That's why Amazon doesn't really want to win this case. Collecting sales tax could be a headache for them, but a killer for a potential competitor. Large companies want steep barriers to entry...
In case you haven't heard, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target and the like have all been lobbying the government to force Amazon to collect sales taxes, the way they all do. Those are Amazon's competitors, and Amazon is the one that bypassed the barriers to entry by not collecting sales taxes from its customers.
The prolem is not Amazon. The problem is that if Amazon loses this argument (not this particular case), it will set a precedent that the one person web site that sells stuff will, also, have to collect sales tax for every state and local that they ship to
That's untrue, unless that single person has a business presence in every state and locality, the way that Amazon has a business presence in California.
The use tax in California is completely infeasible from a records-keeping standpoint, and everyone knows this.
Oh really? If you're a business, you can keep records for when it's time to write purchases off your federal taxes, but you can't keep records for when it's time to pay state use tax on the same purchases? Hmmm, color me skeptical.
But that doesn't make people who don't pay use tax "tax cheats"; to me, it makes completely logical sense that nobody is going to pay the government money if the government never asks them for it. That's why we have shifted the responsibility for collecting taxes to retailers.
My question, however, is why Amazon has a wholly-owned subsidiary in CA, and how this helps it with tax evasion. If they want to evade taxes, shouldn't they just concentrate all their operations in one state, preferably one like Wyoming where very few customers would have to pay sales taxes? Or is this because they want to have many warehouses spread across the country to keep average shipping times low, and they make each regional warehouse a different subsidiary?
I believe it's essentially the latter, with the proviso that the warehouse closest to you -- the one with the lowest shipping time -- is not the one that ships to you. The one in the nearest state is the one that ships to you, and this way Amazon does not have to collect sales taxes from you, you see no taxes on your bill, so the "real price" from Amazon is less than from any other retailer in your area, even if the list price is the same. Hence, Amazon only does it as a tax dodge.
Would you prefer it texas style, where we there are no ballot measures?
As a California resident, I say: Absolutely, positively, YES. I can't remember any ballot measure that ever did anything positive for the state. (Proposition 13 and Proposition 8 are both so notorious that people know which ones I mean even though they recycle the numbers.) Most of the measures are floated by special interests to earmark funds that would be put to better use if they remained in the General Fund. If they put a measure on the ballot to disband the proposition system entirely, that one would definitely get my vote.
I don't know about you, but I don't even keep thousands of dollars of paper money. I keep thousands of dollars of imaginary money -- even more compact and durable than gold -- and every so often I go to a machine that gives me a few paper vouchers that are good for trading imaginary money. If the machine gave me gold instead of paper, I guess I'd have to deal with the gold, but that sounds like a pain in the ass. Gold is kind of heavy. But gold, paper, all the same to me -- the imaginary money is what matters. I don't really care what you translate the imaginary money into, as long as everybody else agrees -- which is why I don't understand the hype about the gold standard.
Gold does have "various technological uses" but they're minor. Silver is a better conductor of electricity. Titanium is more useful for medical applications. Most of the gold in the world really is used either for jewelry or for investment (it just sits there).
a monetary system that lacks intrinsic value (gold at least had that)
What's the intrinsic value of gold? It has value as a material to make jewelry out of, and that seems to be a lasting thing looking at history, but to my mind it's just a matter of personal preference (I would probably prefer silver jewelry to gold, myself) and therefore a false "value." All it would take would be one famous celebrity soccer mom to come along and claim gold causes autism and the value of gold would drop.
I always wonder why all the gold bugs aren't talking about instating an oil standard. Oil really has intrinsic value, because it can be used to do work. I suspect that this option is off the table, however, because America has Fort Knox but all the oil is owned by the darn A-rabs.
A mining company might spend money on drills, but they're doing it as a means to an end -- it doesn't mean drills are their product.... A TV company may spend money on varieties of programming but it's purely a means to an end. It's the capital expenditure that helps them acquire their product so they can sell it.
OK, look at it this way: Diamonds come out of the ground. Like viewer eyeballs -- they're a natural resource. They just exist, the only thing that remains is to go get them. But raw diamonds ain't shit. Diamonds don't get sold for thousands of dollars until they're cut, polished, and set into jewelery. That's what content does to eyeballs. Some people buy raw, uncut diamonds. Some people buy raw, uncut eyeballs -- they don't give a shit, we call them spammers. Real advertisers want cut, polished eyeballs -- they want the ones that have been filtered through content. Maybe the eyeballs are the "product," in a sense, but only in the sense that carbon can become a diamond. The process that creates the diamond out of the carbon is the content. Without the content, all an advertiser is doing is tagging flyers on telephone poles and hoping for the best. Advertisers want names, they want people to see their ads? Fine, here's the phone book. Nuh-uh. It doesn't work that way. A media company's product is its content, because content is what turns raw eyeballs into cut, polished eyeballs.
Fine. Transmitting bits instead of information? Happy now?
No, sorry. You still sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.
Why it's so difficult for you guys to accept that you don't rule in my space, I do not understand. Why would you want to even look like you're in my space?
It's true, though -- you do sound like you spend a lot of time on MySpace.
(often their "lock" is just having a funny shaped screw to turn)
In my day, it was just a hex bolt that was really, really difficult to estimate by eye. (So difficult that I gave up and looked up the precise size on a BBS.)
But to be honest I didn't think it was a major part of their corporation or revenue. Perhaps I've been living in a cave...
Is there anyone here that works for a large business customer of HP and used there software?
(I'm genuinely interested; even though it may sound like a troll that's just because I appear to be ignorant on the subject.)
I'm interested too. I've also heard that HP is nipping at IBM's heels in the IT consulting business, but I only have HP's word on that, too. I've never heard anyone say, "You know what, screw it, HP's experience and expertise is better than IBM's," and I've never known IBM Global Services to allow itself to be undersold, either (at the signing date, anyway).
As far as I can tell, HP has been claiming it's a different kind of company than it really is for years and Apotheker, an enterprise software guy, wants to actually get serious about it. Which is smart, if you've seen what printers retail for these days.
In the U.S., they recommend you carry a photocopy of the identification page of your passport when you travel, because having a copy will "will make getting a new passport easier" should yours be lost or stolen. So it's not all that illegal.
For instance, this can't be removed: "DrmProvider.apk: Provides DRM functions, needed to access media files (including ringtones)" and I most definitely would want it gone. I'll play my music on my own terms.
Maybe you can't remove it, but I don't think you're really forced to use it. I don't use any DRM media on my phone. My ringtone is an MP3 I ripped myself.
My thoughts, exactly. If you listen to radio, you are not the customer -- you're the product. If you watch television, you are not the customer -- you are the product. If you read most magazines (even if you pay for them), you are not a customer -- you're the product. When it comes to media of all kinds, you are the product far more often than you are the client.
But it's not as simple as that, because nobody is a mindless drone who will watch, listen to, or read anything you put in front of them. A magazine isn't 100 percent advertising (in fact that would be illegal by postal regulations in the U.S.) Advertisers wouldn't try to advertise on a radio station that played nothing but a 50Hz tone all day. And in fact, advertisers pick and choose which markets they target based on the content of that media; you might get a lot of drug companies advertising during 30 Rock, for example, but fewer during House. It's really clever and postmodern to say "the viewer is the product," but it's also not really true. Advertisers are paying for access to specific content, which they think appeals to a market that interests them. They want to reach the customers, true, but in order to do so they rely on the content -- so the content is the product. Or why else do you think media companies spend so much money to produce content -- as a loss leader?
Ambassador Lysenko: It seems that the initial reports that one of our submarines was missing were not completely accurate. The submarine in question... is commanded by Captain Marko Ramius. Apparently he's suffered a kind of mental or nervous break down. Just before he sailed, he posted a letter to Admiral Yuri Padorin, in which he announced his intention to... to fire his missiles on the United States. Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: But of course. Ambassador Andrei Lysenko: You... you expected this? Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: Naturally, Ambassador. For you see... in Soviet Russia, lost submarine hunts us!
Really? Judging from what I've seen, real people use their phones a lot more at bars than they do at the supermarket. In my book, "real world testing" doesn't mean "take it home and fiddle around with it as if you're using it."
Phones, wallets full of money, 15" laptops... it's ridiculous the stuff people leave at San Francisco bars. Sometimes they don't come looking for it for a month.
Tax the rich marginally more and all our dept problems go away.
Actually, I don't know anyone who argues that position. The Tax Foundation, while a nonprofit, can be considered a "business friendly" think tank, but it's hard to dispute its positions when they're based on plain math. According to that link, Warren Buffet's tax proposals would barely scratch the national debt (and I've never heard even Buffet claim that his proposals would erase the debt).
In a similar vein, borrowing a computer from somebody is different from stealing it because somebody who borrows a computer has the owner's knowledge and consent.
You should have kept reading through my second paragraph. There I acknowledge that the two things are different -- but that I don't know whether the difference is sufficient to negate the right of the person in possession of the device to not be photographed without their knowledge. If someone steals your car, you are the victim of a crime and you have a legal right to justice; you don't have a legal right to hunt the thief down and kill him. You also don't have the right to camp out in his backyard and take photographs of him through his windows. Hence, there are laws, and neither of us seem to know what the laws are in this specific case. In fact, I suggest that it's going to take a judge to sort it out.
And sure maybe I don't understand the term sociopathy. I have seen psychologists use the term to describe people who have no regard for the rights of others, and are off-put by the restrictions society puts on them in order to protect the rights of others. They consider themselves less free because they aren't allowed to murder.
OK, and now you've just equated people who prefer the BSD license with murderers, and this conversation is over.
Nevertheless it's true that the GPL uses this property right to establish and protect the rights of software users.
...by asserting the creator's exclusive right to place restrictions on when and how that property is used. The BSD license also does this, but the restrictions it imposes are less draconian -- the mere fact that they take far less text to explain is evidence of this.
In all cases, "you're not allowed to violate my rights" is a technical restriction that maximizes the degree to which everyone can exercise their rights and freedoms.
Except, as I've said elsewhere, that's not really what the GPL describes. If I download some code and then modify it, I haven't denied anybody anything that they already had. Everybody else still has the right to download and use the same code. The only thing I'm denying them is the right to use my work -- the set of patches which I made on top of the other code. The right you seem to be defending is your right to take my work and use it as your own, give it to other people, etc., whether I like it or not. That seems to negate your own principle of not being allowed to violate my rights -- property rights being the principle at work here.
Suppose you put a piece of open source code on the Internet, and I would like to download it, modify it, and distribute my modified version to a dozen of my associates (but no one else). Consider these two scenarios:
A. The code is under a BSD license. I download the code, modify it, and distribute it to my associates. From your point of view, nothing has changed; the original code is still available, and while you don't have access to my modified version, in strict point of fact you don't actually even know it exists. B. The code is under the GPL, so I can't legally do what I propose. Therefore I don't make my modified version. There's one less piece of software in the world. From your point of view nothing has changed; and in fact, you don't even realize that a piece of software didn't get produced.
From your point of view, both scenarios are identical. From my point of view, scenario B denies me access to something that other people have free access to, because the restrictions you have imposed in your license make it impossible for people like me to use the code, whereas people who think differently than I do have full access to the code. As I've said elsewhere, "freedom with a significant restriction" is ipso facto less free than "freedom without restriction."
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That's why Amazon doesn't really want to win this case. Collecting sales tax could be a headache for them, but a killer for a potential competitor. Large companies want steep barriers to entry...
In case you haven't heard, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target and the like have all been lobbying the government to force Amazon to collect sales taxes, the way they all do. Those are Amazon's competitors, and Amazon is the one that bypassed the barriers to entry by not collecting sales taxes from its customers.
The prolem is not Amazon. The problem is that if Amazon loses this argument (not this particular case), it will set a precedent that the one person web site that sells stuff will, also, have to collect sales tax for every state and local that they ship to
That's untrue, unless that single person has a business presence in every state and locality, the way that Amazon has a business presence in California.
The use tax in California is completely infeasible from a records-keeping standpoint, and everyone knows this.
Oh really? If you're a business, you can keep records for when it's time to write purchases off your federal taxes, but you can't keep records for when it's time to pay state use tax on the same purchases? Hmmm, color me skeptical.
But that doesn't make people who don't pay use tax "tax cheats"; to me, it makes completely logical sense that nobody is going to pay the government money if the government never asks them for it. That's why we have shifted the responsibility for collecting taxes to retailers.
My question, however, is why Amazon has a wholly-owned subsidiary in CA, and how this helps it with tax evasion. If they want to evade taxes, shouldn't they just concentrate all their operations in one state, preferably one like Wyoming where very few customers would have to pay sales taxes? Or is this because they want to have many warehouses spread across the country to keep average shipping times low, and they make each regional warehouse a different subsidiary?
I believe it's essentially the latter, with the proviso that the warehouse closest to you -- the one with the lowest shipping time -- is not the one that ships to you. The one in the nearest state is the one that ships to you, and this way Amazon does not have to collect sales taxes from you, you see no taxes on your bill, so the "real price" from Amazon is less than from any other retailer in your area, even if the list price is the same. Hence, Amazon only does it as a tax dodge.
Would you prefer it texas style, where we there are no ballot measures?
As a California resident, I say: Absolutely, positively, YES. I can't remember any ballot measure that ever did anything positive for the state. (Proposition 13 and Proposition 8 are both so notorious that people know which ones I mean even though they recycle the numbers.) Most of the measures are floated by special interests to earmark funds that would be put to better use if they remained in the General Fund. If they put a measure on the ballot to disband the proposition system entirely, that one would definitely get my vote.
I don't know about you, but I don't even keep thousands of dollars of paper money. I keep thousands of dollars of imaginary money -- even more compact and durable than gold -- and every so often I go to a machine that gives me a few paper vouchers that are good for trading imaginary money. If the machine gave me gold instead of paper, I guess I'd have to deal with the gold, but that sounds like a pain in the ass. Gold is kind of heavy. But gold, paper, all the same to me -- the imaginary money is what matters. I don't really care what you translate the imaginary money into, as long as everybody else agrees -- which is why I don't understand the hype about the gold standard.
Gold does have "various technological uses" but they're minor. Silver is a better conductor of electricity. Titanium is more useful for medical applications. Most of the gold in the world really is used either for jewelry or for investment (it just sits there).
a monetary system that lacks intrinsic value (gold at least had that)
What's the intrinsic value of gold? It has value as a material to make jewelry out of, and that seems to be a lasting thing looking at history, but to my mind it's just a matter of personal preference (I would probably prefer silver jewelry to gold, myself) and therefore a false "value." All it would take would be one famous celebrity soccer mom to come along and claim gold causes autism and the value of gold would drop.
I always wonder why all the gold bugs aren't talking about instating an oil standard. Oil really has intrinsic value, because it can be used to do work. I suspect that this option is off the table, however, because America has Fort Knox but all the oil is owned by the darn A-rabs.
How about this Merriam-Webster definition, smart guy?
of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language
Read a fucking book.
A mining company might spend money on drills, but they're doing it as a means to an end -- it doesn't mean drills are their product. ...
A TV company may spend money on varieties of programming but it's purely a means to an end. It's the capital expenditure that helps them acquire their product so they can sell it.
OK, look at it this way: Diamonds come out of the ground. Like viewer eyeballs -- they're a natural resource. They just exist, the only thing that remains is to go get them. But raw diamonds ain't shit. Diamonds don't get sold for thousands of dollars until they're cut, polished, and set into jewelery. That's what content does to eyeballs. Some people buy raw, uncut diamonds. Some people buy raw, uncut eyeballs -- they don't give a shit, we call them spammers. Real advertisers want cut, polished eyeballs -- they want the ones that have been filtered through content. Maybe the eyeballs are the "product," in a sense, but only in the sense that carbon can become a diamond. The process that creates the diamond out of the carbon is the content. Without the content, all an advertiser is doing is tagging flyers on telephone poles and hoping for the best. Advertisers want names, they want people to see their ads? Fine, here's the phone book. Nuh-uh. It doesn't work that way. A media company's product is its content, because content is what turns raw eyeballs into cut, polished eyeballs.
Fine. Transmitting bits instead of information? Happy now?
No, sorry. You still sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.
Why it's so difficult for you guys to accept that you don't rule in my space, I do not understand. Why would you want to even look like you're in my space?
It's true, though -- you do sound like you spend a lot of time on MySpace.
Well, it's harder to tap alright. For email it's trivial - if you have access to a server at the receiving end, game's over.
And if you have access to the fax phone line at either end, a pair of alligator clips, and a fax machine, game's over.
(often their "lock" is just having a funny shaped screw to turn)
In my day, it was just a hex bolt that was really, really difficult to estimate by eye. (So difficult that I gave up and looked up the precise size on a BBS.)
But to be honest I didn't think it was a major part of their corporation or revenue. Perhaps I've been living in a cave...
Is there anyone here that works for a large business customer of HP and used there software?
(I'm genuinely interested; even though it may sound like a troll that's just because I appear to be ignorant on the subject.)
I'm interested too. I've also heard that HP is nipping at IBM's heels in the IT consulting business, but I only have HP's word on that, too. I've never heard anyone say, "You know what, screw it, HP's experience and expertise is better than IBM's," and I've never known IBM Global Services to allow itself to be undersold, either (at the signing date, anyway).
As far as I can tell, HP has been claiming it's a different kind of company than it really is for years and Apotheker, an enterprise software guy, wants to actually get serious about it. Which is smart, if you've seen what printers retail for these days.
In the U.S., they recommend you carry a photocopy of the identification page of your passport when you travel, because having a copy will "will make getting a new passport easier" should yours be lost or stolen. So it's not all that illegal.
For instance, this can't be removed: "DrmProvider.apk: Provides DRM functions, needed to access media files (including ringtones)" and I most definitely would want it gone. I'll play my music on my own terms.
Maybe you can't remove it, but I don't think you're really forced to use it. I don't use any DRM media on my phone. My ringtone is an MP3 I ripped myself.
My thoughts, exactly. If you listen to radio, you are not the customer -- you're the product. If you watch television, you are not the customer -- you are the product. If you read most magazines (even if you pay for them), you are not a customer -- you're the product. When it comes to media of all kinds, you are the product far more often than you are the client.
But it's not as simple as that, because nobody is a mindless drone who will watch, listen to, or read anything you put in front of them. A magazine isn't 100 percent advertising (in fact that would be illegal by postal regulations in the U.S.) Advertisers wouldn't try to advertise on a radio station that played nothing but a 50Hz tone all day. And in fact, advertisers pick and choose which markets they target based on the content of that media; you might get a lot of drug companies advertising during 30 Rock, for example, but fewer during House. It's really clever and postmodern to say "the viewer is the product," but it's also not really true. Advertisers are paying for access to specific content, which they think appeals to a market that interests them. They want to reach the customers, true, but in order to do so they rely on the content -- so the content is the product. Or why else do you think media companies spend so much money to produce content -- as a loss leader?
Ambassador Lysenko: It seems that the initial reports that one of our submarines was missing were not completely accurate. The submarine in question... is commanded by Captain Marko Ramius. Apparently he's suffered a kind of mental or nervous break down. Just before he sailed, he posted a letter to Admiral Yuri Padorin, in which he announced his intention to ... to fire his missiles on the United States.
Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: But of course.
Ambassador Andrei Lysenko: You... you expected this?
Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: Naturally, Ambassador. For you see... in Soviet Russia, lost submarine hunts us!
Really? Judging from what I've seen, real people use their phones a lot more at bars than they do at the supermarket. In my book, "real world testing" doesn't mean "take it home and fiddle around with it as if you're using it."
Phones, wallets full of money, 15" laptops... it's ridiculous the stuff people leave at San Francisco bars. Sometimes they don't come looking for it for a month.
She was charged, but the charges were dismissed. She is not guilty of anything.
Tax the rich marginally more and all our dept problems go away.
Actually, I don't know anyone who argues that position. The Tax Foundation, while a nonprofit, can be considered a "business friendly" think tank, but it's hard to dispute its positions when they're based on plain math. According to that link, Warren Buffet's tax proposals would barely scratch the national debt (and I've never heard even Buffet claim that his proposals would erase the debt).
In a similar vein, borrowing a computer from somebody is different from stealing it because somebody who borrows a computer has the owner's knowledge and consent.
You should have kept reading through my second paragraph. There I acknowledge that the two things are different -- but that I don't know whether the difference is sufficient to negate the right of the person in possession of the device to not be photographed without their knowledge. If someone steals your car, you are the victim of a crime and you have a legal right to justice; you don't have a legal right to hunt the thief down and kill him. You also don't have the right to camp out in his backyard and take photographs of him through his windows. Hence, there are laws, and neither of us seem to know what the laws are in this specific case. In fact, I suggest that it's going to take a judge to sort it out.
And sure maybe I don't understand the term sociopathy. I have seen psychologists use the term to describe people who have no regard for the rights of others, and are off-put by the restrictions society puts on them in order to protect the rights of others. They consider themselves less free because they aren't allowed to murder.
OK, and now you've just equated people who prefer the BSD license with murderers, and this conversation is over.
Nevertheless it's true that the GPL uses this property right to establish and protect the rights of software users.
...by asserting the creator's exclusive right to place restrictions on when and how that property is used. The BSD license also does this, but the restrictions it imposes are less draconian -- the mere fact that they take far less text to explain is evidence of this.
In all cases, "you're not allowed to violate my rights" is a technical restriction that maximizes the degree to which everyone can exercise their rights and freedoms.
Except, as I've said elsewhere, that's not really what the GPL describes. If I download some code and then modify it, I haven't denied anybody anything that they already had. Everybody else still has the right to download and use the same code. The only thing I'm denying them is the right to use my work -- the set of patches which I made on top of the other code. The right you seem to be defending is your right to take my work and use it as your own, give it to other people, etc., whether I like it or not. That seems to negate your own principle of not being allowed to violate my rights -- property rights being the principle at work here.
Suppose you put a piece of open source code on the Internet, and I would like to download it, modify it, and distribute my modified version to a dozen of my associates (but no one else). Consider these two scenarios:
A. The code is under a BSD license. I download the code, modify it, and distribute it to my associates. From your point of view, nothing has changed; the original code is still available, and while you don't have access to my modified version, in strict point of fact you don't actually even know it exists.
B. The code is under the GPL, so I can't legally do what I propose. Therefore I don't make my modified version. There's one less piece of software in the world. From your point of view nothing has changed; and in fact, you don't even realize that a piece of software didn't get produced.
From your point of view, both scenarios are identical. From my point of view, scenario B denies me access to something that other people have free access to, because the restrictions you have imposed in your license make it impossible for people like me to use the code, whereas people who think differently than I do have full access to the code. As I've said elsewhere, "freedom with a significant restriction" is ipso facto less free than "freedom without restriction."