That is why, once the states have done their agreement on how to simplify the process, they need to get congress to pass legistlation to enable this. Technically it would be a federal collection distributed to the states. Previous attempts to do this have faltered as the direct-sales lobby has argued that it would be ruinous for small businesses to have to deal with every state and local taxing jurisdiction.
That is why the normalization of rates and of procedures is so key to this whole thing, because it reduces the primary objection to it.
One effect that this whole no-taxation thing has done is to encourage businesses to locate outside of the states where their customers are, so that fewer of their customers need to have sales taxes collected. Thus a state with a lot of customers looses out twice. It loses out on the sales tax itself and it loses out because the mailorder/ecommerce firm decided to locate itself in, say, Nevada rather than California.
To say that the mailorder/ecommerce firm does not have any impact on local infrastructure is a bit decptive. All of the roads and other delivery infrastructure does need to be in place.
It doesn't say in the article, but if they are doing this fairly then there needs to be a split between the sending and the recieving state of the revenues.
But even more than that there needs to be a single reporting form and system (which seems like they are proposing from the limited information in the article). Just filling out the sales tax form for California is a big pain in the butt for our small business. If we had to obtain a resale number and fill out a separate form for every one of the 50 states, some of which might want monthly, others quarterly, and others annual reports on different deadlines...and that is not even starting on all the various city and county jurisdictions.
Apparently 9.95 buys you unlimited listening of a wide variety of music, no burning (yet).
A separate 9.95 buys you unlimited listening of the entire Naxos library of classical recordings plus the ability to burn 10 of them per month onto CDs (is that where the 99 cents number comes from 9.95/10?). Anyway once you are talking about classical 10 per month is a lot (would the entire 70 minute 9th symphony of Beethoven count as one song? If so it is a steal)
Anyhow from some of the posts here it is clear that some folks just want something for nothing and are able to go to some twisted rationalizations to justify it.
By taking the initiative in this MS can create an XML schema that neatly includes ALL of the featureset and terminology of MS Word/Excel/etc.
Which then by virtue of market share becomes standard. It is actually in their best interest to publish it clearly. Then the other potential competitors will feel strong pressure to fit their software to match MS and have no real excuse why they can't. If MS waited there would be some other standard emerging and MS would be pressured by customers to adopt it. Then it would be MS having to shoehorn its document logic into some other form and not the other way around.
While other potential competitors are playing catch-up with making their documents fit into the MS schema MS can be busy thinking about the next thing to do.
So frankly I expect the word document xml (and excel and the rest) to actually be quite clear and documented but very aligned to how MS Word sees a document, which will likely impress others as obtuse.
Same reason that they picked smaller companies. A larger company might have a legal relationship with a national law firm. A small company, if they have representation at all, will most likely only have a relationship with a local law firm. Dealing with court appearances across the country makes a legal defense more expensive. If they sued my company (in So Cal) I could cobble together a holding action defense out of a minimum number of attorney hours, personal time, and no travel costs.
If this gets at least some effective anti-spam legislation on the books then let's look at what an acceptable anti-spam legistlation meeting the DMA's requirement would need to be a good thing.
First it would need enforcement with teeth. Long, sharp, pointy teeth. No itty bitty fine and a clear ability to get by the shelters and shell corporations that the spammers set up to distance themselves from their dirty work.
Second it would need to have no cascading opt-ins. Nobody has any control over what 'marketing partnerships' (which is really just old-fashioned selling of mailing lists) a company engages in so any opt-in should not automaticaly transfer.
Third there should be an option for an enforcable global opt-out. I know that the DMA hates this but I regard it as necessary. We have some e-mail address that just serve business purposes, i.e. info@.... and sales@... amd service@... and webmaster@... and so forth yet these get the worst quantites of spam because they appear on the web site and are picked up by the spiders.
But frankly having the DMA not opposing everything means that at least some legislation can be passed (unless the powerfull breast and penis enlargement lobby can block it!)
I have been looking at watercooling designs, particularly one that could be used to move the heat outside of the house since my home office has TWO P4 noise/heat makers in it.
Two questions I hoped that someone could answer are.
1. Is there a practical way of water-cooling the PSU?
2. has anybody considered placing the hard disk inside some sort of water jacket? I am envisioning some sort of double-walled polybag that the drive would slide into, much like is often done for shipping now.
Is that it will put pressure on MS to lower its large-scale OEM pricing to Gateway (and others), which is how we wound up with office-preinstalled-on-everything in the first place. The net will be lower prices to consumers, and maybe some lost revenue to Microsoft, but if you are predicting the decline and fall of Office as the standard you are being way too unrealistic.
Still, I think it would be really nervy to offer Open Office bundled on all computers.
Re:According to my calculations...
on
Unmaking The Game
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Exactly how those articles support your assertion that the EQ economy will go bust in two years is unclear at best. This is in particular suspect since, as a completely artificial construct Verant can adjust it any way they wish.
There is another angle to this. Not only to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo get a royalty from every game sold, but they are also in competition with each other for game titles.
So lets suppose you are a game developer. You can release on one, two, or all three of the platforms, but each platform is a costly port.
Two of the platforms make a big point of making it hard for pirated copies of your game to run and the third does not. Would that make a difference in which of the three platforms you release on?
After all a pirated copy of a game costs the console maker a royalty payment but it costs the sofware developer a whole sale.
I had read elsewhere that NZ also effectively banned GTA3 because the most stringent rating in NZ is suitable for 15 and up and the bit about using and then killing prostitutes for their money was over the top.
The thing which I feel is irresponsible in all this is that BMX games are a field that usually would be predominated in sales by pre-teens. So dressing up a BMX game with racy graphics and then saying that it is only for adults is a bit like the cigarette comanies using cartoon characters and saying that they aren't marketing to kids.
It was not that great an ad in the first place, but beyond that, come on, it was advertizing, and a pretty fluff piece at that.
Do we expect some big shocking expose here that shows how Albert Einstien, despite his prominet appearance in Apple ads, never in fact owned a Macintosh! Oh the shame! Oh the horror! How low will they stoop just to sell computers!
I mean, with the life-and-death issues going on in the world we are supposed to get upset that it wasn't the real picture of the person and that she had ties to the ad agency that created the ad. Oh the horror! I bet she was even paid to write that ad! How incredibly mercenary it was of her!
Sorry, but if you read the other articles he stole quite a number of things besides the movie itself. The fact that he showed what he had stolen to the review site was just how he used some of the stolen material.
It might make a difference if they were in a dumpster in a parking lot, but whether they were on a table in a break room or in a vault it is still theft.
The Internet News article said that the 450K was the actual cost of the items stolen. They guy apparently had quite a horde of stolen stuff from all of the films that he had worked on.
No, this will not be prosecuted as a breach-of-contract. It will most likely be prosecuted as plain and simple grand theft. Lucasfilm will most likely not try to sue this guy for financial damages because this guy hardly has the money to be worth the suit.
What is more important to Lucasfilm is a publicized case to make folks think twice about lifting stuff from a film set (as happened very recently from the set of The Cat in the Hat film).
The internet news article said that the 450K was the actual cost of the items found in his appartment, and that the potential lost revenue from the early review was incalculable. Apparently this guy had stolen a lot of stuff.
Can anybody tell me why, among the arguments, they did not challenge the constitutionality of the law on the basis of it being ex-post-facto?
In other words the 'facto' of any copyright is the original publishing of the work. In other words at the time of the publishing of the work the creator got the right to use the work for X years and the public got the right to use the work after X years. In other words copyright laws give things to both the creator and the public. To, years later, delay the date at which the public gets the rights which they have had since the work was published in fact is taking something from the public after the fact
So in fact congress could set the copyright to whatever limited period they wished but what they couldn't have done is to apply that new limit to works that have already had their copyright length set.
As I said, there must be something that I am missing, because it seems so obvious. Can anybody explain?
There are many different measures of profit. If you leave off the prorated R&D and associated company overhead I would likely suspect that even the Xbox and dreamcast are 'making money'.
Everyone is positioning this as a Microsoft vs the modders and linux fans thing. Since the PRIMARY use of these modchips are to run copied games then the ones then indeed Microsoft loses money in reduced fees from the software sales but the ones that really lose money are the software manufacturers. Right now the three big console manufacturers are fighting tooth and nail to line up the most popular existing and best upcoming software titles, and even among the games that come out on multiple platforms which ones will be the ones that are the primary platform. So imagine you are a game software company. Would you be influenced in your decision by which of the console vendors does the best job of protecting your sales by fighting software copying?
If someone came up with a modchip that allowed you to run Linux and still prevented copied games from running then Microsoft would be unlikely to care at all.
I'm guessing that the main reason the Linux on Xbox hackers are focusing so much on modded boxes is that otherwise they would have to get a license and pay fees to Microsoft just like any other Xbox title. And to the linux community the idea of having to pay a fee to Microsoft and include a Microsoft accepable EULA would be an anathema (not to mention a violation of the GPL).
Yes, it does put the burden of proof on you, but less than most folks are thinking. One of the provisions of the law is that they cannot interfere with the distribution of files for which you DO have a right to distribute. So make sure that your P2P machine has a big bunch of files for which you do have a right to distribute...GPL software would be a good choice.
So then if the record company does launch, for example a DOS attack on you then you can claim that they were interfering with your ability to distribute files that you had the right to distribute.
The big kicker here is not that you can sue them for damages, but rather that their actions are not protected by the bill...they are criminal hacking and can be prosecuted as a criminal case! Moreover anybody involved with planning it could be charged with conspiracy.
Trying to take the law into your own hands via Mr. Berman' bill is a dangerous activity. Step one foot out of its protections and you could wind up in jail. i sustpect that it will mostly be used as a threat 'remove these files from your computer or we will...'
This is a moderately good description of part of how your head percieves sound as coming from a position but is completely irrelevant to how visual depth is percieved.
One thing that will make or break this technology is how precise your head position has to be. It would seem to me that only an inch or so would put your left eye where your right should be. Not many folks are used to having to hold their heads that still while using a computer.
Frankly all those charities, plus the retailers, have a well-defined class action suit against the firms doing the hijacking of the commissions. And when you put in front of a jury a long list of charities that had commissions hijacked by a company that has to organize on a tiny island to avoid copyright infringement suits and start talking about punitive damages do you think they are going to be impressed for a minute by what is hidden on page six of an EULA? HA! Then you might even be able to persue criminal conspiracy to commit fraud charges against anybody involved with implementing the scheme. This could get real ugly real fast.
I too expected to see this experiment. In particular I like the fact that, like the discovery of the nucleus (which was mentioned), it discovered something entirely different than what it was originally designed for. Moreover both results completely changed the notion of what the universe was like.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why the normalization of rates and of procedures is so key to this whole thing, because it reduces the primary objection to it.
To say that the mailorder/ecommerce firm does not have any impact on local infrastructure is a bit decptive. All of the roads and other delivery infrastructure does need to be in place.
It doesn't say in the article, but if they are doing this fairly then there needs to be a split between the sending and the recieving state of the revenues.
But even more than that there needs to be a single reporting form and system (which seems like they are proposing from the limited information in the article). Just filling out the sales tax form for California is a big pain in the butt for our small business. If we had to obtain a resale number and fill out a separate form for every one of the 50 states, some of which might want monthly, others quarterly, and others annual reports on different deadlines...and that is not even starting on all the various city and county jurisdictions.
A separate 9.95 buys you unlimited listening of the entire Naxos library of classical recordings plus the ability to burn 10 of them per month onto CDs (is that where the 99 cents number comes from 9.95/10?). Anyway once you are talking about classical 10 per month is a lot (would the entire 70 minute 9th symphony of Beethoven count as one song? If so it is a steal)
Anyhow from some of the posts here it is clear that some folks just want something for nothing and are able to go to some twisted rationalizations to justify it.
Which then by virtue of market share becomes standard. It is actually in their best interest to publish it clearly. Then the other potential competitors will feel strong pressure to fit their software to match MS and have no real excuse why they can't. If MS waited there would be some other standard emerging and MS would be pressured by customers to adopt it. Then it would be MS having to shoehorn its document logic into some other form and not the other way around.
While other potential competitors are playing catch-up with making their documents fit into the MS schema MS can be busy thinking about the next thing to do.
So frankly I expect the word document xml (and excel and the rest) to actually be quite clear and documented but very aligned to how MS Word sees a document, which will likely impress others as obtuse.
Same reason that they picked smaller companies. A larger company might have a legal relationship with a national law firm. A small company, if they have representation at all, will most likely only have a relationship with a local law firm. Dealing with court appearances across the country makes a legal defense more expensive. If they sued my company (in So Cal) I could cobble together a holding action defense out of a minimum number of attorney hours, personal time, and no travel costs.
If this gets at least some effective anti-spam legislation on the books then let's look at what an acceptable anti-spam legistlation meeting the DMA's requirement would need to be a good thing. First it would need enforcement with teeth. Long, sharp, pointy teeth. No itty bitty fine and a clear ability to get by the shelters and shell corporations that the spammers set up to distance themselves from their dirty work. Second it would need to have no cascading opt-ins. Nobody has any control over what 'marketing partnerships' (which is really just old-fashioned selling of mailing lists) a company engages in so any opt-in should not automaticaly transfer. Third there should be an option for an enforcable global opt-out. I know that the DMA hates this but I regard it as necessary. We have some e-mail address that just serve business purposes, i.e. info@.... and sales@... amd service@... and webmaster@... and so forth yet these get the worst quantites of spam because they appear on the web site and are picked up by the spiders. But frankly having the DMA not opposing everything means that at least some legislation can be passed (unless the powerfull breast and penis enlargement lobby can block it!)
I have been looking at watercooling designs, particularly one that could be used to move the heat outside of the house since my home office has TWO P4 noise/heat makers in it. Two questions I hoped that someone could answer are. 1. Is there a practical way of water-cooling the PSU? 2. has anybody considered placing the hard disk inside some sort of water jacket? I am envisioning some sort of double-walled polybag that the drive would slide into, much like is often done for shipping now.
Is that it will put pressure on MS to lower its large-scale OEM pricing to Gateway (and others), which is how we wound up with office-preinstalled-on-everything in the first place. The net will be lower prices to consumers, and maybe some lost revenue to Microsoft, but if you are predicting the decline and fall of Office as the standard you are being way too unrealistic. Still, I think it would be really nervy to offer Open Office bundled on all computers.
Exactly how those articles support your assertion that the EQ economy will go bust in two years is unclear at best. This is in particular suspect since, as a completely artificial construct Verant can adjust it any way they wish.
So lets suppose you are a game developer. You can release on one, two, or all three of the platforms, but each platform is a costly port.
Two of the platforms make a big point of making it hard for pirated copies of your game to run and the third does not. Would that make a difference in which of the three platforms you release on?
After all a pirated copy of a game costs the console maker a royalty payment but it costs the sofware developer a whole sale.
I had read elsewhere that NZ also effectively banned GTA3 because the most stringent rating in NZ is suitable for 15 and up and the bit about using and then killing prostitutes for their money was over the top. The thing which I feel is irresponsible in all this is that BMX games are a field that usually would be predominated in sales by pre-teens. So dressing up a BMX game with racy graphics and then saying that it is only for adults is a bit like the cigarette comanies using cartoon characters and saying that they aren't marketing to kids.
Office XP, aka Word 2002 is listed as version 10 as well.
It was not that great an ad in the first place, but beyond that, come on, it was advertizing, and a pretty fluff piece at that. Do we expect some big shocking expose here that shows how Albert Einstien, despite his prominet appearance in Apple ads, never in fact owned a Macintosh! Oh the shame! Oh the horror! How low will they stoop just to sell computers! I mean, with the life-and-death issues going on in the world we are supposed to get upset that it wasn't the real picture of the person and that she had ties to the ad agency that created the ad. Oh the horror! I bet she was even paid to write that ad! How incredibly mercenary it was of her!
Sorry, but if you read the other articles he stole quite a number of things besides the movie itself. The fact that he showed what he had stolen to the review site was just how he used some of the stolen material.
It might make a difference if they were in a dumpster in a parking lot, but whether they were on a table in a break room or in a vault it is still theft.
No, this will not be prosecuted as a breach-of-contract. It will most likely be prosecuted as plain and simple grand theft. Lucasfilm will most likely not try to sue this guy for financial damages because this guy hardly has the money to be worth the suit.
What is more important to Lucasfilm is a publicized case to make folks think twice about lifting stuff from a film set (as happened very recently from the set of The Cat in the Hat film).
The internet news article said that the 450K was the actual cost of the items found in his appartment, and that the potential lost revenue from the early review was incalculable. Apparently this guy had stolen a lot of stuff.
In other words the 'facto' of any copyright is the original publishing of the work. In other words at the time of the publishing of the work the creator got the right to use the work for X years and the public got the right to use the work after X years. In other words copyright laws give things to both the creator and the public. To, years later, delay the date at which the public gets the rights which they have had since the work was published in fact is taking something from the public after the fact
So in fact congress could set the copyright to whatever limited period they wished but what they couldn't have done is to apply that new limit to works that have already had their copyright length set.
As I said, there must be something that I am missing, because it seems so obvious. Can anybody explain?
Two in particular that caught my attention.
1. Cris Rock playing Inspector Cleusau in a Pink Panther Remake.
2. A proposed remake of the classic caper film 'The Italian Job' set in Los Angeles!
Everyone is positioning this as a Microsoft vs the modders and linux fans thing. Since the PRIMARY use of these modchips are to run copied games then the ones then indeed Microsoft loses money in reduced fees from the software sales but the ones that really lose money are the software manufacturers. Right now the three big console manufacturers are fighting tooth and nail to line up the most popular existing and best upcoming software titles, and even among the games that come out on multiple platforms which ones will be the ones that are the primary platform. So imagine you are a game software company. Would you be influenced in your decision by which of the console vendors does the best job of protecting your sales by fighting software copying?
If someone came up with a modchip that allowed you to run Linux and still prevented copied games from running then Microsoft would be unlikely to care at all.
I'm guessing that the main reason the Linux on Xbox hackers are focusing so much on modded boxes is that otherwise they would have to get a license and pay fees to Microsoft just like any other Xbox title. And to the linux community the idea of having to pay a fee to Microsoft and include a Microsoft accepable EULA would be an anathema (not to mention a violation of the GPL).
I mean when the final specification is released in what, 2004, everyone is going to say "Hey look, Fortran is a really up-to date language?"
Would Ford show the prototype of the 2000 Focus in 2002 and then actually sell the 2000 Focus starting in 2005?
So then if the record company does launch, for example a DOS attack on you then you can claim that they were interfering with your ability to distribute files that you had the right to distribute.
The big kicker here is not that you can sue them for damages, but rather that their actions are not protected by the bill...they are criminal hacking and can be prosecuted as a criminal case! Moreover anybody involved with planning it could be charged with conspiracy.
Trying to take the law into your own hands via Mr. Berman' bill is a dangerous activity. Step one foot out of its protections and you could wind up in jail. i sustpect that it will mostly be used as a threat 'remove these files from your computer or we will...'
One thing that will make or break this technology is how precise your head position has to be. It would seem to me that only an inch or so would put your left eye where your right should be. Not many folks are used to having to hold their heads that still while using a computer.
Frankly all those charities, plus the retailers, have a well-defined class action suit against the firms doing the hijacking of the commissions. And when you put in front of a jury a long list of charities that had commissions hijacked by a company that has to organize on a tiny island to avoid copyright infringement suits and start talking about punitive damages do you think they are going to be impressed for a minute by what is hidden on page six of an EULA? HA! Then you might even be able to persue criminal conspiracy to commit fraud charges against anybody involved with implementing the scheme. This could get real ugly real fast.
I too expected to see this experiment. In particular I like the fact that, like the discovery of the nucleus (which was mentioned), it discovered something entirely different than what it was originally designed for. Moreover both results completely changed the notion of what the universe was like.