£200? they bought office XP; a single *new* license isn't even close to that... and read TFA, you save 20% to 50% - not 75%. and still, they managed to *save* £10,000? there are companies that use OOo and whatnot, but surely micro$oft is losing something to these guys... assuming they *would* have bought their licenses new, that would have been like, at least 150 copies
Calm down, I was just using numbers that were easy to work with for the sake of argument. I thought I made it clear that the amounts that I was using weren't real, it was the concept of "lost revenue" that I was talking about.
But anyway, just to restate: I don't believe in the logic of treating business that you didn't get as a fiscal "loss," in general. However, if you were going to go down that route, then certainly the MOST that you could say you 'lost' was the amount that the customer paid to your competitor, NOT the price of your product at the same quantity.
I agree that the £10,000 savings seems a little suspicious; even at 50% savings we're talking about a lot of copies. I inflated the prices and savings in my example to make a point.
Humm. Maybe I'll choke back my disgust and go back in there again sometime, just to have a look.
I think if I ever decide to get into the home-automation stuff (I can think of a few things it would be useful for; mostly just as a glorified light-timer), I think I'll buy one of the Insteon control modules, since they're backwards-compatible with X-10. But I'd probably start out getting some of the X-10 modules, because they're so much cheaper and apparently available everywhere. If they don't work well, it's not a lot of money down the drain and I could upgrade to the Insteon ones.
Taxation for digital sales can be easily automated.
Uh huh. How?
I'm interested in hearing how you plan on knowing when anyone in your state connects to a webserver in some other part of the country or world, via an encrypted connection, and causes some money to be transferred from a bank in some other state to a bank in some other completely unrelated state, and then downloads some data.
Also, you have to be able to force this system onto parties who are both going to be basically hostile to it, since people aren't going to want to pay the tax and are going to avoid if possible, and businesses aren't going to want to pay it because it's going to be a PITA for them and make them less competitive versus merchants (for example, international ones, quasi-legal or not) who don't pay.
This whole thing would be an enforcement nightmare. It's totally unenforceable; the only ways I can think of doing it would rely either on the cooperation of the merchants (not likely, what impetus do they have to comply? It's not like you can magically keep them from selling to residents of your state somehow) or the buyer (equally not likely, and anything that requires their cooperation is the same as the status quo, which is asking people to report use tax on their returns every year).
I can think of only one way to implement such a scheme: pass some sort of Federal law requiring all of the credit card banks and companies to automatically "BCC" your State's Department of Internal Revenue every time you completed a transaction, and then having them automatically charge you Sales Tax on all of your electronic purchases, unless you could prove that sales tax was already included. I don't know about anyone else, but just the idea of that creeps the living hell out of me; people whine about the NSA snooping on their email, which at least you can encrypt -- this would be mandated disclosure.
You know, you should really attribute that quote in your sig to a person, instead of a place. Unless Armonk, NY is particularly talkative.
"Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people." -Nido Qubein (reference)
Qubein is a motivational speaker, and I expect that if he actually did say that in Armonk, NY on August 8th, it was probably in a presentation to IBM (given that they're practically the only game in that town).
That's actually kind of interesting. I feel like there probably is a law against it, though, or everybody and their cousin would be getting payouts from their bookie in Gold Eagles.
There are also other coins you could do it with, I think; IIRC there are some silver pieces which are worth way more than their face value in terms of precious metals.
Actually, couldn't you just do this with any fairly valuable piece of rare US currency? Say a 1928 $2 bill or something; it's got to be worth more than two dollars, but legally it ought to be negotiable as currency. That "Legal for all debts, public and private" line doesn't have an expiration date on it.
It seems too obvious a way to avoid taxes though. If there were really a loophole that good, people would be using it already.
Because a lot of people voted for politicians who promised them a lot of "free" stuff, without thinking too hard about who was going to pay for it?
There was a time when I would have said those politicians were called Democrats, but sadly now it's pretty much everybody (except for some quasi-Libertarians).
Sure, but if I run an online business in New Hampshire (where there is no sales tax), and this is where my servers are and where the credit-card processing occurs, and sell digital downloads to people all over the country and world, there's no way that I'm going to be able to track where the recipients are and pay tax in their jurisdiction. Heck, I'm probably never even going to ask the recipients their addresses. Why do I need to know? If they have a credit card, that's pretty much all I care about.
If Washington, DC wants to tax online stores that are based there, more power to them. All it's going to do is drive high-tech business out into more friendly jurisdictions. But they're going to have a hell of a time trying to tax businesses that sell to DC residents, especially because those same residents will in all likelihood be lying through their teeth to avoid paying the same tax.
The whole dilemma with online purchases boils down to figuring out where the "transaction" really occurred. If I'm in one state and the server is in another and the company that owns the servers is in a third, which State's laws govern the sale? (Normally there is a contract at some point specifying which, and it's usually the state of the company in control of the online store, but I could think it could be argued that it should be otherwise.) And how about when the sale is done internationally? There it's easy to have situations where the buyer, seller, and the processing bank are all in separate countries; you could even introduce additional intermediaries if the buyer was using a PayPal or eGold type service.
The problem here is that the laws we've created to govern "transactions" are based around a model where two people get together and exchange money for goods or services in physical space. It just doesn't translate very well to the amorphous nature of the internet, where businesses can exist online without any real presence in the physical world, besides a few cubic inches in an equipment rack somewhere.
Microsoft only "lost" a potential sale, and even then, they lost a potential sale at a much lower price then they probably would have been willing to accept. I don't know what the pricing on used licenses is, but if we assume (just for the sake of argument here) that a used license is £50 and a new one is £200 and 10 licenses were purchased, they should only be able to claim that they 'didn't receive' £500. Because to claim £2000 is to say that the company would have bought the full-price licenses if the used ones hadn't been available. And that's a pretty fat assumption to make. It's the sort of thing I'd assume out of a Microsoft sales droid or spokesweasel, but let's not repeat it as if it's fact.
Just to use office suites as an example, there are quite a few out there besides Microsoft's. Yes, MS Works is dominant, but that doesn't mean it's the only option. At (to continue my numbers) at £50, you might decide to go with Works. But if the only way you can get it is to pay £200, then suddenly some of the other suites look more attractive -- even though they're not Microsoft Works.
Free products like OpenOffice, even older or less-frequently updated commercial products like Lotus Works, cost much less than Microsoft's offerings and do most of the same things; OpenOffice and StarOffice even interoperate with MS's gear pretty well.
Really, in this example, the people who have the biggest claim to the "lost business" argument are the manufacturers and distributers of other low-cost suites.
Microsoft may be dominant, and they may have a monopoly, but that doesn't entitle them to claim or for us to believe that everyone would pay whatever Microsoft demanded if there wasn't a way to buy it used (or pirate it, another popular option). Some people would just refuse or not be able to pay MS's full price, and seek alternatives.
Sure, I have a few old expired ones hanging around; I'm not sure how far you'll get, seeing as they have my name and picture on them, and a corner is cut off...but they were given back to me by and employee at the DMV because I asked nicely, so I assume I can do whatever non-fradulent thing I want to do with them now.
In some states you can also buy old license plates. That doesn't mean it's legal to put them on your car, but you can get them. In fact, I know of at least one state where the DMV sells "novelty" plates direct: they're not legal to actually use as a license plate, but if you wanted to get a historical one for your Model T, they'll sell it to you.
You can buy and sell all sorts of stuff that would be illegal if used in a certain way.
Other than "I can leave my PC on all day, and at 5pm, it turns the heat on for me!" is there any real practical application?
I don't know about you, but if I leave my PCs on all day, my house is already warm when I come home.
Just the joy of owning a P4 and two G5s I guess. In 20 years we're going to look back on the power consumption figures of these things like a people look at the gas mileage of 1950s land yachts.
Considering that these numbers were taken from what's effectively an advertisement for the product, I don't think that's really a safe assumption to make.
I think in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we need to assume that what they mean is "99.97% of the time that you tell a device to go on, it goes on." That's a salesman's version of "success rate." It includes every effort the system can make to error correct / overcome interference, etc. Otherwise, why wouldn't they use the higher number, after retransmits? It would make their product seem that much better.
Just wondering, is X-10 the protocol that used to be used in those Radio Shack home automation products back in the 80s/early-90s? I never owned any, but I remember looking at them in the catalogs.
They were little boxes, they had low-wattage ones for lights and higher-wattage ones for appliances, and each had two little dials on the front. I think one was for "zones" or something and was lettered, the other one was for "device" and was numbered. I want to say that one dial was red and one was blue or black, but I might just be making that up. (Yeah, I spent waaay too much time looking at the catalog.) I can't remember the name of it though.
Then there was a central command console that you could put somewhere in your house that had switches on them, and I assume you could set each switch to control a different device. It was fairly primitive, and if there was a PC interface I didn't see it or didn't remember it. (There may have been one, but I was in the habit of ignoring computer stuff at Radioshack, since I was an Apple user and they didn't swing that way.)
I haven't seen the RS catalog in a while (since my local store took out its aisle of small electronic parts to replace it with shitty plastic crap I basically lost interest), but if these used the same protocol then I assume there are probably a lot of them hanging around in basements and attics.
Anyone know if it's the same thing, or even remember the RS product I'm talking about?
Actually del.icio.us does interoperate with Safari, albeit indirectly. They provide two javascript links, one to "Post to delicious," and another to visit "My delicious" that you can put in the address bar. Except for not having a hotkey to activate it (like Command-D), it's very convenient. I've never used the public/private bookmarks features, but the whole thing works very well for sharing my bookmarks between my Macs at home and my work PC, without leaving anything on the work PC besides a cookie and a few additions to the toolbar.
I have heard to the antecedent of the American legal system referred to as both "British Common Law" and "English Common Law" interchangeably; if you wanted to elucidate me as to which would be the more correct term and why, I would happily stand corrected.
Agreed; however there's no reason why it ought to suck so much on city-to-city routes and in the Northeast Corridor. Although I understand the population density differences preclude too much Europe/US comparisons, if you look at something like the German DB "ICE" or Inter-City Express network, I think we could easily have something like that here in the Northeast.
Despite normally considering myself a basically small-government Conservative, I think we've put ourselves into a bad situation by giving what is in effect a giant taxpayer subsidy to the trucking industry (in the form of the Interstate Highway system), while crippling the railroads' ability to compete by forcing them to pay for their own infrastructure, and also pay into an obsolete and inflexible (as well as ungodly expensive) employee benefits program in the form of Railroad Retirement.
At the same time, the only way that we really tax truckers for the infrastructure that they use, via the tax on diesel fuel, stifles innovation in the passenger-car market by driving automakers away from what is really a superior internal-combustion technology.
Actually the hand gesture he used doesn't mean "go fuck yourself." (The gesture is one where you put your hand under your chin and brush your fingers forward and outward, like you're clearing something out of your beard.) It's Italian, and it means "you're not worth the hair on my chin," or "you're worthless."
That's my opinion/understanding, anyway, though I've also seen it defined as meaning "Me ne frego," or "I don't give a damn," which is listed here.
Not exactly polite, but not quite the same as giving someone the 'ol middle finger, either. The point is, he could have been a lot more offensive if he had wanted to, but he settled for something arguably middle-of-the-road.
I'm not sure you're getting the concept of 'precedent' correctly. The idea is that you use the most recent available precedent that deals with a similar situation; obviously that means that we don't have to go back to the 1750s very much anymore. If you were arguing something in your local civil or criminal court and the best case you could find to support your line of reasoning was from pre-revolutionary English common law, you're probably going to get laughed at.
However, just because it doesn't happen often or wouldn't be advisable in most situations doesn't mean that those old Common Law cases are off-limits. They are still there, still part of the canon of American case law.
I can't think of the exact cases for you right now, but I have seen old cases mentioned in some Supreme Court opinions, and I can only assume that might occur in oral arguments there more often than they would in any other court. (Although I haven't exactly searched and only ones after 2000 are online anyway.) The more fundamental the issue being dealt with is, and the higher the court it's being argued in, then the further back people may have to look in order to find appropriate precedent.
Just because it doesn't get used very often doesn't mean it's not there.
I think you need to reread your history. Many of the founders of this country had a great deal of respect for the English legal system: in theory at least. It was a particular government (that of King George III) that they were less-than-fond of. A great number of the principles enshrined in both the Declaration of Independence and later in the Constitution trace their lineage back to Britain (in particular to the Magna Carta, which the Founders would have been familiar with).
The American court system in particular was essentially of British design, and most of the early judges and lawyers had read the a lot of British common law to pass the Bar. (At lower levels, the pre- and post-revolutionary court systems probably didn't change that much.) It was very common for aspiring lawyers to read Blackstone's as part of their studies until fairly recently--in my opinion, the lack of this today is really too bad. Recall also, that many of this country's Founders were lawyers who had read the Common Law and were used to thinking in its terms: Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Patrick Henry, and George Mason are just a few; I'm probably forgetting a lot of others. These were men whose concepts of fairness and equality, perhaps of liberty in general, owe at least some credit to their understanding of law.
The everyday jurisprudential theories at work in the courts of England and post-revolutionary America really were about the same, on issues like torts, the definition of crime, etc. Over time there has been divergence on some issues, but there are still a lot of similarities. (More-so than between either the British or American system and a totally different theoretical foundation, like the Roman/Napoleonic Code that is the basis for the French and some other Continental systems.)
Law changes and evolves over time; it's not something that you can easily just create anew out of whole cloth. The American legal system was built on the conceptual foundations provided by Common Law, and there is nothing wrong with referring to it if precedent is needed and nothing more recent can be found. This doesn't happen often (after all, we have 200+ years of our own precedent to go through now), but occasionally some very old Common Law case can be elucidating.
This is not to say that a law is somehow automatically valid here, just because it was present in Britain prior to 1792 (that's an entirely separate branch of government anyway), or even that a court ruling there has an immediate and automatic effect here. It just means that in making arguments and looking for precedent, British case law prior to 1792 is fair game.
Direct solar energy is the ideal source of the energy to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Okay, I'll bite here. Has anyone ever done the math to see how much electrical energy would be required to produce enough hydrogen and oxygen to power a number of fuel cell vehicles that's anywhere close to our current transportation needs? And then gone and multiplied that number by the energy output of the best solar panels? I haven't done the calculation, but I have this feeling that the area would just be prohibitively large.
I have heard, though, that the energy that we use for transportation, in the form of liquid petroleum fuels, is actually greater than the amount of electricity we use.[1] So to have direct solar energy be a feasible power source for transportation would actually be a BIGGER undertaking than replacing every current power plant.
[1] Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations: US Oil Consumption: 20 M bbl. oil / day * 158.984 liters / bbl = 3.18 B liters oil / day * 0.873 kg / liter = 2.78 B kg oil / day 2.78 B kg oil / day * 45MJ / kg = 1.25 × 10^17 J / day == 1.44576042 × 10^12 W = 1.45 TW Transportation believed to account for ~50% of oil consumption, so transportation is 725 GW. According to Wikipedia, the average total electrical power consumption of the entire world is around 1.7 TW, on average, the US is 424.3 GW (2001). So conservatively, the amount of new, green generating capacity we'd need to create in order to replace oil for transportation fuel, would be (assuming roughly equal efficiencies) 170% of what we have in use today (also assuming we want to have the same excess generating capacity as we do now). I think the only way that direct solar would be feasible is if there was some huge step forward in the technology; but if we're placing bets on giant technological breakthroughs, why not just pray for fusion? (Or Tesla's magical Free Energy apparatus?) Obviously this is a very rough calculation, but I think it's helpful to go through, if only to remind us yet again of the sheer size and scope of the energies that are being talked about in proposing solutions for the transportation problem.
I think it also needs to be pointed out that when comparing the relative efficiencies of engines, you need to decide on what kind of output power you're going to use as the standard. I.e., is your end-product going to be mechanical motion or electricity? Because the fuel cell will always have a bit of an advantage over a diesel engine at producing electricity, because to get electricity from a diesel engine requires a generator; conversely deriving mechanical energy from a fuel cell requires a motor.
So if we're talking about trains/buses/cars, you also have to factor in the loss in the motor and its associated equipment. (Alternators, because they don't run on DC usually; speed controls, etc.)
And of course, there's the ever-present problem of where you're getting the energy from that goes into a fuel cell's fuel in the first place. If you're going to split them from water, that's a very energy-intensive process, as is cracking natural gas. Unless you're planning to tap some sort of very green and otherwise-surplus energy to create the fuel, this should really be part of the whole comparison. Since only a few countries seem to have any plan that eliminates a dependence on fossil fuel for electricity generation (France with its nuclear plants, Iceland has geothermal, feel free to add to this list), it seems likely that petroleum or natural gas will be the ultimate energy source here. And that requires adding electric-distribution losses in, and comparing it to the energy investment in the transportation and distribution of liquid fuels.
I'd really be interested in seeing a rigorous, "well to wheels" (or 'well to rails,' in the case of a train) analysis, showing what the advantage was in terms of fuel consumption for a fuel cell vehicle that's ultimately powered by a fossil-fuel energy source, and a well-designed hybrid internal-combustion/electric system. I have a feeling that a well-built diesel-electric may win out; but I'd like to see a fair comparison. I'd also like to see an economic analysis of how much each one costs right now in terms of variable input costs, and under what conditions one would become preferable to each other. (If the diesel-electric is cheaper now, would there ever be a point where petroleum gets so expensive that fuel cells are preferred? If so, when?)
I salute the Japanese for experimenting with this technology (and also on investing in a rail system that doesn't suck, which is more than I can say for the US), but I just wonder if the science and economics behind it work out.
Oh, I'm aware, I worked in a lab. I cut my teeth on a creaky old Fuji FA series and then later worked on a SFA and a Frontier. However some labs charge a relatively obscene amount to scan negatives; I can understand charging less for a CD when it's done at the time of development versus later (when the negatives have been cut into short strips that can't just be run through as a batch), but there are still places out there with Frontiers charging upwards of 50-75 cents/frame for scanning, using the built-in high speed scanners on their processing equipment. And that to me is just blatantly ripping the customer off. Most people don't understand that modern printers scan their negatives ANYWAY to make reprints, or I think they'd probably question why it is that getting a roll scanned to CD-R costs more than getting a reprints made (as was the case at once place where I worked, at least at the time).
24 cents each isn't that bad, though, particularly on cut negatives.
It's unfortunate you don't use Linux, because then you'd have access to the excellent Alexandria application, which I think covers everything you'd want to do (and more, probably). It's designed to quickly catalog an entire personal library of books, download information on them, and store that information in a database. I assume one could export information out to a flat text file if you wanted to from there. It supports a variety of barcode scanners (including the CueCat, it's good for something at last!).
I don't know whether it interconnects with isbndb.com in partiuclar, but it does use Amazon, Proxis, Barnes and Noble, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Amadeus Buch, Internet Bookshop Italia, the US Library of Congress and the British Library; it can also use any other Z39.50 source.
If you really can't boot into Linux for a weekend to do it, perhaps you could use cygwin or something.
The whole thing looks rather suspiciously proprietary; in order to get access and be able to search directly, you have to pay -- or be a member of a library that does. Basically what they're doing is getting libraries to contribute their electronic catalogs to the database, and then selling access to the resulting data -- BACK to the libraries that contributed! Not a bad business model, all they have do do is maintain the hardware and database, and watch the information and cash flow in. With every contribution, what they have becomes more valuable.
While OCLC catalogers create some Collection Sets, most are built by OCLC member libraries, which have purchased a predetermined content set from a publisher and cataloged the set using OCLC cataloging tools in order to make it available to you.... If you are an OCLC member institution, you can contribute a Collection Set of records your staff has cataloged. OCLC will set up a special authorization to allow you to input the records into WorldCat at no charge.
Putting data IN to their system, that's free (naturally); getting anything useful out doesn't seem to be quite so easy, or cheap.
At least not directly. It seems that they have partnered with some web sites in a program called Open WorldCat to share their content, including with Google Scholar and Google Books, but there's apparently no direct public access. The closest I could get was by searching Google Scholar for a term, looking for the [BOOK] results, then clicking on the "Library Search" link, which took me to an Open WorldCat page.
The link to the Open WorldCat page doesn't use a human-readable link, either; it looks like a hash of some sort. For example, the Library link from the Google result for P.L. George's "Automatic mesh generation: application to finite element methods" is this:
Maybe someone can figure out what hash they're using and provide a way to search them directly; just in case anyone was wondering, doing a Google search for "mesh generation" site:worldcatlibraries.org doesn't return anything.
I like their concept in terms of unifying all the library records, but I really am uncomfortable and frankly put off by their obvious and shameless attempts to monetize what ought to be a public resource. I'm glad it's at least searchable through Google, but their web site makes it clear that they'd much prefer you pony up some great and unspoken (of course there's no price listed, so we can only guess) wad of cash to get at their database.
I suppose that their partnership with the likes of Google and Amazon is a step above totally proprietary databases that are 100% pay-to-play, but I still find the concept of any database that's build up almost entirely from contributions by tax-supported Public Libraries doesn't have a globally accessible direct interface to let people search it. Plus, it's not clear that the information that you can search via Google is even their whole catalog: "Open WorldCat returns only the holdings of OCLC member libraries that subscribe to the WorldCat database on FirstSearch." Assumedly, the database that you pay for is more complete, a
Heck, think of it the next time you take that Mountain Dew can back for your 5-cent deposit, or put that Campbells Soup can in the bin next to the trash can. War machines use a lot of steel and aluminum, you know. Even if yours doesn't go into it, it just means that some steel or aluminum, somewhere, is available to be used in some form more evil than a soda can.
The only solution? Don't throw anything away! Especially tinfoil. Fight the man!
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But anyway, just to restate: I don't believe in the logic of treating business that you didn't get as a fiscal "loss," in general. However, if you were going to go down that route, then certainly the MOST that you could say you 'lost' was the amount that the customer paid to your competitor, NOT the price of your product at the same quantity.
I agree that the £10,000 savings seems a little suspicious; even at 50% savings we're talking about a lot of copies. I inflated the prices and savings in my example to make a point.
Humm. Maybe I'll choke back my disgust and go back in there again sometime, just to have a look.
I think if I ever decide to get into the home-automation stuff (I can think of a few things it would be useful for; mostly just as a glorified light-timer), I think I'll buy one of the Insteon control modules, since they're backwards-compatible with X-10. But I'd probably start out getting some of the X-10 modules, because they're so much cheaper and apparently available everywhere. If they don't work well, it's not a lot of money down the drain and I could upgrade to the Insteon ones.
Taxation for digital sales can be easily automated.
Uh huh. How?
I'm interested in hearing how you plan on knowing when anyone in your state connects to a webserver in some other part of the country or world, via an encrypted connection, and causes some money to be transferred from a bank in some other state to a bank in some other completely unrelated state, and then downloads some data.
Also, you have to be able to force this system onto parties who are both going to be basically hostile to it, since people aren't going to want to pay the tax and are going to avoid if possible, and businesses aren't going to want to pay it because it's going to be a PITA for them and make them less competitive versus merchants (for example, international ones, quasi-legal or not) who don't pay.
This whole thing would be an enforcement nightmare. It's totally unenforceable; the only ways I can think of doing it would rely either on the cooperation of the merchants (not likely, what impetus do they have to comply? It's not like you can magically keep them from selling to residents of your state somehow) or the buyer (equally not likely, and anything that requires their cooperation is the same as the status quo, which is asking people to report use tax on their returns every year).
I can think of only one way to implement such a scheme: pass some sort of Federal law requiring all of the credit card banks and companies to automatically "BCC" your State's Department of Internal Revenue every time you completed a transaction, and then having them automatically charge you Sales Tax on all of your electronic purchases, unless you could prove that sales tax was already included. I don't know about anyone else, but just the idea of that creeps the living hell out of me; people whine about the NSA snooping on their email, which at least you can encrypt -- this would be mandated disclosure.
You know, you should really attribute that quote in your sig to a person, instead of a place. Unless Armonk, NY is particularly talkative.
"Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people."
-Nido Qubein (reference)
Qubein is a motivational speaker, and I expect that if he actually did say that in Armonk, NY on August 8th, it was probably in a presentation to IBM (given that they're practically the only game in that town).
That's actually kind of interesting. I feel like there probably is a law against it, though, or everybody and their cousin would be getting payouts from their bookie in Gold Eagles.
There are also other coins you could do it with, I think; IIRC there are some silver pieces which are worth way more than their face value in terms of precious metals.
Actually, couldn't you just do this with any fairly valuable piece of rare US currency? Say a 1928 $2 bill or something; it's got to be worth more than two dollars, but legally it ought to be negotiable as currency. That "Legal for all debts, public and private" line doesn't have an expiration date on it.
It seems too obvious a way to avoid taxes though. If there were really a loophole that good, people would be using it already.
How the hell did we get to this point?
Because a lot of people voted for politicians who promised them a lot of "free" stuff, without thinking too hard about who was going to pay for it?
There was a time when I would have said those politicians were called Democrats, but sadly now it's pretty much everybody (except for some quasi-Libertarians).
Sure, but if I run an online business in New Hampshire (where there is no sales tax), and this is where my servers are and where the credit-card processing occurs, and sell digital downloads to people all over the country and world, there's no way that I'm going to be able to track where the recipients are and pay tax in their jurisdiction. Heck, I'm probably never even going to ask the recipients their addresses. Why do I need to know? If they have a credit card, that's pretty much all I care about.
If Washington, DC wants to tax online stores that are based there, more power to them. All it's going to do is drive high-tech business out into more friendly jurisdictions. But they're going to have a hell of a time trying to tax businesses that sell to DC residents, especially because those same residents will in all likelihood be lying through their teeth to avoid paying the same tax.
The whole dilemma with online purchases boils down to figuring out where the "transaction" really occurred. If I'm in one state and the server is in another and the company that owns the servers is in a third, which State's laws govern the sale? (Normally there is a contract at some point specifying which, and it's usually the state of the company in control of the online store, but I could think it could be argued that it should be otherwise.) And how about when the sale is done internationally? There it's easy to have situations where the buyer, seller, and the processing bank are all in separate countries; you could even introduce additional intermediaries if the buyer was using a PayPal or eGold type service.
The problem here is that the laws we've created to govern "transactions" are based around a model where two people get together and exchange money for goods or services in physical space. It just doesn't translate very well to the amorphous nature of the internet, where businesses can exist online without any real presence in the physical world, besides a few cubic inches in an equipment rack somewhere.
This can't be stated enough.
Microsoft only "lost" a potential sale, and even then, they lost a potential sale at a much lower price then they probably would have been willing to accept. I don't know what the pricing on used licenses is, but if we assume (just for the sake of argument here) that a used license is £50 and a new one is £200 and 10 licenses were purchased, they should only be able to claim that they 'didn't receive' £500. Because to claim £2000 is to say that the company would have bought the full-price licenses if the used ones hadn't been available. And that's a pretty fat assumption to make. It's the sort of thing I'd assume out of a Microsoft sales droid or spokesweasel, but let's not repeat it as if it's fact.
Just to use office suites as an example, there are quite a few out there besides Microsoft's. Yes, MS Works is dominant, but that doesn't mean it's the only option. At (to continue my numbers) at £50, you might decide to go with Works. But if the only way you can get it is to pay £200, then suddenly some of the other suites look more attractive -- even though they're not Microsoft Works.
Free products like OpenOffice, even older or less-frequently updated commercial products like Lotus Works, cost much less than Microsoft's offerings and do most of the same things; OpenOffice and StarOffice even interoperate with MS's gear pretty well.
Really, in this example, the people who have the biggest claim to the "lost business" argument are the manufacturers and distributers of other low-cost suites.
Microsoft may be dominant, and they may have a monopoly, but that doesn't entitle them to claim or for us to believe that everyone would pay whatever Microsoft demanded if there wasn't a way to buy it used (or pirate it, another popular option). Some people would just refuse or not be able to pay MS's full price, and seek alternatives.
Sure, I have a few old expired ones hanging around; I'm not sure how far you'll get, seeing as they have my name and picture on them, and a corner is cut off...but they were given back to me by and employee at the DMV because I asked nicely, so I assume I can do whatever non-fradulent thing I want to do with them now.
In some states you can also buy old license plates. That doesn't mean it's legal to put them on your car, but you can get them. In fact, I know of at least one state where the DMV sells "novelty" plates direct: they're not legal to actually use as a license plate, but if you wanted to get a historical one for your Model T, they'll sell it to you.
You can buy and sell all sorts of stuff that would be illegal if used in a certain way.
Other than "I can leave my PC on all day, and at 5pm, it turns the heat on for me!" is there any real practical application?
I don't know about you, but if I leave my PCs on all day, my house is already warm when I come home.
Just the joy of owning a P4 and two G5s I guess. In 20 years we're going to look back on the power consumption figures of these things like a people look at the gas mileage of 1950s land yachts.
Considering that these numbers were taken from what's effectively an advertisement for the product, I don't think that's really a safe assumption to make.
I think in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we need to assume that what they mean is "99.97% of the time that you tell a device to go on, it goes on." That's a salesman's version of "success rate." It includes every effort the system can make to error correct / overcome interference, etc. Otherwise, why wouldn't they use the higher number, after retransmits? It would make their product seem that much better.
Just wondering, is X-10 the protocol that used to be used in those Radio Shack home automation products back in the 80s/early-90s? I never owned any, but I remember looking at them in the catalogs.
They were little boxes, they had low-wattage ones for lights and higher-wattage ones for appliances, and each had two little dials on the front. I think one was for "zones" or something and was lettered, the other one was for "device" and was numbered. I want to say that one dial was red and one was blue or black, but I might just be making that up. (Yeah, I spent waaay too much time looking at the catalog.) I can't remember the name of it though.
Then there was a central command console that you could put somewhere in your house that had switches on them, and I assume you could set each switch to control a different device. It was fairly primitive, and if there was a PC interface I didn't see it or didn't remember it. (There may have been one, but I was in the habit of ignoring computer stuff at Radioshack, since I was an Apple user and they didn't swing that way.)
I haven't seen the RS catalog in a while (since my local store took out its aisle of small electronic parts to replace it with shitty plastic crap I basically lost interest), but if these used the same protocol then I assume there are probably a lot of them hanging around in basements and attics.
Anyone know if it's the same thing, or even remember the RS product I'm talking about?
Actually del.icio.us does interoperate with Safari, albeit indirectly. They provide two javascript links, one to "Post to delicious," and another to visit "My delicious" that you can put in the address bar. Except for not having a hotkey to activate it (like Command-D), it's very convenient. I've never used the public/private bookmarks features, but the whole thing works very well for sharing my bookmarks between my Macs at home and my work PC, without leaving anything on the work PC besides a cookie and a few additions to the toolbar.
I have heard to the antecedent of the American legal system referred to as both "British Common Law" and "English Common Law" interchangeably; if you wanted to elucidate me as to which would be the more correct term and why, I would happily stand corrected.
Agreed; however there's no reason why it ought to suck so much on city-to-city routes and in the Northeast Corridor. Although I understand the population density differences preclude too much Europe/US comparisons, if you look at something like the German DB "ICE" or Inter-City Express network, I think we could easily have something like that here in the Northeast.
Despite normally considering myself a basically small-government Conservative, I think we've put ourselves into a bad situation by giving what is in effect a giant taxpayer subsidy to the trucking industry (in the form of the Interstate Highway system), while crippling the railroads' ability to compete by forcing them to pay for their own infrastructure, and also pay into an obsolete and inflexible (as well as ungodly expensive) employee benefits program in the form of Railroad Retirement.
At the same time, the only way that we really tax truckers for the infrastructure that they use, via the tax on diesel fuel, stifles innovation in the passenger-car market by driving automakers away from what is really a superior internal-combustion technology.
Actually the hand gesture he used doesn't mean "go fuck yourself." (The gesture is one where you put your hand under your chin and brush your fingers forward and outward, like you're clearing something out of your beard.) It's Italian, and it means "you're not worth the hair on my chin," or "you're worthless."
That's my opinion/understanding, anyway, though I've also seen it defined as meaning "Me ne frego," or "I don't give a damn," which is listed here.
Not exactly polite, but not quite the same as giving someone the 'ol middle finger, either. The point is, he could have been a lot more offensive if he had wanted to, but he settled for something arguably middle-of-the-road.
I'm not sure you're getting the concept of 'precedent' correctly. The idea is that you use the most recent available precedent that deals with a similar situation; obviously that means that we don't have to go back to the 1750s very much anymore. If you were arguing something in your local civil or criminal court and the best case you could find to support your line of reasoning was from pre-revolutionary English common law, you're probably going to get laughed at.
However, just because it doesn't happen often or wouldn't be advisable in most situations doesn't mean that those old Common Law cases are off-limits. They are still there, still part of the canon of American case law.
I can't think of the exact cases for you right now, but I have seen old cases mentioned in some Supreme Court opinions, and I can only assume that might occur in oral arguments there more often than they would in any other court. (Although I haven't exactly searched and only ones after 2000 are online anyway.) The more fundamental the issue being dealt with is, and the higher the court it's being argued in, then the further back people may have to look in order to find appropriate precedent.
Just because it doesn't get used very often doesn't mean it's not there.
I think you need to reread your history. Many of the founders of this country had a great deal of respect for the English legal system: in theory at least. It was a particular government (that of King George III) that they were less-than-fond of. A great number of the principles enshrined in both the Declaration of Independence and later in the Constitution trace their lineage back to Britain (in particular to the Magna Carta, which the Founders would have been familiar with).
The American court system in particular was essentially of British design, and most of the early judges and lawyers had read the a lot of British common law to pass the Bar. (At lower levels, the pre- and post-revolutionary court systems probably didn't change that much.) It was very common for aspiring lawyers to read Blackstone's as part of their studies until fairly recently--in my opinion, the lack of this today is really too bad. Recall also, that many of this country's Founders were lawyers who had read the Common Law and were used to thinking in its terms: Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Patrick Henry, and George Mason are just a few; I'm probably forgetting a lot of others. These were men whose concepts of fairness and equality, perhaps of liberty in general, owe at least some credit to their understanding of law.
The everyday jurisprudential theories at work in the courts of England and post-revolutionary America really were about the same, on issues like torts, the definition of crime, etc. Over time there has been divergence on some issues, but there are still a lot of similarities. (More-so than between either the British or American system and a totally different theoretical foundation, like the Roman/Napoleonic Code that is the basis for the French and some other Continental systems.)
Law changes and evolves over time; it's not something that you can easily just create anew out of whole cloth. The American legal system was built on the conceptual foundations provided by Common Law, and there is nothing wrong with referring to it if precedent is needed and nothing more recent can be found. This doesn't happen often (after all, we have 200+ years of our own precedent to go through now), but occasionally some very old Common Law case can be elucidating.
This is not to say that a law is somehow automatically valid here, just because it was present in Britain prior to 1792 (that's an entirely separate branch of government anyway), or even that a court ruling there has an immediate and automatic effect here. It just means that in making arguments and looking for precedent, British case law prior to 1792 is fair game.
Direct solar energy is the ideal source of the energy to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Okay, I'll bite here. Has anyone ever done the math to see how much electrical energy would be required to produce enough hydrogen and oxygen to power a number of fuel cell vehicles that's anywhere close to our current transportation needs? And then gone and multiplied that number by the energy output of the best solar panels? I haven't done the calculation, but I have this feeling that the area would just be prohibitively large.
I have heard, though, that the energy that we use for transportation, in the form of liquid petroleum fuels, is actually greater than the amount of electricity we use.[1] So to have direct solar energy be a feasible power source for transportation would actually be a BIGGER undertaking than replacing every current power plant.
[1] Just some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
US Oil Consumption: 20 M bbl. oil / day * 158.984 liters / bbl = 3.18 B liters oil / day * 0.873 kg / liter = 2.78 B kg oil / day
2.78 B kg oil / day * 45MJ / kg = 1.25 × 10^17 J / day == 1.44576042 × 10^12 W = 1.45 TW
Transportation believed to account for ~50% of oil consumption, so transportation is 725 GW.
According to Wikipedia, the average total electrical power consumption of the entire world is around 1.7 TW, on average, the US is 424.3 GW (2001).
So conservatively, the amount of new, green generating capacity we'd need to create in order to replace oil for transportation fuel, would be (assuming roughly equal efficiencies) 170% of what we have in use today (also assuming we want to have the same excess generating capacity as we do now). I think the only way that direct solar would be feasible is if there was some huge step forward in the technology; but if we're placing bets on giant technological breakthroughs, why not just pray for fusion? (Or Tesla's magical Free Energy apparatus?)
Obviously this is a very rough calculation, but I think it's helpful to go through, if only to remind us yet again of the sheer size and scope of the energies that are being talked about in proposing solutions for the transportation problem.
I think it also needs to be pointed out that when comparing the relative efficiencies of engines, you need to decide on what kind of output power you're going to use as the standard. I.e., is your end-product going to be mechanical motion or electricity? Because the fuel cell will always have a bit of an advantage over a diesel engine at producing electricity, because to get electricity from a diesel engine requires a generator; conversely deriving mechanical energy from a fuel cell requires a motor.
So if we're talking about trains/buses/cars, you also have to factor in the loss in the motor and its associated equipment. (Alternators, because they don't run on DC usually; speed controls, etc.)
And of course, there's the ever-present problem of where you're getting the energy from that goes into a fuel cell's fuel in the first place. If you're going to split them from water, that's a very energy-intensive process, as is cracking natural gas. Unless you're planning to tap some sort of very green and otherwise-surplus energy to create the fuel, this should really be part of the whole comparison. Since only a few countries seem to have any plan that eliminates a dependence on fossil fuel for electricity generation (France with its nuclear plants, Iceland has geothermal, feel free to add to this list), it seems likely that petroleum or natural gas will be the ultimate energy source here. And that requires adding electric-distribution losses in, and comparing it to the energy investment in the transportation and distribution of liquid fuels.
I'd really be interested in seeing a rigorous, "well to wheels" (or 'well to rails,' in the case of a train) analysis, showing what the advantage was in terms of fuel consumption for a fuel cell vehicle that's ultimately powered by a fossil-fuel energy source, and a well-designed hybrid internal-combustion/electric system. I have a feeling that a well-built diesel-electric may win out; but I'd like to see a fair comparison. I'd also like to see an economic analysis of how much each one costs right now in terms of variable input costs, and under what conditions one would become preferable to each other. (If the diesel-electric is cheaper now, would there ever be a point where petroleum gets so expensive that fuel cells are preferred? If so, when?)
I salute the Japanese for experimenting with this technology (and also on investing in a rail system that doesn't suck, which is more than I can say for the US), but I just wonder if the science and economics behind it work out.
Oh, I'm aware, I worked in a lab. I cut my teeth on a creaky old Fuji FA series and then later worked on a SFA and a Frontier. However some labs charge a relatively obscene amount to scan negatives; I can understand charging less for a CD when it's done at the time of development versus later (when the negatives have been cut into short strips that can't just be run through as a batch), but there are still places out there with Frontiers charging upwards of 50-75 cents/frame for scanning, using the built-in high speed scanners on their processing equipment. And that to me is just blatantly ripping the customer off. Most people don't understand that modern printers scan their negatives ANYWAY to make reprints, or I think they'd probably question why it is that getting a roll scanned to CD-R costs more than getting a reprints made (as was the case at once place where I worked, at least at the time).
24 cents each isn't that bad, though, particularly on cut negatives.
It's unfortunate you don't use Linux, because then you'd have access to the excellent Alexandria application, which I think covers everything you'd want to do (and more, probably). It's designed to quickly catalog an entire personal library of books, download information on them, and store that information in a database. I assume one could export information out to a flat text file if you wanted to from there. It supports a variety of barcode scanners (including the CueCat, it's good for something at last!).
I don't know whether it interconnects with isbndb.com in partiuclar, but it does use Amazon, Proxis, Barnes and Noble, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Amadeus Buch, Internet Bookshop Italia, the US Library of Congress and the British Library; it can also use any other Z39.50 source.
If you really can't boot into Linux for a weekend to do it, perhaps you could use cygwin or something.
The link you provided was dead for me though, although this worked:
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/
The whole thing looks rather suspiciously proprietary; in order to get access and be able to search directly, you have to pay -- or be a member of a library that does. Basically what they're doing is getting libraries to contribute their electronic catalogs to the database, and then selling access to the resulting data -- BACK to the libraries that contributed! Not a bad business model, all they have do do is maintain the hardware and database, and watch the information and cash flow in. With every contribution, what they have becomes more valuable.
From http://www.oclc.org/worldcatsets/about/cooperative
Putting data IN to their system, that's free (naturally); getting anything useful out doesn't seem to be quite so easy, or cheap.
At least not directly. It seems that they have partnered with some web sites in a program called Open WorldCat to share their content, including with Google Scholar and Google Books, but there's apparently no direct public access. The closest I could get was by searching Google Scholar for a term, looking for the [BOOK] results, then clicking on the "Library Search" link, which took me to an Open WorldCat page.
The link to the Open WorldCat page doesn't use a human-readable link, either; it looks like a hash of some sort. For example, the Library link from the Google result for P.L. George's "Automatic mesh generation: application to finite element methods" is this:
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ow/f9f4fc530 c1c64e2a19afeb4da09e526.html
Maybe someone can figure out what hash they're using and provide a way to search them directly; just in case anyone was wondering, doing a Google search for "mesh generation" site:worldcatlibraries.org doesn't return anything.
I like their concept in terms of unifying all the library records, but I really am uncomfortable and frankly put off by their obvious and shameless attempts to monetize what ought to be a public resource. I'm glad it's at least searchable through Google, but their web site makes it clear that they'd much prefer you pony up some great and unspoken (of course there's no price listed, so we can only guess) wad of cash to get at their database.
I suppose that their partnership with the likes of Google and Amazon is a step above totally proprietary databases that are 100% pay-to-play, but I still find the concept of any database that's build up almost entirely from contributions by tax-supported Public Libraries doesn't have a globally accessible direct interface to let people search it. Plus, it's not clear that the information that you can search via Google is even their whole catalog: "Open WorldCat returns only the holdings of OCLC member libraries that subscribe to the WorldCat database on FirstSearch." Assumedly, the database that you pay for is more complete, a
Heck, think of it the next time you take that Mountain Dew can back for your 5-cent deposit, or put that Campbells Soup can in the bin next to the trash can. War machines use a lot of steel and aluminum, you know. Even if yours doesn't go into it, it just means that some steel or aluminum, somewhere, is available to be used in some form more evil than a soda can.
The only solution? Don't throw anything away! Especially tinfoil. Fight the man!
It certainly does. I wonder if General Dynamics will honor the Russian patents :)
Nah, they'll probably just download them from www.AllOfPatent.com.