Copyrights usually have zero economic value. In rare cases, they have some value, but it's short lived. Only in the rarest of rare cases, do they have long lasting economic value, and usually those copyrights were valuable all along, and still tended to enjoy most of the value at the start.
So the idea of having copyrights as a substitute for pensions is as bad as having lottery tickets mailed out periodically instead of social security checks. A few lucky people will strike it rich, but it's no good for the vast majority.
And anyway, if you want financial support, surely a system that is applicable to everyone, rather than just highly successful and lucky artists would be more fair.
What we definitely don't want is special laws for video games. That's a Very Bad Thing.
Why?
It's patently obvious that some classes of work have longer copyright-related economic lifespans than others.
A daily newspaper loses most of its copyright related economic value by the evening of the day it is published, at best. The next day it's fit for nothing better than to line birdcages or wrap fish. Weekly magazines don't last long either, nor do certain TV programs. OTOH, a math textbook can easily sell well for decades, and a movie can be released and rereleased in various different media and venues for years.
Video games and computer software are on the shorter end of the continuum. Five years is plenty.
And there's nothing wrong with wanting free shit. If we didn't want free shit, we wouldn't have copyrights to begin with; the whole point is to cause there to be greater amounts of free shit in the end than there otherwise would be.
You should have the right for your work to carry your name indefinitely, others shouldn't be allowed to claim your work as theirs.
Provided that they do not do so in a way that constitutes fraud, why not?
Except for a teeny tiny exception (not applicable to video games at all, btw), we don't have an attribution right in the US, and we never have had one. But we've got a thriving art industry, which is just as thriving, I'd say, as that of countries that do have an attribution right.
So the attribution right doesn't provide any benefit for the public because it doesn't incentivize authors to create or publish more works than they would if they didn't have it. We know this because the US is at no disadvantage, works-wise. So all it does is burden the public for no good reason.
In that case, we're better off not granting such a right. It does nothing beneficial for the public yet incurs at least some degree of harm.
Mickey Mouse is a character in Steamboat Willie. You don't get his later attributes, until those works enter the public domain. So you don't even get the red of his shorts. But you do get the Mouse as he originally was, and you can do a lot with that. Plus IIRC you also get Minnie and Pete.
And as I've pointed out elsewhere, some of the trademarks will be lost as the work enters the public domain; the ones that would interfere with making new Mouse movies.
That does not give you access to primary sources.
Sure. And the Mona Lisa is in the public domain, but the Louvre guards wouldn't like it if I tried to bring it down to the copy shop. S.B. is on DVD. That's probably good enough for most people.
And another important correction. Mickey Mouse cannot enter the public domain, because Disney has trademarked the character.
Guess again.
Trademarks only exist so long as they serve as a source identifier for marked goods or services. That is, LEVI'S is a trademark because pants with that mark on them can only come from Levi Strauss & Co. But BLUE JEANS is not a trademark (for pants) because pants with that mark on them could come from anywhere.
Once Steamboat Willie hits the public domain, everyone is entitled to make copies of it. This means that a good which has MICKEY MOUSE in it can come from anywhere. And so MICKEY MOUSE cannot function as a trademark, at least for animated films. Further, everyone will be entitled to make new movies which are derivative of Steamboat Willie, if only in that they also feature the Mickey Mouse character (though without any of the changes he's had since 1928). So new animated films will appear as well.
You could still presumably have those novelty ice cream bars that carried the MICKEY MOUSE trademark, or those mouse eared party balloons, but that's probably little consolation to Disney.
This all basically dates back to the interaction of a patent and a trademark case: when shredded wheat was invented, it was patented and sold under the SHREDDED WHEAT trademark. Eventually the patent expired and competitors began selling the same product using the same mark, and the Supreme Court found they had every right to do so, since SHREDDED WHEAT was the name of the product that could now come from anywhere.
Also there was a more recent case in which the Supreme Court again pointed out that trademarks are not a substitute for copyright, and cannot be used to get around the constitutionally required time limits on the duration of copyrights or patents.
(And ironically, meanwhile, there is some reason to think that Steamboat Willie is already in the public domain, due to the specific requirements of the copyright law that applied at the time it was originally released. But the question has never been properly settled, AFAIK.)
But any book that didn't get made into a movie in the first 3-5 years would probably languish for the next 15, and then get strip-mined by the film industry.
Meh. It works both ways. Authors who wanted to write a sequel to a movie would just have to wait for a little while before they'd have their chance.
And in any case, I don't think that your scenario with the movies is terribly likely. Movie studios like to have exclusivity. If no one had jumped on, say, Cryptonomicon rapidly, and then it turned into a waiting game, having two different big budget adaptations of it at the same time would piss off both studios involved. This means they'll have to either develop original stories (which is fine; copyright is all about increasing quantity) or they'll have to take chances and act early in order to avoid getting screwed. Or they'll collude, but we got two rival attack-on-DC movies last year, so I don't think they're doing that so much.
Especially knowing that they are literally waiting like vultures for them to roll over into the public domain precisely so they can deprive authors of any royalty or payment.
They're not. Movie rights for books, unless the book is a best seller by a big name author, usually amount to very little money in the grand scheme of things. Certainly well, well under a million dollars for ordinary books. The catering budget is probably a bigger expense.
Likewise, I dislike the idea of musicians having their music co-opted without their consent into jingles to peddle stain removers and political parties in commercials.
So? I'm sure that some serious lovers of opera dislike the idea of having The Barber of Seville or The Valkyrie used in Bugs Bunny cartoons. If you don't like it, don't listen to it. But don't go telling the rest of us what to do.
Well, the point of copyright is to have works created and published which otherwise wouldn't've been, and to have them in the public domain as fully and quickly as possible. The goal is to promote the progress of science, that is, knowledge.
If the source code is granted copyright protection, it ought to be published so that people can learn from it, and so that when it enters the public domain (or prior, if an applicable exception to copyright applies) it can be modified by anyone who wants to modify it, just as any public domain work may be modified.
Just as patents and trade secrets cannot apply for the same invention, we should not allow trade secrets and copyrights to apply for the same work. If someone wants to keep a program secret, then fine, but why does it benefit the public to grant a copyright on a secret program?
As for piracy of the published source, that would still be illegal, just as pirating a published novel is illegal. Every sort of work under the sun has to deal with this except for software; why should software be treated differently?
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas.
I guess I do, technically.
First, copyright protects expressions of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. E.g. anyone can make a game about a woman who hunts for treasure by raiding tombs and shooting endangered wildlife. But you can't just outright copy Tomb Raider's code, art assets, and so forth.
Second, the reason for granting copyrights isn't so that people can profit from their works, but so that the public profits from having more works created and published than otherwise would've been, and in the public domain as much as possible, as soon as possible. That copyrights may have economic value which can provide a profit for authors is a side effect, a means to an end. It's not the actual point, though.
I don't have an objection to copyright generally, however, provided that it produces a better outcome for the public than if we didn't have copyright.
That $140,000 is per instance of copyright infringement.
Assuming that you're talking about the $150,000 maximum on statutory damages for copyright infringement, no, you're wrong.
Statutory damages are calculated per work, not per infringement. The number of infringements might perhaps have some bearing on the amount of damages which is just, between the minimum and maximum. But there is only one award, no matter how many separate infringements of that work there are, at least in the same case.
Well, the pressing need to leave 1885 immediately was caused by the threat of Buford Tannen killing one of them. But since he was arrested and in custody before the train was stolen, there was time to abort the train stealing plan and to come up with something else. And there's no other time pressure: after all, they've got a time machine. There is the usual problem of being in the past and perhaps changing something, but the effects on the future of putting together a small steam engine for the DeLorean are probably less than that of stealing the whole train.
No, only the time circuits and the flux capacitor needed over a GW of electricity in order to function. The car's actual engine was an ordinary internal combustion engine that output a little less than 100 KW.
(Come to think of it, stealing a steam train seems unnecessarily complicated and history-altering. Surely it would've been easier for Doc Brown to put together an electrically heated steam engine to get the DeLorean moving. Oh well, sensible ideas rarely make for exciting movies.)
Why the fuck anybody would have a problem with companies providing middle-class workers with traffic-reducing, environmentally friendly transport to work us utterly beyond me.
Well, the particular method they're using involves breaking the law in a way that deprives local government of revenues and where they seem to be getting away with it, even though ordinary people never would.
Plus, what's wrong with providing better public transportation, which reduces even more traffic and is more environmentally friendly? (Buses are really not that great compared with electrified rail) Let Google help finance improvements and expansions of the subway system. It'll benefit their workers too, but not just their workers, which I think is part of the issue.
Well, my understanding is that there's a fairly steep ticket for vehicles that park or stand in bus stops. The number I saw was something like $250. In that case, given that there's plenty of evidence that the bus drivers broke the law, the city should pursue that money which they're apparently just leaving on the table. $250 per stop per bus per day for however long these buses have been in service could be quite a lot! And why should the bus companies be allowed to get away with breaking the law just because they did so a lot and if left alone would continue doing so in the future? That doesn't make much sense.
And if they decided to use private stops in a legal manner, well, that's fine. In fact, that's what they should've been doing from the start. And if the local government needs private bus related revenue, it can always tax private bus stops.
Of course, the best solution would be for the companies to not use private buses, and to instead contribute toward improved public mass transit. There are five BART lines that could be extended to cover the South Bay from both sides, probably with a big junction at San Jose. Muni Metro could be expanded to cover more of San Francisco, with attention paid to transfers to and from BART, and the VTA light rail can be dramatically expanded, also with an eye toward BART transfers.
And a better, simplified, unified ticketing system would help too -- assuming they don't all just get merged into one big new transit authority, which might be a sensible idea.
Plus this gets even more cars off the road than private buses do, has the advantage of being fairer, since everyone can ride, and would provide local jobs for constructing and maintaining the system. It'll cost more, but a lot of the companies for whom the bus services are being run have loads of cash and would benefit from it; they can afford to contribute a fair amount and to support the increased government spending and taxes for the rest.
Well, IIRC, the only reason that A/UX even existed was because the US government had a requirement of POSIX compatibility for all computer purchases, even if the actual people and departments who wanted to buy the machines and use them had no intention of ever taking advantage of that.
Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax.
Not really. If that were the case, then the tax would differ between two jobs of differing hardness but equal pay. But it doesn't. Likewise, if we double or halve the amount of work done at a job, and thus the hardness of the job, but don't change the amount of pay, the taxes remain constant while the hardness varies.
What you're really identifying is that if someone's work hours are doubled or halved, this typically comes hand in hand with a doubling or halving of their pay, which is the actual factor that affects their taxes.
The IRS doesn't care if you pour asphalt or sit at your desk.
No, they're widespread opinions. Laws usually come about because people think they're good ideas; why would legislators work to enact laws that everyone except for me was opposed to?
People who inherit wealth didn't work for it, and didn't earn it. Some heirs might be in a desperate way, and it isn't bad to help them get on their feet. Others might inherit items of significant sentimental value but which aren't fabulously valuable and that's not so bad either.
But there is no gain to society for a select few to become particularly wealthy in an undeserving manner, such as by inheritance. In fact, it's dangerous, because wealth tends to provide power, and now you've got people who have no rightful claim to great wealth also possessing great power and likely using it for ill. Certainly that's the usual way things go, and we should adopt rules for the usual case, and not for rare exceptions.
And it's not odd to see wealthy people perfectly in favor of estate taxes. Here's something from Andrew Carnegie's book:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion.... Of all forms of taxation this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community from which it chiefly came, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the State, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the State marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.
As for progressive income taxes, ability to pay is the best way to go. It works. People are okay with it.
An absolute flat tax is pointless unless the amount you need to raise is very very low: taxing everyone, say, $100/year will result in some people easily being able to afford it, others barely able to afford it, and quite a few simply unable to afford it. Saying that it's fair that each person should pay the same quantity doesn't help them get it in order to pay it. You will wind up with a lot of people not paying their taxes, requiring either piling unjust punishment on top of their existing poverty, probably at the expense of the state, thus requiring even more taxes to proceed, or a de facto progressive taxation system in which people who are unable to pay are allowed to slide.
A proportional flat tax similarly fails. Below a certain amount of income, people simply cannot afford to pay, even if the tax were merely 1%. Unable to get blood from a stone, you must again either punish poor people for being poor, which is the sort of thing that justifies having your head cut off by an angry mob with a guillotine, or you wind up adopting a progressive taxation scheme and merely being a hypocrite who is saddled with a stupid tax system.
Some flat tax proposals suggest including various measures to avoid this, e.g. only kicking in above a certain level of income. This means that they're not actually flat taxes, they're progressive taxes which have two brackets, and are thus simply poorly designed. An ideal progressive tax, OTOH, would probably just be a mathematical function, with the tax rates varying smoothly as income varied, but for the sake of simplicity, we tend to have a number of brackets.
As a closing word of advice, you may do well to google things quickly on your own, rather than demanding answers to cover for your own ignorance or as a crappy rhetorical device.
So you're saying that given the opportunity of increased profitability, but worse levels of service and diminished customer satisfaction, a cable TV company which is also a telephone company, would not jump at the chance?
I think that digital cable is now capable of sending individual streams to subscribers' sets. I never really used on demand / pay per view features, but I don't think it's like the old days where there were a half a dozen channels all airing the same movie at slightly different times.
And more importantly, it would mean that cable companies no longer had to pay for and carry some channels they don't care about in order to carry the OTA channels that they do want.
Congress may very well step in, but the threat of Aereo remains the cable companies, rather than Aereo itself.
No, that's not true. An income tax taxes you based on how much you made; whether you worked hard or not in order to make it isn't a factor. In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes.
then tax me again when I... give it to my children as inheritance when I die
Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous. It's not such a big deal when you leave some modest bank accounts or some furniture or something, but it's not good to have people inherit vast estates merely due to the accident of their birth.
Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, dead or alive, you don't have to watch them.
Copyrights usually have zero economic value. In rare cases, they have some value, but it's short lived. Only in the rarest of rare cases, do they have long lasting economic value, and usually those copyrights were valuable all along, and still tended to enjoy most of the value at the start.
So the idea of having copyrights as a substitute for pensions is as bad as having lottery tickets mailed out periodically instead of social security checks. A few lucky people will strike it rich, but it's no good for the vast majority.
And anyway, if you want financial support, surely a system that is applicable to everyone, rather than just highly successful and lucky artists would be more fair.
What we definitely don't want is special laws for video games. That's a Very Bad Thing.
Why?
It's patently obvious that some classes of work have longer copyright-related economic lifespans than others.
A daily newspaper loses most of its copyright related economic value by the evening of the day it is published, at best. The next day it's fit for nothing better than to line birdcages or wrap fish. Weekly magazines don't last long either, nor do certain TV programs. OTOH, a math textbook can easily sell well for decades, and a movie can be released and rereleased in various different media and venues for years.
Video games and computer software are on the shorter end of the continuum. Five years is plenty.
And there's nothing wrong with wanting free shit. If we didn't want free shit, we wouldn't have copyrights to begin with; the whole point is to cause there to be greater amounts of free shit in the end than there otherwise would be.
You should have the right for your work to carry your name indefinitely, others shouldn't be allowed to claim your work as theirs.
Provided that they do not do so in a way that constitutes fraud, why not?
Except for a teeny tiny exception (not applicable to video games at all, btw), we don't have an attribution right in the US, and we never have had one. But we've got a thriving art industry, which is just as thriving, I'd say, as that of countries that do have an attribution right.
So the attribution right doesn't provide any benefit for the public because it doesn't incentivize authors to create or publish more works than they would if they didn't have it. We know this because the US is at no disadvantage, works-wise. So all it does is burden the public for no good reason.
In that case, we're better off not granting such a right. It does nothing beneficial for the public yet incurs at least some degree of harm.
Mickey Mouse is a character in Steamboat Willie. You don't get his later attributes, until those works enter the public domain. So you don't even get the red of his shorts. But you do get the Mouse as he originally was, and you can do a lot with that. Plus IIRC you also get Minnie and Pete.
And as I've pointed out elsewhere, some of the trademarks will be lost as the work enters the public domain; the ones that would interfere with making new Mouse movies.
That does not give you access to primary sources.
Sure. And the Mona Lisa is in the public domain, but the Louvre guards wouldn't like it if I tried to bring it down to the copy shop. S.B. is on DVD. That's probably good enough for most people.
And another important correction. Mickey Mouse cannot enter the public domain, because Disney has trademarked the character.
Guess again.
Trademarks only exist so long as they serve as a source identifier for marked goods or services. That is, LEVI'S is a trademark because pants with that mark on them can only come from Levi Strauss & Co. But BLUE JEANS is not a trademark (for pants) because pants with that mark on them could come from anywhere.
Once Steamboat Willie hits the public domain, everyone is entitled to make copies of it. This means that a good which has MICKEY MOUSE in it can come from anywhere. And so MICKEY MOUSE cannot function as a trademark, at least for animated films. Further, everyone will be entitled to make new movies which are derivative of Steamboat Willie, if only in that they also feature the Mickey Mouse character (though without any of the changes he's had since 1928). So new animated films will appear as well.
You could still presumably have those novelty ice cream bars that carried the MICKEY MOUSE trademark, or those mouse eared party balloons, but that's probably little consolation to Disney.
This all basically dates back to the interaction of a patent and a trademark case: when shredded wheat was invented, it was patented and sold under the SHREDDED WHEAT trademark. Eventually the patent expired and competitors began selling the same product using the same mark, and the Supreme Court found they had every right to do so, since SHREDDED WHEAT was the name of the product that could now come from anywhere.
Also there was a more recent case in which the Supreme Court again pointed out that trademarks are not a substitute for copyright, and cannot be used to get around the constitutionally required time limits on the duration of copyrights or patents.
(And ironically, meanwhile, there is some reason to think that Steamboat Willie is already in the public domain, due to the specific requirements of the copyright law that applied at the time it was originally released. But the question has never been properly settled, AFAIK.)
But any book that didn't get made into a movie in the first 3-5 years would probably languish for the next 15, and then get strip-mined by the film industry.
Meh. It works both ways. Authors who wanted to write a sequel to a movie would just have to wait for a little while before they'd have their chance.
And in any case, I don't think that your scenario with the movies is terribly likely. Movie studios like to have exclusivity. If no one had jumped on, say, Cryptonomicon rapidly, and then it turned into a waiting game, having two different big budget adaptations of it at the same time would piss off both studios involved. This means they'll have to either develop original stories (which is fine; copyright is all about increasing quantity) or they'll have to take chances and act early in order to avoid getting screwed. Or they'll collude, but we got two rival attack-on-DC movies last year, so I don't think they're doing that so much.
Especially knowing that they are literally waiting like vultures for them to roll over into the public domain precisely so they can deprive authors of any royalty or payment.
They're not. Movie rights for books, unless the book is a best seller by a big name author, usually amount to very little money in the grand scheme of things. Certainly well, well under a million dollars for ordinary books. The catering budget is probably a bigger expense.
Likewise, I dislike the idea of musicians having their music co-opted without their consent into jingles to peddle stain removers and political parties in commercials.
So? I'm sure that some serious lovers of opera dislike the idea of having The Barber of Seville or The Valkyrie used in Bugs Bunny cartoons. If you don't like it, don't listen to it. But don't go telling the rest of us what to do.
Well, the point of copyright is to have works created and published which otherwise wouldn't've been, and to have them in the public domain as fully and quickly as possible. The goal is to promote the progress of science, that is, knowledge.
If the source code is granted copyright protection, it ought to be published so that people can learn from it, and so that when it enters the public domain (or prior, if an applicable exception to copyright applies) it can be modified by anyone who wants to modify it, just as any public domain work may be modified.
Just as patents and trade secrets cannot apply for the same invention, we should not allow trade secrets and copyrights to apply for the same work. If someone wants to keep a program secret, then fine, but why does it benefit the public to grant a copyright on a secret program?
As for piracy of the published source, that would still be illegal, just as pirating a published novel is illegal. Every sort of work under the sun has to deal with this except for software; why should software be treated differently?
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas.
I guess I do, technically.
First, copyright protects expressions of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. E.g. anyone can make a game about a woman who hunts for treasure by raiding tombs and shooting endangered wildlife. But you can't just outright copy Tomb Raider's code, art assets, and so forth.
Second, the reason for granting copyrights isn't so that people can profit from their works, but so that the public profits from having more works created and published than otherwise would've been, and in the public domain as much as possible, as soon as possible. That copyrights may have economic value which can provide a profit for authors is a side effect, a means to an end. It's not the actual point, though.
I don't have an objection to copyright generally, however, provided that it produces a better outcome for the public than if we didn't have copyright.
And coincidentally, 15 years is the maximum duration that copyrights should last, according to the only proper study of economic incentives surrounding copyright of which I am aware.
We could use some more research on this, but it sounds okay to me.
If you can crack it apart, then you can just bury the graphite in the empty coal mines and oil wells, if there's no better use for it.
But this is so energy intensive that's it's not likely to happen anytime soon.
As for a limnic eruption, that just gets CO2 out of solution from water. It doesn't get it off the planet. Earth's gravity is too strong for that.
The oxygen in the CO2 is atmospheric oxygen, not fossil oxygen. I'd just as soon not get rid of it.
That $140,000 is per instance of copyright infringement.
Assuming that you're talking about the $150,000 maximum on statutory damages for copyright infringement, no, you're wrong.
Statutory damages are calculated per work, not per infringement. The number of infringements might perhaps have some bearing on the amount of damages which is just, between the minimum and maximum. But there is only one award, no matter how many separate infringements of that work there are, at least in the same case.
The relevant statute is 17 USC 504(c)(1).
Well, the pressing need to leave 1885 immediately was caused by the threat of Buford Tannen killing one of them. But since he was arrested and in custody before the train was stolen, there was time to abort the train stealing plan and to come up with something else. And there's no other time pressure: after all, they've got a time machine. There is the usual problem of being in the past and perhaps changing something, but the effects on the future of putting together a small steam engine for the DeLorean are probably less than that of stealing the whole train.
No, only the time circuits and the flux capacitor needed over a GW of electricity in order to function. The car's actual engine was an ordinary internal combustion engine that output a little less than 100 KW.
(Come to think of it, stealing a steam train seems unnecessarily complicated and history-altering. Surely it would've been easier for Doc Brown to put together an electrically heated steam engine to get the DeLorean moving. Oh well, sensible ideas rarely make for exciting movies.)
Why the fuck anybody would have a problem with companies providing middle-class workers with traffic-reducing, environmentally friendly transport to work us utterly beyond me.
Well, the particular method they're using involves breaking the law in a way that deprives local government of revenues and where they seem to be getting away with it, even though ordinary people never would.
Plus, what's wrong with providing better public transportation, which reduces even more traffic and is more environmentally friendly? (Buses are really not that great compared with electrified rail) Let Google help finance improvements and expansions of the subway system. It'll benefit their workers too, but not just their workers, which I think is part of the issue.
Well, my understanding is that there's a fairly steep ticket for vehicles that park or stand in bus stops. The number I saw was something like $250. In that case, given that there's plenty of evidence that the bus drivers broke the law, the city should pursue that money which they're apparently just leaving on the table. $250 per stop per bus per day for however long these buses have been in service could be quite a lot! And why should the bus companies be allowed to get away with breaking the law just because they did so a lot and if left alone would continue doing so in the future? That doesn't make much sense.
And if they decided to use private stops in a legal manner, well, that's fine. In fact, that's what they should've been doing from the start. And if the local government needs private bus related revenue, it can always tax private bus stops.
Of course, the best solution would be for the companies to not use private buses, and to instead contribute toward improved public mass transit. There are five BART lines that could be extended to cover the South Bay from both sides, probably with a big junction at San Jose. Muni Metro could be expanded to cover more of San Francisco, with attention paid to transfers to and from BART, and the VTA light rail can be dramatically expanded, also with an eye toward BART transfers.
And a better, simplified, unified ticketing system would help too -- assuming they don't all just get merged into one big new transit authority, which might be a sensible idea.
Plus this gets even more cars off the road than private buses do, has the advantage of being fairer, since everyone can ride, and would provide local jobs for constructing and maintaining the system. It'll cost more, but a lot of the companies for whom the bus services are being run have loads of cash and would benefit from it; they can afford to contribute a fair amount and to support the increased government spending and taxes for the rest.
Yes. But many years later, I got an SE/30 and maxed out the RAM, just to have finally done it. Fortunately it didn't cost too much on eBay.
Well, IIRC, the only reason that A/UX even existed was because the US government had a requirement of POSIX compatibility for all computer purchases, even if the actual people and departments who wanted to buy the machines and use them had no intention of ever taking advantage of that.
The Monkey was something they used for debugging. You can read about it here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...
Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax.
Not really. If that were the case, then the tax would differ between two jobs of differing hardness but equal pay. But it doesn't. Likewise, if we double or halve the amount of work done at a job, and thus the hardness of the job, but don't change the amount of pay, the taxes remain constant while the hardness varies.
What you're really identifying is that if someone's work hours are doubled or halved, this typically comes hand in hand with a doubling or halving of their pay, which is the actual factor that affects their taxes.
The IRS doesn't care if you pour asphalt or sit at your desk.
No, they're widespread opinions. Laws usually come about because people think they're good ideas; why would legislators work to enact laws that everyone except for me was opposed to?
People who inherit wealth didn't work for it, and didn't earn it. Some heirs might be in a desperate way, and it isn't bad to help them get on their feet. Others might inherit items of significant sentimental value but which aren't fabulously valuable and that's not so bad either.
But there is no gain to society for a select few to become particularly wealthy in an undeserving manner, such as by inheritance. In fact, it's dangerous, because wealth tends to provide power, and now you've got people who have no rightful claim to great wealth also possessing great power and likely using it for ill. Certainly that's the usual way things go, and we should adopt rules for the usual case, and not for rare exceptions.
And it's not odd to see wealthy people perfectly in favor of estate taxes. Here's something from Andrew Carnegie's book:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. ... Of all forms of taxation this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community from which it chiefly came, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the State, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the State marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.
As for progressive income taxes, ability to pay is the best way to go. It works. People are okay with it.
An absolute flat tax is pointless unless the amount you need to raise is very very low: taxing everyone, say, $100/year will result in some people easily being able to afford it, others barely able to afford it, and quite a few simply unable to afford it. Saying that it's fair that each person should pay the same quantity doesn't help them get it in order to pay it. You will wind up with a lot of people not paying their taxes, requiring either piling unjust punishment on top of their existing poverty, probably at the expense of the state, thus requiring even more taxes to proceed, or a de facto progressive taxation system in which people who are unable to pay are allowed to slide.
A proportional flat tax similarly fails. Below a certain amount of income, people simply cannot afford to pay, even if the tax were merely 1%. Unable to get blood from a stone, you must again either punish poor people for being poor, which is the sort of thing that justifies having your head cut off by an angry mob with a guillotine, or you wind up adopting a progressive taxation scheme and merely being a hypocrite who is saddled with a stupid tax system.
Some flat tax proposals suggest including various measures to avoid this, e.g. only kicking in above a certain level of income. This means that they're not actually flat taxes, they're progressive taxes which have two brackets, and are thus simply poorly designed. An ideal progressive tax, OTOH, would probably just be a mathematical function, with the tax rates varying smoothly as income varied, but for the sake of simplicity, we tend to have a number of brackets.
As a closing word of advice, you may do well to google things quickly on your own, rather than demanding answers to cover for your own ignorance or as a crappy rhetorical device.
So you're saying that given the opportunity of increased profitability, but worse levels of service and diminished customer satisfaction, a cable TV company which is also a telephone company, would not jump at the chance?
I think that digital cable is now capable of sending individual streams to subscribers' sets. I never really used on demand / pay per view features, but I don't think it's like the old days where there were a half a dozen channels all airing the same movie at slightly different times.
And more importantly, it would mean that cable companies no longer had to pay for and carry some channels they don't care about in order to carry the OTA channels that they do want.
Congress may very well step in, but the threat of Aereo remains the cable companies, rather than Aereo itself.
the harder I work, the more money they want
No, that's not true. An income tax taxes you based on how much you made; whether you worked hard or not in order to make it isn't a factor. In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes.
then tax me again when I ... give it to my children as inheritance when I die
Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous. It's not such a big deal when you leave some modest bank accounts or some furniture or something, but it's not good to have people inherit vast estates merely due to the accident of their birth.
Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.