A lot of people are arguing how Internet sales taxes are fair, since taxes are already levied on purchases in 46 states. But you need to remember that Internet sales are not entirely taxless.
1) The company that sells the goods has to pay taxes on their annual profits.
2) The person buying the goods had to pay tax on their income.
Those taxes more than cover the buying chain. Why should everyone be doubled taxed for things? They were already taxed on their income, so why tax them AGAIN on purchases?
I can two viable solutions. 1) Raise income tax and ditch sales tax. 2) Ditch income tax and have a federal flat rate sales tax.
No. For a start, donations to the EFF are not tax-deductible if you're not a US citizen.
Even if they were, I don't feel I earn enough to donate effectively. People who throw them $50 a year are great in large numbers, but you're hardly buying a couple of minutes of campaigning time for them.
I prefer to keep my money and spend it on things which means I don't have to fall into legal traps. If the people who still use Windows XP and keep throwing $1000+ into the EFF every year actually spent that on Linux training, then they're doing a lot better for the world than giving their $$ to the EFF.
Lastly, I think the EFF is a good idea, but if people believe it's going to be their mouthpiece, they are sorely wrong. One large charity is easy for the government to ignore. Millions of complaining citizens are not. Support the things you want directly, instead of giving $1000 to the EFF and feeling 'good about yourself.'
This comparison has come up in numerous replies, but you miss the fact that on some cars, you CAN'T get replacement parts anywhere else!
If you own a Mercedes or a Porsche you will find there are numerous parts for the car (mainly in the gearbox or electronic control systems) which CANNOT be found elsewhere!
Seems as though Lexmark has decided it wants all the pie when it comes to the printing world
Isn't this fair? I don't know if it's a fair lawsuit under the DMCA, but it's fair for Lexmark to try and protect their interests. Lexmark is not a printer monopoly, and it certainly does not have 'all the pie' in the printing world.
The reason Lexmark is pissed is because it sells its printers as a loss leader, and then makes money on the ink cartridges.
This is not new. All console makers do the same thing. The XBox costs more than $149 to make, but MS sells them as loss leaders so they can make money on the games. Sony does the same. Nintendo does the same.
Yet most people would agree that hacking/chipping consoles so you can play stolen games is illegal, even if you don't think it's unethical.
What's different about the printer industry? They're just trying to make their money in the best way possible. After all, it's consumers who have forced them to offer printers as loss leaders rather than having expensive printers and cheap ink.
P2P has gone to shit. I remember 'back in the day' on Napster when half the MP3s you'd get were crappy. Now, however, it's up to at least 80%.
Some people have songs in excellent 192kbps or 128kbps, but mostly are VERY badly encoded 128/112/96/64kbps. What's worse is that Kazaa 2 encourages people to rate these as being 'Excellent' integrity files!
Many MP3s of popular songs on Kazaa now are recorded from low quality radio streams, or off of TV. Seriously, I think so few people are buying CDs nowadays that no-one on Kazaa has a proper well-encoded rip of anything.
I used to download tons of music a few years ago. Now I'm buying CDs out the ass instead, the quality of MP3s on Kazaa is absolutely crap, and I just use them for sampling CDs I want to buy.
The article also mentions that "only a limited number of each eBook will be available, and after a preset number of days, the eBook will lock out the current reader so another patron can check it out."
That's weird. I've noticed many Web pages that Slashdot links to also have this feature. I click on the link and it tells me too many people are reading the site and that I should come back later. So if Slashdot links to every e-book in the library, they won't need to pay for fancy protection systems.
Since you guys seem to have a grounding in advertising and design, I advise you stay there. E-commerce is not particularly going places right now, and if you build up your offline agency business you'll be doing a lot better than focusing on projects which require a large investment of training time.
All of the replies so far in this thread are banging on about general business issues and supply/demand, but what about the problems caused by the fragmented nature of the Internet itself?
I'd like to see some replies from 'people in the know' on how peering agreements, backbone interconnections and peering centers like LINX affect things.
After all, the average packet from the UK to the US doesn't just go over one provider. It goes over my ISP, a UK backbone, through LINX, to the US on a DIFFERENT ISP, then hits a NOC in NYC, goes to ANOTHER backbone.. and so on.
How do all of these different ISPs interact with each other? Do the larger ones set up networks then charge the smaller ones (like my ISP) for bandwidth which is then passed on? Or do they have 'back and forth' arrangements where the ISPs only pay for the difference between in and out traffic?
Textiles manufacturers faced the same problem in the early 1900's. The result? Textile production moved elsewhere.
Electronics production faced the same problem in the 60s. The result? The Japanese ended up producing most home electronics for the next 30 years.
Work falling into the laps of cheaper foreign labor isn't a great thing for people in that market, but it's not a biggie. You simply transfer your skills to a market that demands them rather than hanging onto a market that the third world can handle best.
They had some real crap on Tomorrow's World simply so it'd appeal to Joe Sixpack and five year olds.. both of who WEREN'T THE MAIN GROUPS WHO WATCHED THE SHOW!!
Tommorrow's World would spend tons of time looking at stupid inventions like quicker ways to open tin cans, or 'Young Innovators' fairs where 8 year olds would invent automatic dog food dispensers.
Instead of focusing on such jevenile crap they should have focused on cool widgets, technologies that could change the world, and things of some importance to science, rather than things which make it easier to do the washing up.
Re:That's because Linux admins are self-taught
on
Linux Is Cheaper
·
· Score: 1
Just pick the damn thing up (it's not that heavy) and run with it or throw it in the back of a pick-up truck.
Screw going down to K-Mart in one of these only to have some hick throw it in his truck while I run inside.
Sure, the hick won't be able to do anything with it until hacks come online so you can make your own keys and stuff.. but still, these are worth stealing for novelty value alone.
How can you avoid someone stealing these damn things? Get ready for sky high insurance.
Mostly the latter. It's a trend. I'm waiting to see if anyone catches on. Knowing the (balls) mentality of most Slashdot contributors, everyone will be going 'In S-S-SOVIET RU-RU-RUSSIA' within days. Or not:-D
Besides, Slashdot needs some new trends. Soviet Russia is way (clitoris) past its prime now, and hot grits, Natalie Portman, PROFIT!!, and Beowulf Clusters are truly dead and buried. See my sig.
Another trend is throwing random porn related words into otherwise insightful posts and seeing if you still (cock) get moderated up.
It h-has become a disturbing trend in recruitment circles to advertise jobs you don't actually have, in order to mine résumés for potential employer contacts. I know that this is especially common in the UK. I'd bet that less than half of these jobs are real.
Another worrying trend is that I know people who've responded to job ads, and even gone for interview, and have been told that the job doesn't exist, but that they wanted a healthy batch of résumés on file for when the economy picks up(!!)
Th-th-the best people to ask are the freelance workers, the people actually here on Slashdot. What languages are most in demand?
In the main, as a programmer myself, I find that specific, er, languages are not demanded so much. People want solutions, unh, not languages. That said, from the REAL ads I see (I'm in numerous freelance work groups), PHP and MySQL are way way way at the top of the tree, followed by Java.
That's weird. I was about to ask the same question on here. I swear I've seen that somewhere in a Linux bootup or installation.
Seems no-one else can find it though.. perhaps it has been lost from recent implementations.
That's because Linux admins are self-taught
on
Linux Is Cheaper
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
I'm a Libertarian. Not in any raving crazy way, but just that I would vote for them and I believe in their core principles.
I talk to a lot of people and many say they'd vote for the Libertarians IF they had a chance of winning the election!
What a Catch 22! People don't vote for them because most other people don't vote for them. But if everyone who really wanted to vote Libertarian did.. then they'd probably be up there instead of the Democrats.
The big problem is that American citizens are savvy to strategic voting. They know that if they're more Republican than Democrat (but still like Libertarianism) that if the Democrats show a sign of winning, they'd rather vote for the Republicans strategically than vote for their true party.
This is the problem with two-party states. Those two parties are almost impossible to topple. (Potential exception.. the Conservative Party in the UK has almost collapsed, the Liberals could easily become the main opposition party within 10 years)
I started helping on an open source project called Project Armageddon in 1996. It became a massive thing, with about 50 guys working, artists, programmers, the works. It was due for release in 1998. It still hasn't been released..
Why? Because technology moves too quickly and your game looks old fast. If you write a game with a target for release in two years, you write for the highest end kit, make sure your engine scales, and hope for the best. But what if when two years have passed, you need another year to finish the title? Your title immediately looks old!
What if Red Alert 2 ran a year late? It'd look like an old clunky piece of crap. Okay, it's still an excellent game, but it was more cutting edge in 2000 than it possibly could be in 2001.
So, when titles run even just a year late, the developers have to rush and scramble to make their graphics engine look up to date.. but that introduces new bugs, so they become even more delayed.. then they need to upgrade the engine AGAIN, and repeat ad nauseum.
You are right. But reproduction is genetically programmed into all living creatures.
If all humans stopped reproducing, eventually all humans would die out and be extinct. What would that matter? We'd be dead, we wouldn't know or care.
That type of opinion is seen as sad and defeatist, but is it really? What do we have to gain from propogating our species? After all, Buddhists say that all life is suffering. Let's stop suffering and stop producing more humans.
Are you the guy who got profiled in the article Slashdot linked to yesterday?
I know what you mean about stuff not breaking though. But your job is clearly worth it, by definition, if you're still there. If not, leave, buy an RV, and go tour the US.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people are arguing how Internet sales taxes are fair, since taxes are already levied on purchases in 46 states. But you need to remember that Internet sales are not entirely taxless.
1) The company that sells the goods has to pay taxes on their annual profits.
2) The person buying the goods had to pay tax on their income.
Those taxes more than cover the buying chain. Why should everyone be doubled taxed for things? They were already taxed on their income, so why tax them AGAIN on purchases?
I can two viable solutions. 1) Raise income tax and ditch sales tax. 2) Ditch income tax and have a federal flat rate sales tax.
I'd prefer the 2nd option myself.
You've joined the EFF, right?
No. For a start, donations to the EFF are not tax-deductible if you're not a US citizen.
Even if they were, I don't feel I earn enough to donate effectively. People who throw them $50 a year are great in large numbers, but you're hardly buying a couple of minutes of campaigning time for them.
I prefer to keep my money and spend it on things which means I don't have to fall into legal traps. If the people who still use Windows XP and keep throwing $1000+ into the EFF every year actually spent that on Linux training, then they're doing a lot better for the world than giving their $$ to the EFF.
Lastly, I think the EFF is a good idea, but if people believe it's going to be their mouthpiece, they are sorely wrong. One large charity is easy for the government to ignore. Millions of complaining citizens are not. Support the things you want directly, instead of giving $1000 to the EFF and feeling 'good about yourself.'
Just my opinion of course.
This comparison has come up in numerous replies, but you miss the fact that on some cars, you CAN'T get replacement parts anywhere else!
If you own a Mercedes or a Porsche you will find there are numerous parts for the car (mainly in the gearbox or electronic control systems) which CANNOT be found elsewhere!
I wasnt aware that toners were digital media.
The chips in the cartridges that mean they're 'authentic' Lexmark toner are digital though.
Think about it.. what these rip-off toner companies are doing is equivalent to cracking smartcards on subscription digital TV.
Seems as though Lexmark has decided it wants all the pie when it comes to the printing world
Isn't this fair? I don't know if it's a fair lawsuit under the DMCA, but it's fair for Lexmark to try and protect their interests. Lexmark is not a printer monopoly, and it certainly does not have 'all the pie' in the printing world.
The reason Lexmark is pissed is because it sells its printers as a loss leader, and then makes money on the ink cartridges.
This is not new. All console makers do the same thing. The XBox costs more than $149 to make, but MS sells them as loss leaders so they can make money on the games. Sony does the same. Nintendo does the same.
Yet most people would agree that hacking/chipping consoles so you can play stolen games is illegal, even if you don't think it's unethical.
What's different about the printer industry? They're just trying to make their money in the best way possible. After all, it's consumers who have forced them to offer printers as loss leaders rather than having expensive printers and cheap ink.
I agree, luckily most CDs are 9.99/8.99 or less at Play.com or CDWOW.
I bought the latest MTV Unplugged CD for 9.99 at Play.com a few days ago, and it comes with a DVD of the whole show as well(!!!)
P2P has gone to shit. I remember 'back in the day' on Napster when half the MP3s you'd get were crappy. Now, however, it's up to at least 80%.
Some people have songs in excellent 192kbps or 128kbps, but mostly are VERY badly encoded 128/112/96/64kbps. What's worse is that Kazaa 2 encourages people to rate these as being 'Excellent' integrity files!
Many MP3s of popular songs on Kazaa now are recorded from low quality radio streams, or off of TV. Seriously, I think so few people are buying CDs nowadays that no-one on Kazaa has a proper well-encoded rip of anything.
I used to download tons of music a few years ago. Now I'm buying CDs out the ass instead, the quality of MP3s on Kazaa is absolutely crap, and I just use them for sampling CDs I want to buy.
The article also mentions that "only a limited number of each eBook will be available, and after a preset number of days, the eBook will lock out the current reader so another patron can check it out."
That's weird. I've noticed many Web pages that Slashdot links to also have this feature. I click on the link and it tells me too many people are reading the site and that I should come back later. So if Slashdot links to every e-book in the library, they won't need to pay for fancy protection systems.
Since you guys seem to have a grounding in advertising and design, I advise you stay there. E-commerce is not particularly going places right now, and if you build up your offline agency business you'll be doing a lot better than focusing on projects which require a large investment of training time.
All of the replies so far in this thread are banging on about general business issues and supply/demand, but what about the problems caused by the fragmented nature of the Internet itself?
I'd like to see some replies from 'people in the know' on how peering agreements, backbone interconnections and peering centers like LINX affect things.
After all, the average packet from the UK to the US doesn't just go over one provider. It goes over my ISP, a UK backbone, through LINX, to the US on a DIFFERENT ISP, then hits a NOC in NYC, goes to ANOTHER backbone.. and so on.
How do all of these different ISPs interact with each other? Do the larger ones set up networks then charge the smaller ones (like my ISP) for bandwidth which is then passed on? Or do they have 'back and forth' arrangements where the ISPs only pay for the difference between in and out traffic?
Textiles manufacturers faced the same problem in the early 1900's. The result? Textile production moved elsewhere.
Electronics production faced the same problem in the 60s. The result? The Japanese ended up producing most home electronics for the next 30 years.
Work falling into the laps of cheaper foreign labor isn't a great thing for people in that market, but it's not a biggie. You simply transfer your skills to a market that demands them rather than hanging onto a market that the third world can handle best.
Haha. Nuh-nice to see someone is still, er, wasting the b-b-bucks even in today's financial climate! It brings a tear to my eye, reminds me of 1998.
You're so right.
They had some real crap on Tomorrow's World simply so it'd appeal to Joe Sixpack and five year olds.. both of who WEREN'T THE MAIN GROUPS WHO WATCHED THE SHOW!!
Tommorrow's World would spend tons of time looking at stupid inventions like quicker ways to open tin cans, or 'Young Innovators' fairs where 8 year olds would invent automatic dog food dispensers.
Instead of focusing on such jevenile crap they should have focused on cool widgets, technologies that could change the world, and things of some importance to science, rather than things which make it easier to do the washing up.
Sorry, dam, er, voice recognition soft where.
Just pick the damn thing up (it's not that heavy) and run with it or throw it in the back of a pick-up truck.
Screw going down to K-Mart in one of these only to have some hick throw it in his truck while I run inside.
Sure, the hick won't be able to do anything with it until hacks come online so you can make your own keys and stuff.. but still, these are worth stealing for novelty value alone.
How can you avoid someone stealing these damn things? Get ready for sky high insurance.
Mostly the latter. It's a trend. I'm waiting to see if anyone catches on. Knowing the (balls) mentality of most Slashdot contributors, everyone will be going 'In S-S-SOVIET RU-RU-RUSSIA' within days. Or not :-D
Besides, Slashdot needs some new trends. Soviet Russia is way (clitoris) past its prime now, and hot grits, Natalie Portman, PROFIT!!, and Beowulf Clusters are truly dead and buried. See my sig.
Another trend is throwing random porn related words into otherwise insightful posts and seeing if you still (cock) get moderated up.
Curiously, I'm now in a position to start looking for developers myself.
:-)
Uh oh, this is the worst place you could have said that. I seriously hope you haven't got your real e-mail address on your user page
It h-has become a disturbing trend in recruitment circles to advertise jobs you don't actually have, in order to mine résumés for potential employer contacts. I know that this is especially common in the UK. I'd bet that less than half of these jobs are real.
Another worrying trend is that I know people who've responded to job ads, and even gone for interview, and have been told that the job doesn't exist, but that they wanted a healthy batch of résumés on file for when the economy picks up(!!)
Th-th-the best people to ask are the freelance workers, the people actually here on Slashdot. What languages are most in demand?
In the main, as a programmer myself, I find that specific, er, languages are not demanded so much. People want solutions, unh, not languages. That said, from the REAL ads I see (I'm in numerous freelance work groups), PHP and MySQL are way way way at the top of the tree, followed by Java.
That's weird. I was about to ask the same question on here. I swear I've seen that somewhere in a Linux bootup or installation.
Seems no-one else can find it though.. perhaps it has been lost from recent implementations.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
I'm a Libertarian. Not in any raving crazy way, but just that I would vote for them and I believe in their core principles.
I talk to a lot of people and many say they'd vote for the Libertarians IF they had a chance of winning the election!
What a Catch 22! People don't vote for them because most other people don't vote for them. But if everyone who really wanted to vote Libertarian did.. then they'd probably be up there instead of the Democrats.
The big problem is that American citizens are savvy to strategic voting. They know that if they're more Republican than Democrat (but still like Libertarianism) that if the Democrats show a sign of winning, they'd rather vote for the Republicans strategically than vote for their true party.
This is the problem with two-party states. Those two parties are almost impossible to topple. (Potential exception.. the Conservative Party in the UK has almost collapsed, the Liberals could easily become the main opposition party within 10 years)
Oops, I should have made it clear I left the project in 1997 ;-)
I started helping on an open source project called Project Armageddon in 1996. It became a massive thing, with about 50 guys working, artists, programmers, the works. It was due for release in 1998. It still hasn't been released..
Why? Because technology moves too quickly and your game looks old fast. If you write a game with a target for release in two years, you write for the highest end kit, make sure your engine scales, and hope for the best. But what if when two years have passed, you need another year to finish the title? Your title immediately looks old!
What if Red Alert 2 ran a year late? It'd look like an old clunky piece of crap. Okay, it's still an excellent game, but it was more cutting edge in 2000 than it possibly could be in 2001.
So, when titles run even just a year late, the developers have to rush and scramble to make their graphics engine look up to date.. but that introduces new bugs, so they become even more delayed.. then they need to upgrade the engine AGAIN, and repeat ad nauseum.
You are right. But reproduction is genetically programmed into all living creatures.
If all humans stopped reproducing, eventually all humans would die out and be extinct. What would that matter? We'd be dead, we wouldn't know or care.
That type of opinion is seen as sad and defeatist, but is it really? What do we have to gain from propogating our species? After all, Buddhists say that all life is suffering. Let's stop suffering and stop producing more humans.
Are you the guy who got profiled in the article Slashdot linked to yesterday?
I know what you mean about stuff not breaking though. But your job is clearly worth it, by definition, if you're still there. If not, leave, buy an RV, and go tour the US.