What part of "major corporation" confused you? Google, Viacom, etc. are large companies with respectable legal departments and can be expected to keep track of such things.
Ya know. If I am going to be a doctor. And I am a small practice owner trying to make it. I have no $$ to try and appease every idiotic winey bastid that comes along. I cure people. Guess what my expertise is in medicine.. Not law. Nor in security. nor in...
Its ridiculously stifling to expect everyone getting into medicine to think about all that junk just cause ya have some winey patients or HIPAA.
Want some cheese??
Your arguments holds no water with other occupations, so what's magical about yours? Do you think your customers won't care if you leak private information that they upload?
The current motion sensing is pretty bad, it flinches alot, it jumps around, it felt added on.
I've had the exact opposite experience with Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime Hunters, both of which felt immediately responsive and accurate. Maybe you got a bad unit or controller?
If the guy who bought the hummer suddenly has to pay 20k less in taxes this year - someone else is going to pay more next year.
But it's not even that simple. He paid $20K less by purchasing $60K in capital from a manufacturer that employees people to assemble it. Eventually most of that will work its way out to taxable income, except that it's distributed through a lot of other hands along the way.
Working for a label, I've seen how much decent CD burning costs -- roughly 85% of the cost of the CD once you include printing and distribution.
You will never, ever get me to believe that a $15.00 CD costs $12.75 to burn and ship, particularly not when its the soundtrack to a movie that only costs $10.00 on DVD (including printing and distribution). No way. Uh-uh.
While I dislike the action, it gives Google (and ever other major corporation) a reason to care about my privacy rights. Hate the means; love the ends.
This meme comes about because there is a fatcat class and a starvingmouse class.
That ignores the makingendsmeet class, the kidsdogandavan class, and the doingfinethankyou class. Most professional types are in the kids/dog/van class or higher.
What's so unjustified about expressing a real socio-economic distinction?
I know doctors who's take home pay is over 40k / month. That's more than 12x what the average American makes after taxes.
Sure, some do, but they're typically the older ones who've already paid off their student loans (which were much smaller in the first place, even adjusted for inflation), own all their equipment, and have a few associates working for them. There are some high-profile specialties that pay really well, but that's really the exception.
Speaking of liberating, once I forgot a change of underwear and only realised it half way through my lunch time workout - kinda weird but unexpectedly comfortable.
If you exercise in your office clothes, then either your workouts suck or your coworkers hate you (interpret "or" here in the Boolean sense).
Um... AFAIK, in sane systems, tax write-offs work so you write off the tax portion of the price of whatever you're purchasing, not the entire price.
That's a pretty bad idea. If a business owner earns $10,000 but then turns around and reinvests all of it, US tax law says* there's no net taxable profit. In your system, if those purchases weren't taxable (and many things bought by a business aren't), then he'd owe taxes on the full $10,000.
I think I prefer the current insane system in this specific instance.
I keep reading that `50,000 people` are in his debt but that would assume a 0% mortality rate. I wonder what the real numbers are.
Even then, there are philisophical aspects. Of those 50,000 probably 99.9% faced certain death if he didn't operate. I mean, open heart surgery isn't like a tonsillectomy. I'd say that even the unsuccessful patients' families owe at least a little gratitude to the premier heart surgeon in the history of the world who personally took the case and gave it his best, even if it didn't work out.
Personal DeBakey story:
I was studying to be an OR tech in '93 at Naval Hospital San Diego, and was in surgical rotation when Dr. DeBakey dropped in for a visit. One of my buddies had the awesome and terrifying experience of working on a heart case where half the instruments were named after the surgeon doing it. OK, maybe that's a secondhand story, but it was still pretty cool.
The point is that by upping the max to $100K, lots of doctors and lawyers went out and bought Hummers on the tax payers' dime.
There's a big difference between "tax free" and "on the tax payers' dime". If I pay you under the table for work, then we've cheated the system in that you didn't pay as much in taxes as you owed, but we didn't actively take money out of the system. I'm not defending the situation - I think it's ridiculous - but you're wrong on this part.
BTW, my wife's a doctor and our family cars are a 2003 minivan and an Oldsmobile. This fat-cat doctor meme needs to die as the unjustified expression of class envy that it is.
I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it is unreasonable to expect that entertainment is worth some actual cold hard cash - even at $0.25!
It is always unreasonable to expect that something has a certain value. You can hope it does, you can think that it probably does, you can run market studies to show that it likely does, but you can't say "it should be so" and expect it to happen.
My financing ideas weren't so much direct suggestions as examples of ideas the industry might use to pay for itself. Finding something that actually works is their job.:-).
And by coke-and-hookers, I definitely meant the MPAA-boss types. I really feel sorry for the little guys, the average workers, who busted their butt to learn a craft only to watch their employers waste it. It's not their fault that the studio owners refuse to look to new business models that might keep them afloat. At any rate, most of the craftsmen can work in other industries. Construction workers, electricians, etc. have obvious career paths, as do all computer folks. A caterer can cook for parties as well as they can cook for movie sets. Yes, adjustment will be necessary if the higher-ups don't straighten things out, but that's life. This is true for all industries, and I don't see anything about entertainment that deserves special consideration.
If a media company created a third choise, easy, quick, drm-free downloads at a reasonable price, don't you think that would be a hit?
Very possibly. Another possibility is that people are already spoiled on the idea of free downloads. Either way, the market gets to decide if your proposal is a fair trade, and it's impossible to dictate the answer.
Would I buy what you described? Probably! But you and I are just two people, and two people don't (usually) a market make.
I would say that $0.25 for a full length movie is not just *reasonable*, it's ludicrously cheap..
But here's the thing: consumers decide how much goods are worth. Always. That's how markets work. It's incumbent upon those who want to cater to a market to decide how to deliver a product at a price that their potential customers are willing to pay.
If consumers have collectively decided that music and movies are worth $0.00, then producers have three options:
Convince consumers to pay. Include cool, tangible items with movie purchases like posters or gloves or whatever.
Get sponsors. Advertising pays to bring "Lost" to viewers; maybe Coca-Cola can pay to let them see "Hancock".
Find an easier way to make a buck. Maybe holding down a real job isn't as much fun as snorting coke off a hooker, but them's the breaks.
Seriously, it's out of their hands. Again, producers don't decide what a reasonable price is for their products - consumers do. The best producers can do is figure out how much people are willing to pay and try to make a profit at that level.
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
Why? They chose to invest in a market with no intrinsic value that depended on an artificial scarcity.
I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day, but that's not a reasonable expectation - and neither is yours.
I'm not taking that bait. All animals have, to a certain extent, characteristics which are variations of those found in other animals. Eyes, ears, and various other appendages appear on most animals. That doesn't prove they evolved from each other.
Of course it doesn't - science can't prove anything. That's not how it works. You can look at mitochondrial DNA and be arbitrarily certain of relationships, though, and similar experiments have given the expected results every time they've been tried.
Furthermore, virtually all kinds of animals observed today CAN be considered to be totally different from (e.g. not variations of) most other kinds of animals - even despite having certain characteristics which are similar.
Of course they're different now. The question is whether their respective ancestors were less different than those species current are, and in every case that's been true. Dogs and cats are different, but the further back in time you go, the closer they seem to be.
Even if such an animal could be found, evolutionists would figure out some way to fit it into their theory.
No - they would alter their theory to account for it. ID proponents are the ones that like to bend facts to make it work out.
(Did they ever figure out where the duck-billed platypus came from?)
Space technology is not "flawed." It is rigorously tested to survive A)Lift off B)Months and years of dormancy C)Descent D)Operation on another planet millions of miles away, with minutes-long latency.
If it were open source, maybe someone a few years ago would have noticed that feet aren't meters.
Creationism can't be proven wrong, which is why it isn't science.
Neither can evolution be, FWIW. Why are we teaching either of them?
Sure it can. Find one example - just one! - of an animal in the fossil records that appeared out of nowhere and can't be shown to be a variation of another animal.
Go ahead. We're waiting.
To quote Mark Twain:
No. Mark Twain was a fine writer, but he wasn't a scientist. Other fine writers once thought that the world was flat, but you don't get to use their words in defense of the idea that it isn't round.
Mobs have been laundering money thanks to ignorant loopholes like this for over a century!
Ignorant loopholes? In America, that "loophole" would be that the Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to force me to lock my doors.
Slashdot Mirror
Save me a seat, would ya? I'm heading back over to your team.
What part of "major corporation" confused you? Google, Viacom, etc. are large companies with respectable legal departments and can be expected to keep track of such things.
Ya know. If I am going to be a doctor. And I am a small practice owner trying to make it. I have no $$ to try and appease every idiotic winey bastid that comes along. I cure people. Guess what my expertise is in medicine.. Not law. Nor in security. nor in...
Its ridiculously stifling to expect everyone getting into medicine to think about all that junk just cause ya have some winey patients or HIPAA.
Want some cheese??
Your arguments holds no water with other occupations, so what's magical about yours? Do you think your customers won't care if you leak private information that they upload?
The current motion sensing is pretty bad, it flinches alot, it jumps around, it felt added on.
I've had the exact opposite experience with Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime Hunters, both of which felt immediately responsive and accurate. Maybe you got a bad unit or controller?
If the guy who bought the hummer suddenly has to pay 20k less in taxes this year - someone else is going to pay more next year.
But it's not even that simple. He paid $20K less by purchasing $60K in capital from a manufacturer that employees people to assemble it. Eventually most of that will work its way out to taxable income, except that it's distributed through a lot of other hands along the way.
Yeah, now try that again with a version released this millennium.
What other features would you suggest to Microsoft if they are to have a hope for recovery?
The ability to boot on a single core with 1GB of RAM in under 5 minutes?
Working for a label, I've seen how much decent CD burning costs -- roughly 85% of the cost of the CD once you include printing and distribution.
You will never, ever get me to believe that a $15.00 CD costs $12.75 to burn and ship, particularly not when its the soundtrack to a movie that only costs $10.00 on DVD (including printing and distribution). No way. Uh-uh.
Concerts, the NFL, etc.
You're replying to someone else.
While I dislike the action, it gives Google (and ever other major corporation) a reason to care about my privacy rights. Hate the means; love the ends.
This meme comes about because there is a fatcat class and a starvingmouse class.
That ignores the makingendsmeet class, the kidsdogandavan class, and the doingfinethankyou class. Most professional types are in the kids/dog/van class or higher.
What's so unjustified about expressing a real socio-economic distinction?
If it actually existed as you say? Nothing.
I know doctors who's take home pay is over 40k / month. That's more than 12x what the average American makes after taxes.
Sure, some do, but they're typically the older ones who've already paid off their student loans (which were much smaller in the first place, even adjusted for inflation), own all their equipment, and have a few associates working for them. There are some high-profile specialties that pay really well, but that's really the exception.
Speaking of liberating, once I forgot a change of underwear and only realised it half way through my lunch time workout - kinda weird but unexpectedly comfortable.
If you exercise in your office clothes, then either your workouts suck or your coworkers hate you (interpret "or" here in the Boolean sense).
Um... AFAIK, in sane systems, tax write-offs work so you write off the tax portion of the price of whatever you're purchasing, not the entire price.
That's a pretty bad idea. If a business owner earns $10,000 but then turns around and reinvests all of it, US tax law says* there's no net taxable profit. In your system, if those purchases weren't taxable (and many things bought by a business aren't), then he'd owe taxes on the full $10,000.
I think I prefer the current insane system in this specific instance.
* IANACPA, but that's my understanding of it.
I keep reading that `50,000 people` are in his debt but that would assume a 0% mortality rate. I wonder what the real numbers are.
Even then, there are philisophical aspects. Of those 50,000 probably 99.9% faced certain death if he didn't operate. I mean, open heart surgery isn't like a tonsillectomy. I'd say that even the unsuccessful patients' families owe at least a little gratitude to the premier heart surgeon in the history of the world who personally took the case and gave it his best, even if it didn't work out.
Personal DeBakey story:
I was studying to be an OR tech in '93 at Naval Hospital San Diego, and was in surgical rotation when Dr. DeBakey dropped in for a visit. One of my buddies had the awesome and terrifying experience of working on a heart case where half the instruments were named after the surgeon doing it. OK, maybe that's a secondhand story, but it was still pretty cool.
Being an old and proud Slashdotter, I'd gone many months with R'ing TFA, and somehow I picked this morning to try it the other way.
Yay me.
Here's looking forward to another long stretch of blissful ignorance.
The point is that by upping the max to $100K, lots of doctors and lawyers went out and bought Hummers on the tax payers' dime.
There's a big difference between "tax free" and "on the tax payers' dime". If I pay you under the table for work, then we've cheated the system in that you didn't pay as much in taxes as you owed, but we didn't actively take money out of the system. I'm not defending the situation - I think it's ridiculous - but you're wrong on this part.
BTW, my wife's a doctor and our family cars are a 2003 minivan and an Oldsmobile. This fat-cat doctor meme needs to die as the unjustified expression of class envy that it is.
I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it is unreasonable to expect that entertainment is worth some actual cold hard cash - even at $0.25!
It is always unreasonable to expect that something has a certain value. You can hope it does, you can think that it probably does, you can run market studies to show that it likely does, but you can't say "it should be so" and expect it to happen.
My financing ideas weren't so much direct suggestions as examples of ideas the industry might use to pay for itself. Finding something that actually works is their job. :-).
And by coke-and-hookers, I definitely meant the MPAA-boss types. I really feel sorry for the little guys, the average workers, who busted their butt to learn a craft only to watch their employers waste it. It's not their fault that the studio owners refuse to look to new business models that might keep them afloat. At any rate, most of the craftsmen can work in other industries. Construction workers, electricians, etc. have obvious career paths, as do all computer folks. A caterer can cook for parties as well as they can cook for movie sets. Yes, adjustment will be necessary if the higher-ups don't straighten things out, but that's life. This is true for all industries, and I don't see anything about entertainment that deserves special consideration.
If a media company created a third choise, easy, quick, drm-free downloads at a reasonable price, don't you think that would be a hit?
Very possibly. Another possibility is that people are already spoiled on the idea of free downloads. Either way, the market gets to decide if your proposal is a fair trade, and it's impossible to dictate the answer.
Would I buy what you described? Probably! But you and I are just two people, and two people don't (usually) a market make.
That is so going on my resume within the next 5 minutes. Thanks for the tip!
I would say that $0.25 for a full length movie is not just *reasonable*, it's ludicrously cheap..
But here's the thing: consumers decide how much goods are worth. Always. That's how markets work. It's incumbent upon those who want to cater to a market to decide how to deliver a product at a price that their potential customers are willing to pay.
If consumers have collectively decided that music and movies are worth $0.00, then producers have three options:
Seriously, it's out of their hands. Again, producers don't decide what a reasonable price is for their products - consumers do. The best producers can do is figure out how much people are willing to pay and try to make a profit at that level.
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
Why? They chose to invest in a market with no intrinsic value that depended on an artificial scarcity.
I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day, but that's not a reasonable expectation - and neither is yours.
I'm not taking that bait. All animals have, to a certain extent, characteristics which are variations of those found in other animals. Eyes, ears, and various other appendages appear on most animals. That doesn't prove they evolved from each other.
Of course it doesn't - science can't prove anything. That's not how it works. You can look at mitochondrial DNA and be arbitrarily certain of relationships, though, and similar experiments have given the expected results every time they've been tried.
Furthermore, virtually all kinds of animals observed today CAN be considered to be totally different from (e.g. not variations of) most other kinds of animals - even despite having certain characteristics which are similar.
Of course they're different now. The question is whether their respective ancestors were less different than those species current are, and in every case that's been true. Dogs and cats are different, but the further back in time you go, the closer they seem to be.
Even if such an animal could be found, evolutionists would figure out some way to fit it into their theory.
No - they would alter their theory to account for it. ID proponents are the ones that like to bend facts to make it work out.
(Did they ever figure out where the duck-billed platypus came from?)
(Does your sect allow access to Wikipedia?)
Space technology is not "flawed." It is rigorously tested to survive A)Lift off B)Months and years of dormancy C)Descent D)Operation on another planet millions of miles away, with minutes-long latency.
If it were open source, maybe someone a few years ago would have noticed that feet aren't meters.
Quantum theory can then explain why so many clowns can fit inside of a very small vehicle.
Compressability is an inherent property of bozons.
Creationism can't be proven wrong, which is why it isn't science.
Neither can evolution be, FWIW. Why are we teaching either of them?
Sure it can. Find one example - just one! - of an animal in the fossil records that appeared out of nowhere and can't be shown to be a variation of another animal.
Go ahead. We're waiting.
To quote Mark Twain:
No. Mark Twain was a fine writer, but he wasn't a scientist. Other fine writers once thought that the world was flat, but you don't get to use their words in defense of the idea that it isn't round.
Mobs have been laundering money thanks to ignorant loopholes like this for over a century!
Ignorant loopholes? In America, that "loophole" would be that the Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to force me to lock my doors.