It is unpossible to know if it is legal or illegal.
And it could take a decade of arguing between the IRS and well-paid Apple super-tax-lawyers/accountants for a decision to be made, because the size and complexity of tax code means there are never any final answers and mountains of gray-area that can be argued over indefinitely.
You understand that the government offsets lost or unavailable corporate tax revenue by increasing the taxes it does collect, i.e. yours, right?
That's hilarious. Then how do we have a $17 trillion debt in the USA?
What you are saying is absolutely untrue. And money is not a "fixed supply", George Washington's government didn't have $17 trillion dollars --- and they had coins like the "Half-Cent". There isn't even $17 trillion dollars in the entire world --- the circulated physical currency for the USA is about $900 billion, so the other $30 to $50 trillion or so lives inside computers and with some frequency the US government decides just to "make some up" and they use it buy debt.
All I am saying is that the number of contortions you are doing --- I do most of those btw --- are because the environment is very vulnerable. You are aware of the vulnerabilities. They can change tomorrow and likely you personally will know because you keep up on that. But that kind of overhead --- i.e. the "paying attention to all of that" is not something that most people are going to be doing.
I have the theory the popularity of tablets is mostly because parents can give one to a child and not worry bout malware (iPad for sure, at least. Maybe the Kindle ones too.) It isn't that the parents are consciously aware of this either (maybe some are), but a laptop a kid will likely unknowingly install malware and odds run close to 100% for continuous use over the span of a few months -- at least a Windows laptop --- because Windows is a particularly vulnerable minefield.
You know, I have heard that argument several times and i just don't think it holds up to logic, its the same one that MSFT apologists use when explaining away why all their failed acquistitions don't matter but just because they have a LOT of money does not mean they have INFINITE money, and one can only throw around a billion here and a billion there before as they say in Washington it becomes "real money".
Can Google, Apple, and MSFT piss more money away with zero ROI? Sure they can. does that mean it isn't gonna hurt them over time? That would depend on how much positive cash flow they can keep coming in and whether or not spending that money on stupid shit costs them an opportunity down the road that could have actually worked.
What is the point of being rich if you can't blow money at will? That is the definition of being rich and the point of being rich.
"Anti-virus software -- it's so you don't have to learn to take care of yourself!"
I run without AV 24/7 on all of my devices and some occasionally run Windows!! Shocked?! Well, I'm smart enough to run something other than MSIE and I don't run Javascript on every page from every source, I block ads and I don't run software (especially on Windows) that I don't know about. ALSO, I mitigate the possible damage which could be done in the event of compromise.
Neat. So you've made a life-style and time consuming hobby out of running Windows without anti-virus. And it sounds like it is working for you. Today. Maybe your strategy works tomorrow too. Or maybe it doesn't because of something you didn't expect.
Let's say your method works 100%. How does this benefit grandma? Or a 9-old-year who likes to play Minecraft?
If your "lifestyle" or "hobby" can't be done by stupid people, you can't by defintiion be a "leader" because those people can't follow.
No I'm not defending anti-virus, I'm insulting Windows and how you are essentially making excuses for insecurities. They don't get solved by ignoring them, you know.
Who are the group-think emos that modded this worthless and unsubstantiated rant up?
Challenge to one the diptards that modded this up: exactly how is that post insightful? Does it provide evidence, a link, cite information, provide something new no one has ever heard before? If not, what is your justification for rating a run-of-the-mill rant insightful?
And you expect a run-of-the-mill furniture supplier to be good at this for what reason?
Look, this has its place and maybe will dominate the future --- just lay off the Amish guy and quit giving him grief because your footstool doesn't have USB. Keep it reasonable, you want an iChair? Bother Apple or Google.
most people don't even bother searching for alternatives.
Yahoo and Bing offer search results as impressive as Lycos, Hotbot and Altavista in the 1990s. In fact, as far as I can tell, Yahoo offers the same search results they did in the 1990s.
Bing could do a $100 million advertising campaign and it wouldn't help unless they take an interest in continually refining and improving their search results. No one "gave" the search engine market to Google, they slowly earned it.
Don't most of them fail to achieve their goal? Kickstarter also does another service... someone with a crap idea who is overexcited finds himself shot down and brought back to reality with minimal pain and with a bit of efficiency. The "best" solution to whatever issues Kickstarter has would be a competitor.
if you can't do it you can't do it legally. That still doesn't mean that Kickstarter is anything other than a complete rip-off, transfering risk from the business to the buyer. The way its supposed to be is you make a product, taking the risk, and profiting for doing so. Its not supposed to be you con people into giving you money, let them take the risk that you can't complete development (or that you're just a scam), and then profit as well.
Is that any different than the risk of "pre-orders" of games or products that don't exist yet? Or buying a product that doesn't achieve critical mass and dies (The Barnes & Noble Nook, a Zune, etc.) I agree with you, by the way --- but look at Craigslist. Caveat Emptor.
Non-kickstarter: Bankers, corporate stiffs have 100% control of what can raise capital
kickstarter concept: A bit of democracy possibility to bypass that control.
I don't personally feel Kickstarter is about investment but taking control --- and near stranglehold --- away from the kind of corporate culture unwilling to roll dice or uninterested in small yield/high interest projects.
Human intelligence or even puppy-level intelligence is easy to underestimate.
Bumblebees are quite sophisticated in their behavior.
In the 1960's, they would have thought we would be living on Pluto by now and would have expected us to be on Mars by 1980.
We overestimate the "processing power" of the computers we have right now and we don't yet have the right "minds" to solve the inner subtleties of AI or learning.
And our programming languages are rather pathetic and unevolved. Watch an Apple Newton video from 1987 and benchmark against 2013 and see what you think.
I thought in some of the most hardcore countries that Linux use might be 10% --- I'm talking certain parts of Europe here --- but no in those countries it tops off around 4%. Your estimates of 3% to 5% worldwide are very, very high. If worldwide it is even near 2%, I'd be stunned. I do not know if those stats counted tablets and clearly did not include Linux servers.
LibreOffice is absolutely excellent. Except I think of the "Nacho Libre" movie and I can't see myself saying "Libre" in casual conversation and it sounds exceptionally geeky and not mainstream. Not as bad as "The Gimp" in the name department, but yes the name absolutely falls in the "not helpful department". Versus, say, Firefox which always had a good name or MYSQL was always a good name.
The law in Germany sounds great, the equivalent of "let's move the f on".
There is little gain in sitting around debating or discussing events from 70+ years ago that have been beaten to death worse than a dead horse.
I would like a law outlawing atheists and Christians from discussing evolution while relating it to religion. It is boring as hell, goes nowhere interesting and you hear the worst possible opinions.
Except no one says you must get into a car after having some drinks. Unless you think that's the next part of the constitutional conspiracy, requiring all alcohol drinkers to get into a car after having a drink.
With your communication abilities, you should run for office. You could tell everyone the economy is BOOMING because you know this friend of this one guy that he says he knows that has tripled his income. And we wouldn't be much worse off compared to the politicians we have now. In fact, they could use the competition from a real bullshit-meister. And then if you knock one out of office, you could describe the dethroned ex-politician as THRIVING!!!
And life in the Dead Sea or Antarctica is "thriving" in what way? Maybe we will discover some weird stuff living on Titan or Europa, with minimal metabolism. You are free to label that as thriving, or perhaps you would describe the flora and fauna of the deep Sahara as a thriving ecosystem too. Perhaps you would describe whatever happens in live in a meat cooler as thriving. I mean, hey if words have no meaning there are no limits! Thrive = not thrive, up = down, rare = common, whatever I want to believe is true even if it is not.
And I don't consider whatever barely lives in the Dead Sea as thriving. Living, sure. Thriving? Well, I suppose if you have sufficiently broad definitions of thriving so large that it encompasses "not thriving" too, hey knock yourself out! No really.
If your definition of thriving is broad enough to include "not thriving", you really do need to clobber yourself over the head.;-)
There is no place on Earth that we know of: not the fiercest desert, not the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench, not in the deepest borehole ever made, nor even in the insanely radioactive core of active boiling water reactors - where life does not thrive.
Especially for universes where "thrive" = "not thrive", honest discussion means willful ignorance and overwhelming evidence means grasping at straws.
We cook food in ovens because it kills, we boil water because it kills. But at this point, I have to concede you aren't rational and there isn't a point to further discussion. May you grow wiser in the future and see the difference between dogma versus observation.
Slashdot Mirror
It is unpossible to know if it is legal or illegal.
And it could take a decade of arguing between the IRS and well-paid Apple super-tax-lawyers/accountants for a decision to be made, because the size and complexity of tax code means there are never any final answers and mountains of gray-area that can be argued over indefinitely.
You understand that the government offsets lost or unavailable corporate tax revenue by increasing the taxes it does collect, i.e. yours, right?
That's hilarious. Then how do we have a $17 trillion debt in the USA?
What you are saying is absolutely untrue. And money is not a "fixed supply", George Washington's government didn't have $17 trillion dollars --- and they had coins like the "Half-Cent". There isn't even $17 trillion dollars in the entire world --- the circulated physical currency for the USA is about $900 billion, so the other $30 to $50 trillion or so lives inside computers and with some frequency the US government decides just to "make some up" and they use it buy debt.
All I am saying is that the number of contortions you are doing --- I do most of those btw --- are because the environment is very vulnerable. You are aware of the vulnerabilities. They can change tomorrow and likely you personally will know because you keep up on that. But that kind of overhead --- i.e. the "paying attention to all of that" is not something that most people are going to be doing. I have the theory the popularity of tablets is mostly because parents can give one to a child and not worry bout malware (iPad for sure, at least. Maybe the Kindle ones too.) It isn't that the parents are consciously aware of this either (maybe some are), but a laptop a kid will likely unknowingly install malware and odds run close to 100% for continuous use over the span of a few months -- at least a Windows laptop --- because Windows is a particularly vulnerable minefield.
You know, I have heard that argument several times and i just don't think it holds up to logic, its the same one that MSFT apologists use when explaining away why all their failed acquistitions don't matter but just because they have a LOT of money does not mean they have INFINITE money, and one can only throw around a billion here and a billion there before as they say in Washington it becomes "real money".
Can Google, Apple, and MSFT piss more money away with zero ROI? Sure they can. does that mean it isn't gonna hurt them over time? That would depend on how much positive cash flow they can keep coming in and whether or not spending that money on stupid shit costs them an opportunity down the road that could have actually worked.
What is the point of being rich if you can't blow money at will? That is the definition of being rich and the point of being rich.
"Anti-virus software -- it's so you don't have to learn to take care of yourself!"
I run without AV 24/7 on all of my devices and some occasionally run Windows!! Shocked?! Well, I'm smart enough to run something other than MSIE and I don't run Javascript on every page from every source, I block ads and I don't run software (especially on Windows) that I don't know about. ALSO, I mitigate the possible damage which could be done in the event of compromise.
Neat. So you've made a life-style and time consuming hobby out of running Windows without anti-virus. And it sounds like it is working for you. Today. Maybe your strategy works tomorrow too. Or maybe it doesn't because of something you didn't expect.
Let's say your method works 100%. How does this benefit grandma? Or a 9-old-year who likes to play Minecraft?
If your "lifestyle" or "hobby" can't be done by stupid people, you can't by defintiion be a "leader" because those people can't follow.
No I'm not defending anti-virus, I'm insulting Windows and how you are essentially making excuses for insecurities. They don't get solved by ignoring them, you know.
Who are the group-think emos that modded this worthless and unsubstantiated rant up?
Challenge to one the diptards that modded this up: exactly how is that post insightful? Does it provide evidence, a link, cite information, provide something new no one has ever heard before? If not, what is your justification for rating a run-of-the-mill rant insightful?
Look, this has its place and maybe will dominate the future --- just lay off the Amish guy and quit giving him grief because your footstool doesn't have USB. Keep it reasonable, you want an iChair? Bother Apple or Google.
AT&T did a massive privacy violation and published a list of residential phone numbers complete with address.
most people don't even bother searching for alternatives.
Yahoo and Bing offer search results as impressive as Lycos, Hotbot and Altavista in the 1990s. In fact, as far as I can tell, Yahoo offers the same search results they did in the 1990s.
Bing could do a $100 million advertising campaign and it wouldn't help unless they take an interest in continually refining and improving their search results. No one "gave" the search engine market to Google, they slowly earned it.
Don't most of them fail to achieve their goal? Kickstarter also does another service ... someone with a crap idea who is overexcited finds himself shot down and brought back to reality with minimal pain and with a bit of efficiency. The "best" solution to whatever issues Kickstarter has would be a competitor.
if you can't do it you can't do it legally. That still doesn't mean that Kickstarter is anything other than a complete rip-off, transfering risk from the business to the buyer. The way its supposed to be is you make a product, taking the risk, and profiting for doing so. Its not supposed to be you con people into giving you money, let them take the risk that you can't complete development (or that you're just a scam), and then profit as well.
Is that any different than the risk of "pre-orders" of games or products that don't exist yet? Or buying a product that doesn't achieve critical mass and dies (The Barnes & Noble Nook, a Zune, etc.) I agree with you, by the way --- but look at Craigslist. Caveat Emptor.
Non-kickstarter: Bankers, corporate stiffs have 100% control of what can raise capital
kickstarter concept: A bit of democracy possibility to bypass that control.
I don't personally feel Kickstarter is about investment but taking control --- and near stranglehold --- away from the kind of corporate culture unwilling to roll dice or uninterested in small yield/high interest projects.
Note: I am not arguing "kickstarter" is perfect.
Bumblebees are quite sophisticated in their behavior.
In the 1960's, they would have thought we would be living on Pluto by now and would have expected us to be on Mars by 1980.
We overestimate the "processing power" of the computers we have right now and we don't yet have the right "minds" to solve the inner subtleties of AI or learning.
And our programming languages are rather pathetic and unevolved. Watch an Apple Newton video from 1987 and benchmark against 2013 and see what you think.
I thought in some of the most hardcore countries that Linux use might be 10% --- I'm talking certain parts of Europe here --- but no in those countries it tops off around 4%. Your estimates of 3% to 5% worldwide are very, very high. If worldwide it is even near 2%, I'd be stunned. I do not know if those stats counted tablets and clearly did not include Linux servers.
LibreOffice is absolutely excellent. Except I think of the "Nacho Libre" movie and I can't see myself saying "Libre" in casual conversation and it sounds exceptionally geeky and not mainstream. Not as bad as "The Gimp" in the name department, but yes the name absolutely falls in the "not helpful department". Versus, say, Firefox which always had a good name or MYSQL was always a good name.
Windows Phone - Not Intel Inside
Blackberry - Not Intel Inside
Did someone redefine the world Win?
I did not know it was possible to use the words "Windows Phone" or Blackberry and the word "win" the same sentence.
I've been checking dictionaries, English textbooks and left a message with a professor to get back to me.
Accountability comes with that.
You see don't Google auto-completing Sergey Brin's name and saying "Did you mean dog rapist?" If it did, don't you think Google would change it ASAP?
Google's marketshare is too large and the use of its services is too widespread to just let some guy's reputation be hurt by offensive autocompletes.
There is little gain in sitting around debating or discussing events from 70+ years ago that have been beaten to death worse than a dead horse.
I would like a law outlawing atheists and Christians from discussing evolution while relating it to religion. It is boring as hell, goes nowhere interesting and you hear the worst possible opinions.
People can't pay attention when a long laundry list is being cited.
It is de facto prohibition, and unconstitutional.
!!! [$INSERT STRONGLY WORDED HYPERBOLA] !!!
Except no one says you must get into a car after having some drinks. Unless you think that's the next part of the constitutional conspiracy, requiring all alcohol drinkers to get into a car after having a drink.
Sure that is ridiculous, but so is what you said.
Ok ... I'm done beating the dead horse. THRIVING. Ok that's the last one. THRIVING. No really that was it. TH ... haha fooled you. Ok then.
With your communication abilities, you should run for office. You could tell everyone the economy is BOOMING because you know this friend of this one guy that he says he knows that has tripled his income. And we wouldn't be much worse off compared to the politicians we have now. In fact, they could use the competition from a real bullshit-meister. And then if you knock one out of office, you could describe the dethroned ex-politician as THRIVING!!!
And life in the Dead Sea or Antarctica is "thriving" in what way? Maybe we will discover some weird stuff living on Titan or Europa, with minimal metabolism. You are free to label that as thriving, or perhaps you would describe the flora and fauna of the deep Sahara as a thriving ecosystem too. Perhaps you would describe whatever happens in live in a meat cooler as thriving. I mean, hey if words have no meaning there are no limits! Thrive = not thrive, up = down, rare = common, whatever I want to believe is true even if it is not.
And I don't consider whatever barely lives in the Dead Sea as thriving. Living, sure. Thriving? Well, I suppose if you have sufficiently broad definitions of thriving so large that it encompasses "not thriving" too, hey knock yourself out! No really.
If your definition of thriving is broad enough to include "not thriving", you really do need to clobber yourself over the head. ;-)
There is no place on Earth that we know of: not the fiercest desert, not the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench, not in the deepest borehole ever made, nor even in the insanely radioactive core of active boiling water reactors - where life does not thrive.
Especially for universes where "thrive" = "not thrive", honest discussion means willful ignorance and overwhelming evidence means grasping at straws.
We cook food in ovens because it kills, we boil water because it kills. But at this point, I have to concede you aren't rational and there isn't a point to further discussion. May you grow wiser in the future and see the difference between dogma versus observation.