I think most people regard tax as something that needs to be paid... by other people.
I must admire Bush's (or his Republican advisors) political skill in one way. Any politician can pass massive tax cuts to win popularity, that's obvious. But he went one step further. He passed the tax cuts with an expiary date set for the next term, knowing that there was a more than fifty-fifty chance that it would be a democrat who would be in office and thus have to either take the blame when taxes went up, or be forced to extend cuts that were obviously unsustainable.
Or they just don't upgrade their networks as traffic increases, allowing them to become overloaded. It's good business strategy - if their best effort service is too good, there will be no reason for other companies to pay for above-best-effort service. Got to keep the cheap product sufficiently low quality to avoid eating into the desireability of the higher cost product.
"assuming there is no government-imposed monopoly in place"
What about a natural monopoly? It's possible for a monopoly to exist without a government imposing one. There are several situations where it can happen. For example, in the case where the cost of entry to a market is very high (Got to dig up roads and lay cables), once the first supplier has been set up it may no longer be economical for a competitor to follow as the potential market share will be lower
This is true. You need a little understanding of electronics to make a current-limited power source, and a little skill with mechanical engineering to mount a focusing lens, but it isn't that hard.
The problem with conventional response is that of geography. When your opponent is some script kiddie or amateur hacker, it's all very well - you go to court, get a warrant, trace his IP through the ISP logs, and file charges. But if the attacker is an organised criminal group, the attack will be coming from a computer in Outer Elbonia, where the local police couldn't care less about your paperwork, and the ISP doesn't care that the connection is registered under a false name. There are even ISPs that specialise in hosting scams and malware - usually in Russia or somewhere similar. It can take weeks to go through legal channels, and during those weeks the attacks (Or malware host) keep on running.
The impossibility of regulating the internet is what allows us the freedoms we at Slashdot love so much, but the price of this is that it's largely unpoliceable.
To head off the inevitable dispute over h264 being an open standard: It's open in the sense that it's entirely documented and you can easily look up a specification that details everything about h264, in sufficient detail to write your own encoder or decoder. It's not open in the sense that you can't acually write either of these, as much of the vital mathematics required are subject to patents. So it depends if you consider 'open' to mean access to the specification, or the legal right to use that access.
1. Attack your target.
2. Wait for counterattack.
3. Deny 1, or claim it was an attack launched by compromised computers without your knowledge.
4. Sue your target for the costs of their counterattack.
And if WoW updates don't work, WoW will be the one the customers blame - and Blizzard will have no choice but to stop using BT updates and turn instead to the old fashioned method of servers with lots of capacity.
I have found two good things on IPv6: One is a public, high-retention public usenet server with binaries. The other is now defunct, but used to be one of the semi-mythical university pirate caches - vast deposits of copyright infringement hosted on academic high-bandwidth connections, accessible only via IPv6 where no enforcers are yet capable of looking.
I think the ISPs may want ISP level NAT. It would mean an end to the p2p software that has been placing such a high demand upon their networks, a barrier to VoIP that competes with the very profitable phone service and no more people running their own servers off a domestic connection when the ISP would like such things to be restricted to the more expensive business connections. They have no reason to move to IPv6, because most of their customers wouldn't be able to make the connection between deployment of ISP level NAT and the sudden breaking of their WoW updates and internet-phone software.
True for the majority of porn sites. But there is a portion, funded by ads, malware or scams, which just want to get as many viewers as possible. As these sites are more visible (They arn't afraid to use search engine manipulation, spam or indiscriminate advertising), they tend to get most of the attention.
My theory is that they get a surveying agency to calculate approximatly how many music tracks are downloaded illegally during a year (Including people watching music videos on youtube, and regardless of if the music is RIAA-member-owned or not) and then multiply it by the retail value of a higher-priced CD.
"invalidating any subsequent attempt to patent the technology."
You are assuming the patent system actually works. In practice many patents would be granted - indeed, are granted - for things where prior art not only exists but is widely known. It then falls on the defendents to spend millions of dollars in court to fight the patents.
This is why Firefox doesn't support h264. The licence terms, while not exactly incompatible with the GPL, are sufficiently complex in their interactions that it's easier to just avoid it altogether.
The codecs are similar. It might be possible to use some of the acceleration capabilities in some chips, but it still won't be as good as a chip designed for webm.
But they have no problems with exports of finished products using rare earth elements. They just want to make sure that the manufacturing stays in China, paying Chinese taxes and creating Chinese jobs.
Used to be 4. Convenience. Not true for music now that we have iTunes (A legal music store not rendered useless by DRM, tiny library or other such flaws) but still true to some extent for movies. Going to a store takes time and effort, and people are busy and lazy.
At which point the inventor discovers that if they want to enforce their patent against any large corporation, it'll cost them several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. Plus they couldn't use their patents anyway, because usage patents would follow. Eg, an inventor comes up with a new form of;nanofolded insulation' foam (I just made that up), and patents it. But a few weeks later someone has read his patent and patented 'use of nanofolded insulation in HVAC systems,' 'nanofolded insulation catalytic reactor', 'a filter system using nanofolded insulation' - and so on. One of the reasons that large companies cross-licence their patent portfolios is that they know it's impossible for any of them to do business without infringing on patents they don't even know about.
The annoying thing is that if someone just looked at one of these publicly accessible, unauthenticated streams they coud potentially be charged for computer misuse or whatever else their jurisdiction's generic 'hacking' offense is. There really needs to be some higher bar on those laws sometimes.
Lots to get there. Not so much to get back. Compare size of the rockets to get the Apollo missions up vs the tiny little lunar lander.. only half of which was needed to make escape velocity. You still need some energy, but surprisingly little. The tricky part would be manufacturing the cargo rockets themselves, or sending empty cargo rockets from Earth. This is why many hypothetical mining schemes use accelerators - all you need to do is wrap your semi-refined moon rock in something conductive and feed it in one end, and aim for it to land somewhere uninhabitable on earth. Added bonus: Doubles as a WMD that lets you drop a hypersonic rock on any city you don't like.
"Companies don't move overseas to save on taxes. They move there to save on labor and to have reduced regulations."
You assume a country exists in only one place. That isn't really true any more. It's quite easy for a company to have it's manufacturing facilities in China where labor costs are lowest while being officially incorporated in Guernsey.
Guernsey is a good tax haven. That's why Specsavers is incorporated there.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most people regard tax as something that needs to be paid... by other people.
I must admire Bush's (or his Republican advisors) political skill in one way. Any politician can pass massive tax cuts to win popularity, that's obvious. But he went one step further. He passed the tax cuts with an expiary date set for the next term, knowing that there was a more than fifty-fifty chance that it would be a democrat who would be in office and thus have to either take the blame when taxes went up, or be forced to extend cuts that were obviously unsustainable.
Or they just don't upgrade their networks as traffic increases, allowing them to become overloaded. It's good business strategy - if their best effort service is too good, there will be no reason for other companies to pay for above-best-effort service. Got to keep the cheap product sufficiently low quality to avoid eating into the desireability of the higher cost product.
"assuming there is no government-imposed monopoly in place"
What about a natural monopoly? It's possible for a monopoly to exist without a government imposing one. There are several situations where it can happen. For example, in the case where the cost of entry to a market is very high (Got to dig up roads and lay cables), once the first supplier has been set up it may no longer be economical for a competitor to follow as the potential market share will be lower
This is true. You need a little understanding of electronics to make a current-limited power source, and a little skill with mechanical engineering to mount a focusing lens, but it isn't that hard.
The problem with conventional response is that of geography. When your opponent is some script kiddie or amateur hacker, it's all very well - you go to court, get a warrant, trace his IP through the ISP logs, and file charges. But if the attacker is an organised criminal group, the attack will be coming from a computer in Outer Elbonia, where the local police couldn't care less about your paperwork, and the ISP doesn't care that the connection is registered under a false name. There are even ISPs that specialise in hosting scams and malware - usually in Russia or somewhere similar. It can take weeks to go through legal channels, and during those weeks the attacks (Or malware host) keep on running.
The impossibility of regulating the internet is what allows us the freedoms we at Slashdot love so much, but the price of this is that it's largely unpoliceable.
To head off the inevitable dispute over h264 being an open standard: It's open in the sense that it's entirely documented and you can easily look up a specification that details everything about h264, in sufficient detail to write your own encoder or decoder. It's not open in the sense that you can't acually write either of these, as much of the vital mathematics required are subject to patents. So it depends if you consider 'open' to mean access to the specification, or the legal right to use that access.
1. Attack your target. 2. Wait for counterattack. 3. Deny 1, or claim it was an attack launched by compromised computers without your knowledge. 4. Sue your target for the costs of their counterattack.
And if WoW updates don't work, WoW will be the one the customers blame - and Blizzard will have no choice but to stop using BT updates and turn instead to the old fashioned method of servers with lots of capacity.
I have found two good things on IPv6: One is a public, high-retention public usenet server with binaries. The other is now defunct, but used to be one of the semi-mythical university pirate caches - vast deposits of copyright infringement hosted on academic high-bandwidth connections, accessible only via IPv6 where no enforcers are yet capable of looking.
I think the ISPs may want ISP level NAT. It would mean an end to the p2p software that has been placing such a high demand upon their networks, a barrier to VoIP that competes with the very profitable phone service and no more people running their own servers off a domestic connection when the ISP would like such things to be restricted to the more expensive business connections. They have no reason to move to IPv6, because most of their customers wouldn't be able to make the connection between deployment of ISP level NAT and the sudden breaking of their WoW updates and internet-phone software.
True for the majority of porn sites. But there is a portion, funded by ads, malware or scams, which just want to get as many viewers as possible. As these sites are more visible (They arn't afraid to use search engine manipulation, spam or indiscriminate advertising), they tend to get most of the attention.
My theory is that they get a surveying agency to calculate approximatly how many music tracks are downloaded illegally during a year (Including people watching music videos on youtube, and regardless of if the music is RIAA-member-owned or not) and then multiply it by the retail value of a higher-priced CD.
"invalidating any subsequent attempt to patent the technology."
You are assuming the patent system actually works. In practice many patents would be granted - indeed, are granted - for things where prior art not only exists but is widely known. It then falls on the defendents to spend millions of dollars in court to fight the patents.
This is why Firefox doesn't support h264. The licence terms, while not exactly incompatible with the GPL, are sufficiently complex in their interactions that it's easier to just avoid it altogether.
Because x264 is far more advanced - mpeg2 couldn't do HDTV without insane bitrates.
The codecs are similar. It might be possible to use some of the acceleration capabilities in some chips, but it still won't be as good as a chip designed for webm.
But they have no problems with exports of finished products using rare earth elements. They just want to make sure that the manufacturing stays in China, paying Chinese taxes and creating Chinese jobs.
You're over-thinking it.
*printscreen* *paste*
Used to be 4. Convenience. Not true for music now that we have iTunes (A legal music store not rendered useless by DRM, tiny library or other such flaws) but still true to some extent for movies. Going to a store takes time and effort, and people are busy and lazy.
It already is, though.
At which point the inventor discovers that if they want to enforce their patent against any large corporation, it'll cost them several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. Plus they couldn't use their patents anyway, because usage patents would follow. Eg, an inventor comes up with a new form of ;nanofolded insulation' foam (I just made that up), and patents it. But a few weeks later someone has read his patent and patented 'use of nanofolded insulation in HVAC systems,' 'nanofolded insulation catalytic reactor', 'a filter system using nanofolded insulation' - and so on. One of the reasons that large companies cross-licence their patent portfolios is that they know it's impossible for any of them to do business without infringing on patents they don't even know about.
The annoying thing is that if someone just looked at one of these publicly accessible, unauthenticated streams they coud potentially be charged for computer misuse or whatever else their jurisdiction's generic 'hacking' offense is. There really needs to be some higher bar on those laws sometimes.
People respect criminals only so long as they are taking other people's money.
Significently less friction in one-sixth gravity.
Lots to get there. Not so much to get back. Compare size of the rockets to get the Apollo missions up vs the tiny little lunar lander.. only half of which was needed to make escape velocity. You still need some energy, but surprisingly little. The tricky part would be manufacturing the cargo rockets themselves, or sending empty cargo rockets from Earth. This is why many hypothetical mining schemes use accelerators - all you need to do is wrap your semi-refined moon rock in something conductive and feed it in one end, and aim for it to land somewhere uninhabitable on earth. Added bonus: Doubles as a WMD that lets you drop a hypersonic rock on any city you don't like.
"Companies don't move overseas to save on taxes. They move there to save on labor and to have reduced regulations."
You assume a country exists in only one place. That isn't really true any more. It's quite easy for a company to have it's manufacturing facilities in China where labor costs are lowest while being officially incorporated in Guernsey.
Guernsey is a good tax haven. That's why Specsavers is incorporated there.