There must not be any AIA (American Intitute of Architects) memebers reading slashdot right now, as I'm sure that they will land on this with a ton of bricks.
Architects are far more organized when it comes to lobby $$$ to protect the Architect designation, and most states already have laws on the books protecting the Architect designation. Microsoft who has, AFAIK, only lost over the MCSE "Engineer" title in Ontario took on the disorganized Professional Engineering industry. Archtects are far more flush with cash (Have you heard the AIA commercials on your local radio? That takes money, and they've got it).
I say they find themselves in court in less than a month, and I'll give 3:1 odds that RedHat loses.
Because NASA doesn't have any engineering capability left (to speak of). Thanks to Pres. Reagan, the mantra of "outsource to private industry" has been taken to the extreme, and nearly all of the design and engineering is done by private firms. Since we pay overhead and salaries for contract administration on the goverment side, plus the engineers in industry (along with g/a/profit), we're paying full price (plus) either way.
"But when we don't need them (contractors) we don't have to pay salaries," I hear you cry. Sorry, wrong again. Contracts are written for long term usage, with general scope in the contract. Individual design projects are doled out by project managers at NASA. Since the contractors and project managers work side by side year after year, there is social incentive to keep "your people" working, whether or not there's actual tasks to be done at the moment. Remember - if you cancel a task and your best guy at the contractor doesn't have work, he get's dropped. If he moves to get a new job, you've just lost your best worker with no chance of getting him back. It's in your best _business_ interest to keep him working as well.
Have you ever seen what they can do to a DVD? Have you tried to re-purchase "The Little Mermaid" on DVD in the stores recently? Have you ever wanted to make a copy of the movie that had JUST the movie (no mandatory ads in the beginning)? Did you know that VHS tapes degrade over time and viewing (and that MacroVision prevents their copying?) If you owned a copy of Song of the South, wouldn't you like to have a backup?
Have you ever wanted to leave your original DVD ro CD in the Jukebox, where it's safe, and burn a copy to take with you on vacation?
Did you know that these rights management schemes are effectively useless against for-profit pirates (aside: I'm not one of these)? Have you considered that, with 6 MILLION, ACTIVE file sharers, that accounts for less than 0.1% of the population (aside: I'm not one of these either)?
Now, ask me again: Would these new laws really make a difference to me? Hell yes. It's a PITA to rip and recode a DVD. It's a PITA to dub a VHS tape. It's a PITA to rip and burn a backup CD. It's a trivial process to copy VHS-VHS with two standard VCRs, if no macrovision is involved. It's illegal to manufacture an interface box. It would be a trivial exercise to build a jukebox with a recordable (CD/DVD) drive and let you dub a copy. You can't do that 'cause it's illegal to manufacture such a beast.
Type up a letter and mail it everyone listed as a Representative at house.gov in your state, except your local representative. Your local Rep should get a handwritten (very neatly, thank you) letter.
You may also want to drop a line to the first sub-committee (Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property) listed here:
http://www.house.gov/judiciary/submembers.htm
and to the first sub-committee (Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection) listed here:
(BTW - Mary Bono is on that last committee. You might just want to hand write a note that if she doesn't like the bill, you recommend she stick it up her...um, no, maybe that's not a good idea, on second thought)
I'm in Boucher's district and have met and talked with him personally before - he's a genuinely smart guy. My only dissappointments are that he feeds at the pork trough like eveyone else (my community has been the benficiary of about $60k in various matching grants for small projects) and that he's very party-line on general issues. Of course, I've never met a politician who doesn't have those faults, on either side.
At least according to press releases from his office he is facing a heavily (Republican Party) funded carpet-bagger in the next election. I dont' remember the fellows name, but I think he's from Florida. I'd like to say he's safe, 'cause even my far-right in-laws vote for him, but you never know. There are a lot of stupid people areound here who believe anything a TV commercial tell them, and some of them vote.
Yeah, but when your wife sits down and she starts getting all of you pr0n ads, she's gonna get suspicious that your not really spending all of your time on the computer reading slashdot.
(BTW - I agree, for the most part. Our hacked 135hr TiVo does a pretty good job of finding new stuff for the SO to watch, and keeps my Alton Brown safe and sound for me until I can find a few hours to watch 'em all. If TiVo got a multiple user function, we'd be in heaven - no wading through Haunted Houses of Eastern Mongolia and Bear in the Big Blue House to find my New Yankee Workshop)
Don't need a "camera" filter. Browse through the Schott Optical catalog and find the bandpass you need to reject. Order the proper diameter. ??? Profit! (sorry, couldn't resist)
Sure, you drop a couple hundred bux on it, but you're a professional right? You're going to reproduce and resell these things on every street corner for $5 profit a pop. It's a small price to pay - probably less than the projectionists cut of take.
LOTR hasn't had it's chance to produce the money whore-child which is bound to follow. Mark my works, when the Silmarillion is prepared for a trilogy release in a few years we're in for a real treat that may have us wishing for SW EpI-III.
If you ask me, the "intent" of the regulatory law is either to:
1. Provide a mechanism to ensure that safety and performance standards for public services are maintained.
AND/OR
2. To prevent a defacto monopolistic situation from becoming abusive. In this case, it's the copper "last mile" (last 3 miles for me;-) which is single-source.
If NY is attacking based on case 1, Vonage is a phone company. They provide a utility service and should be subject to all the cr@p that every other phone provider goes through. Can you say "long distance?" I knew you could. They use the same model - no physical plant, just bits routed to the right places, with A/D and D/A at each end, running over your existing copper which is owned by another entity.
If, as some slashdotters have suggested, that the real reason for regulation is the control of monopolistic abuses by the owners of the last mile (which, not coincidentally, happens to be local phone providers in nearly all cases), then Vonage is clearly not a phone company, but neither are the non-owner long distance carriers.
IMHO Vonage is clearly providing a telecommunications service, and is no different than a long distance carrier which does not own your local physical plant.
A closing thought...a converstion...
"No, your honor, this check isn't for wages, it's a gift. I don't have to pay taxes on a gift, it's right there in the IRS code. You see, I enjoy sitting in this cubicle as a hobby. I play around on this computer that happens to sit here and I do some design work with my friends - all of us members of this neat club. Now, there's this big company..I think they own the building...and through their generosity they offer many residents of my town a monetary gift each year. In fact, everyone in our club gets a gift, as does the local park and I think some of the schools. Yes, they give me a portion of the gift every two weeks - they say it makes it easier for their philanthropic budgeting. Job? No, its definitely not a job, it's more of a club...you send in your membership application and if you're a good fit - we all have similar interests - you get this membership card which lets you in. Sure, sometimes a member misbehaves, and they lose their membership priveleges - did you know they have a walking trail and free photocopying?"
Usually it's not so bad, but this is getting out of hand. The hope is that you'll get pissed off at the Government, and complain to get the requirments removed. It's also known as Group Punishement.
It's a "sneaky" way of reducing the cost they advertise, making it more difficult to compare consumer plans. What if McDonalds started advertising $0.99 Big Mac meal, but throwing in a $1.50 "minimum wage compliance fee", a $0.83 "health inspection recovery fee", and a $2.23 "Adjusted market value surcharge", then add a $0.45 "franchise remuneration fee", a $.67 "potato and beef transportation adjustment", and a $0.23 "Owner compensation fee". Oh, and then tack on the 5% sales tax and 4.5% prepared food tax, just for good measure.
It's not about the fees which are assesed by the government for raising money from the consumer, its the business costs which would normally be paid by business which are being added on.
I don't charge a professional licensing fee to my clients. I don't add a surcharge for my insurance, though it is about 13% of my gross billables (I've never had a claim). Heck, I don't even charge mileage for site inspections. It's all included in my hourly rate. That will end soon, as I do plan to add a surcharge to recover the Tennessee "professional privilege tax" for my TN work. I don't live in TN, but have clients who may need my services there. Of the 5 states I will be registered to practice in, only TN has this tax, and it makes my registration there about 1200% more expensive than any other state, on an annual basis. Call me a hypocrite, but it's a significant cost increase for a single market...and I plan to pass it on.
Federal Excise Tax: $1.29
Nope, cost of doing business Federal Universal Service Fund: $0.56
Yes, they get billed, but it's another business cost State Gross Receipts Tax: $0.15
Sneaky...a business tax passed on to the consumer (not a "real" tax) State Sales Tax: $1.76
DING-DING-DING...this is a real tax, intended to be paid by the consumer. State Telecom Excise: $1.00
Oh, sorry, another business tax, just like the FED one County Surcharge: $0.05
Looks like a tower fee to me County Telecom Excise: $0.79
FED, STATE, and CO...a trifecta of non-consumer-taxes MCTD Surcharge: $0.24
Oh, please, "surcharge" is so 80s Local Sales Tax: $1.81
Tax #2..were batting.200 with the real taxes now State 911: $1.20
Hmmm...real fee, aimed at the consumer, but I'm going to say no. County 911: $0.30
Ditto Regulatory Programs Fee: $0.86
Oh, not even close.
I get 2 out of 13. Some are really taxes, but are intended to raise revenue from busnesses. Most business are expected to roll those into the cost of goods/services, adding only the sales taxes.
As for business passing on the costs, I plan to do so myself. I have the opportunity to practice engineering (I'm a PE) in Tennessee. Now, I don't mind the annual registration fee of $70, though it's the highest of the 5 states in which I will hold a license. However, if you actually want to provide sevice as an engineer, there's an additional "professional privilege" tax of $400/year. All registered professionals pay it (doctors, lawyers, accountants...) in order to practice. I have already informed my clients that any time I'm needed to apply my TN seal, there will be a "professional privilege tax recovery fee" added to their invoice (A fixed fee plus a percentage of the total value).
Most SUV owners would kill for 20mpg in the real world. Heck, I got a Honda Pilot to tote the family around in and haul all my junk. It's a "mid sized" SUV, and I have to be on the highway for most of the tank to get over 20MPG (got almost 24 on a 300mi trip recently, but that doesn't make up for the 16-17 it gets going back and forth over the mountain I live on.)
The ever popular mid-sized Dodge Durango claimes 12/16, but from all the folks I've heard from, they've never seen anything that good. And don't forget that the real gas hogs don't have EPA milage stickers, as anything over 8500lbs GVWR doesn't have to have them. That would include the H1 and Dodge's V10 powered stuff, as well as others (sorry, I'm not usually in the market for a 40k-120k vehicle).
I suspect you could count on one hand the number of (distinct) SUVs which get better than 20MPG on the city side of the EPA sticker.
Yes, there are certainly some limitations, but ifyou take a page from sheetrockers, you can do everything in sixteenths (you're a geek, right? hex is in your blood).
It's not "four and a half inches" it's "four and eight" (sixteenths). Need a 32nd? Your sixteenth is either "strong" or "weak".
Of course, for probably less than your metric tapemeasures, you could have purchased a centering taple measure, with the correct scale on one edge and a half scale of the same numbers on the other. Read the regular side, then find the correspoding number on the other - its exactly half.
Ahhh, but remember - according to the RIAA we haven't purchased an item which we may use any way we wish.
If I had a rental business, I could rent that plate out on an hourly/daily/weekly basis. If it broke, I'm SOL (okay, I'd charge the renter for the broken disc, but that's beside the point). It's value is in its physical form.
A CD is different because I've purchased the rights to the data which the disc contains, and I'm explicitly forbidden from renting it in the US. It just happens to be in a particular format which a particular piece of electronics can play.
"Why would stores not want you having a phone with you?"
You respond to your own question with: "The one real useful thing I do with it is snap pictures of things I see in a store I want to look up online later and get for cheaper."
Boy, I'm glad you don't "shop" in my store! That's a perfect reason for the store owner to not want you in there with your phone.
OTOH, if you use it like I did my digicam a few years ago (back when 1MP was HUGE), and make up a "(insert gift-givign occasion) gift idea list" for your relatives who don't know what to get you, it's a real crowd pleaser.
Yes, I ALWAYS use a credit card to pay for PayPal transactions (paypal hasn't burned me yet in either direction, so I'm okay with it). Credit cards are the best buyer's protection you can get, and I'll even pay a 2-3% upcharge to get the protection if the seller is a worrywart about paypal. CC companies usually take the attitude of "shoot first, ask questions later" when dealing with sellers, and I've never had a problem with a CC dispute. If you're dissatisfied, your CC co is dissatisfied...and they hold the purse strings.
You forgot to mention that you'll have to buy a Mac if you want to participate (at least for the first year) legally. I've heard the DVDJon is working on a way to let Linux user's bid, though.
Yes, you can. And if there are several complaints, action will probably be taken, depending on the venue. In an enclosed mall, you'd better believe that the mall management will have a talk with the vendor, and their lease will not be renewed unless things shape up.
Property owners who have high visibility leases, and depend on high visibility and positive consumer attitude are very careful about keeping the image up. One or two lousy stores can drag down the profits of an entire mall, and force good clients to look for retail space elsewhere. No leasees = no money for landlords. They do care.
Smaller places will be more tolerant as long as the rent checks don't bounce. The bigger the city, the less policing will go on in these "off-main" singles or low volume rentals. The smaller the city, the more careful everybody is. A few really bad trasactions, especially with the wrong people (tip: beware of grandma, she knows everybody in town), can spell doom for a business. If you run a shady business in a small town (say, less than 100,000pop) you can expect to only get leased space from an equally shady landlord, or you'll have to buy your own place.
Then, of course, there's the local licensing authority. You can always lodge a complaint with the board which grants business licneses. Depending on the rules, it may be possible to get a repeat offender banned form doing business in your town.
If you come into my house to burglarize it, and I shoot you in the legs to stop you, I'm liable for your loss of future income earning potential. Think it sounds farfetched? I remember a case when I was in HS that revolved around that exact scenerio, and the burglar won.
Faulty products are faulty products. If Microsoft fails to offer a repair to a product it knows is defective. Unlike the stolen Ford, our pirate friends may have tried to get the patch and were denied it. Microsoft now has knowledge of a defective instance of the product and has knowingly refused to make the necessary safety corrections. Regardless of the legal status of the ownership, the product liability remains. The fact that the "product" is digital is what makes it not quite fit the traditional product mold. All the disclaimers won't help either,as known defects _will_ make you liable no matter what. As a PE, if I say in my contract "that's not my responsibility" but the "not by me" design is clearly faulty, I'm still liable.
If they can prove it has been stolen from them, they should notify the autorities of the theft and have the product returned to them for repair or destruction.
(I'm not advocating piracy - I have legal copies of XP - but making a patch unavailable is wrong. How would you get the sasser patch if your inet connex was down due to sasser? My parents couldn't, because I couldn't get the patch and write it to disc for them, and they own a legal copy of XP home.)
Gosh, is it so hard to tell that he meant "un-re-compressed"? Of course DVDs are compressed, but DVD-9 means the ability to back up a DVD verbatim. There are reasons to want to do this (some are even legal).
DVD-shrink will still have its purposes, though. I've run a couple of my daughter's Disney DVDs through it so (1) she'd never touch my originals and (2) it plays the movie directly - no menus, no commercials, no format setup screens.
I'm actually thinking about how many of AB's Good Eats I can cram onto one disc - they take up a lot of room in the jukebox at just 3 episodes per disc. I just need a way to get a "top level" menu to access all the original content without a buttload of re-authoring. Dual sided would be even better (since the jukebox can flip a disc internally).
I use my drive for data backup. At less than $1 a disc, I do full weekly backups of all my (in-house generated) business data for my engineering firm. At the current rate, I'll cross the 4.3GB threshold sometime in fall '04. These will be out in quantity just in time. I know, there are ways to get better compression out of a (mostly) static data set than backing it all up, but recovery is far faster this way. If my drive dies, I can restore the entire thing in less than 20 minutes. If I screw up a single file, I can just go to the most recent backup - not have to sift through a multi-generational backup set. And with what I saved on dedicated backup software, I can buy a new DVD+9 drive and another year's worth of discs.
(yes, my main applications drive is bigger than 4.3G...it's about 60GB. That's why it gets imaged by Ghost on a removable drive once a week. Yes, I've tested it...swap the primary with the backup and it's transparent. I sleep much better knowing that in the event of a major HD crash, I'm less than $100 billable time from being back in business)
Actually, this is quite easy to remove...I talked my mother through it over the phone (and she doesn't know the difference between AOL and the internet). Sure, it took her 30 minutes to perform all three steps (boot to safe mode - 8 minutes, delete the exe's - 12 minutes, and remove the registy keys - 10 minutes), but it was actually quite simple. Most of the delay came from me trying to walk her tough the process over the phone wihtout having my machine set up identical to hers:
Me: Okay, press the button on the computer to turn it on and then press f8 Mom: Ess or Eff? Me: Eff-Eight, the function key Mom:Press F8 and hold it? Do I press F and hold it while I press the 8? Me: No, F8 is a key at the top of the keyboard, near the center. Mom. Oh. Okay, the starting windws screen is up, do I press F8 now? Me: Yes Mom: (long pause) It's coming up (pause) Okay, I have my normal picture on the screen. Me: Oh. Okay, lets turn the computer off and try again. [rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat]
It's sort of like talking your dog through doing open heart surgery over the telephone, with the only commands you can give being "sit", "speak", and "heel", and the only feedback is the dog barking.
At least now she's been forced to install a working antivirus program and the firewall software.
If you're really brave, check ou the DVD clubls section. It turns out that Columbia House is actually quite a bargain, when played correctly. I use it like a rental house: Buy 6-8 discs at about $8/ea net (incl tax and s&h). Those I like, I keep, those I don't like I sell on amazon or ebay, usually for about the same as I paid, sometimes a couple of bucks more, after commissions and postage.
Slashdot Mirror
There must not be any AIA (American Intitute of Architects) memebers reading slashdot right now, as I'm sure that they will land on this with a ton of bricks.
Architects are far more organized when it comes to lobby $$$ to protect the Architect designation, and most states already have laws on the books protecting the Architect designation. Microsoft who has, AFAIK, only lost over the MCSE "Engineer" title in Ontario took on the disorganized Professional Engineering industry. Archtects are far more flush with cash (Have you heard the AIA commercials on your local radio? That takes money, and they've got it).
I say they find themselves in court in less than a month, and I'll give 3:1 odds that RedHat loses.
Because NASA doesn't have any engineering capability left (to speak of). Thanks to Pres. Reagan, the mantra of "outsource to private industry" has been taken to the extreme, and nearly all of the design and engineering is done by private firms. Since we pay overhead and salaries for contract administration on the goverment side, plus the engineers in industry (along with g/a/profit), we're paying full price (plus) either way.
"But when we don't need them (contractors) we don't have to pay salaries," I hear you cry. Sorry, wrong again. Contracts are written for long term usage, with general scope in the contract. Individual design projects are doled out by project managers at NASA. Since the contractors and project managers work side by side year after year, there is social incentive to keep "your people" working, whether or not there's actual tasks to be done at the moment. Remember - if you cancel a task and your best guy at the contractor doesn't have work, he get's dropped. If he moves to get a new job, you've just lost your best worker with no chance of getting him back. It's in your best _business_ interest to keep him working as well.
It's lose-lose.
Troll, no doubt, but it's a nice opening...
You don't have small children, do you?
Have you ever seen what they can do to a DVD? Have you tried to re-purchase "The Little Mermaid" on DVD in the stores recently? Have you ever wanted to make a copy of the movie that had JUST the movie (no mandatory ads in the beginning)? Did you know that VHS tapes degrade over time and viewing (and that MacroVision prevents their copying?) If you owned a copy of Song of the South, wouldn't you like to have a backup?
Have you ever wanted to leave your original DVD ro CD in the Jukebox, where it's safe, and burn a copy to take with you on vacation?
Did you know that these rights management schemes are effectively useless against for-profit pirates (aside: I'm not one of these)? Have you considered that, with 6 MILLION, ACTIVE file sharers, that accounts for less than 0.1% of the population (aside: I'm not one of these either)?
Now, ask me again: Would these new laws really make a difference to me? Hell yes. It's a PITA to rip and recode a DVD. It's a PITA to dub a VHS tape. It's a PITA to rip and burn a backup CD. It's a trivial process to copy VHS-VHS with two standard VCRs, if no macrovision is involved. It's illegal to manufacture an interface box. It would be a trivial exercise to build a jukebox with a recordable (CD/DVD) drive and let you dub a copy. You can't do that 'cause it's illegal to manufacture such a beast.
Quit treating me like a d@mned criminal.
Type up a letter and mail it everyone listed as a Representative at house.gov in your state, except your local representative. Your local Rep should get a handwritten (very neatly, thank you) letter.
e s/ Commerce_Trade_and_Consumer_Protection_Members.htm
You may also want to drop a line to the first sub-committee (Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property) listed here:
http://www.house.gov/judiciary/submembers.htm
and to the first sub-committee (Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection) listed here:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/subcommitte
(BTW - Mary Bono is on that last committee. You might just want to hand write a note that if she doesn't like the bill, you recommend she stick it up her...um, no, maybe that's not a good idea, on second thought)
I'm in Boucher's district and have met and talked with him personally before - he's a genuinely smart guy. My only dissappointments are that he feeds at the pork trough like eveyone else (my community has been the benficiary of about $60k in various matching grants for small projects) and that he's very party-line on general issues. Of course, I've never met a politician who doesn't have those faults, on either side.
At least according to press releases from his office he is facing a heavily (Republican Party) funded carpet-bagger in the next election. I dont' remember the fellows name, but I think he's from Florida. I'd like to say he's safe, 'cause even my far-right in-laws vote for him, but you never know. There are a lot of stupid people areound here who believe anything a TV commercial tell them, and some of them vote.
Yeah, but when your wife sits down and she starts getting all of you pr0n ads, she's gonna get suspicious that your not really spending all of your time on the computer reading slashdot.
(BTW - I agree, for the most part. Our hacked 135hr TiVo does a pretty good job of finding new stuff for the SO to watch, and keeps my Alton Brown safe and sound for me until I can find a few hours to watch 'em all. If TiVo got a multiple user function, we'd be in heaven - no wading through Haunted Houses of Eastern Mongolia and Bear in the Big Blue House to find my New Yankee Workshop)
Don't need a "camera" filter. Browse through the Schott Optical catalog and find the bandpass you need to reject. Order the proper diameter. ??? Profit! (sorry, couldn't resist)
Sure, you drop a couple hundred bux on it, but you're a professional right? You're going to reproduce and resell these things on every street corner for $5 profit a pop. It's a small price to pay - probably less than the projectionists cut of take.
LOTR hasn't had it's chance to produce the money whore-child which is bound to follow. Mark my works, when the Silmarillion is prepared for a trilogy release in a few years we're in for a real treat that may have us wishing for SW EpI-III.
"Phone service" "Telephone" "VOIP" blah balh blah.
;-) which is single-source.
If you ask me, the "intent" of the regulatory law is either to:
1. Provide a mechanism to ensure that safety and performance standards for public services are maintained.
AND/OR
2. To prevent a defacto monopolistic situation from becoming abusive. In this case, it's the copper "last mile" (last 3 miles for me
If NY is attacking based on case 1, Vonage is a phone company. They provide a utility service and should be subject to all the cr@p that every other phone provider goes through. Can you say "long distance?" I knew you could. They use the same model - no physical plant, just bits routed to the right places, with A/D and D/A at each end, running over your existing copper which is owned by another entity.
If, as some slashdotters have suggested, that the real reason for regulation is the control of monopolistic abuses by the owners of the last mile (which, not coincidentally, happens to be local phone providers in nearly all cases), then Vonage is clearly not a phone company, but neither are the non-owner long distance carriers.
IMHO Vonage is clearly providing a telecommunications service, and is no different than a long distance carrier which does not own your local physical plant.
A closing thought...a converstion...
"No, your honor, this check isn't for wages, it's a gift. I don't have to pay taxes on a gift, it's right there in the IRS code. You see, I enjoy sitting in this cubicle as a hobby. I play around on this computer that happens to sit here and I do some design work with my friends - all of us members of this neat club. Now, there's this big company..I think they own the building...and through their generosity they offer many residents of my town a monetary gift each year. In fact, everyone in our club gets a gift, as does the local park and I think some of the schools. Yes, they give me a portion of the gift every two weeks - they say it makes it easier for their philanthropic budgeting. Job? No, its definitely not a job, it's more of a club...you send in your membership application and if you're a good fit - we all have similar interests - you get this membership card which lets you in. Sure, sometimes a member misbehaves, and they lose their membership priveleges - did you know they have a walking trail and free photocopying?"
Usually it's not so bad, but this is getting out of hand. The hope is that you'll get pissed off at the Government, and complain to get the requirments removed. It's also known as Group Punishement.
It's a "sneaky" way of reducing the cost they advertise, making it more difficult to compare consumer plans. What if McDonalds started advertising $0.99 Big Mac meal, but throwing in a $1.50 "minimum wage compliance fee", a $0.83 "health inspection recovery fee", and a $2.23 "Adjusted market value surcharge", then add a $0.45 "franchise remuneration fee", a $.67 "potato and beef transportation adjustment", and a $0.23 "Owner compensation fee". Oh, and then tack on the 5% sales tax and 4.5% prepared food tax, just for good measure.
It's not about the fees which are assesed by the government for raising money from the consumer, its the business costs which would normally be paid by business which are being added on.
I don't charge a professional licensing fee to my clients. I don't add a surcharge for my insurance, though it is about 13% of my gross billables (I've never had a claim). Heck, I don't even charge mileage for site inspections. It's all included in my hourly rate. That will end soon, as I do plan to add a surcharge to recover the Tennessee "professional privilege tax" for my TN work. I don't live in TN, but have clients who may need my services there. Of the 5 states I will be registered to practice in, only TN has this tax, and it makes my registration there about 1200% more expensive than any other state, on an annual basis. Call me a hypocrite, but it's a significant cost increase for a single market...and I plan to pass it on.
Federal Excise Tax: $1.29 .200 with the real taxes now
Nope, cost of doing business
Federal Universal Service Fund: $0.56
Yes, they get billed, but it's another business cost
State Gross Receipts Tax: $0.15
Sneaky...a business tax passed on to the consumer (not a "real" tax)
State Sales Tax: $1.76
DING-DING-DING...this is a real tax, intended to be paid by the consumer.
State Telecom Excise: $1.00
Oh, sorry, another business tax, just like the FED one
County Surcharge: $0.05
Looks like a tower fee to me
County Telecom Excise: $0.79
FED, STATE, and CO...a trifecta of non-consumer-taxes
MCTD Surcharge: $0.24
Oh, please, "surcharge" is so 80s
Local Sales Tax: $1.81
Tax #2..were batting
State 911: $1.20
Hmmm...real fee, aimed at the consumer, but I'm going to say no.
County 911: $0.30
Ditto
Regulatory Programs Fee: $0.86
Oh, not even close.
I get 2 out of 13. Some are really taxes, but are intended to raise revenue from busnesses. Most business are expected to roll those into the cost of goods/services, adding only the sales taxes.
As for business passing on the costs, I plan to do so myself. I have the opportunity to practice engineering (I'm a PE) in Tennessee. Now, I don't mind the annual registration fee of $70, though it's the highest of the 5 states in which I will hold a license. However, if you actually want to provide sevice as an engineer, there's an additional "professional privilege" tax of $400/year. All registered professionals pay it (doctors, lawyers, accountants...) in order to practice. I have already informed my clients that any time I'm needed to apply my TN seal, there will be a "professional privilege tax recovery fee" added to their invoice (A fixed fee plus a percentage of the total value).
Businesses get taxed...and we pass it on.
Most SUV owners would kill for 20mpg in the real world. Heck, I got a Honda Pilot to tote the family around in and haul all my junk. It's a "mid sized" SUV, and I have to be on the highway for most of the tank to get over 20MPG (got almost 24 on a 300mi trip recently, but that doesn't make up for the 16-17 it gets going back and forth over the mountain I live on.)
The ever popular mid-sized Dodge Durango claimes 12/16, but from all the folks I've heard from, they've never seen anything that good. And don't forget that the real gas hogs don't have EPA milage stickers, as anything over 8500lbs GVWR doesn't have to have them. That would include the H1 and Dodge's V10 powered stuff, as well as others (sorry, I'm not usually in the market for a 40k-120k vehicle).
I suspect you could count on one hand the number of (distinct) SUVs which get better than 20MPG on the city side of the EPA sticker.
Yes, there are certainly some limitations, but ifyou take a page from sheetrockers, you can do everything in sixteenths (you're a geek, right? hex is in your blood).
8 94 8&ccsyn=22
It's not "four and a half inches" it's "four and eight" (sixteenths). Need a 32nd? Your sixteenth is either "strong" or "weak".
Of course, for probably less than your metric tapemeasures, you could have purchased a centering taple measure, with the correct scale on one edge and a half scale of the same numbers on the other. Read the regular side, then find the correspoding number on the other - its exactly half.
http://amos.catalogcity.com/cc.class/cc?pcd=590
D2mn, how did this end up as a top level thread? Oh, well, I suppose its no more out of contect than most other posts here ;-)
Nothing to see...keep walking...
Ahhh, but remember - according to the RIAA we haven't purchased an item which we may use any way we wish.
If I had a rental business, I could rent that plate out on an hourly/daily/weekly basis. If it broke, I'm SOL (okay, I'd charge the renter for the broken disc, but that's beside the point). It's value is in its physical form.
A CD is different because I've purchased the rights to the data which the disc contains, and I'm explicitly forbidden from renting it in the US. It just happens to be in a particular format which a particular piece of electronics can play.
Quote:
"Why would stores not want you having a phone with you?"
You respond to your own question with:
"The one real useful thing I do with it is snap pictures of things I see in a store I want to look up online later and get for cheaper."
Boy, I'm glad you don't "shop" in my store! That's a perfect reason for the store owner to not want you in there with your phone.
OTOH, if you use it like I did my digicam a few years ago (back when 1MP was HUGE), and make up a "(insert gift-givign occasion) gift idea list" for your relatives who don't know what to get you, it's a real crowd pleaser.
Yes, I ALWAYS use a credit card to pay for PayPal transactions (paypal hasn't burned me yet in either direction, so I'm okay with it). Credit cards are the best buyer's protection you can get, and I'll even pay a 2-3% upcharge to get the protection if the seller is a worrywart about paypal. CC companies usually take the attitude of "shoot first, ask questions later" when dealing with sellers, and I've never had a problem with a CC dispute. If you're dissatisfied, your CC co is dissatisfied...and they hold the purse strings.
Paypal's own buyers protection is useless.
You forgot to mention that you'll have to buy a Mac if you want to participate (at least for the first year) legally. I've heard the DVDJon is working on a way to let Linux user's bid, though.
Yes, you can. And if there are several complaints, action will probably be taken, depending on the venue. In an enclosed mall, you'd better believe that the mall management will have a talk with the vendor, and their lease will not be renewed unless things shape up.
Property owners who have high visibility leases, and depend on high visibility and positive consumer attitude are very careful about keeping the image up. One or two lousy stores can drag down the profits of an entire mall, and force good clients to look for retail space elsewhere. No leasees = no money for landlords. They do care.
Smaller places will be more tolerant as long as the rent checks don't bounce. The bigger the city, the less policing will go on in these "off-main" singles or low volume rentals. The smaller the city, the more careful everybody is. A few really bad trasactions, especially with the wrong people (tip: beware of grandma, she knows everybody in town), can spell doom for a business. If you run a shady business in a small town (say, less than 100,000pop) you can expect to only get leased space from an equally shady landlord, or you'll have to buy your own place.
Then, of course, there's the local licensing authority. You can always lodge a complaint with the board which grants business licneses. Depending on the rules, it may be possible to get a repeat offender banned form doing business in your town.
If you come into my house to burglarize it, and I shoot you in the legs to stop you, I'm liable for your loss of future income earning potential. Think it sounds farfetched? I remember a case when I was in HS that revolved around that exact scenerio, and the burglar won.
Faulty products are faulty products. If Microsoft fails to offer a repair to a product it knows is defective. Unlike the stolen Ford, our pirate friends may have tried to get the patch and were denied it. Microsoft now has knowledge of a defective instance of the product and has knowingly refused to make the necessary safety corrections. Regardless of the legal status of the ownership, the product liability remains. The fact that the "product" is digital is what makes it not quite fit the traditional product mold. All the disclaimers won't help either,as known defects _will_ make you liable no matter what. As a PE, if I say in my contract "that's not my responsibility" but the "not by me" design is clearly faulty, I'm still liable.
If they can prove it has been stolen from them, they should notify the autorities of the theft and have the product returned to them for repair or destruction.
(I'm not advocating piracy - I have legal copies of XP - but making a patch unavailable is wrong. How would you get the sasser patch if your inet connex was down due to sasser? My parents couldn't, because I couldn't get the patch and write it to disc for them, and they own a legal copy of XP home.)
Gosh, is it so hard to tell that he meant "un-re-compressed"? Of course DVDs are compressed, but DVD-9 means the ability to back up a DVD verbatim. There are reasons to want to do this (some are even legal).
DVD-shrink will still have its purposes, though. I've run a couple of my daughter's Disney DVDs through it so (1) she'd never touch my originals and (2) it plays the movie directly - no menus, no commercials, no format setup screens.
I'm actually thinking about how many of AB's Good Eats I can cram onto one disc - they take up a lot of room in the jukebox at just 3 episodes per disc. I just need a way to get a "top level" menu to access all the original content without a buttload of re-authoring. Dual sided would be even better (since the jukebox can flip a disc internally).
I use my drive for data backup. At less than $1 a disc, I do full weekly backups of all my (in-house generated) business data for my engineering firm. At the current rate, I'll cross the 4.3GB threshold sometime in fall '04. These will be out in quantity just in time. I know, there are ways to get better compression out of a (mostly) static data set than backing it all up, but recovery is far faster this way. If my drive dies, I can restore the entire thing in less than 20 minutes. If I screw up a single file, I can just go to the most recent backup - not have to sift through a multi-generational backup set. And with what I saved on dedicated backup software, I can buy a new DVD+9 drive and another year's worth of discs.
(yes, my main applications drive is bigger than 4.3G...it's about 60GB. That's why it gets imaged by Ghost on a removable drive once a week. Yes, I've tested it...swap the primary with the backup and it's transparent. I sleep much better knowing that in the event of a major HD crash, I'm less than $100 billable time from being back in business)
Actually, this is quite easy to remove...I talked my mother through it over the phone (and she doesn't know the difference between AOL and the internet). Sure, it took her 30 minutes to perform all three steps (boot to safe mode - 8 minutes, delete the exe's - 12 minutes, and remove the registy keys - 10 minutes), but it was actually quite simple. Most of the delay came from me trying to walk her tough the process over the phone wihtout having my machine set up identical to hers:
Me: Okay, press the button on the computer to turn it on and then press f8
Mom: Ess or Eff?
Me: Eff-Eight, the function key
Mom:Press F8 and hold it? Do I press F and hold it while I press the 8?
Me: No, F8 is a key at the top of the keyboard, near the center.
Mom. Oh. Okay, the starting windws screen is up, do I press F8 now?
Me: Yes
Mom: (long pause) It's coming up (pause) Okay, I have my normal picture on the screen.
Me: Oh. Okay, lets turn the computer off and try again.
[rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat]
It's sort of like talking your dog through doing open heart surgery over the telephone, with the only commands you can give being "sit", "speak", and "heel", and the only feedback is the dog barking.
At least now she's been forced to install a working antivirus program and the firewall software.
If you're really brave, check ou the DVD clubls section. It turns out that Columbia House is actually quite a bargain, when played correctly. I use it like a rental house: Buy 6-8 discs at about $8/ea net (incl tax and s&h). Those I like, I keep, those I don't like I sell on amazon or ebay, usually for about the same as I paid, sometimes a couple of bucks more, after commissions and postage.