It's actually pretty irrelevant anyway - Twitter has never had a business model. They just have no clue how to make money.
The only reason they are bitching is that they are worried investors will figure this out before they IPO and the employees cash out before they go down the drain...
Coming out "swinging" would have been more like "that's nothing, we have an answer to this that you will like even more!". This is more like a kid in the playground saying "no fair, I wasn't ready, do over!"
It's not a tax on the business, it's a tax on the buyer. The difference here is not that the buyer is not still supposed to pay, it's that Amazon will now handle the collection, because that's 1000x times more efficient than trying to enforce it for every single person in the state(s) collecting it.
And, the complaint from in-state businesses is not that the Amazon, etc is using resources of their state, it's that they are able to compete unfairly with a sometimes 9+% price break. Sure, it can hurt huge companies like Wal-mart with a physical presence in all states, but ironically it's even *worse* for the small, local businesses who are already being hurt by Wal-mart's physical presence...
Sales taxes of all kinds can be considered 'double dipping' as your income is already taxed. Additionally, they are regressive taxes.
They are regressive, definitely, but not necessarily double dipping, as they are collected by different government entities. Some states have no or very low income tax, and for many of those that do the state income tax revenue barely makes it down to the local level - property and sales taxes generate most of the local city and county government revenue.
Paying $1 for a damn song isn't going to kill you, and if it's not worth it to you, I'm sure you can live without it. "It's too expensive, so I have the right to steal it" is just a stupid argument.
If it's so easy and artists are so lazy, go make your own art and entertain yourself! What is the justification for copying it then? I swear, the only people in this acting more entitled than the copyright owners are the pirates...
And I also already answered your other question - copyrights do serve a purpise, for a movie 2-3 years is probably plenty, for a musician maybe a bit longer; but "70 years after death" is absurd, and 120 years for a corporation is insane.
Huge amounts of money are made by live music performances
Yeah, can't wait for "Avatar Live".
But seriously, why should that matter? If an artist records a song, he should be able to profit from selling the recording and not be forced to tour live if he doesn't want to. Jesus Christ, people. Paying $1 for a damn song isn't going to kill you, and if it's not worth it to you, I'm sure you can live without it. "It's too expensive, so I have the right to steal it" is just a stupid argument. There are valid reasons for patents and copyrights, they should just be used for those reasons and not to create permanent monopolies...
Microsoft is definitely MUCH stricter about XBox Live integration for all games/apps on the 360 than, say, Sony with the PS3. They made a "partial" exception for EA because without it they'd be missing online play for the majority of console sports games, etc. I'd imagine after looking at the insane profits WoW has been making in recent years Microsoft would be willing to work with Blizzard on some sort of B.net support as well...
Actually, in the mid 1990's Kodak was still reasonably profitable and still had an 80% share of film (in the US - Fuji pretty much owned Japan), 70%+ share of disposable cameras (a big business for them in the 90's) and the largest share (but declining) of camera hardware sales.
They lost all three of those businesses due to digital (film because it became mostly obsolete, disposable cameras because digitals are reusable, and the cheap point and shoot camera market because the advantages of digital cameras justified a higher price. And then Canon, Sony, and Nikon entered this new market with some very solid, reasonably priced entries...
The simple fact is vast quantities of creative works were produced before Copyright existed, and increasing quantities have been (and continue to be) created since without any thought given to Copyright. The implication that Copyright is an essential part of creative works doesn't stand up to even a cursory examination.
The big difference is that historically the larger the effort and cost of the work, the larger the effort and cost to copy it. No one is going to pay to copy the Sistine Chapel. And to copy a painting required a skilled artist and almost as much effort as making the original. Even a book would have to be copied by hand with a fountain pen or typeset by hand with a primitive printing press.
Today, whether it's a book or song written by one person or a $200M movie, they are trivially easy and cheap to copy, and if the creators are not given at least some window of time before copying it were freely allowed, there is no way many of these works (especially movies) would make back the initial expense. Then again, that limitation could probably be more like 2-3 years (at which point most movies have made 95%+ of what they will ever make) instead of 120!
The original purpose of Copyright law was very fair - to allow someone to cover their production expenses and make a living before becoming part of the public domain. Now it's been perverted to allow giant media corporations a near permanent dynastic protection to anything they do...
It might be a "limited time" if they didn't keep extending it whenever the material of large companies starts to get close said limit. I'm pretty sure the Founding Fathers didn't put this provision in the Constitution so that Mickey Mouse was still "a protected work of art" 200 years from now...
Kodak was known primarily for it's film and related products. That of course is not an easy transition to digital as it negates the need for film. It's hard for a company to do away with their core business voluntarily.
Actually, up to 1976 Kodak was still selling over 80% of camera hardware in the US (and an almost complete monopoly on film). Canon and Nikon were fairly high end prosumer brands at that time.
The problem was that they sold a lot of cheap cameras and made most of their profits on film (the razor/printer/etc strategy). That model completely fell apart on *both* the hardware and the film sides with the advent of digital photography...
Completely true - Facebook (where I would guess 80%+ of the photos are from cameraphones) is rapidly making Flick as irrelevant as Kodak...
And that doesn't even include the fact that the claim no one uses cameraphones on Flickr is completely bogus anyway - Flickr actually says the iPhone has been the #1 camera on their site for a while now... http://www.flickr.com/cameras/
Then you have an exceptionally good optometrist, and you are in that 1% of people I mentioned. Most are not in your situation.
Again not true. Jeez, look it up, contacts are very often able to correct vision to 20/20, ie. the same as any nominal human vision. Optometrist skill has little to do with it, contacts are manufactured at very standard sizes and corrections and it's not rocket science to find the right one.
Are you really willing to risk your whole life on the goodwill of somebody who volunteered to join the TSA?
As I said, that's pretty absurd exaggeration. But yes, I am willing to risk some pretty annoying inconvenience in this case, as I know that in the end there is no real reason or evidence to suspect me of anything.
If in this really trivial case you are *not* willing to stand up to a clear violation of your rights, I guess you get what you deserve...
In theory, but I'm not one for absurd conspiracy theories:)
Handing you over to a military prison without habeas corpus is just NOT going to happen for someone who stands up to an invasive TSA search at a bus stop. The only US citizens currently affected by this sort of law so far were detained IN AL QUEDA TRAINING CAMPS in Afghanistan (which is debatably already grounds for revocation of citizenship as under current federal law as joining a foreign military at war and/or an intentional act of overthrow of the US...)
Personally I think it's detestable that they are not *either* given the rights of a citizen or the rights of a prisoner of war (they seem to be getting neither) but trying to argue talking back to the TSA will get you "gitmoed" is just a slippery slope fallacy to the extreme...
Well, in all seriousness, you are not going to be sent to a maximum security military prison for telling a TSA employee at a bus station to piss off. If you decide the best way to test the law is attempt to smuggle a bomb into an airport, well, you won't get much sympathy from most people even if you still should have your rights protected...
But in the end that's why I said it's "the problem". You basically have to risk conviction (and potential financial hardship, etc, depending on your legal representation) by breaking an unjust law in the hope it will be overturned and you cleared of wrongdoing...
The problem is based on the US legal system the way to challenge the Constitutionality of these laws is to break them, and then (after a likely horrible reaming by the justice system) appeal to the Supreme court to try to get it overturned.
Unless someone stands up to the violation of their civil rights, these things never get tested. Relying on the useless Congress that passed the law in the first place to overturn it is pretty much futile.
And seriously - not wearing a seatbelt (or motorcycle helmet, etc) is as much completely selfish as it is stupid. If it's not the government's responsibility to require a seatbelt, it should also not be their business to assist you when you don't. I almost think intentionally not using a safety device like this should be equivalent to a blanket "DNR" order so that the rest of us don't have to foot the medical bill for these morons...
If you wear glasses or contacts, then you are not physically capable of telling the difference between a Standard and HD images at any reasonable distance from the TV screen for any size TV. Presently, that is the majority of the population. As much as glasses and contacts help, they cannot improve your vision enough to make up the difference.
WTF are you talking about?? That is utterly untrue. My (and may others) actually get *better* than 20/20 vision from wearing contacts. I work in the video industry, have horrible (uncorrectect) vision, and could trivially tell the difference between a 480i and 1080p image from twice the recommended viewing distance.
I assume you are being facetious there - it *is* still a phone..:)
Or is it just not capable of transmitting the recorded voice over a network connection the the Siri master computers?
Siri used to be a normal App Store app before Apple bought the company, and (from what I have heard) it ran fine on the iPhone 4 (non S). It does the speech to text on the device, and then sends the text to the server... so there could be some (probably minor) performance issue/delay on a 3GS. But I would imagine in the end it's mostly about marketing/differentiating their newest phone.
There aren't any official APIs yet, but there is definitely a lot of Siri hacking going on right now... technically it's still beta, so it is conceivable Apple will open up official support for it eventually...
I don't know anyone who actually uses video for phone calls.
Just because you don't know anyone, doesn't mean it's not hugely popular outside your social circle. Skype or Facetime is great for relatives, families with kids, etc, who travel a lot or are spread out around the world and don't get to see each other in person more than once a year or so. It has definitely caught on now.
Same with HD. Not even considering television or movie content, between the Xbox 360 and PS3 there are 40M+ game consoles in the US alone that greatly benefit from an HDTV.
And most of us feel that was stupid anyway. But it was all we could buy when our old tvs finally died.
*Most* of us? Speak for yourself. Unless you are surveying in a retirement home the majority of people you ask will much prefer HD (and flat screens) over big bulky SD CRTs.
but it only grants you a carefully selected subset of the most basic of the new functionality, so it's not really the same version after all.
That's a pretty huge exaggeration. The only missing features for the 3GS are Siri and in-place photo editing. 2 features of 200+ added with iOS 5. Big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually pretty irrelevant anyway - Twitter has never had a business model. They just have no clue how to make money.
The only reason they are bitching is that they are worried investors will figure this out before they IPO and the employees cash out before they go down the drain...
Coming out "swinging" would have been more like "that's nothing, we have an answer to this that you will like even more!". This is more like a kid in the playground saying "no fair, I wasn't ready, do over!"
It's not a tax on the business, it's a tax on the buyer. The difference here is not that the buyer is not still supposed to pay, it's that Amazon will now handle the collection, because that's 1000x times more efficient than trying to enforce it for every single person in the state(s) collecting it.
And, the complaint from in-state businesses is not that the Amazon, etc is using resources of their state, it's that they are able to compete unfairly with a sometimes 9+% price break. Sure, it can hurt huge companies like Wal-mart with a physical presence in all states, but ironically it's even *worse* for the small, local businesses who are already being hurt by Wal-mart's physical presence...
Sales taxes of all kinds can be considered 'double dipping' as your income is already taxed. Additionally, they are regressive taxes.
They are regressive, definitely, but not necessarily double dipping, as they are collected by different government entities. Some states have no or very low income tax, and for many of those that do the state income tax revenue barely makes it down to the local level - property and sales taxes generate most of the local city and county government revenue.
I already answered your question in the post...
Paying $1 for a damn song isn't going to kill you, and if it's not worth it to you, I'm sure you can live without it. "It's too expensive, so I have the right to steal it" is just a stupid argument.
If it's so easy and artists are so lazy, go make your own art and entertain yourself! What is the justification for copying it then? I swear, the only people in this acting more entitled than the copyright owners are the pirates...
And I also already answered your other question - copyrights do serve a purpise, for a movie 2-3 years is probably plenty, for a musician maybe a bit longer; but "70 years after death" is absurd, and 120 years for a corporation is insane.
Huge amounts of money are made by live music performances
Yeah, can't wait for "Avatar Live".
But seriously, why should that matter? If an artist records a song, he should be able to profit from selling the recording and not be forced to tour live if he doesn't want to. Jesus Christ, people. Paying $1 for a damn song isn't going to kill you, and if it's not worth it to you, I'm sure you can live without it. "It's too expensive, so I have the right to steal it" is just a stupid argument. There are valid reasons for patents and copyrights, they should just be used for those reasons and not to create permanent monopolies...
That and international box office/DVD sales/TV licensing, which can often take a movie that underperformed in US box office to profitability...
There are about a billion screenshots, video clips, and even an beta that has been going on for a while now. Troll.
Microsoft is definitely MUCH stricter about XBox Live integration for all games/apps on the 360 than, say, Sony with the PS3. They made a "partial" exception for EA because without it they'd be missing online play for the majority of console sports games, etc. I'd imagine after looking at the insane profits WoW has been making in recent years Microsoft would be willing to work with Blizzard on some sort of B.net support as well...
Actually, in the mid 1990's Kodak was still reasonably profitable and still had an 80% share of film (in the US - Fuji pretty much owned Japan), 70%+ share of disposable cameras (a big business for them in the 90's) and the largest share (but declining) of camera hardware sales.
They lost all three of those businesses due to digital (film because it became mostly obsolete, disposable cameras because digitals are reusable, and the cheap point and shoot camera market because the advantages of digital cameras justified a higher price. And then Canon, Sony, and Nikon entered this new market with some very solid, reasonably priced entries...
The simple fact is vast quantities of creative works were produced before Copyright existed, and increasing quantities have been (and continue to be) created since without any thought given to Copyright. The implication that Copyright is an essential part of creative works doesn't stand up to even a cursory examination.
The big difference is that historically the larger the effort and cost of the work, the larger the effort and cost to copy it. No one is going to pay to copy the Sistine Chapel. And to copy a painting required a skilled artist and almost as much effort as making the original. Even a book would have to be copied by hand with a fountain pen or typeset by hand with a primitive printing press.
Today, whether it's a book or song written by one person or a $200M movie, they are trivially easy and cheap to copy, and if the creators are not given at least some window of time before copying it were freely allowed, there is no way many of these works (especially movies) would make back the initial expense. Then again, that limitation could probably be more like 2-3 years (at which point most movies have made 95%+ of what they will ever make) instead of 120!
The original purpose of Copyright law was very fair - to allow someone to cover their production expenses and make a living before becoming part of the public domain. Now it's been perverted to allow giant media corporations a near permanent dynastic protection to anything they do...
It might be a "limited time" if they didn't keep extending it whenever the material of large companies starts to get close said limit. I'm pretty sure the Founding Fathers didn't put this provision in the Constitution so that Mickey Mouse was still "a protected work of art" 200 years from now...
Kodak was known primarily for it's film and related products. That of course is not an easy transition to digital as it negates the need for film. It's hard for a company to do away with their core business voluntarily.
Actually, up to 1976 Kodak was still selling over 80% of camera hardware in the US (and an almost complete monopoly on film). Canon and Nikon were fairly high end prosumer brands at that time.
The problem was that they sold a lot of cheap cameras and made most of their profits on film (the razor/printer/etc strategy). That model completely fell apart on *both* the hardware and the film sides with the advent of digital photography...
Completely true - Facebook (where I would guess 80%+ of the photos are from cameraphones) is rapidly making Flick as irrelevant as Kodak...
And that doesn't even include the fact that the claim no one uses cameraphones on Flickr is completely bogus anyway - Flickr actually says the iPhone has been the #1 camera on their site for a while now... http://www.flickr.com/cameras/
Then you have an exceptionally good optometrist, and you are in that 1% of people I mentioned. Most are not in your situation.
Again not true. Jeez, look it up, contacts are very often able to correct vision to 20/20, ie. the same as any nominal human vision. Optometrist skill has little to do with it, contacts are manufactured at very standard sizes and corrections and it's not rocket science to find the right one.
Are you really willing to risk your whole life on the goodwill of somebody who volunteered to join the TSA?
As I said, that's pretty absurd exaggeration. But yes, I am willing to risk some pretty annoying inconvenience in this case, as I know that in the end there is no real reason or evidence to suspect me of anything.
If in this really trivial case you are *not* willing to stand up to a clear violation of your rights, I guess you get what you deserve...
In theory, but I'm not one for absurd conspiracy theories :)
Handing you over to a military prison without habeas corpus is just NOT going to happen for someone who stands up to an invasive TSA search at a bus stop. The only US citizens currently affected by this sort of law so far were detained IN AL QUEDA TRAINING CAMPS in Afghanistan (which is debatably already grounds for revocation of citizenship as under current federal law as joining a foreign military at war and/or an intentional act of overthrow of the US...)
Personally I think it's detestable that they are not *either* given the rights of a citizen or the rights of a prisoner of war (they seem to be getting neither) but trying to argue talking back to the TSA will get you "gitmoed" is just a slippery slope fallacy to the extreme...
Well, in all seriousness, you are not going to be sent to a maximum security military prison for telling a TSA employee at a bus station to piss off. If you decide the best way to test the law is attempt to smuggle a bomb into an airport, well, you won't get much sympathy from most people even if you still should have your rights protected...
But in the end that's why I said it's "the problem". You basically have to risk conviction (and potential financial hardship, etc, depending on your legal representation) by breaking an unjust law in the hope it will be overturned and you cleared of wrongdoing...
The problem is based on the US legal system the way to challenge the Constitutionality of these laws is to break them, and then (after a likely horrible reaming by the justice system) appeal to the Supreme court to try to get it overturned.
Unless someone stands up to the violation of their civil rights, these things never get tested. Relying on the useless Congress that passed the law in the first place to overturn it is pretty much futile.
And seriously - not wearing a seatbelt (or motorcycle helmet, etc) is as much completely selfish as it is stupid. If it's not the government's responsibility to require a seatbelt, it should also not be their business to assist you when you don't. I almost think intentionally not using a safety device like this should be equivalent to a blanket "DNR" order so that the rest of us don't have to foot the medical bill for these morons...
If you wear glasses or contacts, then you are not physically capable of telling the difference between a Standard and HD images at any reasonable distance from the TV screen for any size TV. Presently, that is the majority of the population. As much as glasses and contacts help, they cannot improve your vision enough to make up the difference.
WTF are you talking about?? That is utterly untrue. My (and may others) actually get *better* than 20/20 vision from wearing contacts. I work in the video industry, have horrible (uncorrectect) vision, and could trivially tell the difference between a 480i and 1080p image from twice the recommended viewing distance.
Does the 3GS not have a microphone
I assume you are being facetious there - it *is* still a phone.. :)
Or is it just not capable of transmitting the recorded voice over a network connection the the Siri master computers?
Siri used to be a normal App Store app before Apple bought the company, and (from what I have heard) it ran fine on the iPhone 4 (non S). It does the speech to text on the device, and then sends the text to the server... so there could be some (probably minor) performance issue/delay on a 3GS. But I would imagine in the end it's mostly about marketing/differentiating their newest phone.
There aren't any official APIs yet, but there is definitely a lot of Siri hacking going on right now... technically it's still beta, so it is conceivable Apple will open up official support for it eventually...
I don't know anyone who actually uses video for phone calls.
Just because you don't know anyone, doesn't mean it's not hugely popular outside your social circle. Skype or Facetime is great for relatives, families with kids, etc, who travel a lot or are spread out around the world and don't get to see each other in person more than once a year or so. It has definitely caught on now.
Same with HD. Not even considering television or movie content, between the Xbox 360 and PS3 there are 40M+ game consoles in the US alone that greatly benefit from an HDTV.
And most of us feel that was stupid anyway. But it was all we could buy when our old tvs finally died.
*Most* of us? Speak for yourself. Unless you are surveying in a retirement home the majority of people you ask will much prefer HD (and flat screens) over big bulky SD CRTs.
but it only grants you a carefully selected subset of the most basic of the new functionality, so it's not really the same version after all.
That's a pretty huge exaggeration. The only missing features for the 3GS are Siri and in-place photo editing. 2 features of 200+ added with iOS 5. Big deal.