This looks like the typical situation of company A trying to fuck over company B, just when company B is about to release a product. Company A won't be wanting to help you out, but simply get you away from company B. They probably won't treat you any better, if not worse.
Huh, what, where? "The same as I'm already doing" can be e.g. developer or architect, but there's nothing saying they're even remotely going for the same customers. If he was going to a direct competitor I imagine he'd say so, because that's a whole different ball of fur.
Not really surprising given how small the quality difference between a half decent (but still cheap) home cinema setup and a real cinema is these days.
To be fair you'd still get a quite a few cinema tickets for a good projector, sound system and in small apartments many don't have the real estate to give you a good cinema feeling. If a cinema ticket got me an instant teleport to and from my seat, I'd be there a lot. But your home cinema is extremely convenient, that's what.
As TV shows, they still live in the pre-globalization world. I'm wondering what cave they live in and wonder if they'll ever come out. I pirate them when they come out and usually buy the season on BluRay when it becomes available. If it hadn't been for the existance of AnyDVD HD and the assurance that if I want I can just rip and use those however I want, I probably wouldn't have bought those either. If I can't get them without DRM, broken DRM is the second best.
Well, all companies care most about their biggest market shares and Windows is a lot bigger than Mac and Linux. But at least they haven't had a corporate interest in making it work better on Windows, it's not like it could possibly get any better. IM and voice is still one of the big social pressures they can use to keep control, I remember having trouble getting and sending files with Kopete and Pidgin on MSN, things were dead slow, disconnected, wouldn't resume and all sorts of crap. Short summary of discussion: "Um.. uh.. let me try something" "Just use MSN" "I can't, I'm on Linux" "Sigh... why can't you use normal software like everybody else??" At least in that sense, Facebook and Google+ are available to everybody and it works the same. But every sort of network that Microsoft can use to keep you in the MS sphere, they will.
Trouble is that most people are clueless to what they're getting, so you can pay a fair price for a 2000 sq ft house and still get crap, except you've spent more. To take a beloved group of workers here on slashdot, is the consultant with the highest price tag the best? And for what it's worth, the amount of hidden problems people take over when they buy old houses is usually larger, not smaller. Sellers will often sell at convienient times, kniwing things will break down very soon but not just yet.
I know, you're years ahead of us on paying off the initial cost. You guys had BBB and the like while we were barely getting started on ADSL, our fiber rollout has really been in the last few years. We're both just rubbing it in for the US guys though.
In Norway 73% of the households have broadband in a country with an average population density equal to Maine. We just passed 10 Mbit/s average and 5 Mbit/s mean this month, here's the statistics, green is average and blue is mean speed. And to anyone who reply that the US is larger, so what? Norway is a tiny corner of Europe, if we can get decent Internet here you can get it in tiny corners of the US.
What I don't get is why every time somebody finds a planet, it makes the front page. We know there are many stars. We know that many stars have orbiting planets.
About 23 years ago - 19 since we didn't really believe the 1988 discovery at first - we didn't know a single damn one. Not how many, not what sizes, not what orbits, nothing. Granted there's 688 of them by now and we don't need every single one hitting the front page, but this is groundbreaking science in progress. We've discovered more in the last 20 years than in the 60 years before that since we found Pluto. We're now looking for Earth-like planets in Earth-like solar systems, IMO that's probably the most interesting thing in astronomy since... well, ever. Stars? Great, but nothing lives on stars. But we do know at least one form of carbon-based life that lives on planets. Or well, one planet. But if you don't like it I'm sure there's sites with more celebrity gossip and less science reporting. As far as I'm concerned this is good old fashioned news for nerds. There's plenty covering the mainstream stuff.
When you take a Sky TV package (from £20 a month) with Sky Talk & Line Rental (£12.25 a month)
So if you already pay at least 32.25 you can add 7.50 for broadband, that's hardly a fair comparison. The lowest you can get broadband only for is 10 + 12.25 = 22.25/month, three times your quoted price.
Except it's not a "criminal" charge, it's a misdemeanor. And they have the way speed tickets are handled for automatic radars as a precedent for punishment without court.
You can't dispute it? I'm quite sure you can here in Norway, it's just that 99.9% don't have any reason to. If you do, then it starts in the court system at the lowest level. This is typical for many minor infractions, you get a fine from the police that you can either pay or dispute. As far as I know there's no requirement that you get a tribunal first, only that you get it by request.
But these prices are out of context for people who do not realise the difference in price levels for Norway. Take those prices, alongside the minimum wage rate and average cost of a Big Mac, and you can see it is not that expensive, relative to other commodities.
True, I'm just not sure how valid the comparison would be. A Big Mac largely reflects local wages and local ingredient prices, while computer equipment is almost to a dollar the same except for taxes and such around the world. There's a lot of expensive equipment in the fiber itself, the boxes and the centrals which would cost the same throughout the world. Other things like actually laying down the cables and running the company itself follows local wages, so I suppose it would be somewhat cheaper but it probably wouldn't be half the price in a country with half the price level. Still, I was rather surprised to hear he had broadband for $15 (10 GBP), looking online most offers I found was around $25 (17 GBP) which is more reasonable with respect to our and GB price levels.
Around here you can't get Internet for $15/month. About $40/month is common for a slow DSL line, like 2/0.5 Mbit or so. Decently speedy lines are $60-80, with fiber taking another premium on top of that.
Wikipedia? Nice, but hardly required. Granted, Norway is really high up there on online banking but I'd go nuts just paying bills. I had to fix some complicated paperwork so instead of a lot of back and forth and verified copies and whatnot I figured I'd just drop by the bank. For one, almost all the local branches are gone because just do it online. You can find ATMs to take money out and almost all have their paycheck electronically deposited, but to find an actual cashier where you can pay a bill is practically gone. When I finally dug one up, the queue was forever, the clientel left who didn't pay their bills online dubious and the fees asoociated with it outragous. Expect paying anywhere between $5 and $8 in fees per bill you pay manually. Anything and everything about it screams "Please don't come here, go online and do it". I suppose you could find a web cafe as your "bank", but with everyone having Internet at home and on their phones they're going the way of the payphone too. I'd probably end up doing my banking at McDonalds in exchange for a burger, how fucked up is that? No Internet is like banning you from streets because streets have stores and you were caught shoplifting in one of them. Not that copyright infringement is equal to stealing in any case. The only thing I hope is that this is some weird French thing that hopefully won't spread anywhere else.
Yes, it's about 1% of the population but about 2.5% of all households. Pretty much everyone will know someone, friends or family who has gotten such a notice. I would guess those that are first hit are those renting out apartments, typically the internet subscription is in the name of the one renting out while the tenants are doing the infringing. That should quickly escalate to a debate where the person disconnected is not the "bad guy" nor are most of the tenants. My prediction is that this will turn into a PR mess soon.
Not sure how this article which was on slashdot a few days ago arrived at 37% being due to Java JRE exploits, 32% acrobat and 16% flash exploits, but then people must be a lot more lazy updating their JRE than anything else...
One challenger has picked up the gauntlet. But we're not really interested in stepping up to the challenge. They'll go uncontested, I'm sure.
From the linked page:
After that, a manned lunar landing might be possible in 2025â"2030.
So vague predictions that maybe they will in 15-20 years. That is what, like two Apollo programs in the future? I wouldn't call that picking it up, maybe they've been eyeing it a bit but it's very far from a Kennedy-style commitment.
I have 60/60 Mbit fiber for about $100/month here in Norway. All it'd take to have 400/400 Mbit fiber is one phone call and about $1000/month. Some operators in the chain even say up to 1000/1000 Mbit, call us for pricing. No caps and I've had ~6 MB/s both downloading and uploading. Before with cable and DSL it was always how far are you from the central, how clogged are our lines. With fiber it's only a matter of how much you want to pay, really. After all they have to keep some pretty fat pipes to the backbone for that line to be useful, that's what costs money now.
The unfortunate truth is that I've met very many such hard-working men and women, but their work is never going to be more than a footnote in history because ultimately they were making a product that never made more than a footnote. It can be code that is the true opposite of thedailywtf, code that is well designed, performs great, is robust, reliable, maintainable, scalable and every other quality you can think of but one - it's not really doing anything important for the users or two customers need it and the rest of the world doesn't. Even if we assume there's an extended circle around Jobs predicting what users will want, it's microscopic compared to the company as a whole and ultimately he was taking the decisions. The kind of decisions that aren't based in fact, that you can't prove is right or wrong at least not until years later. And he was for the most part right.
It comes down to this. Apple is Apple because of Steve Jobs. If he hadn't been there the whole company could very well have been driven into the ground by one or more clueless CEOs and all those hard-working people would have to find some other place to be hard-working. And I'm sure they'd do well as good people are hard to find, but engineers can't stop a company from making products people don't want while it is possible to fix the quality of a product people do want. Hell, if you've successfully predicted the future the chances are your product is better than anything else on the market anyway, giving you a great head start on every one. Now, hopefully the circle around Jobs is strong enough to take over, but I don't know. It's one thing to say you will predict what your customers will want, it's another thing to actually do it. I'm not sure it can be taught.
The space program was killed because both superpowers now felt they'd done enough huffing and puffing to prove both their rocket programs were good enough to litter each other with ICBMs. The US was done one-upping the Soviet Union over Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and the Soviets weren't ready for a race to Mars. Hell, they never even went to the moon. Of course you could say they should have continued for science and showing off their technological superiority even more, but all the other reasons went away. Even if the US dropped the glove nobody's picked it up to put another man on the moon since.
Why yes, if you're one parent or one teacher who has seen the educational system of the country go to shit, then it's obviously all of it is your fault. And nobody has ever had to deal with these people after they left school and would have first hand experience without being neither parent nor teacher. I can't quite make up my mind if troll or retard best describes you, but somebody failed on your education...
Well, at least Kissinger was part of the Paris Peace Accords and Arafat the Oslo Accords, both treaties that were signed then ignored. I honestly don't know what Obama did for his, except trying to pull out of some wars his country already was in. But yes, for one they tend to overlook past villainy and they award it way prematurely to impose the peace rather than award the peace after the fact. That tends to fail spectacularly when the parties aren't actually ready to make peace and all you're left with is a prize to a villain for a betrayed peace agreement. And to give it to a sitting president, fuck what if the US had to go to war these last couple years? Should he bring his peace prize to the war room for perfect irony? I'm a Norwegian but that committee doesn't represent anyone but the washed up politicians on it.
Yes. The colder air than usual in the stratosphere is caused by the fact that greenhouse gases insulate so much that less heat escape to space. Common sense actually.
You have a very optimistic understanding of what common sense is. Most people don't seem to understand that local and regional climate variations can be a lot bigger than global variations. Take for example my country of Norway, if I compare us to say Siberia or Alaska we probably have 3-4C warmer climate because of the Gulf Stream, while the estimates on global warming are something like 0.8C in the last 100 years. If global warming fucks up that, our country and most of Northern Europe could end up being a colder place even if the world in total warms up. Also precipitation will change around the world, which leads to huge changes. For example one I thing I heard was that warmer poles means more humid air and more snowfall, weighing up for increased melting. But the world has still gotten warmer as a whole. There's lots of things like that where people point to a local phenomenon and say see, global warming is false. That's roughly as far as common sense goes, I'm afraid.
That's some pretty serious denial you got going on there.
When it comes to the desktop and desktop software, there's plenty denial going around. Desktop Linux is stable at <1%, Firefox use is in decline and OpenOffice I don't know any good numbers on but in the Steam software survey MS Office is at 57.26% and OpenOffice at 14.63%, no idea if that includes LibreOffice or not. And at all the large companies I've been at as a consultant I've seen thousands of MS Office desktops and not a single place with OpenOffice installed. So there's some popular stuff running on top of a Linux/BSD kernel like Android, OS X and various set top boxes - you can hardly call Android open anymore - but OSS is hardly taking over the world. It's not going away either, but it remains marginal in most areas. Now for all sorts of back-end stuff where you just need a computing box, servers, HPC, supercomputers, rendering farms and so on sure. As long as you can hide it in a closet and users don't need to see it.
Long story short, people are worse at recognizing value reductions than cost increases. That's why in stores food comes in smaller and smaller packages until a new "economy size" package is introduced. That is why politicians create tons of product and service taxes rather than increase the income tax. They'd rather take resale value out of the game than increase prices and people will protest less.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like the typical situation of company A trying to fuck over company B, just when company B is about to release a product. Company A won't be wanting to help you out, but simply get you away from company B. They probably won't treat you any better, if not worse.
Huh, what, where? "The same as I'm already doing" can be e.g. developer or architect, but there's nothing saying they're even remotely going for the same customers. If he was going to a direct competitor I imagine he'd say so, because that's a whole different ball of fur.
Not really surprising given how small the quality difference between a half decent (but still cheap) home cinema setup and a real cinema is these days.
To be fair you'd still get a quite a few cinema tickets for a good projector, sound system and in small apartments many don't have the real estate to give you a good cinema feeling. If a cinema ticket got me an instant teleport to and from my seat, I'd be there a lot. But your home cinema is extremely convenient, that's what.
As TV shows, they still live in the pre-globalization world. I'm wondering what cave they live in and wonder if they'll ever come out. I pirate them when they come out and usually buy the season on BluRay when it becomes available. If it hadn't been for the existance of AnyDVD HD and the assurance that if I want I can just rip and use those however I want, I probably wouldn't have bought those either. If I can't get them without DRM, broken DRM is the second best.
Well, all companies care most about their biggest market shares and Windows is a lot bigger than Mac and Linux. But at least they haven't had a corporate interest in making it work better on Windows, it's not like it could possibly get any better. IM and voice is still one of the big social pressures they can use to keep control, I remember having trouble getting and sending files with Kopete and Pidgin on MSN, things were dead slow, disconnected, wouldn't resume and all sorts of crap. Short summary of discussion: "Um.. uh.. let me try something" "Just use MSN" "I can't, I'm on Linux" "Sigh... why can't you use normal software like everybody else??" At least in that sense, Facebook and Google+ are available to everybody and it works the same. But every sort of network that Microsoft can use to keep you in the MS sphere, they will.
Trouble is that most people are clueless to what they're getting, so you can pay a fair price for a 2000 sq ft house and still get crap, except you've spent more. To take a beloved group of workers here on slashdot, is the consultant with the highest price tag the best? And for what it's worth, the amount of hidden problems people take over when they buy old houses is usually larger, not smaller. Sellers will often sell at convienient times, kniwing things will break down very soon but not just yet.
I know, you're years ahead of us on paying off the initial cost. You guys had BBB and the like while we were barely getting started on ADSL, our fiber rollout has really been in the last few years. We're both just rubbing it in for the US guys though.
In Norway 73% of the households have broadband in a country with an average population density equal to Maine. We just passed 10 Mbit/s average and 5 Mbit/s mean this month, here's the statistics, green is average and blue is mean speed. And to anyone who reply that the US is larger, so what? Norway is a tiny corner of Europe, if we can get decent Internet here you can get it in tiny corners of the US.
What I don't get is why every time somebody finds a planet, it makes the front page. We know there are many stars. We know that many stars have orbiting planets.
About 23 years ago - 19 since we didn't really believe the 1988 discovery at first - we didn't know a single damn one. Not how many, not what sizes, not what orbits, nothing. Granted there's 688 of them by now and we don't need every single one hitting the front page, but this is groundbreaking science in progress. We've discovered more in the last 20 years than in the 60 years before that since we found Pluto. We're now looking for Earth-like planets in Earth-like solar systems, IMO that's probably the most interesting thing in astronomy since... well, ever. Stars? Great, but nothing lives on stars. But we do know at least one form of carbon-based life that lives on planets. Or well, one planet. But if you don't like it I'm sure there's sites with more celebrity gossip and less science reporting. As far as I'm concerned this is good old fashioned news for nerds. There's plenty covering the mainstream stuff.
SKy BB - 7.50 per month for totally unlimited use
And the small print:
When you take a Sky TV package (from £20 a month)
with Sky Talk & Line Rental (£12.25 a month)
So if you already pay at least 32.25 you can add 7.50 for broadband, that's hardly a fair comparison. The lowest you can get broadband only for is 10 + 12.25 = 22.25/month, three times your quoted price.
Except it's not a "criminal" charge, it's a misdemeanor. And they have the way speed tickets are handled for automatic radars as a precedent for punishment without court.
You can't dispute it? I'm quite sure you can here in Norway, it's just that 99.9% don't have any reason to. If you do, then it starts in the court system at the lowest level. This is typical for many minor infractions, you get a fine from the police that you can either pay or dispute. As far as I know there's no requirement that you get a tribunal first, only that you get it by request.
But these prices are out of context for people who do not realise the difference in price levels for Norway. Take those prices, alongside the minimum wage rate and average cost of a Big Mac, and you can see it is not that expensive, relative to other commodities.
True, I'm just not sure how valid the comparison would be. A Big Mac largely reflects local wages and local ingredient prices, while computer equipment is almost to a dollar the same except for taxes and such around the world. There's a lot of expensive equipment in the fiber itself, the boxes and the centrals which would cost the same throughout the world. Other things like actually laying down the cables and running the company itself follows local wages, so I suppose it would be somewhat cheaper but it probably wouldn't be half the price in a country with half the price level. Still, I was rather surprised to hear he had broadband for $15 (10 GBP), looking online most offers I found was around $25 (17 GBP) which is more reasonable with respect to our and GB price levels.
Around here you can't get Internet for $15/month. About $40/month is common for a slow DSL line, like 2/0.5 Mbit or so. Decently speedy lines are $60-80, with fiber taking another premium on top of that.
Wikipedia? Nice, but hardly required. Granted, Norway is really high up there on online banking but I'd go nuts just paying bills. I had to fix some complicated paperwork so instead of a lot of back and forth and verified copies and whatnot I figured I'd just drop by the bank. For one, almost all the local branches are gone because just do it online. You can find ATMs to take money out and almost all have their paycheck electronically deposited, but to find an actual cashier where you can pay a bill is practically gone. When I finally dug one up, the queue was forever, the clientel left who didn't pay their bills online dubious and the fees asoociated with it outragous. Expect paying anywhere between $5 and $8 in fees per bill you pay manually. Anything and everything about it screams "Please don't come here, go online and do it". I suppose you could find a web cafe as your "bank", but with everyone having Internet at home and on their phones they're going the way of the payphone too. I'd probably end up doing my banking at McDonalds in exchange for a burger, how fucked up is that? No Internet is like banning you from streets because streets have stores and you were caught shoplifting in one of them. Not that copyright infringement is equal to stealing in any case. The only thing I hope is that this is some weird French thing that hopefully won't spread anywhere else.
Yep, slashcode doesn't like it. You can use < and > for < and > respectively though.
Yes, it's about 1% of the population but about 2.5% of all households. Pretty much everyone will know someone, friends or family who has gotten such a notice. I would guess those that are first hit are those renting out apartments, typically the internet subscription is in the name of the one renting out while the tenants are doing the infringing. That should quickly escalate to a debate where the person disconnected is not the "bad guy" nor are most of the tenants. My prediction is that this will turn into a PR mess soon.
Not sure how this article which was on slashdot a few days ago arrived at 37% being due to Java JRE exploits, 32% acrobat and 16% flash exploits, but then people must be a lot more lazy updating their JRE than anything else...
One challenger has picked up the gauntlet. But we're not really interested in stepping up to the challenge. They'll go uncontested, I'm sure.
From the linked page:
After that, a manned lunar landing might be possible in 2025â"2030.
So vague predictions that maybe they will in 15-20 years. That is what, like two Apollo programs in the future? I wouldn't call that picking it up, maybe they've been eyeing it a bit but it's very far from a Kennedy-style commitment.
I have 60/60 Mbit fiber for about $100/month here in Norway. All it'd take to have 400/400 Mbit fiber is one phone call and about $1000/month. Some operators in the chain even say up to 1000/1000 Mbit, call us for pricing. No caps and I've had ~6 MB/s both downloading and uploading. Before with cable and DSL it was always how far are you from the central, how clogged are our lines. With fiber it's only a matter of how much you want to pay, really. After all they have to keep some pretty fat pipes to the backbone for that line to be useful, that's what costs money now.
The unfortunate truth is that I've met very many such hard-working men and women, but their work is never going to be more than a footnote in history because ultimately they were making a product that never made more than a footnote. It can be code that is the true opposite of thedailywtf, code that is well designed, performs great, is robust, reliable, maintainable, scalable and every other quality you can think of but one - it's not really doing anything important for the users or two customers need it and the rest of the world doesn't. Even if we assume there's an extended circle around Jobs predicting what users will want, it's microscopic compared to the company as a whole and ultimately he was taking the decisions. The kind of decisions that aren't based in fact, that you can't prove is right or wrong at least not until years later. And he was for the most part right.
It comes down to this. Apple is Apple because of Steve Jobs. If he hadn't been there the whole company could very well have been driven into the ground by one or more clueless CEOs and all those hard-working people would have to find some other place to be hard-working. And I'm sure they'd do well as good people are hard to find, but engineers can't stop a company from making products people don't want while it is possible to fix the quality of a product people do want. Hell, if you've successfully predicted the future the chances are your product is better than anything else on the market anyway, giving you a great head start on every one. Now, hopefully the circle around Jobs is strong enough to take over, but I don't know. It's one thing to say you will predict what your customers will want, it's another thing to actually do it. I'm not sure it can be taught.
The space program was killed because both superpowers now felt they'd done enough huffing and puffing to prove both their rocket programs were good enough to litter each other with ICBMs. The US was done one-upping the Soviet Union over Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and the Soviets weren't ready for a race to Mars. Hell, they never even went to the moon. Of course you could say they should have continued for science and showing off their technological superiority even more, but all the other reasons went away. Even if the US dropped the glove nobody's picked it up to put another man on the moon since.
Why yes, if you're one parent or one teacher who has seen the educational system of the country go to shit, then it's obviously all of it is your fault. And nobody has ever had to deal with these people after they left school and would have first hand experience without being neither parent nor teacher. I can't quite make up my mind if troll or retard best describes you, but somebody failed on your education...
Well, at least Kissinger was part of the Paris Peace Accords and Arafat the Oslo Accords, both treaties that were signed then ignored. I honestly don't know what Obama did for his, except trying to pull out of some wars his country already was in. But yes, for one they tend to overlook past villainy and they award it way prematurely to impose the peace rather than award the peace after the fact. That tends to fail spectacularly when the parties aren't actually ready to make peace and all you're left with is a prize to a villain for a betrayed peace agreement. And to give it to a sitting president, fuck what if the US had to go to war these last couple years? Should he bring his peace prize to the war room for perfect irony? I'm a Norwegian but that committee doesn't represent anyone but the washed up politicians on it.
This must not be the same committee that decides who gets a Peace prize, you know, like in 2009.
You know, like, maybe it isn't.
Yes. The colder air than usual in the stratosphere is caused by the fact that greenhouse gases insulate so much that less heat escape to space. Common sense actually.
You have a very optimistic understanding of what common sense is. Most people don't seem to understand that local and regional climate variations can be a lot bigger than global variations. Take for example my country of Norway, if I compare us to say Siberia or Alaska we probably have 3-4C warmer climate because of the Gulf Stream, while the estimates on global warming are something like 0.8C in the last 100 years. If global warming fucks up that, our country and most of Northern Europe could end up being a colder place even if the world in total warms up. Also precipitation will change around the world, which leads to huge changes. For example one I thing I heard was that warmer poles means more humid air and more snowfall, weighing up for increased melting. But the world has still gotten warmer as a whole. There's lots of things like that where people point to a local phenomenon and say see, global warming is false. That's roughly as far as common sense goes, I'm afraid.
Why were you wrong? (...) I think that, when describing a dead plugin, Shockwave pretty much is the definition.
You fail at reading comprehension:
I never really got on with flash and figured it wasn't long until that died too as it couldn't do half the things that Shockwave could.
He thought flash would die right after shockwave, and it didn't.
That's some pretty serious denial you got going on there.
When it comes to the desktop and desktop software, there's plenty denial going around. Desktop Linux is stable at <1%, Firefox use is in decline and OpenOffice I don't know any good numbers on but in the Steam software survey MS Office is at 57.26% and OpenOffice at 14.63%, no idea if that includes LibreOffice or not. And at all the large companies I've been at as a consultant I've seen thousands of MS Office desktops and not a single place with OpenOffice installed. So there's some popular stuff running on top of a Linux/BSD kernel like Android, OS X and various set top boxes - you can hardly call Android open anymore - but OSS is hardly taking over the world. It's not going away either, but it remains marginal in most areas. Now for all sorts of back-end stuff where you just need a computing box, servers, HPC, supercomputers, rendering farms and so on sure. As long as you can hide it in a closet and users don't need to see it.
Long story short, people are worse at recognizing value reductions than cost increases. That's why in stores food comes in smaller and smaller packages until a new "economy size" package is introduced. That is why politicians create tons of product and service taxes rather than increase the income tax. They'd rather take resale value out of the game than increase prices and people will protest less.