The salient point here is that non-shooter residents won't have a firearm in the home. So, while I don't believe a cop is more or less likely to be a shooter than anybody else, we've eliminated the non-shooting general populace by positing a situation where the resident has a firearm in the home. And that population is likely to be a better shooter, because it doesn't take much to have more firearms training than the average police officer.
Situational awareness and body language are great for getting you some extra time before the guns clear leather. However, when doors are being bashed in, you the defender do not need to read body language. Situational awareness is useful, but the police's (potentially) greater awareness is offset by your (guaranteed) greater terrain knowledge. What you need are muscle memory for presentation, sight alignment, breath control, and smooth trigger pull. These are skills you develop with trigger time.
If you're just walking down the street or standing in a store and a shootout spontaneously breaks out, situational awareness and body language will get you precious time to hug the floor, clear out, or clear leather.
The police win firefight engagements with numbers and/or designated marksmen. No, really. Thats how. The other stuff is great for preventing a firefight from getting started. Its great to give you warning that the fight is coming, and that you need to respond to it. But if you're a cop with a suspect and you're looking at each other over the barrel of a gun, looking around to increase your situational awareness is begging to get shot.
But the guy you were replying to was right. Individual officers quite frequently don't have a lot of firearms training.
Lets think about this for a moment.
If the police force is reasonably useful and generally good, there isn't any reason to get into a shoot out with them. They're doing a good job.
If the police force is corrupt and aggressive, there isn't any good opportunity to get into a shoot out with them. They've got numbers and no pressing need to respect things like your right to life.
(In between those options you've got a so-so police force that is doing a decent job under severe budget crunches and a public that doesn't wanna pony up for better coverage)
You can think you're good at firearms combat, and be right (or wrong), and still come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that getting into a shootout isn't in your best interests. They've got quantity. And quantity is a quality all its own.
In terms of Star Wars, I'm not going to get into a shootout with stormtroopers. Even though they're almost universally bad shots, there are so goddamn many of them that it isn't worth the trouble if I can avoid it.
Whats your point? Police don't get shot at all that often themselves. And most of their firearms training is.. at the range. Infrequently, no less. It will depend on the department, of course, but their qualification is probably going to be from stationary positions in bays on a range. At paper. And the rounds fired in qualification are less than a gun owner will fire in one trip to the range. I think you think police are gun owners. They're not, really. They're law enforcers that get issued guns. A lot of their job doesn't involve a firearm, and they consequently spent a lot more time learning non-firearms subjects.
Maybe there are a lot of departments out there with reactive targets, and practical shooting galleries. I doubt it, though. Takes a lot more money and space per shooter.
Beer is in vending machines all over japan. Has been for a long time. About 300 yen and off you go with your Sapporo Ichiban or Kirin or Asahi Dry. No ID, no hacking, no elaborate physical or mental contortions.
Tobacco is more difficult. But I don't know how secure the rfid (I think?) cards are. Probably not very. I'd guess, although I have no proof, that its more a feel-good thing than an actual attempt to quash underage smoking.
Bootleg merchants aren't going to show up at the event and start knitting, sewing, and silk-screening t-shirts. That shit is already made. Which means the infringement has already happened.
I think its silly of them to file, but at least it isn't as absurd as the summary makes it out.
Choices for president... Obama and McCain. Underwhelming and oh-god-why. Sure, the people who don't vote might get a different name elected if they voted, but how does that, in any way, make government better when the other guy is also shitty?
I understand the non-voters a lot more than voters. The choices are terrible, either way. Exactly 1 vote matters. Alternatively, your vote is worth 1/n votes where n is the number of people who voted with you, assuming your candidate won.
In small, municipal positions where the total number of elligible voters is small, it is more understandable to vote. Your vote is more likely to make a difference. On the other hand, the power of your vote is most trivial. Most of government that will touch your life is going to be decided by county, state, or federal bodies.
The US election system is fundamentally borked. Power accrues to 2 parties because if either party splinters, the unsplit opposition party tends to dominate the elections. And the two parties with power garner so many votes that there isn't real hope of getting a third party candidate elected. So.. the system is fairly well engineered to present largely substandard choices, chosen primarily for being least revolting to the most numbers rather than any particular greatness of leadership.
Other election systems have their own issues, no lie. But this one we have makes me not want to participate.
So... there aren't any flight sticks for flight sims, steering wheels for racers, arcade sticks for fighters, or turbo settings on 3rd party controllers because players shouldn't be allowed to get an advantage because they've bought an extra peripheral?
Perhaps there is an actual, consistent argument for not permitting a mouse to work with a console, but that most certainly is not it.
He (you) take a new magazine and use it to knock the eject mechanism to remove the spent magazine. The FN FAL is the only rifle in the game that does this (despite the AK having a similar eject mechanism, making it possible. In fact, this nonchalant reloading was originally going to be used on the AK, not the FAL).
Yes, but pretty much every recent shooter I've played has you drop a magazine, seat a magazine, and then pull the charging handle. Which... is dumb.
If I had a round in the chamber, it is entirely unnecessary to work the charging handle at all. Seat the mag, pull the trigger.
If I did not have a round in the chamber, seat the mag and unseat the charging handle from its held open position.
Now, if the game were to have weapon failures, it would be necessary to pull the charging handle. Clear a jam, or because the bolt failed to lock back on an empty magazine, failure to feed/fire/extract/eject. Whatever. I suspect people wouldn't like that because its less fun. But.. where is the fun in the reloading animation being pointlessly long? In fact, it punishes players with less skill to a greater degree than those with high skill. They're more likely to need to reload under fire because they use more bullets to score a kill.
I guess its an incentive to not suck.. but.. it is neither fun nor realistic.
Are you... blind? He didn't say it was fucking easy. He said that being an investigative journalist (I'll restrain myself from laughing) from a desk is fucking easy because it is neither investigative nor journalism. And because it is easy, there are way too many people who are capable of doing it. Which means the only way to distinguish yourself is to be early and often. You can't win on skill, because there isn't any. So yeah.. satisfaction is low and burnout is real high.
On the other hand, if you do the difficult job of actual investigation and journalism, you won't have to rush to slam out stories. Your energy will be spent getting the details right on a GOOD story. And because it is difficult, there are actual skills required and less people who possess them.
Uh.. what? Before I picked up a messaging plan, which was before I had a phone with a text-friendly interface, I rarely received SMS messages. And I never read them, because everybody I wanted to talk to knew that I wasn't going to bother with SMS messages. Still billed for 15c, literally nickel and dimed, for receiving the message.
How would they know you read it, anyway? The message, in its entirety, is transfered to your phone at time of delivery not time of perusal.
Congratulations. You are pretty much at the pinnacle of attempting to push anecdote as data.
Again. I have not said that all workers are subject to being fired because of an increase in labor cost. So please, do stop trying to bring up "there must be at least one worker" because at no point in time have I said that there will be no workers.
Even if you are correct and the facility you work in could not, in fact, do without any of its employees. That still doesn't mean you should, or could, accurately extrapolate from your experience to all employers.
Thing is, we actually end up replacing skills more than we replace people. So we end up with unskilled folks plus machines rather than skilled labor.
Finally, machines have their own troubles. They certainly do break down (or I wouldn't have a job), but you're right that they're less trouble as a whole. Then again, when a machine goes bad, it can screw up everything run through it consistently. That really sucks, especially when you can't really afford to do proper repairs. Sometimes I think the whole damn plant is held together with duct tape.
You've replaced the expensive parts (skilled labor) with less expensive parts (automation). No shock there. The fact that you have the less expensive unskilled labor still is no surprise, either. It is difficult to replace unskilled labor in no small part because it is less expensive. Making unskilled labor more expensive with legislation makes it easier to replace with automation, pretty much exactly like technology becoming cheaper makes unskilled labor more prone to replacement by automation.
And yes, because a single machine is, in effect, taking the place of multiple workers (generally) a catastrophic failure can be quite irritating and has many cascading effects. A catastrophic failure in a lone worker is probably less likely to have such a staggering cascading effect. But actual workers have smaller cascading effects far more often. When they have bad days, or they're just ready to get the hell home. Or they're worried about their child in the hospital. Or whatever. Less catastrophic failure is an exchange for frequent distraction.
Where did I say anything about running a factory with no laborers? I didn't. I said absolutely necessary. Which it isn't. Go ahead, tell your factory managers that they'll have to pay each minimum wage worker $1/hour more. It won't surprise me a bit if they find some unnecessary minimum wage worker to ex-employ. Because the work he was doing was not indispensable. Important? Quite possibly. Can you get as much done without him? No. Can you get by without him? Almost assuredly.
Of course we're automating as much minimum wage work as possible. Minimum wage laws make it more and more feasible to replace actual workers with automata. People are expensive. They constantly incur payroll expense, are inconsistent, get sick, complain. Machines don't.
And no, I never did work a factory. Just a warehouse. A very busy one. Definitely not skilled labor. Thoroughly unenjoyable.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but I made no ethical judgements in what I said. Zero. But this odd belief that somehow government intervention frees us from the problems of resource allocation does not serve us well.
Not all "lost jobs" are necessarily bad. But a failure to acknowledge the losses tends to lead to overapplication of the protocol generating the losses. That can be bad.
Lets say that minimum wage is $7 even. Joe is earning $7.50. Minimum wage is raised to $7.50. Joe probably isn't going to be getting a raise. But now prices have gone up a little to pay for the increase to the minimum wage earners who got a legislated raise. So Joe is poorer than he was before. And so is every one else who wasn't earning minimum wage, but you probably have more empathy for somebody earning on the low-but-not-minimum part of the pay scale.
Minimum wage might be economically neutral (that is to say, gains by the minimum wage earners would be offset by losses to everybody not a minimum wage earner) if all work was entirely necessary. But minimum wage work probably isn't absolutely necessary. So if unskilled work that isn't necessary to a business is worth some flat amount of money, when minimum wage is raised, they'll respond by dropping a position to pay the remaining positions the new minimum. Or by keeping the staff, but telling them to knock off earlier. Any unfinished work, say sweeping the floors, is a non-monetary cost passed on to consumers.
Actually, there are lots of ways to pass on the costs of minimum wage. As mentioned, dropping a position and having your current staff work a little less. Employers could also respond, instead of dropping minimum wage positions, by extending the period between renovation/redecoration. Such a response causes the job losses to be felt in construction and associated industry. There is also inflation, which obviously not controllable by the employer, but is a natural artifact of the prices of goods and services going up when no actual additional value has been contributed.
Keep kidding yourself that legislating a raise in cost for anything, doesn't lead to less of something complementary in response. Minimum wage legislation can't make workers more efficient or more resources available. It could, but doesn't, mandate the number of positions or the hours those positions must work.
the tl;dr of it: If workers don't become more efficient, or more resources (not money) are not available, legislation that raises the cost of labor will result in less labor. Either through fewer hires or fewer hours.
Uh.. in what way are they bundled? I can use any, all, or none of the Google services. I do not need to use one in order to use another. There are no price breaks for one if you have another. Well.. except for Google Contacts. Thats bundled with, at least, gmail and gv. Although it is totally usable without either mail or voice services. Same price, though, either way.
Being available from the same vendor is not a "bundle".. otherwise Ford is bundling the Focus with the Explorer.
And none of that is priced predatorily. There are free office products not from Google. And there are lots of mail hosts free, that are not from Google.
Actually, it couldn't be less predatory. I know those search engines from Before Google sucked. But you know what they charged you? The same as Google.
Well just cause I'm a nice guy, I did read the actual general statute.
The language of the use tax requirements, in isolation, might be as you state. But it is not in isolation. It has been specifically constructed to apply only to interstate commerce. Intrastate commerce has already been covered by the sales tax section. If it isn't taxable intrastate (as in not covered by 105.164-4) it isn't taxable by 105-164.6 (use tax). If it is taxable intrastate, sales tax must be collected by the retailer at time of sale.
The NC Department of Revenue explicitly states that:
The use tax applies to transactions that would be subject to sales tax if the purchase were made in North Carolina. The use tax rate is the same as the sales tax rate that would apply to the purchase if it were made in North Carolina.
It is a sales tax on interstate commerce, full stop.
If not, I have news for you. Every phone that has ever advertised that it is easy to take pictures is a phone that has advertised the exact same thing. Unless, of course, the process of sending those pictures has been some arcane ritual that can only take place on the third minute of the seventh hour the day after your first born takes its first breath. Which is probably not the case.
What you take pictures of and how easy it is to take them are separate issues. If it is easy to take a picture of your dog, it is also easy to take a picture of a naked person. But I don't see any outrage over the iPhone's photo taking process, which is also pretty simple. Ditto the lack of outrage over Android, Motorola, LG, Samsung...
If it is the content of the advert in question, where is the outrage for the endless commercials (read: porn) depicting bare chested men pushing beer, beach vacation spots, travel reservations, antiperspirants, body wash, exercise or diet programs, or whatever else. The damage such lewd imagery does to the children!
Piracy and free demos are... pretty well unrelated. But I can see why Crytek and EA would want free demos to go away. Because then gamers can find out that a game sucks before buying it.
Is that what I hear you saying, EA? Crytek?
EA: Fuck! We're out of good ideas! Crytek: Us too! EA: Kill the free demos before anybody finds out! Crytek: Right away! Releasing demo-minators! Fuck! Thats a great idea for a game! We can tag it "They won't be back!"
Not to mention that games moving online is a penalty to piracy. Who pirates a multiplayer FPS for the single player campaign? It might be a material argument for single player only games. But I'll wait until game publishers aren't cranial-anal linked, pushing single player games that won't start without phoning home to ask permission, or must have an active connection at all times while playing. When they put out a functional game, I might listen to them calling their customers scumsucking thieves. Until then, I'll play some other company's games.
Slashdot Mirror
The salient point here is that non-shooter residents won't have a firearm in the home. So, while I don't believe a cop is more or less likely to be a shooter than anybody else, we've eliminated the non-shooting general populace by positing a situation where the resident has a firearm in the home. And that population is likely to be a better shooter, because it doesn't take much to have more firearms training than the average police officer.
You're missing my point.
Situational awareness and body language are great for getting you some extra time before the guns clear leather. However, when doors are being bashed in, you the defender do not need to read body language. Situational awareness is useful, but the police's (potentially) greater awareness is offset by your (guaranteed) greater terrain knowledge. What you need are muscle memory for presentation, sight alignment, breath control, and smooth trigger pull. These are skills you develop with trigger time.
If you're just walking down the street or standing in a store and a shootout spontaneously breaks out, situational awareness and body language will get you precious time to hug the floor, clear out, or clear leather.
The police win firefight engagements with numbers and/or designated marksmen. No, really. Thats how. The other stuff is great for preventing a firefight from getting started. Its great to give you warning that the fight is coming, and that you need to respond to it. But if you're a cop with a suspect and you're looking at each other over the barrel of a gun, looking around to increase your situational awareness is begging to get shot.
But the guy you were replying to was right. Individual officers quite frequently don't have a lot of firearms training.
Lets think about this for a moment.
If the police force is reasonably useful and generally good, there isn't any reason to get into a shoot out with them. They're doing a good job.
If the police force is corrupt and aggressive, there isn't any good opportunity to get into a shoot out with them. They've got numbers and no pressing need to respect things like your right to life.
(In between those options you've got a so-so police force that is doing a decent job under severe budget crunches and a public that doesn't wanna pony up for better coverage)
You can think you're good at firearms combat, and be right (or wrong), and still come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that getting into a shootout isn't in your best interests. They've got quantity. And quantity is a quality all its own.
In terms of Star Wars, I'm not going to get into a shootout with stormtroopers. Even though they're almost universally bad shots, there are so goddamn many of them that it isn't worth the trouble if I can avoid it.
Whats your point? Police don't get shot at all that often themselves. And most of their firearms training is .. at the range. Infrequently, no less. It will depend on the department, of course, but their qualification is probably going to be from stationary positions in bays on a range. At paper. And the rounds fired in qualification are less than a gun owner will fire in one trip to the range. I think you think police are gun owners. They're not, really. They're law enforcers that get issued guns. A lot of their job doesn't involve a firearm, and they consequently spent a lot more time learning non-firearms subjects.
Maybe there are a lot of departments out there with reactive targets, and practical shooting galleries. I doubt it, though. Takes a lot more money and space per shooter.
i'm guessing you've never been to japan.
The last time I was there, I saw maybe 5 obese people in a week. And 2 of those were foreigners.
-years.
Beer is in vending machines all over japan. Has been for a long time. About 300 yen and off you go with your Sapporo Ichiban or Kirin or Asahi Dry. No ID, no hacking, no elaborate physical or mental contortions.
Tobacco is more difficult. But I don't know how secure the rfid (I think?) cards are. Probably not very. I'd guess, although I have no proof, that its more a feel-good thing than an actual attempt to quash underage smoking.
Right.. because if you go to the track, you can put money that the horse with the highest odds of winning comes in last.
Oh wait.. you can't.
When the student must explicitly permit it, yeah sure, why not?
Bootleg merchants aren't going to show up at the event and start knitting, sewing, and silk-screening t-shirts. That shit is already made. Which means the infringement has already happened.
I think its silly of them to file, but at least it isn't as absurd as the summary makes it out.
And, also, no real benefits.
Choices for president... Obama and McCain. Underwhelming and oh-god-why. Sure, the people who don't vote might get a different name elected if they voted, but how does that, in any way, make government better when the other guy is also shitty?
I understand the non-voters a lot more than voters. The choices are terrible, either way. Exactly 1 vote matters. Alternatively, your vote is worth 1/n votes where n is the number of people who voted with you, assuming your candidate won.
In small, municipal positions where the total number of elligible voters is small, it is more understandable to vote. Your vote is more likely to make a difference. On the other hand, the power of your vote is most trivial. Most of government that will touch your life is going to be decided by county, state, or federal bodies.
The US election system is fundamentally borked. Power accrues to 2 parties because if either party splinters, the unsplit opposition party tends to dominate the elections. And the two parties with power garner so many votes that there isn't real hope of getting a third party candidate elected. So.. the system is fairly well engineered to present largely substandard choices, chosen primarily for being least revolting to the most numbers rather than any particular greatness of leadership.
Other election systems have their own issues, no lie. But this one we have makes me not want to participate.
So... there aren't any flight sticks for flight sims, steering wheels for racers, arcade sticks for fighters, or turbo settings on 3rd party controllers because players shouldn't be allowed to get an advantage because they've bought an extra peripheral?
Perhaps there is an actual, consistent argument for not permitting a mouse to work with a console, but that most certainly is not it.
Uh, Encryption? Its the same thing that kept an untold number of APs out of Google's data collection efforts.
So.. Learn it. Love it. Use it.
Yes, but pretty much every recent shooter I've played has you drop a magazine, seat a magazine, and then pull the charging handle. Which... is dumb.
If I had a round in the chamber, it is entirely unnecessary to work the charging handle at all. Seat the mag, pull the trigger.
If I did not have a round in the chamber, seat the mag and unseat the charging handle from its held open position.
Now, if the game were to have weapon failures, it would be necessary to pull the charging handle. Clear a jam, or because the bolt failed to lock back on an empty magazine, failure to feed/fire/extract/eject. Whatever. I suspect people wouldn't like that because its less fun. But.. where is the fun in the reloading animation being pointlessly long? In fact, it punishes players with less skill to a greater degree than those with high skill. They're more likely to need to reload under fire because they use more bullets to score a kill.
I guess its an incentive to not suck.. but.. it is neither fun nor realistic.
Are you... blind? He didn't say it was fucking easy. He said that being an investigative journalist (I'll restrain myself from laughing) from a desk is fucking easy because it is neither investigative nor journalism. And because it is easy, there are way too many people who are capable of doing it. Which means the only way to distinguish yourself is to be early and often. You can't win on skill, because there isn't any. So yeah.. satisfaction is low and burnout is real high.
On the other hand, if you do the difficult job of actual investigation and journalism, you won't have to rush to slam out stories. Your energy will be spent getting the details right on a GOOD story. And because it is difficult, there are actual skills required and less people who possess them.
Uh.. what? Before I picked up a messaging plan, which was before I had a phone with a text-friendly interface, I rarely received SMS messages. And I never read them, because everybody I wanted to talk to knew that I wasn't going to bother with SMS messages. Still billed for 15c, literally nickel and dimed, for receiving the message.
How would they know you read it, anyway? The message, in its entirety, is transfered to your phone at time of delivery not time of perusal.
Congratulations. You are pretty much at the pinnacle of attempting to push anecdote as data.
Again. I have not said that all workers are subject to being fired because of an increase in labor cost. So please, do stop trying to bring up "there must be at least one worker" because at no point in time have I said that there will be no workers.
Even if you are correct and the facility you work in could not, in fact, do without any of its employees. That still doesn't mean you should, or could, accurately extrapolate from your experience to all employers.
You've replaced the expensive parts (skilled labor) with less expensive parts (automation). No shock there. The fact that you have the less expensive unskilled labor still is no surprise, either. It is difficult to replace unskilled labor in no small part because it is less expensive. Making unskilled labor more expensive with legislation makes it easier to replace with automation, pretty much exactly like technology becoming cheaper makes unskilled labor more prone to replacement by automation.
And yes, because a single machine is, in effect, taking the place of multiple workers (generally) a catastrophic failure can be quite irritating and has many cascading effects. A catastrophic failure in a lone worker is probably less likely to have such a staggering cascading effect. But actual workers have smaller cascading effects far more often. When they have bad days, or they're just ready to get the hell home. Or they're worried about their child in the hospital. Or whatever. Less catastrophic failure is an exchange for frequent distraction.
Where did I say anything about running a factory with no laborers? I didn't. I said absolutely necessary. Which it isn't. Go ahead, tell your factory managers that they'll have to pay each minimum wage worker $1/hour more. It won't surprise me a bit if they find some unnecessary minimum wage worker to ex-employ. Because the work he was doing was not indispensable. Important? Quite possibly. Can you get as much done without him? No. Can you get by without him? Almost assuredly.
Of course we're automating as much minimum wage work as possible. Minimum wage laws make it more and more feasible to replace actual workers with automata. People are expensive. They constantly incur payroll expense, are inconsistent, get sick, complain. Machines don't.
And no, I never did work a factory. Just a warehouse. A very busy one. Definitely not skilled labor. Thoroughly unenjoyable.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but I made no ethical judgements in what I said. Zero. But this odd belief that somehow government intervention frees us from the problems of resource allocation does not serve us well.
Not all "lost jobs" are necessarily bad. But a failure to acknowledge the losses tends to lead to overapplication of the protocol generating the losses. That can be bad.
Follow along with this thought experiment.
Lets say that minimum wage is $7 even. Joe is earning $7.50. Minimum wage is raised to $7.50. Joe probably isn't going to be getting a raise. But now prices have gone up a little to pay for the increase to the minimum wage earners who got a legislated raise. So Joe is poorer than he was before. And so is every one else who wasn't earning minimum wage, but you probably have more empathy for somebody earning on the low-but-not-minimum part of the pay scale.
Minimum wage might be economically neutral (that is to say, gains by the minimum wage earners would be offset by losses to everybody not a minimum wage earner) if all work was entirely necessary. But minimum wage work probably isn't absolutely necessary. So if unskilled work that isn't necessary to a business is worth some flat amount of money, when minimum wage is raised, they'll respond by dropping a position to pay the remaining positions the new minimum. Or by keeping the staff, but telling them to knock off earlier. Any unfinished work, say sweeping the floors, is a non-monetary cost passed on to consumers.
Actually, there are lots of ways to pass on the costs of minimum wage. As mentioned, dropping a position and having your current staff work a little less. Employers could also respond, instead of dropping minimum wage positions, by extending the period between renovation/redecoration. Such a response causes the job losses to be felt in construction and associated industry. There is also inflation, which obviously not controllable by the employer, but is a natural artifact of the prices of goods and services going up when no actual additional value has been contributed.
Keep kidding yourself that legislating a raise in cost for anything, doesn't lead to less of something complementary in response. Minimum wage legislation can't make workers more efficient or more resources available. It could, but doesn't, mandate the number of positions or the hours those positions must work.
the tl;dr of it: If workers don't become more efficient, or more resources (not money) are not available, legislation that raises the cost of labor will result in less labor. Either through fewer hires or fewer hours.
Uh.. in what way are they bundled? I can use any, all, or none of the Google services. I do not need to use one in order to use another. There are no price breaks for one if you have another. Well.. except for Google Contacts. Thats bundled with, at least, gmail and gv. Although it is totally usable without either mail or voice services. Same price, though, either way.
Being available from the same vendor is not a "bundle" .. otherwise Ford is bundling the Focus with the Explorer.
And none of that is priced predatorily. There are free office products not from Google. And there are lots of mail hosts free, that are not from Google.
Actually, it couldn't be less predatory. I know those search engines from Before Google sucked. But you know what they charged you? The same as Google.
Well just cause I'm a nice guy, I did read the actual general statute.
The language of the use tax requirements, in isolation, might be as you state. But it is not in isolation. It has been specifically constructed to apply only to interstate commerce. Intrastate commerce has already been covered by the sales tax section. If it isn't taxable intrastate (as in not covered by 105.164-4) it isn't taxable by 105-164.6 (use tax). If it is taxable intrastate, sales tax must be collected by the retailer at time of sale.
The NC Department of Revenue explicitly states that:
It is a sales tax on interstate commerce, full stop.
I.. hope you're joking.
If not, I have news for you. Every phone that has ever advertised that it is easy to take pictures is a phone that has advertised the exact same thing. Unless, of course, the process of sending those pictures has been some arcane ritual that can only take place on the third minute of the seventh hour the day after your first born takes its first breath. Which is probably not the case.
What you take pictures of and how easy it is to take them are separate issues. If it is easy to take a picture of your dog, it is also easy to take a picture of a naked person. But I don't see any outrage over the iPhone's photo taking process, which is also pretty simple. Ditto the lack of outrage over Android, Motorola, LG, Samsung ...
If it is the content of the advert in question, where is the outrage for the endless commercials (read: porn) depicting bare chested men pushing beer, beach vacation spots, travel reservations, antiperspirants, body wash, exercise or diet programs, or whatever else. The damage such lewd imagery does to the children!
Piracy and free demos are... pretty well unrelated. But I can see why Crytek and EA would want free demos to go away. Because then gamers can find out that a game sucks before buying it.
Is that what I hear you saying, EA? Crytek?
EA: Fuck! We're out of good ideas!
Crytek: Us too!
EA: Kill the free demos before anybody finds out!
Crytek: Right away! Releasing demo-minators! Fuck! Thats a great idea for a game! We can tag it "They won't be back!"
Not to mention that games moving online is a penalty to piracy. Who pirates a multiplayer FPS for the single player campaign? It might be a material argument for single player only games. But I'll wait until game publishers aren't cranial-anal linked, pushing single player games that won't start without phoning home to ask permission, or must have an active connection at all times while playing. When they put out a functional game, I might listen to them calling their customers scumsucking thieves. Until then, I'll play some other company's games.