Publicity, largely. Hard to target people based on a demographic profile when you can't identify them until after the lawsuit is started, and "Music label sues schoolteacher for $150,000" is an awful headline PR-wise.
If they had some way to ensure they only sued unlikeable people who the public felt no sympathy for, I'm sure sure they would - just to set an example and scare people.
I've been a pirate since before Napster - never joined 'the scene,' but had access to my share of exclusive tracker sites, and did some repackaging. From my perspective as an insider... you're right. Piracy has declined. There are just so many legitimate, affordable, dependable services now. Who wants to mess around with finding good torrents when you can just subscribe to Netflix?
Music piracy today usually means finding a youtube downloader site and using that to just grab youtube rips. The quality isn't great, but it's convenient.
Not entirely. There's also a selection process. The types of skills and personality it takes to govern well are opposed to those skills required to climb the ladder in politics: Aggression, a willingness to do whatever it takes to advance your career, and a willingness to set aside any scruples and seek out the donations it takes to fund an effective campaign. There are good politicians, but they seldom make it up to the national level.
It's one of those total-free-speech places. They detest the idea of moderation. The problem with such a place is that you end up with all the people who have no-where else to go, because the rest of the internet keeps banning them.
PewDiePie is an internet celebrity. He has money, and influence - when he says something, millions hear it. Tens of millions. When he decides it's funny to say 'Kill all the jews! Only jokeing.' then a lot of people get to see that joke. So yes, he does get a lot of criticism.
I just think he is un-funny. Most of his 'comedy' consists of screaming like a chipmunk on helium.
Short version on the tape coding thing: It's syncronisation. There's no clock channel, so the bitstream needs to be self-syncronising, and the clock circuit can only syncronise on a bit transition. So more than a few consecutive zeros or ones and it goes wrong. There are a lot of different means of solving this, all of which involve having a few more bits in the signal than there are in the data. In GCR, four bits of data become five bits on tape.
6250 using GCR coding for syncronisation, which requires five bits on tape for every four bits of usable storage. 6250 bytes/inch, after removing the overhead imposed by GCR, comes to exactly 5000 bytes-per-inch of actual usable storage on the tape.
I suspect the manufacturer reported raw storage capacity rather than usable storage capacity in order to make their tape sound more impressive. I wouldn't be surprised it there was even an asterisk on the box. I'm reminded of how LTO tape media today is always labeled with the compressed capacity in huge numbers, with a little asterisk and a much smaller number - both numerically and in print size - stating how much data the tape actually holds.
A passenger vehicle would probably be a hex- or octocopter. Just a safety measure - such a craft would still be able to limp down to a safe-ish landing in the event of mechanical failure. A quadcopter will generally flip over if a rotor stops working and, at best, fall down to earth.
You've got to be careful about expiry. I compiled a big collection of expired music for my website, and found lots of things you can get caught out on. - A remastered or restored release counts as a new work. - What is expired in one jurisdiction may not be in another. - In the UK, weirdly, it's possible for recording of music to be public domain but the music itsself and the lyrics to both be still covered by copyright. You can play the recording, but you make a derivative work. I think. I'm not sure how this works myself. - Many tracks are released much later than they are recorded. In some cases, decades after the artist is dead. Buddy Holly had an especially productive posthumous career. Copyright starts at publication, not recording.
In the UK the base date for music expiring is 1962 or older. A static date. We extended the copyright term from 50 years to 70 following intensive lobbying from the music industry (Got to protect the Beatles, they are far too profitable to expire), but didn't re-copyright expired works*, so it's really twenty-year-long freeze on new expirations. Though I do imagine that when those twenty years are up, there will be a lot of demands from the music industry to extend it a few more decades.
*Confusingly, a previous extension did, but not the 50->70 one.
They are very common indeed in the world of piracy. There was a time when RAR was the world leader in typical compression ratio, and pirates desperately needed the best compression around. Even though 7z is now superior in just about every way, RAR has become entrenched, and very hard to displace.
More importantly, if you have sine, you can easily incorporates circles into your layout. A whole new class of stylish but unintuitive interface is open now!
Businesses have costs for cash too. Paying a secure transport company to provide vans and guards to transport it to the banks. Losses from counterfeit currency. Losses from store employees who 'lose' some of the money from the till. Cashless payment fees are usually less than a percent - cheaper than handling cash.
Has been used. I'm a ham, and aside from APRS (Primarily a position-reporting protocol that runs over packet as a L2 transport) there's practically no use of packet radio at all any more. It was completely displaced by the internet. In part because it got left behind technologically - high-speed operation still means 1200bps.
The hoarding is, strangely, the opposite of hoarding - thanks to a bit of financial trickery called fractional reserve. Actual 'money' is a tiny amount of the money in circulation: It's almost all transfer of debt, tracked in meticulous detail. You take out a loan, you owe the bank money - then you put it into your bank account, which records how much they owe you. They then use that money - or rather, the debt to you - to fund more loans, to people who put it into their own accounts... and so on. A bank owes and is owed vast amounts of money that dwarf the actual amount of currency they have to hand.
It also means there is a small chance that, if a bank goes out of business, everyone who has a savings account with that bank will see their life's savings vanish through no fault of their own. It's highly unlikely, but it has happened - and is the reason that governments will shovel giant mountains of taxpayer money into a failing bank to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Creating money in that manner is a powerful economic tool, but one which can go horribly wrong if not used with caution. If simply issuing currency worked all the time then there would be no need for taxation - and you can be sure that would be a popular political position to take. The problem is inflation: The more the currency is circulating, and less each individual unit is worth. Too much entering circulation not only means the value falls steadily, but can spark a crisis of confidence: If everyone sees their money falling in value then they want to get rid of it, which means it becomes even less valuable, so people try even harder to get rid of it, so the value falls... eventually the cycle reaches the dreaded hyperinflation stage, and you start to see people using wheelbarrows full of currency to buy their groceries and wiping their ass on trillion-dollar bills that are now worth less than toilet paper.
I was just outdated by ten years. The fact that the IRS has had to issue a specific memorandum saying it is illegal does imply that it must have been a known practice prior to this. So they closed that loophole - I'm sure there are others.
There are plenty of ways around that too. Easiest one? Don't bring it in. If you have only a few shareholders, you can just keep it overseas. But, if you do want it back in the US... get a loan. A huge loan. Secured upon the money you are not bringing into the US. As you have perfectly secure collateral, in liquid assets no less, you can take out your huge loan with a very low interest rate. There will be some cost, of course, but less than if you were to pay tax. It does look a bit iffy in accounting having what looks like a serious liabilities issue on paper, but traders understand how the game is played.
People have been finding ways to legally avoid paying tax for as long as tax has existed. I've read of accounts from the Roman republic of people grumbling that the richest citizens of Rome somehow managed to avoid taxation. There are more tricks than you or I can possibly imagine to achieve this aim.
Also if you say there should be no taxes of any type... well, I hope you can afford a private security guard for your home, because you just laid off the entire police force. Better get some exercise too, because I don't know how long the roads are going to be viable with no maintenance and no-one footing the power bill for traffic signals. Sorry to puncture your libertarian bubble, but taxation is rather important for a functional society.
No-one is proposing a percent-for-percent changeover. That would be silly. Obviously a revenue tax would be at a much lower percentage than a corporation tax on profits - ideally so that the total amount taken would be the same. The post is just suggesting that a tax on revenue rather than profit may be more difficult to avoid through the use of underhanded but entirely legal accounting tricks.
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Publicity, largely. Hard to target people based on a demographic profile when you can't identify them until after the lawsuit is started, and "Music label sues schoolteacher for $150,000" is an awful headline PR-wise.
If they had some way to ensure they only sued unlikeable people who the public felt no sympathy for, I'm sure sure they would - just to set an example and scare people.
I've been a pirate since before Napster - never joined 'the scene,' but had access to my share of exclusive tracker sites, and did some repackaging. From my perspective as an insider... you're right. Piracy has declined. There are just so many legitimate, affordable, dependable services now. Who wants to mess around with finding good torrents when you can just subscribe to Netflix?
Music piracy today usually means finding a youtube downloader site and using that to just grab youtube rips. The quality isn't great, but it's convenient.
100GB? That's... it? I've got more than that.
Argument 1 is a bit dated now. It used to be true, but there are a number of legal online music services around now that generally work reliably.
Less true for video. There are a few of those too, but no one service has a complete library of modern popular television.
Not entirely. There's also a selection process. The types of skills and personality it takes to govern well are opposed to those skills required to climb the ladder in politics: Aggression, a willingness to do whatever it takes to advance your career, and a willingness to set aside any scruples and seek out the donations it takes to fund an effective campaign. There are good politicians, but they seldom make it up to the national level.
It's one of those total-free-speech places. They detest the idea of moderation. The problem with such a place is that you end up with all the people who have no-where else to go, because the rest of the internet keeps banning them.
PewDiePie is an internet celebrity. He has money, and influence - when he says something, millions hear it. Tens of millions. When he decides it's funny to say 'Kill all the jews! Only jokeing.' then a lot of people get to see that joke. So yes, he does get a lot of criticism.
I just think he is un-funny. Most of his 'comedy' consists of screaming like a chipmunk on helium.
Use terms like 'unborn children' and people will accuse you of trying to subtly push a side in the abortion debate.
The same thing will happen if you use 'fetus' instead though. I can't think of any term that wouldn't potentially lead to that outcome.
Short version on the tape coding thing: It's syncronisation. There's no clock channel, so the bitstream needs to be self-syncronising, and the clock circuit can only syncronise on a bit transition. So more than a few consecutive zeros or ones and it goes wrong. There are a lot of different means of solving this, all of which involve having a few more bits in the signal than there are in the data. In GCR, four bits of data become five bits on tape.
6250 using GCR coding for syncronisation, which requires five bits on tape for every four bits of usable storage. 6250 bytes/inch, after removing the overhead imposed by GCR, comes to exactly 5000 bytes-per-inch of actual usable storage on the tape.
I suspect the manufacturer reported raw storage capacity rather than usable storage capacity in order to make their tape sound more impressive. I wouldn't be surprised it there was even an asterisk on the box. I'm reminded of how LTO tape media today is always labeled with the compressed capacity in huge numbers, with a little asterisk and a much smaller number - both numerically and in print size - stating how much data the tape actually holds.
A passenger vehicle would probably be a hex- or octocopter. Just a safety measure - such a craft would still be able to limp down to a safe-ish landing in the event of mechanical failure. A quadcopter will generally flip over if a rotor stops working and, at best, fall down to earth.
There is one other means of flying, one that does not involve blasting air down, but the taxi-blimp brings its own practical difficulties.
You've got to be careful about expiry. I compiled a big collection of expired music for my website, and found lots of things you can get caught out on.
- A remastered or restored release counts as a new work.
- What is expired in one jurisdiction may not be in another.
- In the UK, weirdly, it's possible for recording of music to be public domain but the music itsself and the lyrics to both be still covered by copyright. You can play the recording, but you make a derivative work. I think. I'm not sure how this works myself.
- Many tracks are released much later than they are recorded. In some cases, decades after the artist is dead. Buddy Holly had an especially productive posthumous career. Copyright starts at publication, not recording.
In the UK the base date for music expiring is 1962 or older. A static date. We extended the copyright term from 50 years to 70 following intensive lobbying from the music industry (Got to protect the Beatles, they are far too profitable to expire), but didn't re-copyright expired works*, so it's really twenty-year-long freeze on new expirations. Though I do imagine that when those twenty years are up, there will be a lot of demands from the music industry to extend it a few more decades.
*Confusingly, a previous extension did, but not the 50->70 one.
They are very common indeed in the world of piracy. There was a time when RAR was the world leader in typical compression ratio, and pirates desperately needed the best compression around. Even though 7z is now superior in just about every way, RAR has become entrenched, and very hard to displace.
Now try rewriting that to do polar to Cartesian coordinate transform.
More importantly, if you have sine, you can easily incorporates circles into your layout. A whole new class of stylish but unintuitive interface is open now!
I'm guessing DogDude is in the US. Chip&Pin is much rarer there, and credit cards are favored over debit cards.
Businesses have costs for cash too. Paying a secure transport company to provide vans and guards to transport it to the banks. Losses from counterfeit currency. Losses from store employees who 'lose' some of the money from the till. Cashless payment fees are usually less than a percent - cheaper than handling cash.
Has been used. I'm a ham, and aside from APRS (Primarily a position-reporting protocol that runs over packet as a L2 transport) there's practically no use of packet radio at all any more. It was completely displaced by the internet. In part because it got left behind technologically - high-speed operation still means 1200bps.
The hoarding is, strangely, the opposite of hoarding - thanks to a bit of financial trickery called fractional reserve. Actual 'money' is a tiny amount of the money in circulation: It's almost all transfer of debt, tracked in meticulous detail. You take out a loan, you owe the bank money - then you put it into your bank account, which records how much they owe you. They then use that money - or rather, the debt to you - to fund more loans, to people who put it into their own accounts... and so on. A bank owes and is owed vast amounts of money that dwarf the actual amount of currency they have to hand.
It also means there is a small chance that, if a bank goes out of business, everyone who has a savings account with that bank will see their life's savings vanish through no fault of their own. It's highly unlikely, but it has happened - and is the reason that governments will shovel giant mountains of taxpayer money into a failing bank to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Creating money in that manner is a powerful economic tool, but one which can go horribly wrong if not used with caution. If simply issuing currency worked all the time then there would be no need for taxation - and you can be sure that would be a popular political position to take. The problem is inflation: The more the currency is circulating, and less each individual unit is worth. Too much entering circulation not only means the value falls steadily, but can spark a crisis of confidence: If everyone sees their money falling in value then they want to get rid of it, which means it becomes even less valuable, so people try even harder to get rid of it, so the value falls... eventually the cycle reaches the dreaded hyperinflation stage, and you start to see people using wheelbarrows full of currency to buy their groceries and wiping their ass on trillion-dollar bills that are now worth less than toilet paper.
I was just outdated by ten years. The fact that the IRS has had to issue a specific memorandum saying it is illegal does imply that it must have been a known practice prior to this. So they closed that loophole - I'm sure there are others.
There are plenty of ways around that too. Easiest one? Don't bring it in. If you have only a few shareholders, you can just keep it overseas. But, if you do want it back in the US... get a loan. A huge loan. Secured upon the money you are not bringing into the US. As you have perfectly secure collateral, in liquid assets no less, you can take out your huge loan with a very low interest rate. There will be some cost, of course, but less than if you were to pay tax. It does look a bit iffy in accounting having what looks like a serious liabilities issue on paper, but traders understand how the game is played.
People have been finding ways to legally avoid paying tax for as long as tax has existed. I've read of accounts from the Roman republic of people grumbling that the richest citizens of Rome somehow managed to avoid taxation. There are more tricks than you or I can possibly imagine to achieve this aim.
Also if you say there should be no taxes of any type... well, I hope you can afford a private security guard for your home, because you just laid off the entire police force. Better get some exercise too, because I don't know how long the roads are going to be viable with no maintenance and no-one footing the power bill for traffic signals. Sorry to puncture your libertarian bubble, but taxation is rather important for a functional society.
No-one is proposing a percent-for-percent changeover. That would be silly. Obviously a revenue tax would be at a much lower percentage than a corporation tax on profits - ideally so that the total amount taken would be the same. The post is just suggesting that a tax on revenue rather than profit may be more difficult to avoid through the use of underhanded but entirely legal accounting tricks.