I used to drive one of them ('98 New Beetle TDI, 5-spd.). Really enjoyed it. After emissions equipment, it only has about 95 HP, but it doesn't feel like it. The engine has a lot of low end torque, and through the manual gearbox it's pretty fun to drive. With the auto, it'd be a misery.
I used to regularly get between 39 and 44 MPG out of it, and I did a lot of mixed secondary/highway driving. I think if you really drove with economy in mind, it would be closer to 45-50.
The price of the fuel fluctuates here in the Northeast seasonally; in the winter it's significanly more expensive than gas, in the summer it's cheaper.
You have to keep the car for about 100,000 miles in order for the fuel economy savings to pay for the increased cost of the engine, though. So if you buy and hold on to cars, it's a good deal: but if you're someone who develops a wandering eye every 36 months or so, it's not really economical.
Just so you know, if you telecommute to an employer in NYC: if you're sacked, its NY unemployment benefits that you draw. If your actions result in criminal negligence, you'll be tried in NY. Your employer is paying payroll tax in NY. Your rights as a worker are those of a New Yorker, and are enforced in and by the New York legal system. I fail to see how you "fail utterly to see" how a telecommuter doesn't consume (expensive) resources in the state in which he or she is actually employed.
I consider this all part of the problem. A person should get the services from the area/municipality into which they're paying taxes. This means if they're doing the work in Pig's Knuckle, Arkansas, then they should be paying taxes there on their income, and paying unemployment tax there, and if they get sacked, that's where they'll draw their unemployment from.
What I think needs to be stopped, is the way companies can claim that a worker is a "New York employee," even though they work from New Jersey 99% of the time. They're not -- they're a Jersey-based employee, and they should be compensated accordingly, pay taxes accordingly, etc.
The different jurisdictions for liability purposes are slightly more complex, but it's not as though that's an issue that companies haven't figured out. In most cases concerning negligence by an employee, it's the corporation itself that gets sued, not the employee, so it wouldn't matter a whole lot where the employee was based out of.
It's just generally a mistake to have people using tax jurisdictions that are not the place they're physically located when they're doing the work. Whatever State your brain is located in during the time you're working for the company, that ought to be your tax jurisdiction.
None of the services you mention are being consumed by the telecommuter. They're being consumed by the telecommuter's parent corporation, and should be paid out of that company's taxes (real estate, corporate income, capital gains, etc.).
It seems like what you're really saying is that corporations pay too little taxes: that's a valid concern, but it's separate from where their employees should be paying taxes. All those 'protecting the business climate' types of services should be borne by the corporation, and not dependent on the tax revenues of its employees, who really don't get much of a say in where the company is located.
I think you're vastly overstating the resources being consumed by somebody who is just calling in and remotely working for a corporation. The great majority of tax revenues on state and local levels are spent on things like transportation infrastructure, education, public works, etc. None of those things are being used by the remote employee. They may have contributed to bringing the parent corporation to that area, but that doesn't mean the employees should have to bear the cost: the company should, if they want to be located in a particularly expensive area (i.e. Manhattan).
What would be very cool is if it would attempt to match the beats per minute of your song to your actual steps per minute, so you could run to music at whatever pace you wanted to. I think iTunes has a BPM field, so you could probably at least have the iPod choose songs that were close to your pace (so you could have different pump-up, running, and cool-down music), but I don't know if you can easily alter the playback speed of an MP3 without altering it's pitch to do exact cadence matching. I wonder if it has enough processor overhead to do on-the-fly resampling.
You joke, but I'm pretty sure some of those crazy Japanese electro-toilets do stuff like this. Maybe they analyze your urine and not your -- as you so delicately put it -- "loaf." If they don't actually exist, then someone was seriously considering making one, because the article I read (this was at least a year or so ago) was quite serious in tone.
I wonder how people would feel about being told they're pregnant by their toilet?
I'm aware. However, if you look at the bandwidth allocations at the lower end of the HF spectrum, they are correspondingly smaller as well. I'd argue that the AM broadcast band's spectrum is significantly more valuable than an equivalent-sized chunk in the UHF or VHF. (For distance communication; obviously feelings may differ depending on what you want to do wirelessly.)
So I don't think the FCC's choice of scale is really misleading: it's basically an appropriate choice for the material. Also, in my post I called the AM band the most "obvious" hog, not the largest. By MHz, certainly the UHF broadcast band is larger. A single TV channel would sit across all of the AM broadcast band, after all.
I've heard that at times, back before FM radio overshadowed the medium-wave bands, that there was discussion about moving "AM radio" to SSB operation, in order to increase the number of possible stations and free up more bandwidth. Obviously this never happened, but it's interesting to note that the thinking driving the current digital TV (and eventually, I suspect, digital radio) changeover is not new. It's just that this is the first time when it's really gotten traction.
I fail utterly to see how I am consuming any resources in NYC by calling/videoconferencing/emailing people there, which are not otherwise being paid for privately. The phone and data lines are being paid for by the recipient of the call. I'm not using their roads, I'm not using their sewer lines, and I'm not using their water (would be paid for anyway), libraries, emergency services, schools, or dog catchers.
If a company wants to have a NYC address, they can have that NYC address: and they should pay real estate tax, corporate tax, and the people who work there should pay income tax. Because they are all using services from that area, by virtue of their physical presence.
Remote workers are not using any resources, and should not be paying any taxes. They should be paying income tax in whatever state they're sitting in while doing the work. It's those states that are getting screwed (if they have reciprocity agreements with NY), since they're actually getting their services used by someone who isn't paying any taxes!
Taxing people on where they're physically located while they do the work is fair for everyone. It gives the municipalities that are actually responsible for serving those people the revenue stream they're owed, and also lets people choose where they want to live based on the tax structure. People should be able to choose where they want to live based on the taxes they're going to have to pay and the services they think they're going to get there. It's a value proposition, just like everything else in life. Only right now, this bizarre system of tax laws keeps people tied to where their employer chooses to be located, even if that's nowhere near where they actually are.
How should NYC pay for the costs of legislating, policing, and judging the protections of the workers while they're telecommunting to NYC businesses? Or any of the other municipal/state costs that keep NYC such a great place to work, even virtually?
I can't tell whether or not you're joking.
I'm sorry, but if I'm telecommuting into an "office" in NYC, I'm using zero services from the City of New York, that are not already being paid for by my employer there.
If I keel over at my desk onto my "virtual office," NYC isn't going to pay for the ambulance to come pick me up. When I flush the toilet, it's not NYC's sewage system that the waste is going to go into. The only reason I'm commuting to NYC at all is because there are (presumably) other people there that I want to communicate with -- after all, "telecommuting" is just a fancy word for communicate -- and those people pay taxes. So NYC is still getting their cut for the value they're providing.
This whole argument is ridiculous. What happens if a person in New York and a person in Des Moines have a discussion over a forum or Wiki, that's on a server in a colo in San Francisco. Should both people pay tax in SF? They're "working" there (they may not know it), aren't they? Oh wait, SF has already been paid -- by the company that runs the colo facility. Likewise, if I "telecommute" into NYC, whoever I'm commuting in to see is paying taxes.
New York City isn't doing anything to make itself a "great place to work virtually," they just happen to have a lot of people living there. Those people live there and pay taxes, but there's no reason why people not physically residing there should.
Your argument fails to make any sense.
In my mind, the problem here is why companies that have telecommuting employees insist on keeping them based, on paper, in NYC. If the guy works form his house in Jersey, put that down as his work location. If he works from the North Pole, put that down on his W-2. I've done remote-work jobs, and I've never used the location I'm calling-in to as my work location: I use whatever piece of ground I'm sitting on while I'm doing the work.
Computer do a lot of things, but they do not allow you to physically be in two places at the same time. All of this "tele-work" stuff just confuses the issue, which is inherently just a person sitting somewhere, in front of a computer and a telephone, talking to some other people, in a different place. There's no reason why this should be difficult to figure out.
That doesn't surprise me quite as much as you might think. NYC is actually a bit of an exception. They have some of the best tap water in the country, because it all comes down from tightly-controlled reservoirs in the Catskills, via a large aqueduct. (Maybe more than one, these days.) I'm not sure whether or not it's chlorinated and if so how much, but I can personally attest that it's some of the best-tasting municipal water around. Perhaps the volume and headend quality is high enough that they don't have to chlorinate like other places out in the 'burbs do.
It's no secret that some bottled waters are really nothing but "tap water," either before a lot of junk is added into it, or after it's been run through some filtering to take most of it back out. I'm pretty sure Dasani falls into this category.
I can only assume there are ways that municipalities can meet water quality requirements, and that there are ways that don't involve chlorine. But I have been to quite a few places (including where I live right now) where you can literally smell the chlorine by putting your nose a few inches from the top of a glass, or when you turn on a shower or large faucet. In other places I've lived, this hasn't been true. (Apparently the Santa Clara Valley in CA is heavily chlorinated as well, see this article. And Akron, OH's water sounds downright disgusting.)
It would be interesting to see how much (in ppm) chlorine is in various municipal water supplies, and what the best and worst ones are in taste tests. I know I'll never move to another house/apartment without tasting the water first, at the very least so as to avoid any nasty surprises later. About the only good thing I can say about chlorine is that if you leave a pitcher of water out for a few hours, it dissipates. (Activated charcoal filters also work.)
What's also interesting to note is how long negative public perception of a particular water source lingers. The article on Santa Clara talks about negative perceptions as a result of contamination that occured in the 80s, and I suspect that there will be people in Akron drinking bottled water long after they remedy whatever the problem is with their system. So even if every place in the country had great-tasting tap water, it would take a long time for people to be willing to switch back. And it only takes one bad experience with tap water to make people drink something else, even if it costs more.
They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.
I noticed however that aside from what I knew was down around 20MHz (namely the 15m amateur band), there is a chunk of specturm that's just allocated to "Fixed" and "Mobile" operation (20.010 to 21.0 MHz), so it's not wholly unbelievable. That's the same allocation as the frequencies they're actually asking for, which is a 20 MHz block up at 2155 MHz.
Anyone with an interest in IT these days owes it to themselves to take a look at the Freqency Allocation Chart. Most people I've showed it to (I have a large printout on my wall) are generally surprised at the huge swaths of bandwidth taken up by commercial broadcasting allocations that are barely utilized today. By far the most obvious hog on the chart is the AM radio spectrum, but the VHF and UHF TV bands are pretty bad, too, for what most people get from them.
Of course, I'm probably deluding myself to even imagine that whatever purpose the FCC is going to put them towards, if/when they're reallocated, will do any more public good then sitting there un/under-utilized, like they are right now.
Your point about "digital audio" media is well taken, but most generic CD-Rs are classed as 'data storage' and not 'digital audio' and thus don't offer any kickbacks to the media companies here in the U.S. [1] So your giant spindle of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, designed for use in your computer's drive, are safe; regardless of whether you burn Red Book audio to them or not.
I haven't looked recently so I don't even know if Best Buy and the other big box stores even sell the "digital audio" type of CD-Rs anymore. I'm sure if you go to Guitar Center or any other low-budget-musician supply store, you'll find them: basically they're designed for use with special "consumer" audio recording devices, which wouldn't use the data discs. (Oh, and they cost a lot more than the computer/data ones, obviously.)
Interestingly enough, actual professional-grade CD-burners (which the industry seems to define as anything with balanced XLR inputs and rackmount ears), normally don't have such silly restrictions, and will happily burn onto whatever type of blank you shove in there.
It would please me to no end if the "Digital Audio" tax was the stake through the heart of the "consumer" CD-R format, since it was a hideous abortion to begin with from day one. Ironically, the only people I ever knew who bought the expensive "Digital Audio" CD-Rs were people in garage bands who had 'consumer' CD-recording equipment that wouldn't use data discs. Meanwhile, a few years later, every guy with a computer and a spare bay in it bought a data drive and started copying CDs.
Hope the industry got their money's worth with that law. Any time I start to feel any moral hiccups while "stealing" music, I just think of what the industry did to DAT and how they tried to do it to CD-R, and go about my merry way.
References: [1] MUSIC PIRACY AND THE AUDIO HOME RECORDING ACT. See section The Audio Home Recording Act, specifically: "The SCMS and royalty requirements apply only to digital audio recording devices. Because computers are not digital audio recording devices, they are not required to comply with Serial Copy Management System requirement."
Personally I prefer the first, because it's more logical.
This may be something that's only appreciated by geeks, but it just seems slightly more elegant.
mobi.yahoo.com = The mobile version of the site yahoo which is commercial.
This lends itself easily to new features/technologies: rss.yahoo.com = The RSS feed of the site yahoo which is commercial.
The DNS was desiged to go from very general TLDs to specific subdomains. There's really no good reason why the same site should ever have to be strewn across two TLDs, except just to give the registrars more money every time a new technology rolls around.
I've got an even better one for you, it's called "about:blank". Then just use the little searchy-box thingy in the upper right-hand corner of your browser. You can even configure said searchy-box so that it uses your choice of engine.
That's assuming of course that you're using a browser that doesn't suck.
This is true -- but I think at least asking for a root password is better than just being vunerable without the password to begin with: at least in the former case, the onus is on the user, rather than not giving them any opportunity at all.
I'm not sure that there really is any solution to the "stupid user" vulnerabilities: people will do that whether it's a computer or an ATM (a few years ago I saw a news station, I think in NYC, set up a dummy 'card cleaner' terminal and got lots of people to swipe their ATM/credit cards). It's just human stupidity. So at a certain point you have to basically say "we've made the software secure, the weak point is now between the keyboard and the chair." When that's the case, you can't really blame the software designers any more. (Unless their design is somehow exacerbating user stupidity, but I don't think this is precisely the case with most Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter) password dialogs.)
If Windows went the route of MacOS or most desktop Linux distros, and asked for the admin password only when it was required to do something, and attempted to make it clear what application was requesting permission and for what purpose (accessing what?), it wouldn't be a magic cure-all, but it would be a step in the right direction. You are never going to do anything for the people that will happily download and try to install SuprBlitzPartyPoker.exe off of Gnutella -- they're beyond help. But that doesn't mean that the improvement is without merit, just because some people will defeat it because of their idiocy.
As someone I worked with liked to say, "There is no patch for the ID-10-T error."
How do they handle the metadata and MP3 file tags for classical music?
I've never really downloaded any classical music because I've been concerned that the tags wouldn't contain anywhere the information that I normally type in myself from the CD case. A lot of online services just try to match the usual pop-music fields of Artist, Album, Track Name, and that's really not enough information for classical recordings.
At the least, I'd want to make sure that I was going to get the composer, conductor, orchestra, date of recording, names of any soloists, and venue (although usually if you know the date of recording and the orchestra, you can back out the venue if you do some research). So far I haven't been very satisfied with downloaded offerings.
Pretty much the only Sony products I buy anymore are their classical CD offerings, because I think they produce a good product and I haven't found an online source that approaches both the audible quality and metadata quality of physical CDs.
Can you give any sort of a reference as to U.S. Government activity in regards to AllOfMp3? I would like to know who and which branch of government is doing that, because frankly I think there are enough messed-up things in this country deserving of government attention that are a whole hell of a lot higher up on the priority list than whether somebody in Russia is skimming off Vivendi-Universal's revenue stream.
Any politician or government body that thinks that's a national priority has some serious accountability problems.
Bottled water sells because of psychological tricks and convenience. MP3s can sell the same way.
Actually bottled water sells because a lot of municipalities chlorinate their water, making it taste like shit.
Although it's true that marketing and convenience play a large part too (people buying bottled water even though they have good-tasting tap water, or well water), but it's not always purely marketing.
I drink bottled water only because the tap water in my office tastes like it came from the shallow end of the local Y's swimming pool, and de-chlorinating it (by leaving it in an open-topped container) isn't really practical.
Although I admit the situation is more grey where the public has been scammed into funding construction of a venue, but in those situations I think it's more a case of 'sucks to be you, next time watch who you vote for.' Besides which, most times the argument for using public funds to build stadiums and venues isn't one of "you'll be able to go to concerts!" but instead it's something along the lines of "it'll create x jobs in our city" (where x is outrageously large). So I don't think the public can really claim that they were promised affordable access to events -- unless it was in writing and part of the funding deal, in which case they can take the venue operator to court. But generally speaking, it's just one more reason why spending public money on those kinds of projects (casinos, malls, etc. also) are a bad idea, and the politicians who support them generally sleazeballs of the highest order.
You have no right to go to a concert or sporting event, and you certainly have no right to sit in a front-row seat. If you want to do any of those things, you can pay for them, and you can compete with other people who want to do them for who's willing to pay the most. If you don't want to pay ridiculous sums of money to go to a concert, or sit in a particular seat, don't do it.
Eventually, the concert promoters will hit the limits of what people are willing to pay for and they'll reduce the prices, or stop increasing them. But as long as people keep acting like going to concerts and sporting events are some sort of a necessity in order to live, they're going to keep them priced according to that demand (in other words: high).
If you don't like paying the ticket price with the Ticketmaster tax included, don't go. If it's worth your money to see a particular act or team, I won't fault you for going, it's your money to spend however you want. But it's just like buying any other consumer good: if you purchase it, you're implicitly saying that the business model that produced it is "okay by me!" If that's not true, take your hand away from your wallet, and go buy some blank CD-Rs instead.
Currently, the majority of Microsoft's employees enjoy full admin rights on their desktop PCs, which is an unusual practice in the enterprise space...
An unusual practice? Where? Most places I know have their users running as admin, because there is still software around that won't function properly if it's not run that way.
If Microsoft forces its employees to run as non-admin users, I think it's a good thing, because maybe it will lessen the amount of crap software that's designed with the assumption that it's going to be run that way.
Unfortunately, that doesn't help the situation with the tons of legacy apps that assume this, and it only takes one important legacy app in a corporate environment to hose the entire security model of non-admin users.
I should just point out that if you're not using a true randomly-generated pad for encryption and decryption, then it really isn't a one-time pad. At that point it becomes a type of book cipher, because the "key" is really which CD (or book) to use to decrypt with, and the correct starting position (offset or page number).
While using a commercial CD might seem to offer a high-level of security, it's a substantially reduced keyspace from using 600MB of random bits.
Foreign countries have governments, too. Governments which in many cases can compel industry to install backdoors into their hardware with far less fanfare than the U.S. government would cause by doing something similar.
Another Swiss manufacturer of encryption equipment, Crypto AG, has a less-than-stellar history in this regard.
I Googled them and this was the first link that I found: Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?. (Site may be down, I used the Google cache.) A little tinfoil-hattish, but I don't think the attitude is unjustified given current events.
Just being foreign isn't a guarantee of security, and in fact it probably makes the situation a lot more complicated. If you think industry/government collusion is bad in the United States, there are a lot of places that are far worse in this regard.
It should also be pretty obvious, that since they haven't actually signed any contract with any consumers by which they [movie publishers] are obliged to not enable their DRM, this announcement of theirs still leaves open to them the possibility to, at any time and with no penalty to them, change their minds if they believe that the market penetration of the newest DRM enable hardware has passed the point beyond which said hardware has become the de facto standard.
In other words, their promises are as worthless as the paper they are written in.
Very well said. This was pretty much what ran through my mind as I was reading the article initally.
Sony and the other studios obviously don't care about the consumer or what you can do as an end-user with your television. The purpose of consumers is to be a source of revenue, full stop. They will do whatever they can to maximize that revenue stream, within the bounds of the risk/benefit framework created by laws and punishments. (So they won't act illegally, insofar as the penalty from getting caught times the risk of getting caught is greater than the chances of success times the possible gain.)
So if they're doing something which on the surface looks illogical or unprofitable, or basically looks like it's good for the consumer at their expense: watch out. Corporations do not do that.
If Sony says that they won't use region coding in Blu-Ray, or if the studios get together and say they won't use the ICT for a while, they are not doing this to be nice. They are doing it because they perceive that they're not getting people onto the locked-down DRM bandwagon known as "high definition."
It's called a 'bait and switch.' You give a little in the short term, but in the long term, you make them your bitch.
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I used to drive one of them ('98 New Beetle TDI, 5-spd.). Really enjoyed it. After emissions equipment, it only has about 95 HP, but it doesn't feel like it. The engine has a lot of low end torque, and through the manual gearbox it's pretty fun to drive. With the auto, it'd be a misery.
I used to regularly get between 39 and 44 MPG out of it, and I did a lot of mixed secondary/highway driving. I think if you really drove with economy in mind, it would be closer to 45-50.
The price of the fuel fluctuates here in the Northeast seasonally; in the winter it's significanly more expensive than gas, in the summer it's cheaper.
You have to keep the car for about 100,000 miles in order for the fuel economy savings to pay for the increased cost of the engine, though. So if you buy and hold on to cars, it's a good deal: but if you're someone who develops a wandering eye every 36 months or so, it's not really economical.
Just so you know, if you telecommute to an employer in NYC: if you're sacked, its NY unemployment benefits that you draw. If your actions result in criminal negligence, you'll be tried in NY. Your employer is paying payroll tax in NY. Your rights as a worker are those of a New Yorker, and are enforced in and by the New York legal system. I fail to see how you "fail utterly to see" how a telecommuter doesn't consume (expensive) resources in the state in which he or she is actually employed.
I consider this all part of the problem. A person should get the services from the area/municipality into which they're paying taxes. This means if they're doing the work in Pig's Knuckle, Arkansas, then they should be paying taxes there on their income, and paying unemployment tax there, and if they get sacked, that's where they'll draw their unemployment from.
What I think needs to be stopped, is the way companies can claim that a worker is a "New York employee," even though they work from New Jersey 99% of the time. They're not -- they're a Jersey-based employee, and they should be compensated accordingly, pay taxes accordingly, etc.
The different jurisdictions for liability purposes are slightly more complex, but it's not as though that's an issue that companies haven't figured out. In most cases concerning negligence by an employee, it's the corporation itself that gets sued, not the employee, so it wouldn't matter a whole lot where the employee was based out of.
It's just generally a mistake to have people using tax jurisdictions that are not the place they're physically located when they're doing the work. Whatever State your brain is located in during the time you're working for the company, that ought to be your tax jurisdiction.
None of the services you mention are being consumed by the telecommuter. They're being consumed by the telecommuter's parent corporation, and should be paid out of that company's taxes (real estate, corporate income, capital gains, etc.).
It seems like what you're really saying is that corporations pay too little taxes: that's a valid concern, but it's separate from where their employees should be paying taxes. All those 'protecting the business climate' types of services should be borne by the corporation, and not dependent on the tax revenues of its employees, who really don't get much of a say in where the company is located.
I think you're vastly overstating the resources being consumed by somebody who is just calling in and remotely working for a corporation. The great majority of tax revenues on state and local levels are spent on things like transportation infrastructure, education, public works, etc. None of those things are being used by the remote employee. They may have contributed to bringing the parent corporation to that area, but that doesn't mean the employees should have to bear the cost: the company should, if they want to be located in a particularly expensive area (i.e. Manhattan).
What would be very cool is if it would attempt to match the beats per minute of your song to your actual steps per minute, so you could run to music at whatever pace you wanted to. I think iTunes has a BPM field, so you could probably at least have the iPod choose songs that were close to your pace (so you could have different pump-up, running, and cool-down music), but I don't know if you can easily alter the playback speed of an MP3 without altering it's pitch to do exact cadence matching. I wonder if it has enough processor overhead to do on-the-fly resampling.
You joke, but I'm pretty sure some of those crazy Japanese electro-toilets do stuff like this. Maybe they analyze your urine and not your -- as you so delicately put it -- "loaf." If they don't actually exist, then someone was seriously considering making one, because the article I read (this was at least a year or so ago) was quite serious in tone.
I wonder how people would feel about being told they're pregnant by their toilet?
I'm aware. However, if you look at the bandwidth allocations at the lower end of the HF spectrum, they are correspondingly smaller as well. I'd argue that the AM broadcast band's spectrum is significantly more valuable than an equivalent-sized chunk in the UHF or VHF. (For distance communication; obviously feelings may differ depending on what you want to do wirelessly.)
So I don't think the FCC's choice of scale is really misleading: it's basically an appropriate choice for the material. Also, in my post I called the AM band the most "obvious" hog, not the largest. By MHz, certainly the UHF broadcast band is larger. A single TV channel would sit across all of the AM broadcast band, after all.
I've heard that at times, back before FM radio overshadowed the medium-wave bands, that there was discussion about moving "AM radio" to SSB operation, in order to increase the number of possible stations and free up more bandwidth. Obviously this never happened, but it's interesting to note that the thinking driving the current digital TV (and eventually, I suspect, digital radio) changeover is not new. It's just that this is the first time when it's really gotten traction.
I fail utterly to see how I am consuming any resources in NYC by calling/videoconferencing/emailing people there, which are not otherwise being paid for privately. The phone and data lines are being paid for by the recipient of the call. I'm not using their roads, I'm not using their sewer lines, and I'm not using their water (would be paid for anyway), libraries, emergency services, schools, or dog catchers.
If a company wants to have a NYC address, they can have that NYC address: and they should pay real estate tax, corporate tax, and the people who work there should pay income tax. Because they are all using services from that area, by virtue of their physical presence.
Remote workers are not using any resources, and should not be paying any taxes. They should be paying income tax in whatever state they're sitting in while doing the work. It's those states that are getting screwed (if they have reciprocity agreements with NY), since they're actually getting their services used by someone who isn't paying any taxes!
Taxing people on where they're physically located while they do the work is fair for everyone. It gives the municipalities that are actually responsible for serving those people the revenue stream they're owed, and also lets people choose where they want to live based on the tax structure. People should be able to choose where they want to live based on the taxes they're going to have to pay and the services they think they're going to get there. It's a value proposition, just like everything else in life. Only right now, this bizarre system of tax laws keeps people tied to where their employer chooses to be located, even if that's nowhere near where they actually are.
How should NYC pay for the costs of legislating, policing, and judging the protections of the workers while they're telecommunting to NYC businesses? Or any of the other municipal/state costs that keep NYC such a great place to work, even virtually?
I can't tell whether or not you're joking.
I'm sorry, but if I'm telecommuting into an "office" in NYC, I'm using zero services from the City of New York, that are not already being paid for by my employer there.
If I keel over at my desk onto my "virtual office," NYC isn't going to pay for the ambulance to come pick me up. When I flush the toilet, it's not NYC's sewage system that the waste is going to go into. The only reason I'm commuting to NYC at all is because there are (presumably) other people there that I want to communicate with -- after all, "telecommuting" is just a fancy word for communicate -- and those people pay taxes. So NYC is still getting their cut for the value they're providing.
This whole argument is ridiculous. What happens if a person in New York and a person in Des Moines have a discussion over a forum or Wiki, that's on a server in a colo in San Francisco. Should both people pay tax in SF? They're "working" there (they may not know it), aren't they? Oh wait, SF has already been paid -- by the company that runs the colo facility. Likewise, if I "telecommute" into NYC, whoever I'm commuting in to see is paying taxes.
New York City isn't doing anything to make itself a "great place to work virtually," they just happen to have a lot of people living there. Those people live there and pay taxes, but there's no reason why people not physically residing there should.
Your argument fails to make any sense.
In my mind, the problem here is why companies that have telecommuting employees insist on keeping them based, on paper, in NYC. If the guy works form his house in Jersey, put that down as his work location. If he works from the North Pole, put that down on his W-2. I've done remote-work jobs, and I've never used the location I'm calling-in to as my work location: I use whatever piece of ground I'm sitting on while I'm doing the work.
Computer do a lot of things, but they do not allow you to physically be in two places at the same time. All of this "tele-work" stuff just confuses the issue, which is inherently just a person sitting somewhere, in front of a computer and a telephone, talking to some other people, in a different place. There's no reason why this should be difficult to figure out.
Although I'd hate to see spammers taking advantage of this somehow.
I doubt very much that spammers pay taxes anyway. Unless you count the bribes they're probably paying to the Russian mob as "taxes."
That doesn't surprise me quite as much as you might think. NYC is actually a bit of an exception. They have some of the best tap water in the country, because it all comes down from tightly-controlled reservoirs in the Catskills, via a large aqueduct. (Maybe more than one, these days.) I'm not sure whether or not it's chlorinated and if so how much, but I can personally attest that it's some of the best-tasting municipal water around. Perhaps the volume and headend quality is high enough that they don't have to chlorinate like other places out in the 'burbs do.
It's no secret that some bottled waters are really nothing but "tap water," either before a lot of junk is added into it, or after it's been run through some filtering to take most of it back out. I'm pretty sure Dasani falls into this category.
I can only assume there are ways that municipalities can meet water quality requirements, and that there are ways that don't involve chlorine. But I have been to quite a few places (including where I live right now) where you can literally smell the chlorine by putting your nose a few inches from the top of a glass, or when you turn on a shower or large faucet. In other places I've lived, this hasn't been true. (Apparently the Santa Clara Valley in CA is heavily chlorinated as well, see this article. And Akron, OH's water sounds downright disgusting.)
It would be interesting to see how much (in ppm) chlorine is in various municipal water supplies, and what the best and worst ones are in taste tests. I know I'll never move to another house/apartment without tasting the water first, at the very least so as to avoid any nasty surprises later. About the only good thing I can say about chlorine is that if you leave a pitcher of water out for a few hours, it dissipates. (Activated charcoal filters also work.)
What's also interesting to note is how long negative public perception of a particular water source lingers. The article on Santa Clara talks about negative perceptions as a result of contamination that occured in the 80s, and I suspect that there will be people in Akron drinking bottled water long after they remedy whatever the problem is with their system. So even if every place in the country had great-tasting tap water, it would take a long time for people to be willing to switch back. And it only takes one bad experience with tap water to make people drink something else, even if it costs more.
They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.
I noticed however that aside from what I knew was down around 20MHz (namely the 15m amateur band), there is a chunk of specturm that's just allocated to "Fixed" and "Mobile" operation (20.010 to 21.0 MHz), so it's not wholly unbelievable. That's the same allocation as the frequencies they're actually asking for, which is a 20 MHz block up at 2155 MHz.
Anyone with an interest in IT these days owes it to themselves to take a look at the Freqency Allocation Chart. Most people I've showed it to (I have a large printout on my wall) are generally surprised at the huge swaths of bandwidth taken up by commercial broadcasting allocations that are barely utilized today. By far the most obvious hog on the chart is the AM radio spectrum, but the VHF and UHF TV bands are pretty bad, too, for what most people get from them.
Of course, I'm probably deluding myself to even imagine that whatever purpose the FCC is going to put them towards, if/when they're reallocated, will do any more public good then sitting there un/under-utilized, like they are right now.
Your point about "digital audio" media is well taken, but most generic CD-Rs are classed as 'data storage' and not 'digital audio' and thus don't offer any kickbacks to the media companies here in the U.S. [1] So your giant spindle of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, designed for use in your computer's drive, are safe; regardless of whether you burn Red Book audio to them or not.
I haven't looked recently so I don't even know if Best Buy and the other big box stores even sell the "digital audio" type of CD-Rs anymore. I'm sure if you go to Guitar Center or any other low-budget-musician supply store, you'll find them: basically they're designed for use with special "consumer" audio recording devices, which wouldn't use the data discs. (Oh, and they cost a lot more than the computer/data ones, obviously.)
Interestingly enough, actual professional-grade CD-burners (which the industry seems to define as anything with balanced XLR inputs and rackmount ears), normally don't have such silly restrictions, and will happily burn onto whatever type of blank you shove in there.
It would please me to no end if the "Digital Audio" tax was the stake through the heart of the "consumer" CD-R format, since it was a hideous abortion to begin with from day one. Ironically, the only people I ever knew who bought the expensive "Digital Audio" CD-Rs were people in garage bands who had 'consumer' CD-recording equipment that wouldn't use data discs. Meanwhile, a few years later, every guy with a computer and a spare bay in it bought a data drive and started copying CDs.
Hope the industry got their money's worth with that law. Any time I start to feel any moral hiccups while "stealing" music, I just think of what the industry did to DAT and how they tried to do it to CD-R, and go about my merry way.
References:
[1] MUSIC PIRACY AND THE AUDIO HOME RECORDING ACT. See section The Audio Home Recording Act, specifically: "The SCMS and royalty requirements apply only to digital audio recording devices. Because computers are not digital audio recording devices, they are not required to comply with Serial Copy Management System requirement."
Personally I prefer the first, because it's more logical.
This may be something that's only appreciated by geeks, but it just seems slightly more elegant.
mobi.yahoo.com = The mobile version of the site yahoo which is commercial.
This lends itself easily to new features/technologies:
rss.yahoo.com = The RSS feed of the site yahoo which is commercial.
The DNS was desiged to go from very general TLDs to specific subdomains. There's really no good reason why the same site should ever have to be strewn across two TLDs, except just to give the registrars more money every time a new technology rolls around.
I've got an even better one for you, it's called "about:blank". Then just use the little searchy-box thingy in the upper right-hand corner of your browser. You can even configure said searchy-box so that it uses your choice of engine.
That's assuming of course that you're using a browser that doesn't suck.
This is true -- but I think at least asking for a root password is better than just being vunerable without the password to begin with: at least in the former case, the onus is on the user, rather than not giving them any opportunity at all.
I'm not sure that there really is any solution to the "stupid user" vulnerabilities: people will do that whether it's a computer or an ATM (a few years ago I saw a news station, I think in NYC, set up a dummy 'card cleaner' terminal and got lots of people to swipe their ATM/credit cards). It's just human stupidity. So at a certain point you have to basically say "we've made the software secure, the weak point is now between the keyboard and the chair." When that's the case, you can't really blame the software designers any more. (Unless their design is somehow exacerbating user stupidity, but I don't think this is precisely the case with most Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter) password dialogs.)
If Windows went the route of MacOS or most desktop Linux distros, and asked for the admin password only when it was required to do something, and attempted to make it clear what application was requesting permission and for what purpose (accessing what?), it wouldn't be a magic cure-all, but it would be a step in the right direction. You are never going to do anything for the people that will happily download and try to install SuprBlitzPartyPoker.exe off of Gnutella -- they're beyond help. But that doesn't mean that the improvement is without merit, just because some people will defeat it because of their idiocy.
As someone I worked with liked to say, "There is no patch for the ID-10-T error."
Let me guess ... starts with I, ends in M?
Weren't you guys supposed to have switched to Linux already?
How do they handle the metadata and MP3 file tags for classical music?
I've never really downloaded any classical music because I've been concerned that the tags wouldn't contain anywhere the information that I normally type in myself from the CD case. A lot of online services just try to match the usual pop-music fields of Artist, Album, Track Name, and that's really not enough information for classical recordings.
At the least, I'd want to make sure that I was going to get the composer, conductor, orchestra, date of recording, names of any soloists, and venue (although usually if you know the date of recording and the orchestra, you can back out the venue if you do some research). So far I haven't been very satisfied with downloaded offerings.
Pretty much the only Sony products I buy anymore are their classical CD offerings, because I think they produce a good product and I haven't found an online source that approaches both the audible quality and metadata quality of physical CDs.
Can you give any sort of a reference as to U.S. Government activity in regards to AllOfMp3? I would like to know who and which branch of government is doing that, because frankly I think there are enough messed-up things in this country deserving of government attention that are a whole hell of a lot higher up on the priority list than whether somebody in Russia is skimming off Vivendi-Universal's revenue stream.
Any politician or government body that thinks that's a national priority has some serious accountability problems.
Bottled water sells because of psychological tricks and convenience. MP3s can sell the same way.
Actually bottled water sells because a lot of municipalities chlorinate their water, making it taste like shit.
Although it's true that marketing and convenience play a large part too (people buying bottled water even though they have good-tasting tap water, or well water), but it's not always purely marketing.
I drink bottled water only because the tap water in my office tastes like it came from the shallow end of the local Y's swimming pool, and de-chlorinating it (by leaving it in an open-topped container) isn't really practical.
Actually I think allofmp3.com is back up now. I haven't tried to get anything, but their site isn't down anymore.
Guess they did whatever they had to do.
Agreed.
Although I admit the situation is more grey where the public has been scammed into funding construction of a venue, but in those situations I think it's more a case of 'sucks to be you, next time watch who you vote for.' Besides which, most times the argument for using public funds to build stadiums and venues isn't one of "you'll be able to go to concerts!" but instead it's something along the lines of "it'll create x jobs in our city" (where x is outrageously large). So I don't think the public can really claim that they were promised affordable access to events -- unless it was in writing and part of the funding deal, in which case they can take the venue operator to court. But generally speaking, it's just one more reason why spending public money on those kinds of projects (casinos, malls, etc. also) are a bad idea, and the politicians who support them generally sleazeballs of the highest order.
You have no right to go to a concert or sporting event, and you certainly have no right to sit in a front-row seat. If you want to do any of those things, you can pay for them, and you can compete with other people who want to do them for who's willing to pay the most. If you don't want to pay ridiculous sums of money to go to a concert, or sit in a particular seat, don't do it.
Eventually, the concert promoters will hit the limits of what people are willing to pay for and they'll reduce the prices, or stop increasing them. But as long as people keep acting like going to concerts and sporting events are some sort of a necessity in order to live, they're going to keep them priced according to that demand (in other words: high).
If you don't like paying the ticket price with the Ticketmaster tax included, don't go. If it's worth your money to see a particular act or team, I won't fault you for going, it's your money to spend however you want. But it's just like buying any other consumer good: if you purchase it, you're implicitly saying that the business model that produced it is "okay by me!" If that's not true, take your hand away from your wallet, and go buy some blank CD-Rs instead.
Currently, the majority of Microsoft's employees enjoy full admin rights on their desktop PCs, which is an unusual practice in the enterprise space ...
An unusual practice? Where? Most places I know have their users running as admin, because there is still software around that won't function properly if it's not run that way.
If Microsoft forces its employees to run as non-admin users, I think it's a good thing, because maybe it will lessen the amount of crap software that's designed with the assumption that it's going to be run that way.
Unfortunately, that doesn't help the situation with the tons of legacy apps that assume this, and it only takes one important legacy app in a corporate environment to hose the entire security model of non-admin users.
I should just point out that if you're not using a true randomly-generated pad for encryption and decryption, then it really isn't a one-time pad. At that point it becomes a type of book cipher, because the "key" is really which CD (or book) to use to decrypt with, and the correct starting position (offset or page number).
While using a commercial CD might seem to offer a high-level of security, it's a substantially reduced keyspace from using 600MB of random bits.
Foreign countries have governments, too. Governments which in many cases can compel industry to install backdoors into their hardware with far less fanfare than the U.S. government would cause by doing something similar.
Another Swiss manufacturer of encryption equipment, Crypto AG, has a less-than-stellar history in this regard.
I Googled them and this was the first link that I found: Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?. (Site may be down, I used the Google cache.) A little tinfoil-hattish, but I don't think the attitude is unjustified given current events.
Just being foreign isn't a guarantee of security, and in fact it probably makes the situation a lot more complicated. If you think industry/government collusion is bad in the United States, there are a lot of places that are far worse in this regard.
It should also be pretty obvious, that since they haven't actually signed any contract with any consumers by which they [movie publishers] are obliged to not enable their DRM, this announcement of theirs still leaves open to them the possibility to, at any time and with no penalty to them, change their minds if they believe that the market penetration of the newest DRM enable hardware has passed the point beyond which said hardware has become the de facto standard.
In other words, their promises are as worthless as the paper they are written in.
Very well said. This was pretty much what ran through my mind as I was reading the article initally.
Sony and the other studios obviously don't care about the consumer or what you can do as an end-user with your television. The purpose of consumers is to be a source of revenue, full stop. They will do whatever they can to maximize that revenue stream, within the bounds of the risk/benefit framework created by laws and punishments. (So they won't act illegally, insofar as the penalty from getting caught times the risk of getting caught is greater than the chances of success times the possible gain.)
So if they're doing something which on the surface looks illogical or unprofitable, or basically looks like it's good for the consumer at their expense: watch out. Corporations do not do that.
If Sony says that they won't use region coding in Blu-Ray, or if the studios get together and say they won't use the ICT for a while, they are not doing this to be nice. They are doing it because they perceive that they're not getting people onto the locked-down DRM bandwagon known as "high definition."
It's called a 'bait and switch.' You give a little in the short term, but in the long term, you make them your bitch.