Come talk to me when you add "takes 5 minutes to set up", "entire cost subsidized by your sattelite TV provider for adding a year to your contract", and "can record the actual digital feed without re-encoding" to your list of compelling reasons.
Yes it is. The entire delivery of a message to you from the sender's perspective is push. If you choose to use a pull style system to read your mail, such as POP3, that is your choice, and not required in any way. Technically, nothing is stoping you from doing what thousands of users have been doing for decades and just opening the mailspool with a client that is running on the server, or having your client machine be the server.
Sure, a pull based approach to reading mail may be what makes firewalls a non-issue, but that's internal to your network and doesn't impose any costs on the content generator. In the context of this discussion, pull based e-mail would be like you logging into the server of everybody who may want to send you e-mail and checking to see if they have a message for you.
Makes you think? Did you even read what the other guy said?
I have DirecTV with Tivo and I don't have a home phone at all. Vonage or otherwise. It works fine. Setting it up involved plugging it in, inserting my access card, and telling DirecTV I had a new receiver. It took less than 5 minutes. I think that this:
And out of the numbers of TiVo users, how many are tech-savvy enough to set up TiVo on analog alone?
My head is spinning. We're back where we started. Why don't you go back to the begining of the thread and read it again. This is a discussion about the terms of a standard contract with a photographer. Since you've just figured that out now, I feel silly for having argued with you. For me, this thread is over.
Full disclosure. I'm (usually) a contract programmer.
Contracts without a work-for-hire clause are rare. They are the exception, not the rule. Out of the dozen or so device drivers and applications I've written for clients, I own the rights to only one of them.
Architecture - Furniture design
I don't know enough to comment on these...
Musicians, Composers
Again, the artist retaining their copyright is the exception, not the rule, for commissioned works. The publisher typically acquires the copyright as part of the contract.
the only exception is if the work falls under the 'work for hire' definitions.
This is a convienient exception for you to make when we're explicitly talking about work for hire.
Oh, and I'd love to find a publishing scientist that isn't an employee somewhere. Consultant scientist just doesn't make sense.
A publiching scientist usually works for a university. Regardless, the journal publisher becomes the copyright holder, not the employer.
Only if the contract says so (demands an assignment of rights) or if you're a salaried employee. This is not usually the case.
Wrong. This is almost always the case. It doesn't matter if you're a contractor instead of an employee, if the buyer can't get the rights from you they'll go work with somebody else. Please feel free to give examples to the contrary. What list of fields can you come up with where the producer keeps the copyright and not the entity who commissions the work?
Like I've said in other posts, I'm not against giving more rights to the client as long as I feel rightly compensated for those rights, what I don't want is to give up all my rights. I think the point is unfairly argued, you shouldn't demand copyright from the photographer but instead be able to get negotiate extended usage rights while the photographer maintains the copyright.
Why should your busniess be special compared to every other creative field? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
you want to be able to make a copy of it 25 years from now without coming back to me and paying for me to make you a copy
The issue isn't paying you. I would have no problem paying you. This isn't about money. The problem is when you can't be found. Let's face it, you and your business aren't going to be around forever. Your copyright will outlast you, and your clients. Perhaps if copyrights were only 20 years or so this would be a different story.
I'm not trying to be an asshole about it.
Neither am I. All I'm saying is that the way you do business is a luxury afforded only to photographers.
If you write software for someone, lets say you do it in Visual Studio, or IdeaJ, or WebShpere, are you required to give them a copy of that so that they can go in and make changes to the code as easily as you did?
That's rediculous. That's like asking if you give your customers access to your darkroom. When you write custom code the customer gets it, and exclusive rights to it, in almost every case. Every software contracting job I've worked on has had a boilerplate work-for-hire form that I had to sign all my copyrights away on.
The product is the prints, the negatives are just a way to get there.
If you ask me, the product is the photographs, not the prints... But I guess that's why I didn't hire somebody like you to take the pictures at my wedding. Hell, I didn't even get any prints, though I do have 20Gb of beautifully retouched high-resoulution digital images I could easily make prints from.
Why do I have to change how I run my business to make you happy if I can find enough customers that appreciate the time and effort I put into my work?
You shouldn't. However I think the only reason you can find enough customers to agree with your terms is that there is a general lack of understanding about how work for hire is generally handled, and that until recently there weren't a lot of options; you just couldn't find a photographer that would transfer rights. Now that copyrights are becoming better understood, and more photographers are willing to part with the reproduction rights that will likely start to change. This question being posted on Slashdot is an example of that. I do, however, think your original explanation of why was not the primary reason, if it's the reason at all. Clearly you do it because it's in your business interests. Reality, and your most recent response, is at odds with your initial explanation. Judging by this comment though:
Even when I do that, people still come back to me to make reprints either because they like the quality of my prints, I'm sometimes cheaper than comparable quality printing or they don't want some other person to see them naked.
I wonder if it would actually have much of an impact on your business at all either way.
Secondly, you see these as photos of yourselves. I don't see it that way. I see it as my photo of you, or my photo that you happen to be in and sometimes even just my photo and you completely dissapear in it and all i see is my work. I guess it depends on the photographer. What I do is try and capture you as I see you. While I'm a fairly cynical and sarcastic jerk I do have a love of people and emotions and try and catch people through the rose colored glasses that sometimes fall on my head.
You're not buying a picture of yourself, you're buying how I saw you, wanted to see you for that moment.
That's lovely. You can see it however you want, the fact of the matter is you were hired for the end result, and in *every other for-hire situation*, the result is what the customer owns. You said it yourself; the customer is buying your work. It should be theirs. You poured your soul into it, and then you sold it to them.
It's a good thing you're an artist, because the rules would be different if you produced any other type of product, regardless of how much of yourself you put into it.
I'm not saying you shouldn't cover your costs. Charge what you need to, or even what you can get away with...
You're right about one thing though. There are plenty of photographers out there that understand the way the rest of the world works. The people who hire a photographer who keeps the copyrights are the people who don't understand what they're getting. Anybody else would have no trouble finding a way to get the rights to their images.
As for this:
Do you really need 1000 negs of your wedding?
In 50 years when you're dead, and your customer wants a fresh set of prints from their wedding, if they have the negatives they're fine. If they don't, the best they can do is get high res photocopies of whatever prints they happen to have. As somebody who loves their work, I'm sure you know what the quality difference there is. Chances are, you're never going to do anything with those images again (unless your real reasoning is gouging your customers on reproductions, which is counter to what you're claiming). You'll have other work of subject matter you actually care about that you can enjoy and the rest of your work that you did for-hire will be rotting away somewhere instead of being appreciated by the only people that actually care about it. Is that the best way to treat something you claim is very personal to you?
First of all, I don't see any references backing up your claim that the only reason that GM wouldn't sell such a car is that they couldn't turn a profit on it. The profit motive is not the only factor in corporate beauracracies, but that is a whole other argument altogether.
There are millions of outstanding shares and their shareholders watching GM to make sure they maintain a profit focus. You need only look up their quote on your favorite finance site and read the news for numerous references to their profit focus. I can't say I can prove they have no other motives but I find the idea that they may in this situation dubious for many reasons especially since:
probable reason that GM wouldn't produce and sell such a car (in the short term), is that they have X billion dollars invested in current capital infrastructure, and producing a sporty sedan with 100 mpg would completely cannibalise their current market, thus requiring them to write off said X billion dollars
It's still a profit motive if you decide that something will not be as profitable as your existing product line when you take capital depreciation into account. In that situation, one of two things would happen...
1. The amazing new technology will be brought to market after the current generation becomes obsolete.
2. The cost savings and profit opportunities will be such that a competitor will emerge and force the current generation of technology to become obsolete sooner.
There is a chance that said competitor could be bought, or suppressed through patent law as frequently happens in the drug industry, but such tactics only keep the new technology off the market for a limited time. In an industry where you wouldn't replace all of the existing product in a decade, a 10-20 year delay is not that big of a deal. Dispite what all of the environmental groups would have you believe, anything we can do in 10-20 years is a drop in the bucket in a geological time frame, so it's not like it makes that big of a difference. The real question should be, if the protections that will delay the introduction of a new-technology vehicle didn't exist, would a company with the resources of GM have existed, or spent the money to develop the technology when they did, or would we have had to wait 20 years for it to even be invented?
How much did they cost to build? I believe everything in your summary there except for this:
All of these cars were much simpler to manufacture than conventional vehicles, which offset the cost of the advanced materials used to make them
The only reason GM wouldn't sell such a car is if they couldn't turn a profit on it. Since you're telling people to do research (with some totaly uncalled for obscenity thrown in), why don't you provide some references to back that claim up?
NAFTA reduces the duties on items shipped across the border between certain types of parties, but it doesn't reduce the paperwork... In fact, it adds a form.
Because then he couldn't background an IRC client and DCC bot, or run the auto-mudding script he's planning, or have a coordination point for the new windows worm he's written.
Yes and there are other places that cut police and then gang violence goes up. Like my neighborhood. They also wanted to cut the fire department in my neighborhood. Yeah, real smart thing to do in a neighborhood, made entirely of WOOD houses near oily eucliptis trees. Light a match their and the whole neighborhood goes!
In what way does this has something to do whi my comment about judging situations in context instead of jumping to conclusions without knowing the facts?
Have you ever read a public meeting agenda and attended a public meeting? Have you meet your local officials and discussed your issues with how they are working on things?
Yes. This is how I am able to make decisions in context. Read my comment again. You seem to be confused about what I was saying.
A changing system never runs; A running system never changes.
Ideally, this means you would take the time to understand every update to your system, and install only those that were critical in order to maximize stability. Automatic updates are the other extreme and, if you ask me, never a good idea.
If you are responsible for numerous machines, perhaps automated updates are right for you, but you should maintain control. Learn about the update, and personally send out the updates you deem important and know to be compatible to your client's machines. Letting a bunch of individual entities with no knowledge of each other all have free reign over a machine is never a good idea, no matter how well intentioned all the parties involved may be.
Don't forget that politics is what cuts our police force, closes our schools...
You make that statement like these things could never be the right decision... I could think of a few towns mear me that could use a police force reduction... Do you really need 300 cops in a town with essentially zero non-traffic related crimes? Similarly, school consolodation could make sense for a variety of reasons depending on the community.
Why don't you try making decisions based on facts instead of rhetoric and feeling. Don't make assumptions about situations that may or may not even exist. There's a word for making up your mind about what should and shouldn't be done out of context: stupid.
Linux is essentially architected the same way a modern mainframe O/S are architected. You have a reasonable user interface that is connected to a terrible one via pushrods.
That is the biggest pile of misunderstanding and innaccuracy I've heard this week.
Do you have some crazy notion that graphical applications on Linux all manipulate commandline equivalents behind the scenes? That's just not the case. A graphical application on Linux is pushing all the same buttons and manipulating all the same data behind the scenes as the windows version, just with different APIs. There's no fundamental difference between the way a database application, a spreadsheet, or a word processor works between the two systems, and there's certainly no "work getting done by cruft underneath".
Perhaps you were only speaking of configuration? Well guess what. For the most part you're still wrong. Interface and application configuration differs between the two only in encapsulation and storage methods. Arguably, both methods have advantages, but neither of them are really "cruft".
From a pure architecture perspective the Windows approach is the right one, there is much less to go wrong.
Once again, bullshit. In fact there's so much *more* that can go wrong, since the registry model allows for the possiblilty of corruption of all system configuration data through one rogue application, and the essential lack of separation between administrative permissions and the default user in most installations allows for endless and easy methods of destroying your system... either by accident or through the introduction of malicious code.
but if something does go wrong you have a lot more visibility into the problem and it is more likely that you can fix it - if you know what you are doing.
Now you're just being funny... That was sarcasm, right? You have visibility into how windows works behind the scenes? There's detailed logs? You can debug individual components independant of the whole system? You can look at the source to see what's going on, were you so inclined?
My experience has been that people who have never used windows before have an even easier time taking to linux distributions than people who used to use windows. Instead of adapting your ways, you're learning fresh...
This may be different with the recent move to have mainstream distros look and (ugh) act more like windows, but I doubt it. Before there was windows people managed to learn how to use computers. People can be pretty smart when they want to be.
Anybody sane proposes a flat tax with a standard deduction. That deduction should reflect your cost of living. This makes it so the problem you describe is minimised. If the tax is 15%, and the deduction is $15,000, the person who makes $20,000 pays only $750, while the person that makes $2,000,000 pays $297,750.
Most proposals I've seen have a flat deduction, but I'd like to see a geographically based deduction. In other words, if you live in an expensive area of the country your dedution would be higher (you'd have to make more money in order to be considered "rich"). This would combat sprawl and poverty in urban areas.
The top 1% of wealth owners had 40% of the wealth, but paid only 35% of the income tax burden?
What the hell does that have to do with anything? This is an income tax, remember? It's a tax on how much you earn not how much you own. Stop diluting the argument with irrelavant statistics.
whatever Apple used to prevent this type of thing)
If I were them, what I'd do is have the counter lag a random amount of time between 45 minutes and an hour. Since they appear to be selling between 100 and 200 songs a minute They'd get an extra 10000 song sales or so out of the promotion, and they'd make it incredibly difficult to win through prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
Come talk to me when you add "takes 5 minutes to set up", "entire cost subsidized by your sattelite TV provider for adding a year to your contract", and "can record the actual digital feed without re-encoding" to your list of compelling reasons.
DIY units just can't compete yet.
Email isn't a push system...
Yes it is. The entire delivery of a message to you from the sender's perspective is push. If you choose to use a pull style system to read your mail, such as POP3, that is your choice, and not required in any way. Technically, nothing is stoping you from doing what thousands of users have been doing for decades and just opening the mailspool with a client that is running on the server, or having your client machine be the server.
Sure, a pull based approach to reading mail may be what makes firewalls a non-issue, but that's internal to your network and doesn't impose any costs on the content generator. In the context of this discussion, pull based e-mail would be like you logging into the server of everybody who may want to send you e-mail and checking to see if they have a message for you.
Too many firewalls in todays world for "push" anything to work.
Which explains why e-mail doesn't work.
Makes you think? Did you even read what the other guy said?
I have DirecTV with Tivo and I don't have a home phone at all. Vonage or otherwise. It works fine. Setting it up involved plugging it in, inserting my access card, and telling DirecTV I had a new receiver. It took less than 5 minutes. I think that this:
And out of the numbers of TiVo users, how many are tech-savvy enough to set up TiVo on analog alone?
is slightly uncalled for.
My head is spinning. We're back where we started. Why don't you go back to the begining of the thread and read it again. This is a discussion about the terms of a standard contract with a photographer. Since you've just figured that out now, I feel silly for having argued with you. For me, this thread is over.
I know what it means... What I'm saying is that contract boilerplate in the the fields I listed includes work-for-hire as a default term.
Photography
Given. This is what we were discussing.
Contract programming
Full disclosure. I'm (usually) a contract programmer.
Contracts without a work-for-hire clause are rare. They are the exception, not the rule. Out of the dozen or so device drivers and applications I've written for clients, I own the rights to only one of them.
Architecture - Furniture design
I don't know enough to comment on these...
Musicians, Composers
Again, the artist retaining their copyright is the exception, not the rule, for commissioned works. The publisher typically acquires the copyright as part of the contract.
the only exception is if the work falls under the 'work for hire' definitions.
This is a convienient exception for you to make when we're explicitly talking about work for hire.
Oh, and I'd love to find a publishing scientist that isn't an employee somewhere. Consultant scientist just doesn't make sense.
A publiching scientist usually works for a university. Regardless, the journal publisher becomes the copyright holder, not the employer.
Only if the contract says so (demands an assignment of rights) or if you're a salaried employee. This is not usually the case.
Wrong. This is almost always the case. It doesn't matter if you're a contractor instead of an employee, if the buyer can't get the rights from you they'll go work with somebody else. Please feel free to give examples to the contrary. What list of fields can you come up with where the producer keeps the copyright and not the entity who commissions the work?
Recording Musicians
Graphic artists
Jounalists
(most) Authors
Documentation writers
Programmers
Publishing scientists
In all these fields you almost always sell your copyright when you do work for hire. It's not a matter of thinking it is, it *actually* is that way.
Like I've said in other posts, I'm not against giving more rights to the client as long as I feel rightly compensated for those rights, what I don't want is to give up all my rights. I think the point is unfairly argued, you shouldn't demand copyright from the photographer but instead be able to get negotiate extended usage rights while the photographer maintains the copyright.
Why should your busniess be special compared to every other creative field? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
you want to be able to make a copy of it 25 years from now without coming back to me and paying for me to make you a copy
The issue isn't paying you. I would have no problem paying you. This isn't about money. The problem is when you can't be found. Let's face it, you and your business aren't going to be around forever. Your copyright will outlast you, and your clients. Perhaps if copyrights were only 20 years or so this would be a different story.
I'm not trying to be an asshole about it.
Neither am I. All I'm saying is that the way you do business is a luxury afforded only to photographers.
If you write software for someone, lets say you do it in Visual Studio, or IdeaJ, or WebShpere, are you required to give them a copy of that so that they can go in and make changes to the code as easily as you did?
That's rediculous. That's like asking if you give your customers access to your darkroom. When you write custom code the customer gets it, and exclusive rights to it, in almost every case. Every software contracting job I've worked on has had a boilerplate work-for-hire form that I had to sign all my copyrights away on.
The product is the prints, the negatives are just a way to get there.
If you ask me, the product is the photographs, not the prints... But I guess that's why I didn't hire somebody like you to take the pictures at my wedding. Hell, I didn't even get any prints, though I do have 20Gb of beautifully retouched high-resoulution digital images I could easily make prints from.
Why do I have to change how I run my business to make you happy if I can find enough customers that appreciate the time and effort I put into my work?
You shouldn't. However I think the only reason you can find enough customers to agree with your terms is that there is a general lack of understanding about how work for hire is generally handled, and that until recently there weren't a lot of options; you just couldn't find a photographer that would transfer rights. Now that copyrights are becoming better understood, and more photographers are willing to part with the reproduction rights that will likely start to change. This question being posted on Slashdot is an example of that. I do, however, think your original explanation of why was not the primary reason, if it's the reason at all. Clearly you do it because it's in your business interests. Reality, and your most recent response, is at odds with your initial explanation. Judging by this comment though:
Even when I do that, people still come back to me to make reprints either because they like the quality of my prints, I'm sometimes cheaper than comparable quality printing or they don't want some other person to see them naked.
I wonder if it would actually have much of an impact on your business at all either way.
Secondly, you see these as photos of yourselves. I don't see it that way. I see it as my photo of you, or my photo that you happen to be in and sometimes even just my photo and you completely dissapear in it and all i see is my work. I guess it depends on the photographer. What I do is try and capture you as I see you. While I'm a fairly cynical and sarcastic jerk I do have a love of people and emotions and try and catch people through the rose colored glasses that sometimes fall on my head.
You're not buying a picture of yourself, you're buying how I saw you, wanted to see you for that moment.
That's lovely. You can see it however you want, the fact of the matter is you were hired for the end result, and in *every other for-hire situation*, the result is what the customer owns. You said it yourself; the customer is buying your work. It should be theirs. You poured your soul into it, and then you sold it to them.
It's a good thing you're an artist, because the rules would be different if you produced any other type of product, regardless of how much of yourself you put into it.
I'm not saying you shouldn't cover your costs. Charge what you need to, or even what you can get away with...
You're right about one thing though. There are plenty of photographers out there that understand the way the rest of the world works. The people who hire a photographer who keeps the copyrights are the people who don't understand what they're getting. Anybody else would have no trouble finding a way to get the rights to their images.
As for this:
Do you really need 1000 negs of your wedding?
In 50 years when you're dead, and your customer wants a fresh set of prints from their wedding, if they have the negatives they're fine. If they don't, the best they can do is get high res photocopies of whatever prints they happen to have. As somebody who loves their work, I'm sure you know what the quality difference there is. Chances are, you're never going to do anything with those images again (unless your real reasoning is gouging your customers on reproductions, which is counter to what you're claiming). You'll have other work of subject matter you actually care about that you can enjoy and the rest of your work that you did for-hire will be rotting away somewhere instead of being appreciated by the only people that actually care about it. Is that the best way to treat something you claim is very personal to you?
First of all, I don't see any references backing up your claim that the only reason that GM wouldn't sell such a car is that they couldn't turn a profit on it. The profit motive is not the only factor in corporate beauracracies, but that is a whole other argument altogether.
There are millions of outstanding shares and their shareholders watching GM to make sure they maintain a profit focus. You need only look up their quote on your favorite finance site and read the news for numerous references to their profit focus. I can't say I can prove they have no other motives but I find the idea that they may in this situation dubious for many reasons especially since:
probable reason that GM wouldn't produce and sell such a car (in the short term), is that they have X billion dollars invested in current capital infrastructure, and producing a sporty sedan with 100 mpg would completely cannibalise their current market, thus requiring them to write off said X billion dollars
It's still a profit motive if you decide that something will not be as profitable as your existing product line when you take capital depreciation into account. In that situation, one of two things would happen...
1. The amazing new technology will be brought to market after the current generation becomes obsolete.
2. The cost savings and profit opportunities will be such that a competitor will emerge and force the current generation of technology to become obsolete sooner.
There is a chance that said competitor could be bought, or suppressed through patent law as frequently happens in the drug industry, but such tactics only keep the new technology off the market for a limited time. In an industry where you wouldn't replace all of the existing product in a decade, a 10-20 year delay is not that big of a deal. Dispite what all of the environmental groups would have you believe, anything we can do in 10-20 years is a drop in the bucket in a geological time frame, so it's not like it makes that big of a difference. The real question should be, if the protections that will delay the introduction of a new-technology vehicle didn't exist, would a company with the resources of GM have existed, or spent the money to develop the technology when they did, or would we have had to wait 20 years for it to even be invented?
How much did they cost to build? I believe everything in your summary there except for this:
All of these cars were much simpler to manufacture than conventional vehicles, which offset the cost of the advanced materials used to make them
The only reason GM wouldn't sell such a car is if they couldn't turn a profit on it. Since you're telling people to do research (with some totaly uncalled for obscenity thrown in), why don't you provide some references to back that claim up?
NAFTA reduces the duties on items shipped across the border between certain types of parties, but it doesn't reduce the paperwork... In fact, it adds a form.
Because then he couldn't background an IRC client and DCC bot, or run the auto-mudding script he's planning, or have a coordination point for the new windows worm he's written.
Yes and there are other places that cut police and then gang violence goes up. Like my neighborhood. They also wanted to cut the fire department in my neighborhood. Yeah, real smart thing to do in a neighborhood, made entirely of WOOD houses near oily eucliptis trees. Light a match their and the whole neighborhood goes!
In what way does this has something to do whi my comment about judging situations in context instead of jumping to conclusions without knowing the facts?
Have you ever read a public meeting agenda and attended a public meeting? Have you meet your local officials and discussed your issues with how they are working on things?
Yes. This is how I am able to make decisions in context. Read my comment again. You seem to be confused about what I was saying.
You must be a Bush NAZI!
Or... Nevermind.. You're just an idiot.
A changing system never runs; A running system never changes.
Ideally, this means you would take the time to understand every update to your system, and install only those that were critical in order to maximize stability. Automatic updates are the other extreme and, if you ask me, never a good idea.
If you are responsible for numerous machines, perhaps automated updates are right for you, but you should maintain control. Learn about the update, and personally send out the updates you deem important and know to be compatible to your client's machines. Letting a bunch of individual entities with no knowledge of each other all have free reign over a machine is never a good idea, no matter how well intentioned all the parties involved may be.
Don't forget that politics is what cuts our police force, closes our schools...
You make that statement like these things could never be the right decision... I could think of a few towns mear me that could use a police force reduction... Do you really need 300 cops in a town with essentially zero non-traffic related crimes? Similarly, school consolodation could make sense for a variety of reasons depending on the community.
Why don't you try making decisions based on facts instead of rhetoric and feeling. Don't make assumptions about situations that may or may not even exist. There's a word for making up your mind about what should and shouldn't be done out of context: stupid.
Linux is essentially architected the same way a modern mainframe O/S are architected. You have a reasonable user interface that is connected to a terrible one via pushrods.
That is the biggest pile of misunderstanding and innaccuracy I've heard this week.
Do you have some crazy notion that graphical applications on Linux all manipulate commandline equivalents behind the scenes? That's just not the case. A graphical application on Linux is pushing all the same buttons and manipulating all the same data behind the scenes as the windows version, just with different APIs. There's no fundamental difference between the way a database application, a spreadsheet, or a word processor works between the two systems, and there's certainly no "work getting done by cruft underneath".
Perhaps you were only speaking of configuration? Well guess what. For the most part you're still wrong. Interface and application configuration differs between the two only in encapsulation and storage methods. Arguably, both methods have advantages, but neither of them are really "cruft".
From a pure architecture perspective the Windows approach is the right one, there is much less to go wrong.
Once again, bullshit. In fact there's so much *more* that can go wrong, since the registry model allows for the possiblilty of corruption of all system configuration data through one rogue application, and the essential lack of separation between administrative permissions and the default user in most installations allows for endless and easy methods of destroying your system... either by accident or through the introduction of malicious code.
but if something does go wrong you have a lot more visibility into the problem and it is more likely that you can fix it - if you know what you are doing.
Now you're just being funny... That was sarcasm, right? You have visibility into how windows works behind the scenes? There's detailed logs? You can debug individual components independant of the whole system? You can look at the source to see what's going on, were you so inclined?
I'd go on, but I've fed the trolls enough today.
My experience has been that people who have never used windows before have an even easier time taking to linux distributions than people who used to use windows. Instead of adapting your ways, you're learning fresh...
This may be different with the recent move to have mainstream distros look and (ugh) act more like windows, but I doubt it. Before there was windows people managed to learn how to use computers. People can be pretty smart when they want to be.
Anybody sane proposes a flat tax with a standard deduction. That deduction should reflect your cost of living. This makes it so the problem you describe is minimised. If the tax is 15%, and the deduction is $15,000, the person who makes $20,000 pays only $750, while the person that makes $2,000,000 pays $297,750.
Most proposals I've seen have a flat deduction, but I'd like to see a geographically based deduction. In other words, if you live in an expensive area of the country your dedution would be higher (you'd have to make more money in order to be considered "rich"). This would combat sprawl and poverty in urban areas.
The top 1% of wealth owners had 40% of the wealth, but paid only 35% of the income tax burden?
What the hell does that have to do with anything? This is an income tax, remember? It's a tax on how much you earn not how much you own. Stop diluting the argument with irrelavant statistics.
The last Best Buy salesperson I talked to told me that the size of their employee discount was based on the number of service plans they sold.
whatever Apple used to prevent this type of thing)
If I were them, what I'd do is have the counter lag a random amount of time between 45 minutes and an hour. Since they appear to be selling between 100 and 200 songs a minute They'd get an extra 10000 song sales or so out of the promotion, and they'd make it incredibly difficult to win through prediction.