNav service, and even then you could ONLY use the GPS for their TeleNav service and nothing else (that was a very large part of the reason I went AT&T with my 8300, because a smartphone without a GPS is like a bicycle without pedals). I hope Apple has a lot more clout and won't allow Verizon to pull that on their iPhone customers, because that would be a real shame.
The mobile phone is heavily subsidized by the carrier that issued it to you. Stop supporting this model and buy a phone of your own, not one that the carrier is basically leasing to you.
Just to play devil's advocate here, why should lock-down not be permitted?
No, really. There are plenty of devices that you can buy that are not locked down. Most of the Nokia line offers non-locked-down phones. There are a decent handful of Android devices. Blackberries are generally available in an unlocked flavor.
Yes, they are more expensive, but that's because you aren't being subsidized by a damned phone company when you get it. It's your phone, and all the features belong to you. The phone company can't turn off your GPS like Verizon likes to. They can't turn off the WiFi like AT&T likes to. You put their SIM in the phone and you use it for what you want to use it for, and pay accordingly.
AT&T seems to welcome unlocked GSM phones (admittedly, their discount for using an unlocked unsubsidized phone is nonexistent, and they'll still force you on a data plan for certain phones whether locked or unlocked). From what I've heard, Sprint not only loves 'em, they offer a discount. There aren't as many unlocked phones available for Verizon, since they are LTE and the rest of the world is pretty much GSM, but it's not like there aren't offerings for unlocked phones.
It's only the fact that we USAians are so used to having our phones subsidized that we've forgotten there is a whole universe of unlocked phones out there that we can use, if we want to get off the mobile carrier teat and buy them ourselves.
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And (no offense) don't send your kids to school there unless you shop around carefully for a town with a wealthy tax base and can afford the property taxes there, or can afford a private school.
I lived in New Hampshire for about a decade. Lovely state, great job market, wonderful tax system (as long as you're healthy, young, and not a parent, and I met all three qualifications at the time).
But the town I lived in (north of Concord) had a high school that was struggling to regain accreditation (in other words, when kids graduated from that high school, they had to go for a GED in order to have their graduation mean anything). I served on their volunteer IT Committee for a while, and there was absolutely no money for anything.
There's a huge legal chasm between hiring a true third party, and inventing one by creating a subsidiary.
A subsidiary is not sufficient arms-length for Nexus avoidance. Trust me, I worked for a company that tried that. It did not go well. Thankfully our own lawyers stopped us before the company got too batshit crazy trying it, because it would have hurt. Real bad.
The law may have changed in the intervening decade. But I very much doubt it.
So, wait, I can break the law and not get penalized as long as I pull out of the state the instant I get caught?
Look, the CT case sounds like a raw deal, but I've also worked with a few people who tried to subcontract to CT and ended up not getting paid (the tax-collection department he worked for in CT cancelled all payments to out-of-state contractors that year to balance the budget, just washed the liability off the books and told them to get the fuck out), so I've come to the conclusion that living or doing business in CT is criminally insane anyway.
A DC is enough of a presence to subject them to state law. I'm not saying it's right, but it's how it works.
The DC is subcontracted, but it looks like they didn't really honestly subcontract it, they tried to invent a new division that only distributed product. I don't know the legal term for it, but the technical term is "shenanigans".
I'm still hoping some major shipper will decide that Brunswick Landing (soon-to-be-former BNAS) would be an awesome distribution point. Lots of cheap land, plenty of local labor, relatively easy highway access, low population, and two frakking HUGE runways that aren't going to see a whole lot of use other than General Aviation.
PS I think your Dad was my highschool english teacher.
Nope, but I've heard that one a few times before. I know of a highschool English teacher with the same last name as me, but we're not related. :)
If they have a presence, that would be $4.5 Billion in sales to Texans. Whether the products were shipped from Texas or not is irrelevant. If you have a presence in the state, you need to collect and remit sales tax for ALL sales to residents of that state, regardless of where you shipped it from.
Agreed that the number still seems pretty high, though.
Actually, if Amazon truly contracted Texas-based shipping to a real third party then it might be true that NO ONE owes Texas that money. Amazon (outside Texas) sold the goods, and another company (also outside Texas) shipped the goods to the customer. As long as that Texas distribution center is not owned by or affiliated with Amazon in any way, and never ships any product to any customers in Texas, Amazon might be OK. No single sale to a Texas customer has been fulfilled from anyone affiliated with Amazon who has a presence in Texas.
The company inside Texas is not the seller, so they don't have to collect taxes. Every company I've worked for has done this for some subset of their products - it's usually called a "Direct Ship" arrangement.
However, such "arm's-length" agreements tend to fall apart quickly unless you are having the actual manufacturer of the goods ship for you, or you get competitive bids and can prove that you truly are doing business with a third party distributor. If Amazon happens to be the only customer for that distribution center, and the company that runs the DC happens to be closely associated with Amazon, especially if owned by Amazon or if they have a common parent company, they're probably fucked.
They also have to avoid intrastate shipping like the plague. In many cases, you also have to make sure that your Texas-based DC is not shipping to any Texas-based customers (which is why when I lived in Lexington Kentucky I never had any product shipped from the DC 10 miles from my apartment, but now that I'm in Maine I get stuff from Lexington all the time). If you start shipping within a state, you lose interstate trade protections, because the order was fulfilled at your orders from the same state as the customer resides.
So, as long as the Texas DC was:
1. Only ever used to ship Amazon product to Amazon customers OUTSIDE Texas, and ...it may be true that neither company owes Texas jack shit.
2. Not owned by Amazon or shares a parent company with Amazon.
IANAL, but I've done a lot of tax programming for major retailers over the years.
While I agree that sales taxes are ridiculous and hard and all that, I feel it's important to point out that Amazon actually has a presence in Texas, and therefore when they sell product to Texans they actually do need to be collecting sales tax and remitting it to the State of Texas. This is commonly known as "nexus" in sales/use tax circles. This is what Texas is asking for - sales/use tax from sales to Texans from Amazon (who has a presence in Texas and is therefore subject to the laws of Texas with regards to their sales in Texas).
If Amazon was being told they needed to collect on behalf of, for example, Maine, they have the absolute right to tell Maine's comptroller to go straight to hell. In fact, as a citizen of Maine, I'd love to be able to listen to that conversation. I'll never be able to tell our comptroller to go to hell, so it'd be great to be able to hear someone else say it.
Amazon has no presence here in Maine, therefore they have no obligation to follow Maine's regulations surrounding sales/use taxes, which are intrastate law, not interstate. The sales/use tax on things I buy from Amazon is my responsibility to track as a Mainer doing business with a company outside the state, and I owe that money to Maine at the end of the year (and we have a system called "Alternative Use Tax" where I pay a small stipend based on income tax to cover any incidental out-of-state purchases I happen to make if I don't want to track them all, which I use).
But Amazon has a presence in Texas. In the same way that the company I currently work for has to start collecting and remitting State sales taxes every time we open our first store in each State (or call center, or warehouse, or business office, or whatever), Amazon really does owe that sales tax to the State of Texas, whether they have been collecting it from their customers or not.
Now, they can certainly choose to pull out of Texas in order to avoid having to collect taxes there, that's within their rights. But they still owe the State of Texas $269 million (plus whatever other sales they make before they finish the pullout), because they were supposed to be collecting that money from their customers who live in Texas for the entire time they've had a presence there.
Note to Amazon: Please come to Maine. We could use the jobs. I'll happily pay sales tax on purchases made from you.
Pricing and phone capabilities.
AT&T gets $5 a month for the limited SMS plan that gives you 400 or 500 messages a month. That plan can be used from the dumbest of dumbphones. Dumbphones always have an easy SMS interface built in to the address book.
AT&T gets $15 a month for "Data Unlimited for non-Smartphones". That plan can be used from any phone that supports sending and receiving email. I've had my share of dumbphones, and few of them are really as good at email as they are at SMS.
Sure, if you already are dropping $25+ a month on a data plan it makes sense to use your data and send emails or IMs. But for dumbphone users, it's still cheaper to handle occasional text communication via SMS.
Unfortunately I'm in a two year contract -- yet another aspect that should scare you.
Absolutely.
With phones like the Nokia 5800s going for $250 (unlocked) off Amazon.com and not needing a data plan at all, I'm still amazed anyone wants to get into a multi-year commitment for a phone unless they have some specific need for a platform.
Once you drop the $250 on it, you have something with the call plan pricing of a dumbphone and the capabilities of a smartphone (as long as you're OK with only getting data via WiFi), standalone GPS with voice navigation, music player, and all the other gewgaws you expect on a smartphone.
Hell, even if you want a dumbphone you can get unlocked units in the $40-60 range ($100 less than the dumbphone ETF). And they don't have the stupid "media access" buttons that can be pressed so easily to put a buck on your monthly bill.
I understand the pricing difference is a lot higher for the really-high-end phones, but if you just want some extra capabilities there are tons of decent unlocked phones out there that are quite capable. Plus, of course, there's always the used market if you pick a phone that's locked to the carrier of your choice.
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=1056283&topic=1102160
I haven't set it up yet, it's not yet available on my account. So everything I'm about to say comes from reading the manual.
Google appears to be providing you the option of SMS texting you or calling you on a voice line. If you opt for the "landline" option I presume an electronic voice will read off the number for you, so no SMS charges, no need for a cell phone at all. You can use your landline.
Miracle Max: It probably owes you data huh? I'll ask it.
Inigo Montoya: It's bricked. It can't talk.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY bricked. There's a big difference between mostly bricked and all bricked. Mostly bricked is slightly unbricked. With all bricked, well, with all bricked there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through its hard drive and look for loose data.
The problem with phones of any kind is that they are always powered on so a pre-boot authentication scheme does not work for them. Even if you tried to protect the key the device has to have it in memory to decrypt the data so there could be a way to get it.
You can still lock the phone and make the data inaccessible for any practical purpose.
Look at the Blackberry model.
- Filesystem is encrypted by a long key.
- Long key is present on the phone, but key is encrypted by the user's login password.
I have a moderately complex password controlled by a set of rules my company sets, and the phone locks itself after 15 minutes of non-use.
When the phone is locked, the OS still has access to the keyring so it can check my email and stuff, but I have no way of getting at any of that information because the user interface doesn't work until I unlock the phone.
If you try to unlock my phone and mess up the password ten times, the phone overwrites the long decryption key with garbage. It then proceeds to write garbage over the entire filesystem (rendering it indistinguishable from most of my corporate email, but I digress).
Actually, if Apple had even encrypted the keyring decryption key with the passcode of the user, the default of a 4-number passcode means it would take up to 10,000 tries to get to the keyring. Still not terribly secure, but better than leaving the key hanging out of the ignition as things appear to be at the moment.
The key is that, apparently, the iPhone has enough information onboard to decrypt the passwords. This is a huge mistake. It's like leaving the key in the lock on your house. I'm hoping this story is bullshit, or if it's true Apple can resolve this quickly in the next OS release.
Assuming the assertions in the article are true...
I can only compare this to the Blackberry, since I own one and have researched its security model. All information in the filesystem as a whole (including the keyring) is encrypted by a key that is itself encrypted by the passcode you set to log in to the device. The password has strength parameters set in (minimum 8 chars, one number, etc). The phone locks itself after 15 minutes of non-use. My company sets all of these parameters and I can't override them.
I can choose optional portions of the filesystem that can be outside the encryption (all or portions of any SD chips you install, your address book so you can make calls when the phone is locked, etc). But email and passwords and such are protected (unless you're stupid enough to put passwords in your address book and not encrypt the address book, of course).
So if you get your paws on my Blackberry and it's locked you have to figure out the password in order to decrypt the key that allows access to the filesystem and keyring. After 10 bad tries, the phone overwrites the decryption keys with garbage and then starts formatting the filesystem.
That's not to say it's 100% secure - if you pull the SIM the phone can never receive the "wipe" command (so you have 10 tries or you can attempt to copy the contents of internal soldered memory), and of course you can pull the SD chip and copy it so you can decrypt that at your leisure.
But, hell, it's at least difficult.
Yes, but it's simply easier to it instead.
All kidding aside, yes, you can move them. The problem is that each bird is generally orbited with a set amount of fuel, usually reserved for small orbital adjustments and/or the final de-orbital burn that causes the satellite to get the hell out of the way and burn up in the atmosphere like a good orbital citizen.
So, either the repositioning is going to take a lot of time (make a small adjustment to nudge the bird out of geosync, allow its new position to catch up with it, and nudge it back), or a lot of fuel (same basic process, but more of a push than a nudge). This fuel expenditure will, by necessity, reduce the satellite's longevity. The owner might decide to use all fuel for orbital corrections, extending the satellite's mission life but turning it into geosync space junk and locking out a useful geosync slot for quite some time.
I doubt any of this is really relevant, honestly. TFA cites an Irridium satellite that went for $23 million on the used market, which was itself considered a bargain because the bird cost $5 billion to orbit. These guys are talking about trying to buy a functional satellite from a bankruptcy auction for less than 1% of that. Their bid will be lost in the initial flurry of lowball attempts that the caller uses to warm his voice up.
It's like going to a popular automotive auction with $200 to spend and finding out the only car there has a bluebook value of $20,000. You're wasting your time. Bidding will start somewhere around 20-30 times your final offer.
On the upside, they've raised some money. Once the satellite goes to someone else, I wonder how many solar-panel-powered WiFi repeaters you can build for a couple hundred grand?
If the grid is strong enough, it'll absorb a certain amount of the momentum of the debris that passes through. I'm no expert on orbital mechanics, but we learned in high school many years ago that an orbit is maintained by maintaining a specific speed, and if you slow down you drop into a lower orbit. I'm assuming this is still true and "new math" hasn't somehow changed this basic bit of orbital mechanics.
So let's say your net is in a geostationary orbit at the equator, going somewhere in the vicinity of 7,000 miles an hour to maintain geosync orbit. Your large net collides with a bit of debris going 7,000 miles an hour in the opposite direction. The object would, of course, puncture your net, but the energy put into making that puncture is "stolen" from the momentum/speed of the object. This means the debris would now slow down. At the very least, it would likely descend to a less desirable orbital slot. Maybe enough to become subject to increased atmospheric friction.
Even if you didn't clear up the area, you've at least cleared some junk out of the most desirable orbits.
Anything broken off your net would be moving at some percentage of the piece of debris that hit it, so newly-introduced debris would seem to have a tendency to de-orbit rather quickly.
Thereabouts, probably. On the other hand:
1. There was a great deal of publicity and anyone involved in an acceleration-related accident who happened to be driving a Toyota probably tried to blame it on the car instead of themselves.
2. Toyota accounts for a consistent 15% or so of the overall US sales market, and that's AFTER the crisis and drop in their sales figures related to this incident.
In other words, their reporting of a specific problem that they've gotten massively bad press on is "only" double their corresponding sales numbers.
You know, a lot of car manufacturers would give the left testicle of their CEO to only have problem reports double after accusations like this...
I'm not saying their handling of the problem was perfect or that all is fluffy bunnies, but they seem to have done a decent job of investigating the problem, and all the brouhaha seems to have been over mechanical issues (like floor mats, which they recalled and fixed very early on).
I don't own a Toyota (well, technically I guess my Pontiac Vibe sorta qualifies, since it's a Matrix in disguise), but I have several friends who have had Toyotas with issues and Toyota puts a lot of stake in their reputation. One friend had his Tacoma recalled for rust on the frame, and Toyota took his 8-year-old truck and completely rebuilt it around a new frame for him, even fixing some other problems they discovered (new shocks, etc) for free, and gave him a really nice brand-new Lexus for the month it took to do the work. When they were done, they apologized profusely for his inconvenience. He'll be a Toyota driver for life.
Compare that to my repair experiences with Ford on brand-new cars with defects, and it's just no contest.
I take a view that the phone company that happens to be offering my wife's service at the moment is a transitory relationship, and I don't take on contractual obligations I have no intention of fulfilling.
We buy the phone and only buy a SIM and monthly access from them. If one of them pisses her off, they get their SIM back and we move her to a different carrier. The convenience store is full of them. At the moment, AT&T is treating us pretty fairly (they take the correct amount off my credit card every month, and in return my phone's voice circuit works when I want to make a call).
I no longer take advantage of their subsidies because I don't want the hassle of having to bypass their lockdown bullshit or buy extra services from them, legal or no my time isn't worth saving the money on a phone and dealing with having to unlock features I wanted from the get-go. My wife wants a phone with a set of features. We shop on Amazon and find her a phone, then choose a carrier that supports that phone. Done.
Actually, my wife and her parents started out with subsidized phones. My wife then decided that the Blackberry data plan was too expensive, and wanted to switch to a different phone with WiFi. AT&T wouldn't play ball. So we bought her the Nokia and took the data plan off her contract. AT&T lost the entire data contract rather than a portion of it, and my wife ended up with a pretty smart smartphone for $250 that isn't carrier-dependent.
Later, AT&T changed their tower configuration so my wife's parents' phones refused to work. AT&T acknowledged the problem and tried to force them to re-up for 2 additional years in return for free crappy replacement phones.
I mail-ordered them each an inexpensive $40 dumb phone that had more features than their old AT&T ones did (and didn't have the prominent "MediaNet" button right next to the hang-up button that costs a buck when you hit it accidentally) and told them to put their existing SIM chips in them. The new phones work better than the old ones, and they're thrilled that they have phones they can actually back up over USB and get their photos and stuff out of without paying for MMS messages or emails to do so.
The contracts are all up this summer, then they'll go month-to-month plans, and we'll replace phones as they want new phones rather than when AT&T tells them they can have new ones. And the features on the adverts will actually be present in the phones (Verizon Blackberry GPS lockdown, I'm looking at you) and work without extra cost (AT&T Wifi needing a data plan, I'm looking at you).
Still, those restrictions are part of the subsidy and the subsidy is part of your contract, so if you want to try and bypass them don't be surprised if the carrier decides they no longer want your phone to play on their network, and they'd be within their rights to impose an ETF on you and terminate service, or demand that you put their firmware back on in order to use their service.
Honestly, why knowingly put yourself in such a contract when you know the first thing you're going to want to do is violate the terms of it? If you don't like the contract, don't sign the damned thing. Buy a phone that actually meets your needs, rather than one where you are in an antagonistic relationship with the people you bought it from.
I may have taken T-Mobile's discount you mentioned above and mis-attributed it to Sprint. Since we don't get service for either around here, I get them confused occasionally. :)
The real question is, why should we not be allowed to disable their restriction systems and use the computers we buy in any manner we see fit?
It's a condition of the subsidy.
If you choose to have someone else pay for all or part of your telephone, how is it suddenly patently unfair that you have to live by the terms you agreed to when you accepted the subsidy? You had the choice of buying your own phone without the subsidy and the restrictions.
I'm sympathetic to your point of view, but you did accept a discount in return for your vendor-locked phone. The restrictions are part of the package you seem to have agreed to.
That's why my wife's phone is an unlocked one. Sure, it cost us more money up front, but we don't need a data plan for her smartphone (it's got WiFi, and she just uses data only when she's at home). We don't need a navigation plan for her GPS (it's got a GPS and mapping software with downloadable maps, so she doesn't need data to navigate). We only need a voice + SMS plan from AT&T, so that's what we bought. They hand us a SIM, we install the SIM in the phone, we turn off data from that SIM on the phone and tell AT&T to block data from their end, we place a test call, and we sign a month-to-month voice/SMS contract, shake the hand of the AT&T salescritter, and walk out the door with a working phone.
If AT&T pisses us off, we go to someone else and get their SIM installed in my wife's phone instead.
Sure, the phone cost us $250 and we could have gotten it for free. But we get to use ALL of the phone, not just the features that AT&T wants us to use. AT&T is merely providing voice for the phone. There's a second SIM slot so I could go out and buy a pay-per-use data plan if my wife really wanted one.
We'll see, the iPhone doesn't tend to pull "mobile" sites like most other phones do, it pulls the entire real site and renders it down to a smaller screen. Blackberries, for example, tend to load preview versions of images by going through BES or BIS, and this is a lot more gentle on mobile bandwidth. I use my Blackberry 83xx (EDGE) all the time, and I have yet to break an average of about 1-2 megabytes per day. Now, admittedly, I don't use a lot of streaming media (would suck over EDGE anyway), but I use Google Maps, corporate and personal email, Gmail, Facebook, and a decent amount of web browsing. And I have yet to break 40 megabytes in a whole month. My phone does not have WiFi, so every bit it gets comes through the mobile network.
Email is done via IMAP and seems to pull entire emails down, not just the first few kilobytes with a "view more" option like the Blackberry's built in email solution.
The iPhone is, in terms of data usage, a pretty inefficient phone. That's not to say it's a bad phone, in fact it looks pretty cool, but its data usage is more computer-like and less phone-like than many other smartphones. There was also some mention about it turning the radio on and off aggressively, which gave it more frequencies on the tower than it really should have had (but saved battery life). I don't know if that problem has been fixed, or even if it was just some bad rumor, but if true that would have a negative effect on any network it operated on.
Having said all that, in at least one way I agree. Verizon is limiting the iPhone to its 3G network, which does not allow simultaneous voice and data (similar to AT&T's 2G EDGE network, but with faster data). If you make a call, your data connection will be interrupted for the duration. If you send or receive SMS/MMS, your data connection will also be interrupted (though for a very short duration).
Contrast this to AT&T where you can be talking on the phone and surfing the web at the same time, something the iPhone happens to be really good at (and if my Blackberry supported it and 3G speeds, I'd probably be gobbling up a lot more monthly bandwidth than I do today, even with all the BES/BIS compression that goes on).
That means the potential impact to Verizon's network is cut nearly in half, because the VeriPhone can only do one thing at a time, whereas the ATTiPhone can do both at the same time. A single phone will have a much lower impact to a given tower on Verizon, because it can't do as much at the same time.
I still think Verizon is going to see some significant hits once the AT&T iPhone defectors start hitting them in droves. Which is great, because I'm on AT&T. The Verizon network is welcome to 'em. :)
I'm still waiting for the reports from early VeriPhone adopters. Verizon caught a LOT of flack in the 8000-series days (a few years ago) when they announced that they were locking down the GPS radios in all 8000-series Blackberries unless you bought their TeleNav service, and even then you could ONLY use the GPS for their TeleNav service and nothing else (that was a very large part of the reason I went AT&T with my 8300, because a smartphone without a GPS is like a bicycle without pedals). I hope Apple has a lot more clout and won't allow Verizon to pull that on their iPhone customers, because that would be a real shame.
The mobile phone is heavily subsidized by the carrier that issued it to you. Stop supporting this model and buy a phone of your own, not one that the carrier is basically leasing to you.
Just to play devil's advocate here, why should lock-down not be permitted?
No, really. There are plenty of devices that you can buy that are not locked down. Most of the Nokia line offers non-locked-down phones. There are a decent handful of Android devices. Blackberries are generally available in an unlocked flavor.
Yes, they are more expensive, but that's because you aren't being subsidized by a damned phone company when you get it. It's your phone, and all the features belong to you. The phone company can't turn off your GPS like Verizon likes to. They can't turn off the WiFi like AT&T likes to. You put their SIM in the phone and you use it for what you want to use it for, and pay accordingly.
AT&T seems to welcome unlocked GSM phones (admittedly, their discount for using an unlocked unsubsidized phone is nonexistent, and they'll still force you on a data plan for certain phones whether locked or unlocked). From what I've heard, Sprint not only loves 'em, they offer a discount. There aren't as many unlocked phones available for Verizon, since they are LTE and the rest of the world is pretty much GSM, but it's not like there aren't offerings for unlocked phones.
It's only the fact that we USAians are so used to having our phones subsidized that we've forgotten there is a whole universe of unlocked phones out there that we can use, if we want to get off the mobile carrier teat and buy them ourselves.