I think people do care, and their annoyance with the TSA is now surpassing their fear of reprisal by the TSA. Matter of time until some politician realizes he can win office by running on an anti-tsa platform... after that the TSA will go down very quickly.
Actually, if the TSA were to focus on actual crime prevention and intelligence, instead of buying machines and machine operators we would be much safer. It would cost an order of magnitude less, and the security theater could be abandoned as it simply doesn't work.
Personally, I think that the use of a contractor in a state to define a nexus is really flimsy and likely to be struck down again by the Supreme Court. It's really no different than using a logistics company or freight forwarder. Of course, that never stops politicians & bureaucrats in a rush to shoot their own big toe off when it comes to collecting revenues.
Actually, if you've ever filed a sales tax report, you'll find in most states you are allowed to keep a small percentage of the tax collected to offset these costs. Most often, it actually is enough to cover sales tax administration reports.
This article one of the better I've read, and the author is right: the TSA is flawed to the core. The TSA also makes the case that law enforcement should never be above the law... sexually assaulting people, stealing people's stuff (taking away contraband) and creating a system of checkpoints with a do not pass list all are contrary to existing law and at least as bad as anything Eastern Europe had to offer in the 1960s and 1970s. If we are exempting law enforcement from sexual assault and theft laws, then we need to change that as there is not one good example where law enforcement should be able to rape, molest or steal from a citizen, EVER. The TSA also has little regard for citizen health as seen in it's apparent lack of safety testing for backscatter detectors and their treatment of people in wheelchairs.
TSA isn't impossible to get rid of. All it takes is one Senator or member of the House to stand up and hold public hearings where citizen after citizen get to tell stories of their wives, children, and grandparents being sexually assaulted, relieved of property or denied access to travel without any kind of right of redress, and the people will be more than happy to get rid of the beast the TSA has become. Personally, I have avoided commercial flights since the TSA became more Stalinist in its tactics because I fear that I would lose my temper and be arrested for questioning the TSA's right to sexually assault, irradiate people, steal stuff and impede other citizens right to freely move. I'll continue to fly privately or not at all (if the boarding+flight+bag claim time is under 5 hours, you usually can drive there in the same time) until this changes. In 2001, I flew over 340,000 miles. Last year, I flew 0 on a commercial airliner.
After reading a few comments, most of the people here don't understand this law very well. What California did is redefine what being located in California means to:
If you use California contractors for marketing purposes (affiliates), you are located in California. Since you are located in California, you have to collect sale tax for us.
If California were more creative, they should have tried defining a nexus as anyone who uses a shipping service with warehouses and vehicle depots in the state of California. Fedex or UPS could not have pulled out as easily under this condition.
So, Amazon fired the California contractors. Now they aren't located in California any more. Stupid law gets equally mind numbing response. Amazon pulls out, and their affiliates, some of which are very large web publishers, will have to forgo participating in Amazon's affiliate program or will have to move out of California to protect their income from their Amazon affiliate programs.
What California did is try to make an end run on the US Constitution and a recent supreme court decision that said requiring out of state merchants to pay sales tax was an attempt to regulate intrastate commerce, a power that is exclusively delegated to the Federal Governement. The basic reason for this is to prevent trade wars between the states over tariffs, duties and exclusionary laws. Fortunately, California has inadvertently aimed it's cannon at it's own foot and fired a round of grapeshot: By attempting to regulate Amazon, California affiliates now will have to leave the state to continue doing business.
A lot of people seem to think somehow Amazon was ducking an obligation to pay sales tax. This is simply wrong. The buyer pays sales tax. The seller only acts as an agent in collecting it (in most states, the seller actually gets to keep a cut of the sales tax). The only way for Amazon to duck sales tax is to not pay sales tax on their taxable purchases.
Some people think that affiliates are not reporting their taxes. Some less intelligent affiliates my not report their income, but most will because Amazon reports your Affiliate income to the IRS, so if you fail to report your affiliate income, you are likely to get into trouble.
A few people see the mail order sales tax issue as one of being fair to local merchants. As it sits, mail order merchants in California can sell to every other state and protectorate without having to collect sales tax on those sales, just like an Indiana retailer doesn't have to collect sales tax for a sale shipped to California. It's actually pretty fair to everyone except huge companies that do have actual locations in every state.
Apparently the article's author has not used Twitter, Facebook or hosted a WordPress blog. The spammers have just changed from email to focusing on social media, forums and blogs.
You have the basic idea of how it would work right. I'm personally hoping that the RIAA is smart enough to see the difference between storing my own music for my own use (iCloud) and sharing music with a few million other people (old Napster, LimeWire, etc). We'll see.
We'll see if Apple has developer's backs with the Lodsys situation. The Android ecosystem is very different and developers are allowed to use whatever system they like for in-app purchases, so I'm not sure that your comparison of Apple and Google's behavior is valid. In Apple's case, the issue is that devs have to use Apple's in app purchase system, and Lodsys is suing developers who use it.
None of those issues are a threat. All the RIAA need do is ask you to produce proof you are the owner of a given song. If you cannot prove it (i.e. show the CD your ripped, show a receipt for the purchase, get an affidavit from the person who gifted it to you, etc...), then the RIAA will show that you have 7,000 more songs you cannot prove you own and that the preponderance of evidence is that you have infringed on their member's copyrights.
* Customization is encouraged and is not hid from the end user. Don't like a key binding? change it. Don't like the default start menu? Change it. Want a new action when you right click? Write a quick bash script (or whatever your scripting language of choice is) and a desktop resource file and you can select files, right click and do what you want. You can even change how your desktop works... want files on it? OK. Want news, twitter and weather? OK. Want nothing? Fine. Want giant fisher-price looking app launch icons? OK, you can do that (it's not my thing... but hey, it's choice). It's up to you.
* File Management in KDE is vastly superior to every other desktop, Mac and Windows included. KIO allows you to open many different services (think ftp, scp, webdav, imap, your favorite vcs, pop3, and a metric ton more) as you would a local folder - just add protocol://user:pass@domain.com/some/folder and you are there. Processes like moving files are not modal, so you can tell KDE to move 500 files and continue working without waiting for the file move to complete. There are three very good file managers, Konqueror (kitchen sink - like Windows Explorer), Dolphin (modern file manager only) and Krusader (old school Norton Commander style) to choose from.
* The file open/save dialog is useful.
* Konsole, the KDE terminal app is awesome and very well integrated with the desktop and file management features. (f4 opens a terminal window in the file managers)
* KDE's notification system works very well, and allows you to do useful stuff with notifications... like running scripts when certain events happen.
KDE isn't for everyone... you really do have to spend some time getting to know KDE and reading some documentation to really get the most from it. It's definitely not for the "I want my phone to be a damn phone, not a GPS, camera, music player and video game system" or the "I want my computer to have TIG welded, permanent training wheels" crowd.
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law. Apple's employees probably care a lot more about not going to jail for contempt of court than they do about getting your business or being cool. All the money and lawyers in the world will not intimidate a Federal Court Judge who spends the better part of their career dealing with litigation between companies, governments and people with more money than God.
b) If 90% of Apple's customers use iCloud for storing pirated music, that will be a problem with the business plan, unless you are right about some legal/license arrangement existing in advance.
c) Assume nothing. It would be wise to read the contract, terms of service and any license agreement between the labels, RIAA and Apple before putting yourself and your family at risk. Personally, I hope Apple has got a solution on this. If not, then I'd rather not be left out in the wind like iPhone developers are right now (see Lodsys).
Google's idea with using Dalvik (and the Java language) was compile once, run on many devices. For the most part, if you stick to specs and not get to crazy with GUI and hardware, it kinda works... not as well as Google had planned... but it has made it easier for developers to target different many dissimilar phones without having to compile for each device...
In a word, yes. You do not have to register to establish a trademark. The entire reason trademarks exist is to prevent someone or some company from stealing your identity in the marketplace... no matter how small you are. This one is not some moral outrage, though. It's typically what happens when a big company steps on the little guys toes: lawsuit, handwringing, and just compensation to the small company.
It would be convenient if you were right, but you've confused correlation with causation. There were a great number of inventions and innovations over the past 400 years that were not in any realm involving intellectual property or we placed in the public domain by their invetors: sanitary sewers, the corporation, scientific method, the modern democratic republic, rotation of crops, pasteurization, immunizations (Salk asked, "Would you patent the sun?" when asked about patenting his Polio vaccine), and penicillin (here's the full stoy) all have much more to do with today's life expectancy than do intellectual property laws. One could make the case that today's intellectual property laws are reducing lifespans by making the cost of life extending medications for diseases like AIDS, certain cancers or Multiple Sclerosis (1yr supply averages over $50,000) out of reach of all but the wealthy. Of course, that's not convenient when you are trying to justify greed as a way of life, so we'll just ignore it.
Loser pays works until you see it in action. Most often it's used to crush the little guy by making a trial too risky by piling legal fees on. Example: $300 debt collection + $3,500 in legal fees and $279 in court costs. Even if you don't owe the money, there is a risk you loose and then have to pay $4K+.
Most of the stuff we are missing on Linux is screensharing and multi-participant video conferencing. Would be nice to have those features, but really, the Windows client is a hog, and it's so poorly written that you can't run it in a Windows virtual machine.
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I think people do care, and their annoyance with the TSA is now surpassing their fear of reprisal by the TSA. Matter of time until some politician realizes he can win office by running on an anti-tsa platform... after that the TSA will go down very quickly.
Actually, what I read was stop wasting money on security theater, period.
Actually, if the TSA were to focus on actual crime prevention and intelligence, instead of buying machines and machine operators we would be much safer. It would cost an order of magnitude less, and the security theater could be abandoned as it simply doesn't work.
In this case, I'll take a bell curve to being on the wrong side of a hockey stick.
Personally, I think that the use of a contractor in a state to define a nexus is really flimsy and likely to be struck down again by the Supreme Court. It's really no different than using a logistics company or freight forwarder. Of course, that never stops politicians & bureaucrats in a rush to shoot their own big toe off when it comes to collecting revenues.
Actually, if you've ever filed a sales tax report, you'll find in most states you are allowed to keep a small percentage of the tax collected to offset these costs. Most often, it actually is enough to cover sales tax administration reports.
This article one of the better I've read, and the author is right: the TSA is flawed to the core. The TSA also makes the case that law enforcement should never be above the law... sexually assaulting people, stealing people's stuff (taking away contraband) and creating a system of checkpoints with a do not pass list all are contrary to existing law and at least as bad as anything Eastern Europe had to offer in the 1960s and 1970s. If we are exempting law enforcement from sexual assault and theft laws, then we need to change that as there is not one good example where law enforcement should be able to rape, molest or steal from a citizen, EVER. The TSA also has little regard for citizen health as seen in it's apparent lack of safety testing for backscatter detectors and their treatment of people in wheelchairs.
TSA isn't impossible to get rid of. All it takes is one Senator or member of the House to stand up and hold public hearings where citizen after citizen get to tell stories of their wives, children, and grandparents being sexually assaulted, relieved of property or denied access to travel without any kind of right of redress, and the people will be more than happy to get rid of the beast the TSA has become. Personally, I have avoided commercial flights since the TSA became more Stalinist in its tactics because I fear that I would lose my temper and be arrested for questioning the TSA's right to sexually assault, irradiate people, steal stuff and impede other citizens right to freely move. I'll continue to fly privately or not at all (if the boarding+flight+bag claim time is under 5 hours, you usually can drive there in the same time) until this changes. In 2001, I flew over 340,000 miles. Last year, I flew 0 on a commercial airliner.
After reading a few comments, most of the people here don't understand this law very well. What California did is redefine what being located in California means to:
If California were more creative, they should have tried defining a nexus as anyone who uses a shipping service with warehouses and vehicle depots in the state of California. Fedex or UPS could not have pulled out as easily under this condition.
So, Amazon fired the California contractors. Now they aren't located in California any more. Stupid law gets equally mind numbing response. Amazon pulls out, and their affiliates, some of which are very large web publishers, will have to forgo participating in Amazon's affiliate program or will have to move out of California to protect their income from their Amazon affiliate programs.
What California did is try to make an end run on the US Constitution and a recent supreme court decision that said requiring out of state merchants to pay sales tax was an attempt to regulate intrastate commerce, a power that is exclusively delegated to the Federal Governement. The basic reason for this is to prevent trade wars between the states over tariffs, duties and exclusionary laws. Fortunately, California has inadvertently aimed it's cannon at it's own foot and fired a round of grapeshot: By attempting to regulate Amazon, California affiliates now will have to leave the state to continue doing business.
A lot of people seem to think somehow Amazon was ducking an obligation to pay sales tax. This is simply wrong. The buyer pays sales tax. The seller only acts as an agent in collecting it (in most states, the seller actually gets to keep a cut of the sales tax). The only way for Amazon to duck sales tax is to not pay sales tax on their taxable purchases.
Some people think that affiliates are not reporting their taxes. Some less intelligent affiliates my not report their income, but most will because Amazon reports your Affiliate income to the IRS, so if you fail to report your affiliate income, you are likely to get into trouble.
A few people see the mail order sales tax issue as one of being fair to local merchants. As it sits, mail order merchants in California can sell to every other state and protectorate without having to collect sales tax on those sales, just like an Indiana retailer doesn't have to collect sales tax for a sale shipped to California. It's actually pretty fair to everyone except huge companies that do have actual locations in every state.
NY already did this and Amazon pulled out just as in California. Since sales tax is paid on top of the the sale, it has no effect on profits.
Apparently the article's author has not used Twitter, Facebook or hosted a WordPress blog. The spammers have just changed from email to focusing on social media, forums and blogs.
Step one: File suit, have enough evidence (on information and suspicion is good enough) to get to discovery.
Step two: Subpoena away.
It's kind of scary how easy it is for the civil legal system to be weaponized.
You have the basic idea of how it would work right. I'm personally hoping that the RIAA is smart enough to see the difference between storing my own music for my own use (iCloud) and sharing music with a few million other people (old Napster, LimeWire, etc). We'll see.
We'll see if Apple has developer's backs with the Lodsys situation. The Android ecosystem is very different and developers are allowed to use whatever system they like for in-app purchases, so I'm not sure that your comparison of Apple and Google's behavior is valid. In Apple's case, the issue is that devs have to use Apple's in app purchase system, and Lodsys is suing developers who use it.
None of those issues are a threat. All the RIAA need do is ask you to produce proof you are the owner of a given song. If you cannot prove it (i.e. show the CD your ripped, show a receipt for the purchase, get an affidavit from the person who gifted it to you, etc...), then the RIAA will show that you have 7,000 more songs you cannot prove you own and that the preponderance of evidence is that you have infringed on their member's copyrights.
Here is why I continue to use KDE:
* Customization is encouraged and is not hid from the end user. Don't like a key binding? change it. Don't like the default start menu? Change it. Want a new action when you right click? Write a quick bash script (or whatever your scripting language of choice is) and a desktop resource file and you can select files, right click and do what you want. You can even change how your desktop works... want files on it? OK. Want news, twitter and weather? OK. Want nothing? Fine. Want giant fisher-price looking app launch icons? OK, you can do that (it's not my thing... but hey, it's choice). It's up to you.
* File Management in KDE is vastly superior to every other desktop, Mac and Windows included. KIO allows you to open many different services (think ftp, scp, webdav, imap, your favorite vcs, pop3, and a metric ton more) as you would a local folder - just add protocol://user:pass@domain.com/some/folder and you are there. Processes like moving files are not modal, so you can tell KDE to move 500 files and continue working without waiting for the file move to complete. There are three very good file managers, Konqueror (kitchen sink - like Windows Explorer), Dolphin (modern file manager only) and Krusader (old school Norton Commander style) to choose from.
* The file open/save dialog is useful.
* Konsole, the KDE terminal app is awesome and very well integrated with the desktop and file management features. (f4 opens a terminal window in the file managers)
* KDE's notification system works very well, and allows you to do useful stuff with notifications... like running scripts when certain events happen.
KDE isn't for everyone... you really do have to spend some time getting to know KDE and reading some documentation to really get the most from it. It's definitely not for the "I want my phone to be a damn phone, not a GPS, camera, music player and video game system" or the "I want my computer to have TIG welded, permanent training wheels" crowd.
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law. Apple's employees probably care a lot more about not going to jail for contempt of court than they do about getting your business or being cool. All the money and lawyers in the world will not intimidate a Federal Court Judge who spends the better part of their career dealing with litigation between companies, governments and people with more money than God.
b) If 90% of Apple's customers use iCloud for storing pirated music, that will be a problem with the business plan, unless you are right about some legal/license arrangement existing in advance.
c) Assume nothing. It would be wise to read the contract, terms of service and any license agreement between the labels, RIAA and Apple before putting yourself and your family at risk. Personally, I hope Apple has got a solution on this. If not, then I'd rather not be left out in the wind like iPhone developers are right now (see Lodsys).
Google's idea with using Dalvik (and the Java language) was compile once, run on many devices. For the most part, if you stick to specs and not get to crazy with GUI and hardware, it kinda works... not as well as Google had planned... but it has made it easier for developers to target different many dissimilar phones without having to compile for each device...
In a word, yes. You do not have to register to establish a trademark. The entire reason trademarks exist is to prevent someone or some company from stealing your identity in the marketplace... no matter how small you are. This one is not some moral outrage, though. It's typically what happens when a big company steps on the little guys toes: lawsuit, handwringing, and just compensation to the small company.
Mod parent up. This describes the situation perfectly.
It would be convenient if you were right, but you've confused correlation with causation. There were a great number of inventions and innovations over the past 400 years that were not in any realm involving intellectual property or we placed in the public domain by their invetors: sanitary sewers, the corporation, scientific method, the modern democratic republic, rotation of crops, pasteurization, immunizations (Salk asked, "Would you patent the sun?" when asked about patenting his Polio vaccine), and penicillin (here's the full stoy) all have much more to do with today's life expectancy than do intellectual property laws. One could make the case that today's intellectual property laws are reducing lifespans by making the cost of life extending medications for diseases like AIDS, certain cancers or Multiple Sclerosis (1yr supply averages over $50,000) out of reach of all but the wealthy. Of course, that's not convenient when you are trying to justify greed as a way of life, so we'll just ignore it.
Loser pays works until you see it in action. Most often it's used to crush the little guy by making a trial too risky by piling legal fees on. Example: $300 debt collection + $3,500 in legal fees and $279 in court costs. Even if you don't owe the money, there is a risk you loose and then have to pay $4K+.
Business Friendly != Large Corporation friendly.
Most businesses are small businesses which are going out of business rapidly. Where do you think all the job loss is coming from?
The business friendly, genius and right center part are disputable.
Most of the stuff we are missing on Linux is screensharing and multi-participant video conferencing. Would be nice to have those features, but really, the Windows client is a hog, and it's so poorly written that you can't run it in a Windows virtual machine.
Virgin Mobile's got phones for $15-$20 and ludicrously cheap plans: $30 gets 1500 minutes, $60 gets unlimited everything.