when I downloaded and fired up Google Maps 20 minutes ago, the second thing I saw was "Help us improve Google, including traffic and other services. Anonymous location data will be collected by Google's location service and sent to Google, and may be stored on your device. Learn more." (The first was just the logo splash.)
I wonder if Hollywood got the idea from others or if they thought of it first? ("Hollywood accounting" seems to boil down to "making movies isn't profitable, but marketing movies is very profitable")
I read the point as "they don't need to buy US-made anymore, they have the factories, they can make their own goods now." *shrug* Either way, China's not sounding like a good market for US-made stuff.
but you do need consumers, and the 'best' consumers (in the sense of the ones who are most able to buy stuff) are the ones that are workers... somewhere.
Of course, it's probably too much to hope that the folks running the companies will realize this before unemployment hits 80%...
If we assume a 15cm diameter power cable (which means a 15cm effective width; sure, the actual cable circumference is more than that but half of it's out of the sunshine and the rest isn't all perpendicular), a one kilometer length of cable would have a 'collection area' of 150m^2. Given full-time sunshine (dicey) and 40% efficiency of conversion (roughly state of the art, iirc) that one kilometer cable will generate about 84 kW. Assume that an average day has about 6 hours of full sunshine (wild-ass guess) and we're looking at 504 kWh per day. Call it 500.
The average household power consumption in the US is about 12000kWh/year, or around 33kWh/day. So a 1km cable could supply about 15 houses, which isn't bad. But that's houses. Wikipedia says that overall power usage in the US per person is a bit over 83000 kWh/year, or 228 kWh per day. So that kilometer of wire can support two people, and we need 600 million kilometers of cable for the US. A probably questionalbe source I found on google indicates that the current US power grid has about 300,000km of power lines, so we're looking at multiplying that by 2000. Definitely a big infrastructure task. That much cable would also cover 90,000 square _kilometers_, roughly the size of Indiana or 1% of the US.
Short answer: It's conceivable, but probably not practical.
for brief periods it's not bad. For actual interaction I suspect it would suck. (last time I had to, I was reconciling two lists and rested my finger on the screen to keep track of my place. After half an hour it got real old.)
true, but it's got to be a good compiler. That's what hurt the Itanium; no compiler that could really take advantage of its capabilities. Although with that other article about improvements in automatic compiler-generated concurrency, that may get better.
The idea I had was to collect the state tax at the time of the transaction. The state is then responsible for (if needed) collecting the rest of the use tax from the tax filer at the end of the year and distributing it to the appropriate city/county (like they already probably do... or should), but since they have the records of transactions for which sales tax was collected they can verify that the tax filer reported the right amount. The business wins (well, doesn't lose as bad) because they only have to track state sales tax, the state wins because they get revenue they're not currently getting, the city/county win because they get revenue they're not currently getting, and the consumer loses because they have to pay more, but not as bad as they could because most of the new tax is at time of purchase; the use tax 'balloon' should be pretty small since it's just city/county level amounts.
Let the state build that into their API. They want the revenue, they can put in the work. And they have the use tax declaration on the income tax form, so they'll be doing the validation at the end of the year anyway. Presumably they already have a way to distribute the county/city part of the use tax back to the county/city... or should.
more than 50. A brick-and-mortar has one set of numbers to remember: one state, one county, one city. You'd be multiplying the complexity by hundreds to access a market that you're probably already serving (at this point, I think it reasonable to assume you already have a webpage).
I figure if the state wants the revenue, the state can do the work of tracking the locality information. They're the ones who get the use tax declaration on the income tax form; they can determine if it's accurate and if it's not, send a bill.
Thought of a refinement later. Collect the state percentage; that's 50 pieces of information to remember, and (usually) the vast majority of the tax involved. The city/county part is smaller, and the state can take care of verifying that the use tax paid is suitable for the city/county of the filer.
Hmmm. Your mention of the automatic reporting by employers/banks makes me think... a lot of the pain for a widespread online company is in the tracking of tax rates. If instead they are allowed to simply report the transaction to the state revenue service (based on billing address, probably) then the state can go to the effort of making sure that the rate is correct for the area. And the company has less regional info to try to keep up to date. (And another chunk of per-user data if they are so kind as to send an email with the total at the end of the year to the purchaser.)
The downside for the consumer is that instead of having the taxes for a transaction show up with the transaction, in small amounts, they have an end-of-year payment of (probably) unexpected size...
I've no interest in sugarcoating anything. I'm just saying that the statement "DRM isn't for protection from customers" is based on an incorrect definition of customer.
a) GP said 'consumers', which includes those who didn't pay.
b) But, as the summary says, the version that got cracked and distributed was bought in a store, so the person who bought it was also a customer. And the DRM was an (unsuccessful) attempt for the company to protect itself from that customer. So 'customer' still works. The "No True Scotsman" fallacy is still a fallacy if you change it to "No True Customer". Sorry...
I like this, personally; I feel that 'too big to (be allowed to) fail' equates directly to 'too big to be left as a time bomb' and getting bailed out should include getting broken up. But then again I feel that one of the great periods in consumer choice on the internet was when those who owned the wires were forced to allow anyone to use the wires who wanted to (at a reasonable rate), and that it would be lovely to go back to that. (Or better yet, just break up into a wire-owning company, a content-generation company, and a data-shovelling company.)
assuming that 'Christian' maps to 'One who follows the teachings of Christ' and 'Scotsman' maps to 'One who resides in Scotland', I'm not seeing how grandparent's statement is equivalent to the described scotsman-related fallacious assertions. That is, it seems that GP's statement is actually related to the term's definition in a way that the NTS fallacy description's examples do not.
Or do you have a different definition for 'Christian'?
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perhaps he actually meant 'return' as in 'return on investment', which can be something beneficial that is not money, rather than 'refund'?
does it count as intentional when I knowingly neglect to research all my options to avoid taxes? Or is it just lazy?
I just have a separate page, way in the back. It has has apple maps and passbook.
when I downloaded and fired up Google Maps 20 minutes ago, the second thing I saw was "Help us improve Google, including traffic and other services. Anonymous location data will be collected by Google's location service and sent to Google, and may be stored on your device. Learn more." (The first was just the logo splash.)
I wonder if Hollywood got the idea from others or if they thought of it first? ("Hollywood accounting" seems to boil down to "making movies isn't profitable, but marketing movies is very profitable")
I read the point as "they don't need to buy US-made anymore, they have the factories, they can make their own goods now." *shrug* Either way, China's not sounding like a good market for US-made stuff.
but you do need consumers, and the 'best' consumers (in the sense of the ones who are most able to buy stuff) are the ones that are workers... somewhere.
Of course, it's probably too much to hope that the folks running the companies will realize this before unemployment hits 80%...
If we assume a 15cm diameter power cable (which means a 15cm effective width; sure, the actual cable circumference is more than that but half of it's out of the sunshine and the rest isn't all perpendicular), a one kilometer length of cable would have a 'collection area' of 150m^2. Given full-time sunshine (dicey) and 40% efficiency of conversion (roughly state of the art, iirc) that one kilometer cable will generate about 84 kW. Assume that an average day has about 6 hours of full sunshine (wild-ass guess) and we're looking at 504 kWh per day. Call it 500.
The average household power consumption in the US is about 12000kWh/year, or around 33kWh/day. So a 1km cable could supply about 15 houses, which isn't bad. But that's houses. Wikipedia says that overall power usage in the US per person is a bit over 83000 kWh/year, or 228 kWh per day. So that kilometer of wire can support two people, and we need 600 million kilometers of cable for the US. A probably questionalbe source I found on google indicates that the current US power grid has about 300,000km of power lines, so we're looking at multiplying that by 2000. Definitely a big infrastructure task. That much cable would also cover 90,000 square _kilometers_, roughly the size of Indiana or 1% of the US.
Short answer: It's conceivable, but probably not practical.
for brief periods it's not bad. For actual interaction I suspect it would suck. (last time I had to, I was reconciling two lists and rested my finger on the screen to keep track of my place. After half an hour it got real old.)
true, but it's got to be a good compiler. That's what hurt the Itanium; no compiler that could really take advantage of its capabilities. Although with that other article about improvements in automatic compiler-generated concurrency, that may get better.
The idea I had was to collect the state tax at the time of the transaction. The state is then responsible for (if needed) collecting the rest of the use tax from the tax filer at the end of the year and distributing it to the appropriate city/county (like they already probably do... or should), but since they have the records of transactions for which sales tax was collected they can verify that the tax filer reported the right amount. The business wins (well, doesn't lose as bad) because they only have to track state sales tax, the state wins because they get revenue they're not currently getting, the city/county win because they get revenue they're not currently getting, and the consumer loses because they have to pay more, but not as bad as they could because most of the new tax is at time of purchase; the use tax 'balloon' should be pretty small since it's just city/county level amounts.
Let the state build that into their API. They want the revenue, they can put in the work. And they have the use tax declaration on the income tax form, so they'll be doing the validation at the end of the year anyway. Presumably they already have a way to distribute the county/city part of the use tax back to the county/city... or should.
more than 50. A brick-and-mortar has one set of numbers to remember: one state, one county, one city. You'd be multiplying the complexity by hundreds to access a market that you're probably already serving (at this point, I think it reasonable to assume you already have a webpage).
I figure if the state wants the revenue, the state can do the work of tracking the locality information. They're the ones who get the use tax declaration on the income tax form; they can determine if it's accurate and if it's not, send a bill.
Thought of a refinement later. Collect the state percentage; that's 50 pieces of information to remember, and (usually) the vast majority of the tax involved. The city/county part is smaller, and the state can take care of verifying that the use tax paid is suitable for the city/county of the filer.
You think it will take Amazon long enough to crank that up for any startup to actually get significant business? I have my doubts.
Hmmm. Your mention of the automatic reporting by employers/banks makes me think... a lot of the pain for a widespread online company is in the tracking of tax rates. If instead they are allowed to simply report the transaction to the state revenue service (based on billing address, probably) then the state can go to the effort of making sure that the rate is correct for the area. And the company has less regional info to try to keep up to date. (And another chunk of per-user data if they are so kind as to send an email with the total at the end of the year to the purchaser.)
The downside for the consumer is that instead of having the taxes for a transaction show up with the transaction, in small amounts, they have an end-of-year payment of (probably) unexpected size...
I've no interest in sugarcoating anything. I'm just saying that the statement "DRM isn't for protection from customers" is based on an incorrect definition of customer.
a) GP said 'consumers', which includes those who didn't pay.
b) But, as the summary says, the version that got cracked and distributed was bought in a store, so the person who bought it was also a customer. And the DRM was an (unsuccessful) attempt for the company to protect itself from that customer. So 'customer' still works. The "No True Scotsman" fallacy is still a fallacy if you change it to "No True Customer". Sorry...
actually, the quote says it has protected animals.
Nah, they don't pay attention to the actual losses; statutory damages are so much higher that there's no point.
I take it back, I misunderstood one premise of your statement in this part of the discussion: that the suit is in fact valid. You are correct.
Not necessarily. Bad publicity surrounding the patent accusation can damage their business even if the accusation is found to be false.
I like this, personally; I feel that 'too big to (be allowed to) fail' equates directly to 'too big to be left as a time bomb' and getting bailed out should include getting broken up. But then again I feel that one of the great periods in consumer choice on the internet was when those who owned the wires were forced to allow anyone to use the wires who wanted to (at a reasonable rate), and that it would be lovely to go back to that. (Or better yet, just break up into a wire-owning company, a content-generation company, and a data-shovelling company.)
'most are not' doesn't seem to directly translate into 'there are no'. 'There are not many', perhaps?
assuming that 'Christian' maps to 'One who follows the teachings of Christ' and 'Scotsman' maps to 'One who resides in Scotland', I'm not seeing how grandparent's statement is equivalent to the described scotsman-related fallacious assertions. That is, it seems that GP's statement is actually related to the term's definition in a way that the NTS fallacy description's examples do not.
Or do you have a different definition for 'Christian'?