I find it really funny that half the comments on this thread talk about how people are leaving California and New York in droves due to the crazy tax schemes like this one.
And yet, here in Texas, I pay sales tax on internet downloads. I pay sales tax on iTunes purchases. I pay sales tax on my WoW subscription because Texas taxes internet entertainment subscriptions.
Apple has retail stores in Texas and thus that likely forces the music tax. I can't imagine that Apple has no stores in New York.
SH-130 and SH-45 in Austin have had this for a few years, since just after they opened the toll roads. It's nothing new.
It's not likely existing roads will be retrofitted with tolls, though; a lot more people get up in arms when they have to start paying tolls on a road their tax dollars already paid to construct.
In Austin, there were a few places where limited-access-style intersections had already been built where they wanted the toll roads to go (such as SH-45 and Parmer, or Loop 1 and Parmer). In both places, they made "free" lanes that you can slip on and off the toll road, to avoid the light and the toll.
Why don't you join Consumer Reports, then ask them to start including power consumption (both on and off) in their television specs and ratings? They are a non-profit third-party organization that does this kind of testing for us.
I'm a consumer reports member. I just sent the following note to them:
Energy consumption is a major factor when considering electronics purchases. As a recent story illustrates (http://www.deviceguru.com/hdtvs-dam-pops-energy-stars-bubble/), a device could consume significantly more energy than advertised, even when it has "earned" an energy star rating. Could you please start to test electronics (especially televisions) with a power monitor device? It would be trivially easy to do so then report the power consumed when on AND off. While other ratings like home appliances are tested for power consumption, I see no data for televisions.
This way, for a small fee, you can make an informed decision before making the first purchase. And by using a third-party non-profit testing organization to hone your buying decisions, you are helping the market drive quality without added government regulation.
Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes. Also remember that many people file jointly, so that $109,000 is really more like a married couple, both of whom work, each making $54,000.
Uhh, no. Stop making up math. Two people making $54,500 each do not equal one taxpayer making $109,000. My wife and I together make around $150,000, but, individually, we make about $75,000 each. Thus we are clearly not in that top bracket you are talking about. Only two-adult families with one income-earning worker might possibly fit in your picture, and those A) are rare and B) benefit from cost savings in other ways.
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each. Think about that. Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes.
That top 10% is a wide range, you know? Why did you just divide the tax burden equally among those at your arbitrary 10% cutoff? If (and I'm making this number up) the top 5% pay 50% of taxes, doesn't that mean the top 5% (using your math) should pay $57,000 in taxes each, while the second 5% (including your favorite $109,000 earner) should only pay $24,000? Or maybe divide it somewhere else? Or maybe recognize that it's a gradual scale and making arbitrary divisions only serves those looking to manipulate statistics?
Most people with that income have lost several times that in their retirement plans in the last year (another made up statistic by me), and would love to give up $24,000 if it meant the economy turned around and they regained the rest of their lost wealth before they wanted to retire.
your hard-earned money
My money does a lot of things, including pay for my lifestyle, but it also pays for the education of other people's children (we have none) and other people's defense and other people's roads (we mostly use toll roads). And yet all of those things benefit us, too, so I'm perfectly happy to pay for them.
Fortunately you benefit from them too, and so you get to pay as well. Isn't civilized society a great place to live?
Then come up with something common, but unique for each site.
Like perhaps use Mp4sd as in "My password for slashdot". When you open a new tab and want to check your Netflix queue, use Mp4nf. It's unique enough that a collision one place doesn't result in everything being lost. Though obviously it's not sufficient to avoid someone who keylogs an unmasked password from discerning the pattern.
Then again, how often is someone going to look at each password out of thousands and thousands stolen to determine any sort of pattern? They're more likely to let a computer try the exact same password at other sites, and just throw away any failures.
I think the point of the cap is to extract more money from the people who use more of the bandwidth.
If you're an optimist, Charter will use the extra money and the list of people willing to pay for more bandwidth as a guide for where to roll out additional fiber.
If you're a pessimist, Charter just wants to extract more money from the people least likely to switch to their only alternative - dial-up.
Absolutely - - - - as long as they stop advertising all plans below 60mbs as "unlimited".
That's been the problem the previous times bandwidth has been brought up. It's not that caps are bad per se, it's that advertising "unlimited" then implementing a (often hidden) cap is fraud.
And of course, another complication is the fact that last-mile competition is stifled by private ownership of the wire, which together with an undue burden on residents for unlimited fiber pulls, creates a very high barrier to entry for new companies willing to offer truly unlimited service and take market share from the entrenched (literally, in this case) competitors.
I should not have to pay for a digital copy of Jimi hendrix' work. The man is dead and has been for decades. It should be in the public domain as the Founding Fathers wished and as is written in the US Constitution.
While I agreed with everything else you said, I don't think this argument is correct.
Copyright should be based on a fixed duration, such as 25 years, perhaps with a registration or notice requirement for it to take effect, and perhaps with a low-cost renewal option (for perhaps another 25 years).
Copyright should not be based on the author's life, because that A) drastically lowers the value of late-life art compared to early-life art, and B) makes it economically viable to murder artists whose works you would like to misappropriate.
We can solve this problem with significantly shorter fixed durations, requirements that works must contain a copyright notice to have initial coverage, and a fee to extend copyright to weed out the thousands of copyrighted works that lose all value after a very short time (while making it possible for works that still have value to keep making value for their owners for a slightly longer time).
Ok, then the government can simply narrow the slice next time it's up to renew the license. That would force the digital transition anyway, due to the bleed analog broadcasts generate into neighboring spectrum.
(Digital can, too, but it's more easily filtered out.)
And I mourn for the society where every station used it's own broadcast format, and every television has to have five decoders to translate NTSC, PAL, ATSC, and other random formats that a big company decided to force onto the market.
If the state is already permitting the use of various frequencies for commercial companies, surely those companies should be able to use those frequencies as they see fit.
Analog broadcasts bleed over into neighboring channels, and bleed badly between neighboring markets.
Besides, we only have so much bandwidth. If we (the public that owns the bandwidth) license bandwidth to someone, and then they don't use it in a way that benefits us, we can take it back or make them change. It's not like a broadcast license issued in 1954 is an infinite right to use of spectrum.
According to the commenter, this effectively makes company e-mail the only way of sending out digital copies of design documents.
I dunno, seems to me a handy Nokia-brand cellular phone with built-in camera could, given enough time, snap adequate pictures of a computer monitor displaying successive chunks of zoomed-in design documents.
Nothing besides the pay for the senators that should be doing something else.
It's all paid for out of the sale price of the freed spectrum. And that price isn't changing.
---
What bothers me a lot more about all of this is that, barely mentioned as an aside during transition conversation, is that many channels will be moving frequencies of their digital stations during the transition.
Every single local station in Austin has a digital broadcast already. I receive them all wonderfully with my little antenna plugged into my Dish Network DVR, so I can tune three channels at once (two satellite, one OTA).
However - I only have a UHF antenna. If the digital broadcasts move back to their old, analog slots on transition day, then 1) All my presets break. 2) I might lose any stations that move back into VHF.
That means folks like me, who are already "prepared" for the transition, might have problems too. Those are all problems I can solve (only Fox is a VHF station in Austin on analog, and I can live without). But what about all the people with converter boxes that needed help getting them set up? Are we all going to have to make rounds with our friends & families to rescan channels to find the new locations?
This really just isn't clear at all. I wish they would work this out by shifting markets one at a time, perhaps starting on the east coast and working west, so it's not the whole country having problems all at once. And that's why I think a slower transition makes more sense.
I'm posting from a MacBook Pro with a matte display, bought last November.
I compared the glossy and the matte laptops side by side in an Apple store. (They were the same price I believe, but obviously if buying a MacBook Pro price isn't my biggest concern.) With the matte laptop, I saw a crisp screen with vibrant colors. With the glossy laptop, I saw my dad and the sales guy reflected in the glass.
As I said, I'm posting on a matte display version.
You don't have a lifestyle that requires a multi-million dollar salary to maintain, or a salary that's derived from getting whacked in the head repeatedly.
But sites can tell when you don't download the ads, and chose to not display the content. I remember something like this coming up a year or two ago here on slashdot.
So yes, OP, you can chose to not download them, but then you might not get the part you wanted to download, either. It might be better to let the site and the advertiser think you saw the ad, then you wink and know better.
These commercial breaks are not 'invasive'. Somebody groping you on the street on your way to work is invasive. You can still choose not to listen to web radio.
I disagree completely. As I sit here at work listening to music, wearing a pair of headphones, I hear the music inside my head, roughly centered between my ears. Having an advertisement unexpected appear in my cranium is intensely invasive, far more so than if it was on a radio in my car or a TV in the room corner that I easily recognize as somewhere not inside my body.
My local NPR outlet kut.org stream the NPR coverage live. I got on with no wait this morning. Given that I'm "working" at the same time, audio-only was plenty good.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it really funny that half the comments on this thread talk about how people are leaving California and New York in droves due to the crazy tax schemes like this one.
And yet, here in Texas, I pay sales tax on internet downloads. I pay sales tax on iTunes purchases. I pay sales tax on my WoW subscription because Texas taxes internet entertainment subscriptions.
Apple has retail stores in Texas and thus that likely forces the music tax. I can't imagine that Apple has no stores in New York.
SH-130 and SH-45 in Austin have had this for a few years, since just after they opened the toll roads. It's nothing new.
It's not likely existing roads will be retrofitted with tolls, though; a lot more people get up in arms when they have to start paying tolls on a road their tax dollars already paid to construct.
In Austin, there were a few places where limited-access-style intersections had already been built where they wanted the toll roads to go (such as SH-45 and Parmer, or Loop 1 and Parmer). In both places, they made "free" lanes that you can slip on and off the toll road, to avoid the light and the toll.
Shocks generate that 1kW only at peak actuation, whereas solar is continuous.
Where exactly on earth is solar power continuous?
Why don't you join Consumer Reports, then ask them to start including power consumption (both on and off) in their television specs and ratings? They are a non-profit third-party organization that does this kind of testing for us.
I'm a consumer reports member. I just sent the following note to them:
Energy consumption is a major factor when considering electronics purchases. As a recent story illustrates (http://www.deviceguru.com/hdtvs-dam-pops-energy-stars-bubble/), a device could consume significantly more energy than advertised, even when it has "earned" an energy star rating. Could you please start to test electronics (especially televisions) with a power monitor device? It would be trivially easy to do so then report the power consumed when on AND off. While other ratings like home appliances are tested for power consumption, I see no data for televisions.
This way, for a small fee, you can make an informed decision before making the first purchase. And by using a third-party non-profit testing organization to hone your buying decisions, you are helping the market drive quality without added government regulation.
Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes. Also remember that many people file jointly, so that $109,000 is really more like a married couple, both of whom work, each making $54,000.
Uhh, no. Stop making up math. Two people making $54,500 each do not equal one taxpayer making $109,000. My wife and I together make around $150,000, but, individually, we make about $75,000 each. Thus we are clearly not in that top bracket you are talking about. Only two-adult families with one income-earning worker might possibly fit in your picture, and those A) are rare and B) benefit from cost savings in other ways.
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each. Think about that. Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes.
That top 10% is a wide range, you know? Why did you just divide the tax burden equally among those at your arbitrary 10% cutoff? If (and I'm making this number up) the top 5% pay 50% of taxes, doesn't that mean the top 5% (using your math) should pay $57,000 in taxes each, while the second 5% (including your favorite $109,000 earner) should only pay $24,000? Or maybe divide it somewhere else? Or maybe recognize that it's a gradual scale and making arbitrary divisions only serves those looking to manipulate statistics?
Most people with that income have lost several times that in their retirement plans in the last year (another made up statistic by me), and would love to give up $24,000 if it meant the economy turned around and they regained the rest of their lost wealth before they wanted to retire.
your hard-earned money
My money does a lot of things, including pay for my lifestyle, but it also pays for the education of other people's children (we have none) and other people's defense and other people's roads (we mostly use toll roads). And yet all of those things benefit us, too, so I'm perfectly happy to pay for them.
Fortunately you benefit from them too, and so you get to pay as well. Isn't civilized society a great place to live?
Then come up with something common, but unique for each site.
Like perhaps use Mp4sd as in "My password for slashdot". When you open a new tab and want to check your Netflix queue, use Mp4nf. It's unique enough that a collision one place doesn't result in everything being lost. Though obviously it's not sufficient to avoid someone who keylogs an unmasked password from discerning the pattern.
Then again, how often is someone going to look at each password out of thousands and thousands stolen to determine any sort of pattern? They're more likely to let a computer try the exact same password at other sites, and just throw away any failures.
I think the point of the cap is to extract more money from the people who use more of the bandwidth.
If you're an optimist, Charter will use the extra money and the list of people willing to pay for more bandwidth as a guide for where to roll out additional fiber.
If you're a pessimist, Charter just wants to extract more money from the people least likely to switch to their only alternative - dial-up.
Absolutely - - - - as long as they stop advertising all plans below 60mbs as "unlimited".
That's been the problem the previous times bandwidth has been brought up. It's not that caps are bad per se, it's that advertising "unlimited" then implementing a (often hidden) cap is fraud.
And of course, another complication is the fact that last-mile competition is stifled by private ownership of the wire, which together with an undue burden on residents for unlimited fiber pulls, creates a very high barrier to entry for new companies willing to offer truly unlimited service and take market share from the entrenched (literally, in this case) competitors.
No pop up, no adds. I'm not sure what you thought I'd see.
I should not have to pay for a digital copy of Jimi hendrix' work. The man is dead and has been for decades. It should be in the public domain as the Founding Fathers wished and as is written in the US Constitution.
While I agreed with everything else you said, I don't think this argument is correct.
Copyright should be based on a fixed duration, such as 25 years, perhaps with a registration or notice requirement for it to take effect, and perhaps with a low-cost renewal option (for perhaps another 25 years).
Copyright should not be based on the author's life, because that A) drastically lowers the value of late-life art compared to early-life art, and B) makes it economically viable to murder artists whose works you would like to misappropriate.
We can solve this problem with significantly shorter fixed durations, requirements that works must contain a copyright notice to have initial coverage, and a fee to extend copyright to weed out the thousands of copyrighted works that lose all value after a very short time (while making it possible for works that still have value to keep making value for their owners for a slightly longer time).
Ok, then the government can simply narrow the slice next time it's up to renew the license. That would force the digital transition anyway, due to the bleed analog broadcasts generate into neighboring spectrum.
(Digital can, too, but it's more easily filtered out.)
And I mourn for the society where every station used it's own broadcast format, and every television has to have five decoders to translate NTSC, PAL, ATSC, and other random formats that a big company decided to force onto the market.
If the state is already permitting the use of various frequencies for commercial companies, surely those companies should be able to use those frequencies as they see fit.
Analog broadcasts bleed over into neighboring channels, and bleed badly between neighboring markets.
Besides, we only have so much bandwidth. If we (the public that owns the bandwidth) license bandwidth to someone, and then they don't use it in a way that benefits us, we can take it back or make them change. It's not like a broadcast license issued in 1954 is an infinite right to use of spectrum.
The fed has altered the deal. Pray they don't alter it further.
According to the commenter, this effectively makes company e-mail the only way of sending out digital copies of design documents.
I dunno, seems to me a handy Nokia-brand cellular phone with built-in camera could, given enough time, snap adequate pictures of a computer monitor displaying successive chunks of zoomed-in design documents.
Nothing besides the pay for the senators that should be doing something else.
It's all paid for out of the sale price of the freed spectrum. And that price isn't changing.
---
What bothers me a lot more about all of this is that, barely mentioned as an aside during transition conversation, is that many channels will be moving frequencies of their digital stations during the transition.
Every single local station in Austin has a digital broadcast already. I receive them all wonderfully with my little antenna plugged into my Dish Network DVR, so I can tune three channels at once (two satellite, one OTA).
However - I only have a UHF antenna. If the digital broadcasts move back to their old, analog slots on transition day, then
1) All my presets break.
2) I might lose any stations that move back into VHF.
That means folks like me, who are already "prepared" for the transition, might have problems too. Those are all problems I can solve (only Fox is a VHF station in Austin on analog, and I can live without). But what about all the people with converter boxes that needed help getting them set up? Are we all going to have to make rounds with our friends & families to rescan channels to find the new locations?
This really just isn't clear at all. I wish they would work this out by shifting markets one at a time, perhaps starting on the east coast and working west, so it's not the whole country having problems all at once. And that's why I think a slower transition makes more sense.
I keep iChat running in webcam setup mode in the screen corner, just to be sure.
I'm posting from a MacBook Pro with a matte display, bought last November.
I compared the glossy and the matte laptops side by side in an Apple store. (They were the same price I believe, but obviously if buying a MacBook Pro price isn't my biggest concern.) With the matte laptop, I saw a crisp screen with vibrant colors. With the glossy laptop, I saw my dad and the sales guy reflected in the glass.
As I said, I'm posting on a matte display version.
Remember, companies have all the rights as people in the US.*
* except when it could inconvenience the company.
You don't have a lifestyle that requires a multi-million dollar salary to maintain, or a salary that's derived from getting whacked in the head repeatedly.
But sites can tell when you don't download the ads, and chose to not display the content. I remember something like this coming up a year or two ago here on slashdot.
So yes, OP, you can chose to not download them, but then you might not get the part you wanted to download, either. It might be better to let the site and the advertiser think you saw the ad, then you wink and know better.
These commercial breaks are not 'invasive'. Somebody groping you on the street on your way to work is invasive. You can still choose not to listen to web radio.
I disagree completely. As I sit here at work listening to music, wearing a pair of headphones, I hear the music inside my head, roughly centered between my ears. Having an advertisement unexpected appear in my cranium is intensely invasive, far more so than if it was on a radio in my car or a TV in the room corner that I easily recognize as somewhere not inside my body.
No, right now it's just Australia's time to be hit by the heat.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2460274.htm
My local NPR outlet kut.org stream the NPR coverage live. I got on with no wait this morning. Given that I'm "working" at the same time, audio-only was plenty good.
If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway
Yeah, but the nice guy probably didn't want to learn that by being laid off in an economy like this, halfway through a school year.
Maybe right now the economy is so bad that people won't rush out to buy junk at 20% off, and it will last longer. =p