That's because you have an _honest_ accountant. Dishonest accountants would save you a lot of money in taxes, but would put you in a lot of trouble with the IRS around audit time. Lots of these cheating small businesses people talk about actually go under when audited by the IRS. There is no way they can afford the back taxes and fines, so they just declare bankruptcy and the owners skip town. A lot of these are like the building contractors who work out of the back of their van and hire only the illegal immigrants standing in front of 7-11 and do everything in cash.
The problem is that all of your dishonest small business neighbors ruined it for you. They "invested" all of their earning into "capital purchases" and the IRS was forced to close the loophole by creating an otherwise rediculous tax on personal property. The rules for small businesses are so crazy because people over the years have come up with tons of crazy loopholes in the otherwise sane laws. That's one reason small businesses are audited so frequently, because they're so good at finding weird new loopholes that the IRS doesn't know about.
The advantage of ITMS is that unlike music stores, they're never out of stock. Sure they don't carry a lot of titles, but most of the time if I'm looking for something I can find it on there. Just try finding anything by Lords of Acid (not an obscure band) in the local Best Buy/B&N/etc... up here and you'll come up empty. Even actual music stores are very hit and miss in this area, and I have to drive 20-30 minutes to get to one.
ITMS means the end of searching every single store in town that sells CDs to find that one album that someone raved about, and getting it in only 30 minutes. You can of course order pretty much any CD still in print (and many that aren't in print) from various places online, but the fastest you'll get it is the next day, and more like 3-5 days if you don't want to pay through the nose for shipping.
Were it not for the obnoxious DRM, I'd never buy a CD again.
DRM guys have been growing up with regards to actual computer security though. Sure they're still making dumb mistakes, but sometimes they actually get it right. AFAIK the latest version of FairPlay has been out for awhile and nobody has managed to get a Hymn like program working again.
Or if they have, they're keeping quiet in the hopes that Apple will stop pooping in their pot. This is another likely scenario.
The worst part is that Hymn by itself was crummy for pirating since it left a big fat signature on the files that Apple could track back to your Credit Card. It was only really useful for people who wanted to play the music on their Linux machine. IIRC, iTunes won't even play the files that were decrypted that way, you have to use something like aacplay. Such a shame.
As always the biggest victims in these DRM schemes are the people who just want to do something a little unusual (but completely legal) that the media company didn't expect. It's just innovation stifling. The worst part is that for the media companies, innovation is often bad. They're in a precarious position already and one more disruptive technology could put them out to pasture for good.
Does it really matter? It's not like these people are trying to set up some sort of lasting relationship here. It's not the sort of environment I think I'd want to try to meet people in anyway. This is more like online one-night-stands, only a fair bit safer and less messy but not quite as fun.
It's not like having cybersex with a girl who, as it turns out, is actually a guy is going to turn you gay or something.
It seems weird to need a pimp in SL though. Anybody can be a landowner and there's nothing another player can do to you worse than making you return home or send you up into the stratosphere (forcing you to return home).
Granted, advertising isn't easy in SL, but if a group of them are getting ripped off by virtual pimps, it would be trivial for them to just leave and start their own place.
The question really should be: What out there is better than SL? Obviously there is a market for Cybersex, and if you can create your own virtual enviornment for both partners to share (instead of the somewhat singular experiance of imagining what is going on from an IRC cybering session), then it seems great.
Granted, it looks pretty dumb most of the time, but even the somewhat dumb looks are better than absolutely text only experiances in IRC, at least to some people. SL is far from perfect, but thus far nobody has made anything better.
It's not fixed though, and it's not LL buying and selling. What happens is if you want to get more in-game money, you go to an index, where the current price of Lindons to USD is listed. You then buy as many as you like at whatever the current price is.
The trick is on the supply side: All of the Linden Dollars listed there are in fact being sold by other players. Players can try to see their Lindens for whatever they think someone will buy them for, but by default the game always buys the cheapest ones available, so if you price yourself too high they'll never be sold.
LL makes their money by taking a cut out of every transaction. Because they eat up 3.8% (or something like that), most currency speculation is squashed (it's rare for the value to change by that much).
Of course you DO get a fixed stipend each week that has nothing to do with the index (it's just LL printing more ingame money, leading to a constant but slow inflation)
I was thinking it was more like "we rented a single office room in this building for our two man European expansion". 100 square feet is fairly small for even an office though, but startups don't always get to do things the "sane" way.
All they had was the application while RIM was building the Blackberry though. The Patents didn't actually go through until there were already Blackberries in people's hands.
My hardware store doesn't keep it under lock and key (sometimes I wish they did, I hate people who pull the cap off, spray a bit on the shelf/other bottles to see what it looks like, then puts the cap back on and lets it get all clogged up!), but they do ask for ID when you buy it. Apparently they won't sell to anybody under 18 without a parent/guardian present.
Little Johnny went to college, a highly prestigous college. He had a bright future ahead of him, a beautiful girlfriend, a seemingly endless supply of all of the best music from yesterday and today at an unbelievable value, but then something went wrong, terribly terribly wrong. Little Johnny started downloading MP3s, the file format of pirates. Soon Johnny couldn't afford to stay in college anymore, his MP3 habit bankrupted him and forced him to drop out just to pay the bills. Now he works as a gas station attendant and lives in the oil pit. Don't let this be you, don't download MP3s.
-- RIAA
By "not affiliated" you mean "except through the K-Street Project right?" They've shown in the past that they can get favorable legislation pushed through both houses and past the president without much trouble at all. Often it's even fast tracked!
Too bad most people don't "read the net" like that. Sure your average Slashdot reader is going to know more about this now, but most people don't seem to venture much past the major media outlets, even on the internet. I doubt you get much descussion about Jury nullification on myspace.
The problem is that there is no advocate for Juries, unlike Judges and Lawyers who spend a lot of time trying to massage any laws into something that is favorable to them. There are no lobbyists for juries. over the years we've gotten to the point where Juries have virtually no power except what is explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.
You're having difficulty with the iTunes interface? Granted, if you're trying to copy music from shared computers or convert everything to WMA or something you're going to have trouble, but it's rare that I find people who can't figure out how to load music on their Ipod, purchase music from the store, or find and play any song in their collection with iTunes.
That's not to say there isn't room for improvement. I'd love to be able to syncronize the libraries of various versions of iTunes installed on the same network, especially between operating systems that have different rules for escaping foreign characters on the filesystem. IMHO, it's already better than 95% of it's competitors, especially the ones that companies like Sony force you to use if you want to use their hardware. Even if the Google player is better, if it can't sync an iPod it's going to be an also-ran.
Uh, this is certainly not the first time this has come up on Slashdot. Do you expect the authors to explain what Linux is every time one of those stores comes up? If you're one of the 5% of Slashdot readers who didn't know what this story was about, do you think there might be a resource you could use?
Eh, it's not hard to get Dells with a Radeon X300 or the like in it. It's not going to win any contests, but you can certainly play Half-Life on it. These are sub $1000 laptops too.
More than that, the first encounter had the humans using a light based drive (basically a giant laser attached to the tail end). They made it a laser so it could be modulated to send messages back to Earth. During the first encounter with the Kzin, the one "nearly insane" crewmember (because he had occasional violent thoughts) was the one that realized it could be used as a weapon.
Of course Niven is a hippy and didn't really like writing about war, so most of the Earth-Kzin stuff is handled by other writers.
One thing that's been bothering me. What do you mean by "lusting after another woman"? Does this include turning your head when an attractive woman passes by? Thinking about attractive women at all? Dreaming about them? If so, you've just set up a wonderful self-guilt machine that you can milk to make you hate yourself for almost no reason at all! On the good chance that you're Catholic, I must commend you, it's something all good Catholics are taught to strive for. Sometimes I swear that the entire Catholic religion was built on guilt.
OTOH, if you have a more realistic defintion, like not masturbating while thinking about a woman, well I can easily see how you can realistically control that.
The second path is much healthier too. The first one will only end up with you developing a resentment of women and a frustrated wife.
IE didn't capture massive market share because it was way better than Netscape (although it was better for quite some time), it captured the market share because it was the default browser of Windows. The kind of people who actually download and upgrade browsers are the kind of people who run Firefox for the most part. I don't think IE7 is going to put a major dent in the usage patterns of your typical website, and most of its gains will be from the IE6/5 crowd as they buy new computers that have IE7 preinstalled instead of IE5.
Controversal flim recieves media attention, film at 11!
Brokeback was never super popular, but there is that dedicated following of fans that watch it over and over, unlike many of those Blockbusters where attendance for the first week was strong but sharply declined in the subsequent weeks. Brokeback started out slow, but didn't decline nearly as fast.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you have an _honest_ accountant. Dishonest accountants would save you a lot of money in taxes, but would put you in a lot of trouble with the IRS around audit time. Lots of these cheating small businesses people talk about actually go under when audited by the IRS. There is no way they can afford the back taxes and fines, so they just declare bankruptcy and the owners skip town. A lot of these are like the building contractors who work out of the back of their van and hire only the illegal immigrants standing in front of 7-11 and do everything in cash.
The problem is that all of your dishonest small business neighbors ruined it for you. They "invested" all of their earning into "capital purchases" and the IRS was forced to close the loophole by creating an otherwise rediculous tax on personal property. The rules for small businesses are so crazy because people over the years have come up with tons of crazy loopholes in the otherwise sane laws. That's one reason small businesses are audited so frequently, because they're so good at finding weird new loopholes that the IRS doesn't know about.
The advantage of ITMS is that unlike music stores, they're never out of stock. Sure they don't carry a lot of titles, but most of the time if I'm looking for something I can find it on there. Just try finding anything by Lords of Acid (not an obscure band) in the local Best Buy/B&N/etc... up here and you'll come up empty. Even actual music stores are very hit and miss in this area, and I have to drive 20-30 minutes to get to one.
ITMS means the end of searching every single store in town that sells CDs to find that one album that someone raved about, and getting it in only 30 minutes. You can of course order pretty much any CD still in print (and many that aren't in print) from various places online, but the fastest you'll get it is the next day, and more like 3-5 days if you don't want to pay through the nose for shipping.
Were it not for the obnoxious DRM, I'd never buy a CD again.
DRM guys have been growing up with regards to actual computer security though. Sure they're still making dumb mistakes, but sometimes they actually get it right. AFAIK the latest version of FairPlay has been out for awhile and nobody has managed to get a Hymn like program working again.
Or if they have, they're keeping quiet in the hopes that Apple will stop pooping in their pot. This is another likely scenario.
The worst part is that Hymn by itself was crummy for pirating since it left a big fat signature on the files that Apple could track back to your Credit Card. It was only really useful for people who wanted to play the music on their Linux machine. IIRC, iTunes won't even play the files that were decrypted that way, you have to use something like aacplay. Such a shame.
As always the biggest victims in these DRM schemes are the people who just want to do something a little unusual (but completely legal) that the media company didn't expect. It's just innovation stifling. The worst part is that for the media companies, innovation is often bad. They're in a precarious position already and one more disruptive technology could put them out to pasture for good.
Does it really matter? It's not like these people are trying to set up some sort of lasting relationship here. It's not the sort of environment I think I'd want to try to meet people in anyway. This is more like online one-night-stands, only a fair bit safer and less messy but not quite as fun.
It's not like having cybersex with a girl who, as it turns out, is actually a guy is going to turn you gay or something.
It seems weird to need a pimp in SL though. Anybody can be a landowner and there's nothing another player can do to you worse than making you return home or send you up into the stratosphere (forcing you to return home).
Granted, advertising isn't easy in SL, but if a group of them are getting ripped off by virtual pimps, it would be trivial for them to just leave and start their own place.
The question really should be: What out there is better than SL? Obviously there is a market for Cybersex, and if you can create your own virtual enviornment for both partners to share (instead of the somewhat singular experiance of imagining what is going on from an IRC cybering session), then it seems great.
Granted, it looks pretty dumb most of the time, but even the somewhat dumb looks are better than absolutely text only experiances in IRC, at least to some people. SL is far from perfect, but thus far nobody has made anything better.
It's not fixed though, and it's not LL buying and selling. What happens is if you want to get more in-game money, you go to an index, where the current price of Lindons to USD is listed. You then buy as many as you like at whatever the current price is.
The trick is on the supply side: All of the Linden Dollars listed there are in fact being sold by other players. Players can try to see their Lindens for whatever they think someone will buy them for, but by default the game always buys the cheapest ones available, so if you price yourself too high they'll never be sold.
LL makes their money by taking a cut out of every transaction. Because they eat up 3.8% (or something like that), most currency speculation is squashed (it's rare for the value to change by that much).
Of course you DO get a fixed stipend each week that has nothing to do with the index (it's just LL printing more ingame money, leading to a constant but slow inflation)
Your town sucks. I have at least 8 hotspots (3 of which are "open" and unprotected) in my neighborhood alone.
I was thinking it was more like "we rented a single office room in this building for our two man European expansion". 100 square feet is fairly small for even an office though, but startups don't always get to do things the "sane" way.
All they had was the application while RIM was building the Blackberry though. The Patents didn't actually go through until there were already Blackberries in people's hands.
I was more referring to lobbyists in general.
My hardware store doesn't keep it under lock and key (sometimes I wish they did, I hate people who pull the cap off, spray a bit on the shelf/other bottles to see what it looks like, then puts the cap back on and lets it get all clogged up!), but they do ask for ID when you buy it. Apparently they won't sell to anybody under 18 without a parent/guardian present.
I can see the ads now:
Little Johnny went to college, a highly prestigous college. He had a bright future ahead of him, a beautiful girlfriend, a seemingly endless supply of all of the best music from yesterday and today at an unbelievable value, but then something went wrong, terribly terribly wrong. Little Johnny started downloading MP3s, the file format of pirates. Soon Johnny couldn't afford to stay in college anymore, his MP3 habit bankrupted him and forced him to drop out just to pay the bills. Now he works as a gas station attendant and lives in the oil pit. Don't let this be you, don't download MP3s.
-- RIAA
By "not affiliated" you mean "except through the K-Street Project right?" They've shown in the past that they can get favorable legislation pushed through both houses and past the president without much trouble at all. Often it's even fast tracked!
Too bad most people don't "read the net" like that. Sure your average Slashdot reader is going to know more about this now, but most people don't seem to venture much past the major media outlets, even on the internet. I doubt you get much descussion about Jury nullification on myspace.
The problem is that there is no advocate for Juries, unlike Judges and Lawyers who spend a lot of time trying to massage any laws into something that is favorable to them. There are no lobbyists for juries. over the years we've gotten to the point where Juries have virtually no power except what is explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.
That's not to say there isn't room for improvement. I'd love to be able to syncronize the libraries of various versions of iTunes installed on the same network, especially between operating systems that have different rules for escaping foreign characters on the filesystem. IMHO, it's already better than 95% of it's competitors, especially the ones that companies like Sony force you to use if you want to use their hardware. Even if the Google player is better, if it can't sync an iPod it's going to be an also-ran.
Uh, this is certainly not the first time this has come up on Slashdot. Do you expect the authors to explain what Linux is every time one of those stores comes up? If you're one of the 5% of Slashdot readers who didn't know what this story was about, do you think there might be a resource you could use?
Eh, it's not hard to get Dells with a Radeon X300 or the like in it. It's not going to win any contests, but you can certainly play Half-Life on it. These are sub $1000 laptops too.
More than that, the first encounter had the humans using a light based drive (basically a giant laser attached to the tail end). They made it a laser so it could be modulated to send messages back to Earth. During the first encounter with the Kzin, the one "nearly insane" crewmember (because he had occasional violent thoughts) was the one that realized it could be used as a weapon.
Of course Niven is a hippy and didn't really like writing about war, so most of the Earth-Kzin stuff is handled by other writers.
One thing that's been bothering me. What do you mean by "lusting after another woman"? Does this include turning your head when an attractive woman passes by? Thinking about attractive women at all? Dreaming about them? If so, you've just set up a wonderful self-guilt machine that you can milk to make you hate yourself for almost no reason at all! On the good chance that you're Catholic, I must commend you, it's something all good Catholics are taught to strive for. Sometimes I swear that the entire Catholic religion was built on guilt.
OTOH, if you have a more realistic defintion, like not masturbating while thinking about a woman, well I can easily see how you can realistically control that.
The second path is much healthier too. The first one will only end up with you developing a resentment of women and a frustrated wife.
I think if you look at the history of it, you'll notice that IE didn't really take off until it was made part of the default install.
IE didn't capture massive market share because it was way better than Netscape (although it was better for quite some time), it captured the market share because it was the default browser of Windows. The kind of people who actually download and upgrade browsers are the kind of people who run Firefox for the most part. I don't think IE7 is going to put a major dent in the usage patterns of your typical website, and most of its gains will be from the IE6/5 crowd as they buy new computers that have IE7 preinstalled instead of IE5.
Controversal flim recieves media attention, film at 11!
Brokeback was never super popular, but there is that dedicated following of fans that watch it over and over, unlike many of those Blockbusters where attendance for the first week was strong but sharply declined in the subsequent weeks. Brokeback started out slow, but didn't decline nearly as fast.