Well, that's questionable. But if they do charge a fee, and many of them do, your only recourse as the payee is against the person who issued the bad check, not the bank. The person who issued the bad check might have a recourse against the bank, but considering that the bank has probably covered itself in its operating agreement, that might not be true. AFAIK this has never been litigated, I'd be interested in seeing a precedent if it has.
Yes, and it specifies that "reasonable" means with a warrant issued by a judge specifying what is to be searched and what is to be seized.
No it doesn't. It says that all warrants must be supported by Oath or affirmation and specify what is to be searched and what is to be seized. It doesn't say that all searches must be preceded by a warrant, and it doesn't even say that all warrants must be issued by a judge, though this is arguably included in the term itself.
In any case, even if you argue that all searches require a warrant, or, more likely, that any a warrant must be used wherever reasonably practicable, this changes considerably when we're talking about government owned libraries and library records. After all, the Fourth Amendment is explicitly and implicitly rooted in property rights, despite some activist Supreme Court judges attempts to create a rule otherwise.
Warrantless searches that are merely fishing expeditions without probably cause are Unconstitutional.
There is already a tried and true way of dealing with the lack of competition caused by bundling.
There are a number of them, actually. But most of them don't work very well for software companies.
It is the same one the U.S. originally declared before being paid off. You split the company into multiple companies.
I don't see how that will work with Microsoft. You can't split it across geographical boundaries, because it's software. And you can't really split it across market segments, because the applications are inherently tied to the operating system. It would be like breaking up Gillette and making one company make the razorblades and another make the razors. When all you really would need to do to accomplish the same thing is to just take away Gillette's patents and the competition will come.
The monopoly Microsoft has was created by the government. The proper solution is to stop giving Microsoft the monopoly, and take away its copyright.
I know copyright law is very messed up and needs to be rewritten, but it is not going to be abolished and would cause a lot of problems if it was.
Well, we're not talking about what's going to actually happen. Microsoft isn't going to get split up, and it would cause a lot of problems to split them up. And I frankly don't see what splitting up Microsoft would accomplish. Instead of one monopoly you'd have four.
Of course, the point under dispute is if the FBI (or anyone else) should be able to sift through library records of people they don't (yet) suspect of terrorism.
Nah, the point is that the FBI suspects everyone who uses a library of terrorism.
How about we require a warrant for EVERY goddamned search so that the RIGHT of the people to be secure in their homes, papers and posessions is not abridged?
It's probably not a good idea, but if we changed the Constitution we could do that.
It's only in the freaking Constitution for Christ's sake.
No, the Constitution bans "unreasonable" searches, not "every goddamned search".
Besides that, library records about you aren't located in your home, papers, or possessions.
Regular salaries are payable in checks, which do NOT require a bank account of your own to cash.
True, but if you want to cash them, you're probably going to need to put a copy of your fingerprint on the check as well as pay a somewhat hefty fee. If you really want to complain about the fee and don't think your employer will fire you over it you can probably get out paying it. After all, if the bank the check was written from refuses to cash the check for the amount it is written for, the check has bounced and your employer is responsible for immediate payment. But like forcing your employer to help you cash the check, not everyone has the luxury of assuring that their employer follows the law.
Or perhaps the actions were useless because they were poorly designed and did not address the real problem?
I think both statements are true. The EU's actions were unnecessary, and the EU's actions didn't address the real problem. Microsoft didn't do anything wrong by bundling Media Player. If you want to say that they did something wrong, what it was was charging too much for Windows.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty stupid if you ask me. The only reason Microsoft has a monopoly is because the government gave it one through copyright law. You want my solution? Abolish copyright law.
What needs to happen is MS needs to be required to offer the media player only as a separate application.
Well, ignoring the fact that the EU doesn't have jurisdiction over the rest of the world, even if you did that, you'd also have to force them to charge a certain price. Then they'll just start bundling something else, and before you know it, the government is running Microsoft (in essence, similar to the way governments run most utility companies). If the government really wants to do that, why don't they just start their own Operating System company? They could run it as a non-profit, similar to the US Post Office.
Of course, I still think the best solution would be to just abolish copyright law.
To be fair, Microsoft was fined nearly a billion dollars in addition to being forced to debundle Media Player. The whole issue of whether or not they'd actually take the Media Player out was just a side game of chicken the EU played with Microsoft.
Laws against bundling a monopoly product with other products just doesn't work when the bundled product is intangible (software), and can be obtained for free. If you're bundling a good movie with a shitty one, fine, that could be abuse of a monopoly, because the good movie nor the shitty one can be obtained for free. But Media Player is already something that can be obtained for free, so forcing them to "sell" the two separately is nonsensical.
There is a counterargument to this, though, and that is that Microsoft hasn't in fact debundled the two products. Sure, one can download Media player for free from Microsoft's website, but unless one already has Windows, it doesn't matter, because (the Windows version of) Media Player will only run on Windows (maybe it runs on Wine, but almost certainly not very well without the Windows dlls).
Maybe a better solution, if you really think Microsoft is abusing its monopoly by tying (and I'm skeptical of this), would be to force Microsoft to charge for the Windows version of Media Player. But what would be a proper price? Isn't the Macintosh version of Media Player also free? What does Microsoft get out of that deal?
While we're at it, let's tax Slashdot posts, and email, and smiling, and helping people.
Sales are a good thing. Why should the government discourage the efficient transfer of goods to the person who wants it the most? If anything we should be taxing the opposite; tax the people who waste resources instead of selling them to someone who can put them to good use; replace the sales tax with the property tax.
It is worded this way specifically because California cannot charge taxes on sales that take place in another state.
Yes they can. California can charge California citizens with taxes on just about any activity occurring anywhere in the universe. Do you also think if a California citizen opens up a bank account in Florida that they don't have to pay taxes on the interest earned in Florida?
OTOH, I found out last week that one of my coworkers thought that it was not necessary to pay any income tax on a $22,000 fellowship if you don't get a W-2 for it. Yeah, right...
Maybe it was just a communications issue. After all, it's not "necessary" to pay that income tax.
I am a resident of California, and honestly I feel a little bad when I buy something on the internet that I could have purchased at a retail outlet. This is because I want to do my part to help the state out of its current financial crisis, and sales tax is one of the little ways that I can do this.
So if you feel bad, send in the use tax. Otherwise you have a more important reason to feel bad, you're committing tax evasion.
Why should online businesses not pay the same taxes brick and mortar businesses do?
Because states like to encourage exports. If the state taxed all the sales made to people outside the state as well as ones made to people inside the state, which they're perfectly free to do, businesses would move in droves out of that state and into one without sales tax.
So instead of taxing the businesses, which in the case of online businesses and businesses which ship products can easily move to another state, the states tax the consumer, who would have a much harder time moving based on an issue like sales taxes. To make the tax easier to collect, because people like to evade taxes, states make the corporations collect the tax and hand it over to the state. However, they can't force a company completely located in another state to collect the tax for them.
Put another way, would you want brick and mortar diamond stores in Delaware to collect New Jersey sales taxes from New Jersey residents when they buy from the Delaware corporation? Brick and mortar stores are taxed the same as online stores.
This is a tax on transactions occurring in California.
Most judges and legal scholars agree that a mail-order transaction takes place in the state in which the product is sold, not the state in which it is bought.
The taxes are levied by California's government against California citizens.
And California is forcing a Michigan company to collect those taxes.
They look at Borders records of gross revenues, multiply by the sales tax rate, and send them a bill. Borders neglected to collect the tax from the end-consumer, but they're still liable for it. From now on, Borders will probably start collecting the tax from the consumer, though, along with raising the prices for everyone to pay for the past-taxes due.
That's not the reason, though. A state (or US territory) could easily set up a simplified sales tax for out-of-state purchases that uses a single rate for the entire state. Now you're down to 50-something taxing jurisdictions in the US, which would be freaking simple to calculate.
Access to source code is sometimes useful, but you'll agree it isn't the same thing as 'open source', won't you?
Sure, open source is much more than that.
All I'm saying is that businesses setting up Linux servers are interested in return on investment, not any licensing ideology.
And what I'm saying is that when they get the best return on investment with Linux, it's usually because of the licensing ideology.
The availability of source code may allow them to generate a higher return on investment than they could with a binary-only platform, but that's true whether or not the code is 'open source', ie irrespective of the licensing ideology, which they generally don't care about.
It's not just access to the source. It's access to the source, the ability to change it, the ability to pay anyone else to change it, etc.
I suspect that most corporate users of Linux don't even modify the OS source code anyway.
They might not, but that doesn't mean they don't benefit from the fact that others can modify the source code. If you buy a non-open source product you're basically held hostage by the Corporation with the copyright on the source. At any time they can demand that you pay them whatever exorbitant fee they want to charge you for an upgrade, or even just to fix a bug in the product they've provided. What open source provides you with is the freedom to tell the company that sold you the original product to shove it - that might mean you pay someone else to maintain the product, or it might mean to maintain it in-house. Either way it has a huge impact on the bottom line.
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Well, that's questionable. But if they do charge a fee, and many of them do, your only recourse as the payee is against the person who issued the bad check, not the bank. The person who issued the bad check might have a recourse against the bank, but considering that the bank has probably covered itself in its operating agreement, that might not be true. AFAIK this has never been litigated, I'd be interested in seeing a precedent if it has.
Yes, and it specifies that "reasonable" means with a warrant issued by a judge specifying what is to be searched and what is to be seized.
No it doesn't. It says that all warrants must be supported by Oath or affirmation and specify what is to be searched and what is to be seized. It doesn't say that all searches must be preceded by a warrant, and it doesn't even say that all warrants must be issued by a judge, though this is arguably included in the term itself.
In any case, even if you argue that all searches require a warrant, or, more likely, that any a warrant must be used wherever reasonably practicable, this changes considerably when we're talking about government owned libraries and library records. After all, the Fourth Amendment is explicitly and implicitly rooted in property rights, despite some activist Supreme Court judges attempts to create a rule otherwise.
Warrantless searches that are merely fishing expeditions without probably cause are Unconstitutional.
On that point we agree.
There is already a tried and true way of dealing with the lack of competition caused by bundling.
There are a number of them, actually. But most of them don't work very well for software companies.
It is the same one the U.S. originally declared before being paid off. You split the company into multiple companies.
I don't see how that will work with Microsoft. You can't split it across geographical boundaries, because it's software. And you can't really split it across market segments, because the applications are inherently tied to the operating system. It would be like breaking up Gillette and making one company make the razorblades and another make the razors. When all you really would need to do to accomplish the same thing is to just take away Gillette's patents and the competition will come.
The monopoly Microsoft has was created by the government. The proper solution is to stop giving Microsoft the monopoly, and take away its copyright.
I know copyright law is very messed up and needs to be rewritten, but it is not going to be abolished and would cause a lot of problems if it was.
Well, we're not talking about what's going to actually happen. Microsoft isn't going to get split up, and it would cause a lot of problems to split them up. And I frankly don't see what splitting up Microsoft would accomplish. Instead of one monopoly you'd have four.
Of course, the point under dispute is if the FBI (or anyone else) should be able to sift through library records of people they don't (yet) suspect of terrorism.
Nah, the point is that the FBI suspects everyone who uses a library of terrorism.
How about we require a warrant for EVERY goddamned search so that the RIGHT of the people to be secure in their homes, papers and posessions is not abridged?
It's probably not a good idea, but if we changed the Constitution we could do that.
It's only in the freaking Constitution for Christ's sake.
No, the Constitution bans "unreasonable" searches, not "every goddamned search".
Besides that, library records about you aren't located in your home, papers, or possessions.
Regular salaries are payable in checks, which do NOT require a bank account of your own to cash.
True, but if you want to cash them, you're probably going to need to put a copy of your fingerprint on the check as well as pay a somewhat hefty fee. If you really want to complain about the fee and don't think your employer will fire you over it you can probably get out paying it. After all, if the bank the check was written from refuses to cash the check for the amount it is written for, the check has bounced and your employer is responsible for immediate payment. But like forcing your employer to help you cash the check, not everyone has the luxury of assuring that their employer follows the law.
Perhaps the EU's actions were unnecessary?
Or perhaps the actions were useless because they were poorly designed and did not address the real problem?
I think both statements are true. The EU's actions were unnecessary, and the EU's actions didn't address the real problem. Microsoft didn't do anything wrong by bundling Media Player. If you want to say that they did something wrong, what it was was charging too much for Windows.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty stupid if you ask me. The only reason Microsoft has a monopoly is because the government gave it one through copyright law. You want my solution? Abolish copyright law.
What needs to happen is MS needs to be required to offer the media player only as a separate application.
Well, ignoring the fact that the EU doesn't have jurisdiction over the rest of the world, even if you did that, you'd also have to force them to charge a certain price. Then they'll just start bundling something else, and before you know it, the government is running Microsoft (in essence, similar to the way governments run most utility companies). If the government really wants to do that, why don't they just start their own Operating System company? They could run it as a non-profit, similar to the US Post Office.
Of course, I still think the best solution would be to just abolish copyright law.
XP N stands for "Not with Media Player". I'm serious.
To be fair, Microsoft was fined nearly a billion dollars in addition to being forced to debundle Media Player. The whole issue of whether or not they'd actually take the Media Player out was just a side game of chicken the EU played with Microsoft.
Laws against bundling a monopoly product with other products just doesn't work when the bundled product is intangible (software), and can be obtained for free. If you're bundling a good movie with a shitty one, fine, that could be abuse of a monopoly, because the good movie nor the shitty one can be obtained for free. But Media Player is already something that can be obtained for free, so forcing them to "sell" the two separately is nonsensical.
There is a counterargument to this, though, and that is that Microsoft hasn't in fact debundled the two products. Sure, one can download Media player for free from Microsoft's website, but unless one already has Windows, it doesn't matter, because (the Windows version of) Media Player will only run on Windows (maybe it runs on Wine, but almost certainly not very well without the Windows dlls).
Maybe a better solution, if you really think Microsoft is abusing its monopoly by tying (and I'm skeptical of this), would be to force Microsoft to charge for the Windows version of Media Player. But what would be a proper price? Isn't the Macintosh version of Media Player also free? What does Microsoft get out of that deal?
Of course no one wants the stripped down version because it costs the same as the full-blown version .
Shouldn't it cost more for the stripped down version? According to the EU bureaucrats, it's better.
While we're at it, let's tax Slashdot posts, and email, and smiling, and helping people.
Sales are a good thing. Why should the government discourage the efficient transfer of goods to the person who wants it the most? If anything we should be taxing the opposite; tax the people who waste resources instead of selling them to someone who can put them to good use; replace the sales tax with the property tax.
It is worded this way specifically because California cannot charge taxes on sales that take place in another state.
Yes they can. California can charge California citizens with taxes on just about any activity occurring anywhere in the universe. Do you also think if a California citizen opens up a bank account in Florida that they don't have to pay taxes on the interest earned in Florida?
OTOH, I found out last week that one of my coworkers thought that it was not necessary to pay any income tax on a $22,000 fellowship if you don't get a W-2 for it. Yeah, right...
Maybe it was just a communications issue. After all, it's not "necessary" to pay that income tax.
But don't they do this already in their retail outlets?
Not if they don't already have retail outlets in that state. Which, if they don't, then they're exempt. If they do, then they're not exempt.
1. Give up on sales tax for online vendors
More specifically, don't rely on out-of-state vendors to collect the tax for you.
2. Charge sales tax for the state where the US HQ are (Delaware becomes the the centre of the online shopping universe)
This would be perfectly legal, perfectly fair, and you've hit on the reason the states don't do this.
3. Charge sales tax for the destination address
The already do this. It's called "use tax". They just can't force out-of-state companies to collect it for them.
I am a resident of California, and honestly I feel a little bad when I buy something on the internet that I could have purchased at a retail outlet. This is because I want to do my part to help the state out of its current financial crisis, and sales tax is one of the little ways that I can do this.
So if you feel bad, send in the use tax. Otherwise you have a more important reason to feel bad, you're committing tax evasion.
Why should online businesses not pay the same taxes brick and mortar businesses do?
Because states like to encourage exports. If the state taxed all the sales made to people outside the state as well as ones made to people inside the state, which they're perfectly free to do, businesses would move in droves out of that state and into one without sales tax.
So instead of taxing the businesses, which in the case of online businesses and businesses which ship products can easily move to another state, the states tax the consumer, who would have a much harder time moving based on an issue like sales taxes. To make the tax easier to collect, because people like to evade taxes, states make the corporations collect the tax and hand it over to the state. However, they can't force a company completely located in another state to collect the tax for them.
Put another way, would you want brick and mortar diamond stores in Delaware to collect New Jersey sales taxes from New Jersey residents when they buy from the Delaware corporation? Brick and mortar stores are taxed the same as online stores.
This is a tax on transactions occurring in California.
Most judges and legal scholars agree that a mail-order transaction takes place in the state in which the product is sold, not the state in which it is bought.
The taxes are levied by California's government against California citizens.
And California is forcing a Michigan company to collect those taxes.
Will they have to pay past sales tax?
Unless they reached some sort of settlement, yes.
If so, how do they collect it?
They look at Borders records of gross revenues, multiply by the sales tax rate, and send them a bill. Borders neglected to collect the tax from the end-consumer, but they're still liable for it. From now on, Borders will probably start collecting the tax from the consumer, though, along with raising the prices for everyone to pay for the past-taxes due.
This law only applies to goods sold to CA residents.
Not exactly. The law was ruled to apply to Borders Group Inc., which isn't a CA resident but a Michigan corporation.
That's not the reason, though. A state (or US territory) could easily set up a simplified sales tax for out-of-state purchases that uses a single rate for the entire state. Now you're down to 50-something taxing jurisdictions in the US, which would be freaking simple to calculate.
Most people have a freezer regardless if they use it or not.
And if they don't use it, it isn't likely to break. And if they use it more than normal, it's likely to break sooner.
And this has what exactly to do with what we were talking about?
And what about when your freezer breaks?
Access to source code is sometimes useful, but you'll agree it isn't the same thing as 'open source', won't you?
Sure, open source is much more than that.
All I'm saying is that businesses setting up Linux servers are interested in return on investment, not any licensing ideology.
And what I'm saying is that when they get the best return on investment with Linux, it's usually because of the licensing ideology.
The availability of source code may allow them to generate a higher return on investment than they could with a binary-only platform, but that's true whether or not the code is 'open source', ie irrespective of the licensing ideology, which they generally don't care about.
It's not just access to the source. It's access to the source, the ability to change it, the ability to pay anyone else to change it, etc.
I suspect that most corporate users of Linux don't even modify the OS source code anyway.
They might not, but that doesn't mean they don't benefit from the fact that others can modify the source code. If you buy a non-open source product you're basically held hostage by the Corporation with the copyright on the source. At any time they can demand that you pay them whatever exorbitant fee they want to charge you for an upgrade, or even just to fix a bug in the product they've provided. What open source provides you with is the freedom to tell the company that sold you the original product to shove it - that might mean you pay someone else to maintain the product, or it might mean to maintain it in-house. Either way it has a huge impact on the bottom line.
If the Sun gives you an adequete supply, of gravity fed water, then I guess it's pretty close to free.