Sorry; no. The 73,954 pages of the Federal Income Tax Code blow that theory to hell.
The Federal Income Tax Code isn't Oklahoma's Income Tax Code, and the tax being talked about is a state tax.
CEOs and other parasitic rich pricks leverage the countless legal deductions to pay the minimum amount of tax they are legally required to pay.
FTFY. Just like every other parasitic prick on the planet. I bet you don't pay more than you are required to, do you? Am I a "parasitic prick" because I gave a thousand bucks to the Red Cross last year so I would owe less in federal taxes? I'd rather see RC get the money than the feds and I'm a bad person?
They could work with industry to produce a external antenna protocol for bluetooth - i.e. you tether your phone to the car and utilise the car's antenna for 3G/4G.
Instead, tether your phone to the car via WiFi and utilize the car's antenna for 3G/4G.
Instead, pay GM $5 for a proprietary solution instead.
So, GM is installing a 3G/4G modem feeding a WiFi hotspot using standard protocols that anything with a WiFi connection can talk to, and this is a "proprietary" solution?
That said, at least with open source you have the chance to find such things, so there is that.
Even with "open source" you still have to get the source code to your spiffy new router. Then you have to do a code review to see what's there. Then compile it, then get the libraries and try to link it, then try comparing the binary just to find out that it will have natural differences from what is installed in the router IF you can extract the binary once it has been flashed into it. (Do many firmware-upgradeable routers have an "extract" function, or only "install"?)
So, if by "chance to find such things" you really mean "install your own code that will overwrite anything that isn't supposed to be there", yes. But to actually FIND the backdoors you need to extract the binary and decompile it anyway. The source may be a guide to what you expect to see, but with optimization and compiler tricks the source may not be all that helpful.
Of course it is doable. All it takes is money. In business such an expense would be called a "fixed cost". I.e., it is the same cost no matter how many subscribers you manage to get. It costs the same if you get 100% of the business or 0%.
What makes it unlikely to happen is that because of the existing cable company, any new provider is unlikely to get more than 50% of the possible subscribers, and likely it will be much less. There is an inherent inertia involved in convincing someone to change their service provider. If the new provider is unlikely to be able to cover even the fixed costs of providing service to an area by getting enough customers, there is no incentive for him to even try. And if the existing company sees the new guy trying to undercut its prices, they'll just lower rates to keep the customers they have and the new guy will wind up with even less of a return on investment as they have to cut their prices even lower.
That's the cause of the "monopoly" that many folks want to blame on the government. "The government" is quite happy to get franchise fees from as many companies as it can, they have no incentive to create a de jure monopoly, and in any case, that Big Bad Government that you think has created the Evil Monopoly is your local city or municipality, not the feds.
so even when all you want is a generic white-box PC for a secretary's desk that will only ever run MS Word and a web browser for the intranet, you still go through almost the same procurement process as for parts for a stealth fighter and end up buying a machine from Dell that is guaranteed to have specific parts,
Yes. Because someone has to maintain that box, and they're probably maintaining many many others. Someone has to deal with it when it doesn't work the way it is supposed to, or has to treat it in special ways because it doesn't fit in with the rest.
You've apparently never come across "identical" computers or hardware that was different in subtle yet significant ways. I have.
I've just recently had a commodity PC that, for some reason that nobody understands, will freeze up for up to fifteen minutes while booting, and then continue on as if nothing was wrong. Same as all the other PCs I've bought from this vendor, but none of them do that. They can't reproduce the problem because they use Windows and Windows doesn't invoke this particular bug.
In the more distant past, the wonderful company called VIA (Chinese, but the "other" China) changed the specifications for the IEEE1394 PHY chip that is used in many 1394 interface cards. I had previously tested and vetted that PHY as suitable for the data collection systems I put together, and then one system just didn't work like it was supposed to. I checked the interface card to make sure it had the "right" chip on it. I swapped two apparently identical cards -- one worked, one did not. I looked at the specs I had already downloaded for it. The problem couldn't be that, it must be somewhere else. Long story short, I looked at debugging output from the system and yes, indeed, the chip specs had changed in a significant way and was no longer suitable for my projects. I now have to go out of my way to make sure that I buy cards with the one PHY chip that I know has the correct specs, and I have to tell others who think "it says its a Firewire card, it should be ok" that THEY have to look for specific chips on those cards, too. (Agere, FW series, BTW.) In other words, I've had to come up with a "procurement document" for something as simple as an IEEE1394 interface card.
Further, in many cases, the procurement rules the government comes up with is because, in the past, people who shouldn't be making decisions about what to buy have decided "that's good enough" and wound up wasting money when it turned out there were considerations for what was "good enough" that they weren't aware of. It is easier, and cheaper, to hand someone in an office a document that says "this is what you are going to buy" than to come back later and fix a problem when what they bought doesn't actually work with the other things already there.
... and throwing them away when they break.
And there's yet another reason for procurement (and disposal) rules. Throwing things away when they break and buying another one is more costly in most cases than simply buying the right, working thing from the beginning.
And you do not want government employees deciding to "throw things away" without rules for that, too, because too many government employees will "throw things away" -- and then take the thing they've thrown away home, or sell them on eBay, because it wasn't really broken, they just wanted to make a little extra money.
In all likelihood, except for a very limited number of military-grade equipment (and sometmes even then) the widgets are probably made on the same assembly line in China.
I used aircraft parts as an example, and the likelyhood that the correct parts are made on the same assembly lines in China as the 30 cent Walmart versions is vanishingly small.
To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
If we could guarantee that the widgets they buy from Walmart are made to acceptable standards and with verifiable provenance when necessary, I'd say sure.
But even though a 30 cent bolt from Walmart looks like a $5 bolt from McDonnell Douglas, the latter has been certified as to material and strength. There is an issue with counterfeit aircraft parts, and aircraft do break when the wrong parts are installed. You wouldn't trust Walmart to provide your aircraft parts, I hope, so buying them there would be a mistake.
The address is used by the post office, and it matters only to the person who is getting the check. Not to me, as long as it is the correct address for the recipient of the money. It feels no different to put a check into an envelope addressed to X than to Y. The address on the envelope doesn't tell anyone WHY you owe the money, only to whom you are sending it. Just one more example, of many, is if I decide to buy an apartment from a rental agency instead of continuing to rent. The address on the envelope will be the same -- the office of the rental agency. Or maybe not. It doesn't make any difference to the kind of transaction.
If the person who had the car received the full sum of money, you received the car, and you have no further business with them, it's apparent that the car was sold and now belongs to you.
"The full sum of money". What does the "full sum of money" feel or look like in a transaction, and how do you know someone else is getting "the full sum" when you aren't giving it to him? Why shouldn't I assume that the $100 I give someone to rent one of their cars is "the full sum" and decide that picking the car up is the last business I do with them? After all, it's giving them "the full sum" and "have no further business" that makes it a sale and not a rental, right? No?
That you're sending money to someone else in repayment for a large sum of money that they gave you doesn't take away from that fact.
What fact? Sending someone money on a monthly basis doesn't prove there was a sale. You only know there was a sale because the piece of paper that went with the transaction said it was. The point is that the ACTIONS taking place do not define the kind of transaction, it is the contractual parts that do. "That fact" is not defined by how you pay someone, it's defined by the contract.
You are arguing from a knowledge of the paperwork involved that the actions fit the kind of transaction, and the discussion is how the transaction looks and feels (the actions) do not define the transaction itself. "It looks like a sale, it feels like a sale..." is meaningless because a sale can look and feel just like renting or leasing and vice versa.
And sure, "the down payment goes to the seller", but as I made clear in the paragraph prior to the part you quoted, it's going to them not because the seller is demanding it,
And to whom would the payment go if not the seller? Would you sell someone something and tell them to pay someone else for it? Of course not. Why would you want to force money you can get directly to be funneled through a third party? Of course the seller wants to be paid the down payment.
but even if you don't, the lender stills pays the full amount on your behalf
No he does not. The lender does not pay the down payment, I do. The down payment is MY responsibility, not the lender's. The down payment is not money I owe to the lender because I have already paid it. The lender only cares how much I want to borrow to cover the rest (other than any artificial requirements he puts on how much equity he wants me to have in the collateral -- the car -- to help ensure I don't find defaulting on the loan a profitable action, before he will make the loan.)
I.e. It's a factor in your arrangement with the lender, not the seller, since all the seller sees is that they're receiving the full amount.
The seller sees that he's getting the full amount because he adds the amount I give him for the down payment to the amount the lender gives him (if the lender actually gives him anything, which isn't a given). I don't see the check from the lender -- there probably won't be one, it will be an electronic transaction, if there is one. And if the seller is doing the financing, he does NOT get the full amount, he gets the payments directly fr
Hold up. You've glossed right over an important distinction: who are you paying?
That is irrelevant. The address on the envelope is a trivial distinction compared to the fact you are paying on a regular basis. And in some cases (as in the car lease/buying example), the address/payee may be exactly the same for both. For a land contract financed by the seller, you're paying the seller just as if you were paying rent to him for a rental transaction.
In your scenarios that involve purchases using down payments, your interaction with the seller doesn't actually go as you've suggested. How it actually goes is like this: you pay them the full amount and you receive the item in exchange. End of story.
Uhhh, no. You pay the down payment, which is not the full amount. That's why it is called a "down payment" and not "the full amount". If you are using an outside lender, THEY pay the rest of the money to the seller, and then you pay the outside lender over time. No, sorry, neither when I bought my last car nor my house did I write a check for the full amount, I wrote a check for only the down payment.
And if the down payment is going to a third party,
The down payment goes to the seller. The lender deals with what is left to pay.
The purchase was still complete up-front, however, which should be readily apparent.
It isn't that readily apparent, because you're paying over time. The physical actions are the same. You pay either the rent or the loan, but it is still paying over time. The name on the check depends on who you owe, not why you owe it.
You talk about "the full amount" as if that were a static concept. There's a pair of shoes I find for $1 at a garage sale. That $1 is the "full amount" for that sale. I go to the bowling alley and pay $1 for renting the shoes. Is that $1 the full value of the shoes? Could be, depends on how used they are. In any case, that $1 is the full amount of the rental. In both cases I pay $1 for possession of shoes. It's indistinguishable from what I've done whether it was a sale or a rental transaction, it's only the terms for the transaction that tell me which is which. (And it would be quite possible for that bowling alley to clear out old shoes by actually selling them for $1, in which case it is impossible to tell from what actually happens whether it is a sale or rental.)
Regardless of the paper, I don't think your examples look, feel, or smell like sales at all. Consider what a purchase normally looks like: money changes hands and a buyer takes ownership.
"Ownership" is a legal concept, not a physical one. "Possession" is the physical action that occurs. I hand money to someone at a shoe store, I take possession of some shoes. I hand money to someone at a bowling alley, I take possession of some shoes. The "ownership" depends on the terms of the transaction, which in one case is a sale and in the other a rental. But the physical actions are identical. Imagine someone who had never been to a bowling alley watching people rent shoes. Do you think he's going to assume they're renting, or would he assume it was a sale?
In the case of your car lease, few people would confuse your "small bucket of money" for the actual price of the car, which could very well be an order of magnitude or more greater.
However, it looks just like, it smells just like, it feels just like, the down payment that one would make in buying a car on time. Down payments aren't the full price of the car, they're only a fraction of it.
Moreover, you clearly had not taken ownership of the car, since what sane person continues to pay a seller for something they already own (note: you may have to pay a lender, but your business with a seller, by definition, always wraps up at the point of sale)?
The "sane person" who has bought an item on time continues to pay for the item after he assumes possession. Who he pays depends on who gave him the credit, and if it is the seller, then yes, indeed, he pays the seller. Your business with the seller does not conclude until he has been paid the amount agreed upon, "by definition" or otherwise. If he sells your payment contract to someone else, that's a different issue, but car dealers, for one, are quite happy to finance your new car purchase. General Motors even created a financing division for such business: GMAC.
The only difference between a lease and a sale on credit for a car, in particular, would be the address on the envelope for the check you send every month. If the same company that handles lease payments also handles loan payments, then there would be no difference in who the check goes to.
Bowling shoes? They're rented at a fraction of the cost. The shoes at the mall, however? Purchased at full price.
"Full price" is defined by the seller. Bowling shoes are used, and used items usually sell for less than list price. Do you believe that you are renting a car if you pay much less than "full price" to the used car dealer? Of course not. I've seen used shoes sell for a dollar at garage sales. Are those rentals because I am not paying "full price"? You cannot use "did I pay 'full price'?" as a determination of whether the transaction was a sale or a rental.
The apartment example works out exactly the same way: you paid a fraction of the value of the item and your use of the item is contingent on ongoing payments, making it clear that there was never a transfer of ownership.
A down-payment for an apartment sale is also a fraction of the price, and over time as a renter you may very well pay more than the "full price" of the apartment had you simply bought it outright. (That's where the concept of "positive cash flow" in rental property comes in -- the owner is paying X on the mortgage for the property he's renting to you but charging greater than X so he has a positive cash flow.) That's probably why I specified twenty years to highlight the long-term costs of renting. Yes, it may be a legal truth that the bank owns your apartment until you pay off the loan, but the physical truth is that you are in possession, and possession is the physically observable effect. Now compare the difference between the bank being the "owner" of your apartment when you buy it with a loan and
the fucking course should advertise itself as costing the 200 bucks(+ whatever),
I have never seen a course catalog entry that lists what the costs of a course are, except for those courses with "lab fees". They never list the costs of required books, and they don't tell you how much the college is going to want just to take the course. That information may be somewhere else in the catalog, but not listed by course.
I wonder though if this is to dodge some sales tax? as no actual sale is happening, just rental?
The only people who care about dodging sales taxes are those who pay them. That's not the book dealer or publisher, that's the buyer. In this case, the student. No, it's a pretty clear case of a publisher trying to deal with fewer sales due to used sales.
are the rates different in usa commonly for such??
There is no "USA" rate for sales tax, it is an individual state and maybe city issue. I believe some states charge different sales tax rates on different things. Usually unprepared food has the lowest rate, sometimes 0. I recall that books and magazines in one state I lived in were considered "the press" and also had no sales tax. Fortunately I have lived for the last two decades in a state that has no sales tax at all, so I don't really care too much about other state's regressive taxation policies.
I go to a car dealer and hand him a small bucket of money. He hands me the keys to a car. I pay a certain sum every month. After a couple of years I get to keep the car.
But wait! There was a contract that said I was only leasing the car. I have to give it back. Other than that piece of paper, the transaction looked like a sale, felt like a sale and smelled like a sale. That would make it a sale, right? I don't think the courts would agree.
I pay a fellow a "down payment" for the keys to an apartment. I pay him a certain amount every month. After 20 years I own the apartment outright, yes? (That's longer than many mortgages.) Looked like a sale, smelled etc... but I signed a paper that says it was only a rental.
I go to a mall. I hand money to a fellow behind a counter and he hands me a pair of shoes. That smells like etc. I go to a bowling alley, hand some money to the guy behind the counter and he hands me a pair of shoes. But that's not a sale?
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the very idea of ownership is being undermined by EULAs, licenses that can be rescinded at any time, and moves like what AspenLaw is doing here.
They're being quite up-front in their terms. It's not a surprise at the end of the term to find out the book has to be returned. Do car leases, apartment or house rentals, or the existence of lending libraries also undermine the concept of ownership, or are they simply alternatives to outright ownership?
Some other publisher attempted to impose a license upon the books they sold and were slapped down over a century ago.
If you read the citation you provided, you'd find this information therein:
Bobbs-Merrill Company sold a copyrighted novel, The Castaway by Hallie Erminie Rives, with the notice, "The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed..." printed immediately below the copyright notice.
I.e., a shrink-wrap license.
The court did not hold that a contract or license imposed on the first sale could not create an obligation. In this case, there was no contract between the owner and the original purchaser, and there was not privity of contract between the owner and any third party.
In other words, simply printing the licensing limitations on a page in the book did not create a contract, BUT the court did not rule that there COULD NOT be a licensing agreement that does limit resale or further distribution.
You can bet that a law book publisher implementing this kind of system will not rely on a "shrink wrap license" arrangement.
Sigh... Hikers make the same mistake with bears. NEVER run away from the bear and NEVER run away from the car, or you will become the prime target.
The normal rule of bear interactions is that you don't have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the person you are with. That's why when you pick teams for the forest hikes, you should always pick the short, fat kid for your team first.
This new paradigm means you don't want to run faster than the tree, you want to run slower. Or run directly towards the car that is trying to run you down.
When the child is running away from the car and the tree is standing still, the difference in speed between the car and the child will be less than the difference between the tree and the car. Simple vector math.
Car at 60 (whatever units you like, MPH, kph, m/s). Tree at 0. Child at 2 directly away from car. Car-Tree = 60. Car-Child = 58.
OTThirdH, expecting that the on-board computer has the _time_ to make these decisions is a sign of someone who hasn't tried embedded programming.
OTFourthH, assuming that the on-board computer has a full and complete database of all other makes and models of cars, including their crashworthiness and safety features from which any decision about which is better to hit can be made is a sign of someone who lives in a world of unicorns and pixie dust.
Actually he states on his website where he draws the line. It's at devices that let you upgrade the firmware. If you can't update it's firmware, it's okay.
That was an interesting line, I thought. What it means is that he trusts the manufacturer of something to not be the spy, but doesn't trust other people not to come up with reverse engineered firmware that could spy on him. A toaster direct out of the box is ok, but one that you can update firmware in isn't.
I have a simple internet-connected power switch. It came from the manufacturer with an interesting feature: it sends data packets to an address somewhere in China. I caught it only because I was trying to reverse engineer the web interface so I could control it from the command line and I was tcpdumping the traffic.
Now, it doesn't matter if the firmware can be reloaded because the "spying" was loaded into the device by the people who made it. They could have easily left out the "update firmware" option and it would have made no difference in the operation of the device. It is a difference that makes no difference.
The company claims it is an intended feature to provide a dynamic DNS service so users could access their switches from anywhere on the net by name, but I have no way to verify the truthiness of that claim, and that feature is completely undocumented. To me, it's an undocumented security flaw that makes the device suspicious and forces me to put a blocking entry in my routers to stop it. In either case, it's true 'spyware', and it came from the manufacturer that way. All it would take for RMS to accept this device would be removing not the spyware it contains but removing the "update firmware" option.
I actually fail to share his fears. So someone creates a proprietary fork of emacs. Erh... ok. So?
I also question the claim that someone making a fork of emacs somehow makes the original emacs less free. How does some company taking free source and adding things to it change the original in any way? You might not want to use the original because there are improvements in the forked version, but so? You weren't going to pay for the original anyway.
I'm uncertain what you mean by saying the exit polls carry much less weight, given that the current media system reports projected statewide results based on individual *precincts* reporting in.
I mean that an exit poll doesn't decide who the winner is, the actual vote does. Precinct results aren't exit polls, they are actual vote totals. "With 48% of the precincts in, X is leading Y by 34,000 to 23,000..." isn't the prediction.
If people are willing to buy that then they will definitely devour some stupid social media thing,
What they will "devour" may be significantly different than what they will base a decision on whether to vote or not on. There is no reason not to at least try.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry; no. The 73,954 pages of the Federal Income Tax Code blow that theory to hell.
The Federal Income Tax Code isn't Oklahoma's Income Tax Code, and the tax being talked about is a state tax.
CEOs and other parasitic rich pricks leverage the countless legal deductions to pay the minimum amount of tax they are legally required to pay.
FTFY. Just like every other parasitic prick on the planet. I bet you don't pay more than you are required to, do you? Am I a "parasitic prick" because I gave a thousand bucks to the Red Cross last year so I would owe less in federal taxes? I'd rather see RC get the money than the feds and I'm a bad person?
And the content can never be Amazoned ... I mean deleted by the copyright holder.
They could work with industry to produce a external antenna protocol for bluetooth - i.e. you tether your phone to the car and utilise the car's antenna for 3G/4G.
Instead, tether your phone to the car via WiFi and utilize the car's antenna for 3G/4G.
Instead, pay GM $5 for a proprietary solution instead.
So, GM is installing a 3G/4G modem feeding a WiFi hotspot using standard protocols that anything with a WiFi connection can talk to, and this is a "proprietary" solution?
That said, at least with open source you have the chance to find such things, so there is that.
Even with "open source" you still have to get the source code to your spiffy new router. Then you have to do a code review to see what's there. Then compile it, then get the libraries and try to link it, then try comparing the binary just to find out that it will have natural differences from what is installed in the router IF you can extract the binary once it has been flashed into it. (Do many firmware-upgradeable routers have an "extract" function, or only "install"?)
So, if by "chance to find such things" you really mean "install your own code that will overwrite anything that isn't supposed to be there", yes. But to actually FIND the backdoors you need to extract the binary and decompile it anyway. The source may be a guide to what you expect to see, but with optimization and compiler tricks the source may not be all that helpful.
Luckily the sea floor is a big place.
It's also a very corrosive place.
Agreed. Let's talk about planets in the solar system instead. The 7th from the Sun seems like an interesting one, don't you think?
So, when that one gets downgraded like Pluto did, will they call it a planetoid or an assteroid?
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal, tip your waitress.
He he, the button I need to click next says "sub-mit". He he.
While that's expensive, it's still quite doable,
Of course it is doable. All it takes is money. In business such an expense would be called a "fixed cost". I.e., it is the same cost no matter how many subscribers you manage to get. It costs the same if you get 100% of the business or 0%.
What makes it unlikely to happen is that because of the existing cable company, any new provider is unlikely to get more than 50% of the possible subscribers, and likely it will be much less. There is an inherent inertia involved in convincing someone to change their service provider. If the new provider is unlikely to be able to cover even the fixed costs of providing service to an area by getting enough customers, there is no incentive for him to even try. And if the existing company sees the new guy trying to undercut its prices, they'll just lower rates to keep the customers they have and the new guy will wind up with even less of a return on investment as they have to cut their prices even lower.
That's the cause of the "monopoly" that many folks want to blame on the government. "The government" is quite happy to get franchise fees from as many companies as it can, they have no incentive to create a de jure monopoly, and in any case, that Big Bad Government that you think has created the Evil Monopoly is your local city or municipality, not the feds.
so even when all you want is a generic white-box PC for a secretary's desk that will only ever run MS Word and a web browser for the intranet, you still go through almost the same procurement process as for parts for a stealth fighter and end up buying a machine from Dell that is guaranteed to have specific parts,
Yes. Because someone has to maintain that box, and they're probably maintaining many many others. Someone has to deal with it when it doesn't work the way it is supposed to, or has to treat it in special ways because it doesn't fit in with the rest. You've apparently never come across "identical" computers or hardware that was different in subtle yet significant ways. I have.
I've just recently had a commodity PC that, for some reason that nobody understands, will freeze up for up to fifteen minutes while booting, and then continue on as if nothing was wrong. Same as all the other PCs I've bought from this vendor, but none of them do that. They can't reproduce the problem because they use Windows and Windows doesn't invoke this particular bug.
In the more distant past, the wonderful company called VIA (Chinese, but the "other" China) changed the specifications for the IEEE1394 PHY chip that is used in many 1394 interface cards. I had previously tested and vetted that PHY as suitable for the data collection systems I put together, and then one system just didn't work like it was supposed to. I checked the interface card to make sure it had the "right" chip on it. I swapped two apparently identical cards -- one worked, one did not. I looked at the specs I had already downloaded for it. The problem couldn't be that, it must be somewhere else. Long story short, I looked at debugging output from the system and yes, indeed, the chip specs had changed in a significant way and was no longer suitable for my projects. I now have to go out of my way to make sure that I buy cards with the one PHY chip that I know has the correct specs, and I have to tell others who think "it says its a Firewire card, it should be ok" that THEY have to look for specific chips on those cards, too. (Agere, FW series, BTW.) In other words, I've had to come up with a "procurement document" for something as simple as an IEEE1394 interface card.
Further, in many cases, the procurement rules the government comes up with is because, in the past, people who shouldn't be making decisions about what to buy have decided "that's good enough" and wound up wasting money when it turned out there were considerations for what was "good enough" that they weren't aware of. It is easier, and cheaper, to hand someone in an office a document that says "this is what you are going to buy" than to come back later and fix a problem when what they bought doesn't actually work with the other things already there.
... and throwing them away when they break.
And there's yet another reason for procurement (and disposal) rules. Throwing things away when they break and buying another one is more costly in most cases than simply buying the right, working thing from the beginning.
And you do not want government employees deciding to "throw things away" without rules for that, too, because too many government employees will "throw things away" -- and then take the thing they've thrown away home, or sell them on eBay, because it wasn't really broken, they just wanted to make a little extra money.
In all likelihood, except for a very limited number of military-grade equipment (and sometmes even then) the widgets are probably made on the same assembly line in China.
I used aircraft parts as an example, and the likelyhood that the correct parts are made on the same assembly lines in China as the 30 cent Walmart versions is vanishingly small.
To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
If we could guarantee that the widgets they buy from Walmart are made to acceptable standards and with verifiable provenance when necessary, I'd say sure.
But even though a 30 cent bolt from Walmart looks like a $5 bolt from McDonnell Douglas, the latter has been certified as to material and strength. There is an issue with counterfeit aircraft parts, and aircraft do break when the wrong parts are installed. You wouldn't trust Walmart to provide your aircraft parts, I hope, so buying them there would be a mistake.
The address on the envelope absolutely matters.
The address is used by the post office, and it matters only to the person who is getting the check. Not to me, as long as it is the correct address for the recipient of the money. It feels no different to put a check into an envelope addressed to X than to Y. The address on the envelope doesn't tell anyone WHY you owe the money, only to whom you are sending it. Just one more example, of many, is if I decide to buy an apartment from a rental agency instead of continuing to rent. The address on the envelope will be the same -- the office of the rental agency. Or maybe not. It doesn't make any difference to the kind of transaction.
If the person who had the car received the full sum of money, you received the car, and you have no further business with them, it's apparent that the car was sold and now belongs to you.
"The full sum of money". What does the "full sum of money" feel or look like in a transaction, and how do you know someone else is getting "the full sum" when you aren't giving it to him? Why shouldn't I assume that the $100 I give someone to rent one of their cars is "the full sum" and decide that picking the car up is the last business I do with them? After all, it's giving them "the full sum" and "have no further business" that makes it a sale and not a rental, right? No?
That you're sending money to someone else in repayment for a large sum of money that they gave you doesn't take away from that fact.
What fact? Sending someone money on a monthly basis doesn't prove there was a sale. You only know there was a sale because the piece of paper that went with the transaction said it was. The point is that the ACTIONS taking place do not define the kind of transaction, it is the contractual parts that do. "That fact" is not defined by how you pay someone, it's defined by the contract.
You are arguing from a knowledge of the paperwork involved that the actions fit the kind of transaction, and the discussion is how the transaction looks and feels (the actions) do not define the transaction itself. "It looks like a sale, it feels like a sale..." is meaningless because a sale can look and feel just like renting or leasing and vice versa.
And sure, "the down payment goes to the seller", but as I made clear in the paragraph prior to the part you quoted, it's going to them not because the seller is demanding it,
And to whom would the payment go if not the seller? Would you sell someone something and tell them to pay someone else for it? Of course not. Why would you want to force money you can get directly to be funneled through a third party? Of course the seller wants to be paid the down payment.
but even if you don't, the lender stills pays the full amount on your behalf
No he does not. The lender does not pay the down payment, I do. The down payment is MY responsibility, not the lender's. The down payment is not money I owe to the lender because I have already paid it. The lender only cares how much I want to borrow to cover the rest (other than any artificial requirements he puts on how much equity he wants me to have in the collateral -- the car -- to help ensure I don't find defaulting on the loan a profitable action, before he will make the loan.)
I.e. It's a factor in your arrangement with the lender, not the seller, since all the seller sees is that they're receiving the full amount.
The seller sees that he's getting the full amount because he adds the amount I give him for the down payment to the amount the lender gives him (if the lender actually gives him anything, which isn't a given). I don't see the check from the lender -- there probably won't be one, it will be an electronic transaction, if there is one. And if the seller is doing the financing, he does NOT get the full amount, he gets the payments directly fr
Hold up. You've glossed right over an important distinction: who are you paying?
That is irrelevant. The address on the envelope is a trivial distinction compared to the fact you are paying on a regular basis. And in some cases (as in the car lease/buying example), the address/payee may be exactly the same for both. For a land contract financed by the seller, you're paying the seller just as if you were paying rent to him for a rental transaction.
In your scenarios that involve purchases using down payments, your interaction with the seller doesn't actually go as you've suggested. How it actually goes is like this: you pay them the full amount and you receive the item in exchange. End of story.
Uhhh, no. You pay the down payment, which is not the full amount. That's why it is called a "down payment" and not "the full amount". If you are using an outside lender, THEY pay the rest of the money to the seller, and then you pay the outside lender over time. No, sorry, neither when I bought my last car nor my house did I write a check for the full amount, I wrote a check for only the down payment.
And if the down payment is going to a third party,
The down payment goes to the seller. The lender deals with what is left to pay.
The purchase was still complete up-front, however, which should be readily apparent.
It isn't that readily apparent, because you're paying over time. The physical actions are the same. You pay either the rent or the loan, but it is still paying over time. The name on the check depends on who you owe, not why you owe it.
You talk about "the full amount" as if that were a static concept. There's a pair of shoes I find for $1 at a garage sale. That $1 is the "full amount" for that sale. I go to the bowling alley and pay $1 for renting the shoes. Is that $1 the full value of the shoes? Could be, depends on how used they are. In any case, that $1 is the full amount of the rental. In both cases I pay $1 for possession of shoes. It's indistinguishable from what I've done whether it was a sale or a rental transaction, it's only the terms for the transaction that tell me which is which. (And it would be quite possible for that bowling alley to clear out old shoes by actually selling them for $1, in which case it is impossible to tell from what actually happens whether it is a sale or rental.)
Regardless of the paper, I don't think your examples look, feel, or smell like sales at all. Consider what a purchase normally looks like: money changes hands and a buyer takes ownership.
"Ownership" is a legal concept, not a physical one. "Possession" is the physical action that occurs. I hand money to someone at a shoe store, I take possession of some shoes. I hand money to someone at a bowling alley, I take possession of some shoes. The "ownership" depends on the terms of the transaction, which in one case is a sale and in the other a rental. But the physical actions are identical. Imagine someone who had never been to a bowling alley watching people rent shoes. Do you think he's going to assume they're renting, or would he assume it was a sale?
In the case of your car lease, few people would confuse your "small bucket of money" for the actual price of the car, which could very well be an order of magnitude or more greater.
However, it looks just like, it smells just like, it feels just like, the down payment that one would make in buying a car on time. Down payments aren't the full price of the car, they're only a fraction of it.
Moreover, you clearly had not taken ownership of the car, since what sane person continues to pay a seller for something they already own (note: you may have to pay a lender, but your business with a seller, by definition, always wraps up at the point of sale)?
The "sane person" who has bought an item on time continues to pay for the item after he assumes possession. Who he pays depends on who gave him the credit, and if it is the seller, then yes, indeed, he pays the seller. Your business with the seller does not conclude until he has been paid the amount agreed upon, "by definition" or otherwise. If he sells your payment contract to someone else, that's a different issue, but car dealers, for one, are quite happy to finance your new car purchase. General Motors even created a financing division for such business: GMAC.
The only difference between a lease and a sale on credit for a car, in particular, would be the address on the envelope for the check you send every month. If the same company that handles lease payments also handles loan payments, then there would be no difference in who the check goes to.
Bowling shoes? They're rented at a fraction of the cost. The shoes at the mall, however? Purchased at full price.
"Full price" is defined by the seller. Bowling shoes are used, and used items usually sell for less than list price. Do you believe that you are renting a car if you pay much less than "full price" to the used car dealer? Of course not. I've seen used shoes sell for a dollar at garage sales. Are those rentals because I am not paying "full price"? You cannot use "did I pay 'full price'?" as a determination of whether the transaction was a sale or a rental.
The apartment example works out exactly the same way: you paid a fraction of the value of the item and your use of the item is contingent on ongoing payments, making it clear that there was never a transfer of ownership.
A down-payment for an apartment sale is also a fraction of the price, and over time as a renter you may very well pay more than the "full price" of the apartment had you simply bought it outright. (That's where the concept of "positive cash flow" in rental property comes in -- the owner is paying X on the mortgage for the property he's renting to you but charging greater than X so he has a positive cash flow.) That's probably why I specified twenty years to highlight the long-term costs of renting. Yes, it may be a legal truth that the bank owns your apartment until you pay off the loan, but the physical truth is that you are in possession, and possession is the physically observable effect. Now compare the difference between the bank being the "owner" of your apartment when you buy it with a loan and
the fucking course should advertise itself as costing the 200 bucks(+ whatever),
I have never seen a course catalog entry that lists what the costs of a course are, except for those courses with "lab fees". They never list the costs of required books, and they don't tell you how much the college is going to want just to take the course. That information may be somewhere else in the catalog, but not listed by course.
I wonder though if this is to dodge some sales tax? as no actual sale is happening, just rental?
The only people who care about dodging sales taxes are those who pay them. That's not the book dealer or publisher, that's the buyer. In this case, the student. No, it's a pretty clear case of a publisher trying to deal with fewer sales due to used sales.
are the rates different in usa commonly for such??
There is no "USA" rate for sales tax, it is an individual state and maybe city issue. I believe some states charge different sales tax rates on different things. Usually unprepared food has the lowest rate, sometimes 0. I recall that books and magazines in one state I lived in were considered "the press" and also had no sales tax. Fortunately I have lived for the last two decades in a state that has no sales tax at all, so I don't really care too much about other state's regressive taxation policies.
But wait! There was a contract that said I was only leasing the car. I have to give it back. Other than that piece of paper, the transaction looked like a sale, felt like a sale and smelled like a sale. That would make it a sale, right? I don't think the courts would agree.
I pay a fellow a "down payment" for the keys to an apartment. I pay him a certain amount every month. After 20 years I own the apartment outright, yes? (That's longer than many mortgages.) Looked like a sale, smelled etc... but I signed a paper that says it was only a rental.
I go to a mall. I hand money to a fellow behind a counter and he hands me a pair of shoes. That smells like etc. I go to a bowling alley, hand some money to the guy behind the counter and he hands me a pair of shoes. But that's not a sale?
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the very idea of ownership is being undermined by EULAs, licenses that can be rescinded at any time, and moves like what AspenLaw is doing here.
They're being quite up-front in their terms. It's not a surprise at the end of the term to find out the book has to be returned. Do car leases, apartment or house rentals, or the existence of lending libraries also undermine the concept of ownership, or are they simply alternatives to outright ownership?
Some other publisher attempted to impose a license upon the books they sold and were slapped down over a century ago.
If you read the citation you provided, you'd find this information therein:
I.e., a shrink-wrap license.
In other words, simply printing the licensing limitations on a page in the book did not create a contract, BUT the court did not rule that there COULD NOT be a licensing agreement that does limit resale or further distribution.
You can bet that a law book publisher implementing this kind of system will not rely on a "shrink wrap license" arrangement.
Um yea, I don't see ANY potential problems by altering someone's genetics to remove fear. This reads like a bad sci-fi movie plot.
Your fear of having your DNA modified can be dealt with by a simple DNA modification...
Sigh... Hikers make the same mistake with bears. NEVER run away from the bear and NEVER run away from the car, or you will become the prime target.
The normal rule of bear interactions is that you don't have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the person you are with. That's why when you pick teams for the forest hikes, you should always pick the short, fat kid for your team first.
This new paradigm means you don't want to run faster than the tree, you want to run slower. Or run directly towards the car that is trying to run you down.
Quick, autonomous vehicle computer, is that large round object directly in front of me a boulder or a beach ball?
Since when do trees move faster than children?
When the child is running away from the car and the tree is standing still, the difference in speed between the car and the child will be less than the difference between the tree and the car. Simple vector math.
Car at 60 (whatever units you like, MPH, kph, m/s). Tree at 0. Child at 2 directly away from car. Car-Tree = 60. Car-Child = 58.
OTThirdH, expecting that the on-board computer has the _time_ to make these decisions is a sign of someone who hasn't tried embedded programming.
OTFourthH, assuming that the on-board computer has a full and complete database of all other makes and models of cars, including their crashworthiness and safety features from which any decision about which is better to hit can be made is a sign of someone who lives in a world of unicorns and pixie dust.
Actually he states on his website where he draws the line. It's at devices that let you upgrade the firmware. If you can't update it's firmware, it's okay.
That was an interesting line, I thought. What it means is that he trusts the manufacturer of something to not be the spy, but doesn't trust other people not to come up with reverse engineered firmware that could spy on him. A toaster direct out of the box is ok, but one that you can update firmware in isn't.
I have a simple internet-connected power switch. It came from the manufacturer with an interesting feature: it sends data packets to an address somewhere in China. I caught it only because I was trying to reverse engineer the web interface so I could control it from the command line and I was tcpdumping the traffic.
Now, it doesn't matter if the firmware can be reloaded because the "spying" was loaded into the device by the people who made it. They could have easily left out the "update firmware" option and it would have made no difference in the operation of the device. It is a difference that makes no difference.
The company claims it is an intended feature to provide a dynamic DNS service so users could access their switches from anywhere on the net by name, but I have no way to verify the truthiness of that claim, and that feature is completely undocumented. To me, it's an undocumented security flaw that makes the device suspicious and forces me to put a blocking entry in my routers to stop it. In either case, it's true 'spyware', and it came from the manufacturer that way. All it would take for RMS to accept this device would be removing not the spyware it contains but removing the "update firmware" option.
I actually fail to share his fears. So someone creates a proprietary fork of emacs. Erh... ok. So?
I also question the claim that someone making a fork of emacs somehow makes the original emacs less free. How does some company taking free source and adding things to it change the original in any way? You might not want to use the original because there are improvements in the forked version, but so? You weren't going to pay for the original anyway.
Yes, but can you make a Beowulf cluster of drones?
I'm uncertain what you mean by saying the exit polls carry much less weight, given that the current media system reports projected statewide results based on individual *precincts* reporting in.
I mean that an exit poll doesn't decide who the winner is, the actual vote does. Precinct results aren't exit polls, they are actual vote totals. "With 48% of the precincts in, X is leading Y by 34,000 to 23,000 ..." isn't the prediction.
If people are willing to buy that then they will definitely devour some stupid social media thing,
What they will "devour" may be significantly different than what they will base a decision on whether to vote or not on. There is no reason not to at least try.