There are a lot of aspiring competitors to YouTube, none of which have been able to get much traction. I'm sure one of them would agree to turn off their cookies for whitehouse.gov content in return for the publicity of being chosen to host whitehouse videos. Google might even agree to turn off cookies in the face of that sort of threat.
I'm not arguing that they have an obligation to provide me with specific goods or services; but that it reduces individual freedom and is a form of coercion if they attempt to prevent others from providing me goods or services unless I purchase their goods and services as well. This is particularly problematic when entities have monopoly power and so can coerce others into accepting such contracts.
In general, I only consider contracts valid when entered into by individuals with roughly equal bargaining power. A contract signed by a destitute man desperate for lunch, with a megacorporation who has achieved a monopoly on food supply, is not a "meeting of the mind".
Yes, they did also do the figurative meaning: they changed their game from being about selling drugs to being about selling something else in order to figuratively "sugarcoat" the subject.
But they did so by skinning the game with sugary graphics, which seems pretty "literally" sugar coating to me, in that rather than merely figuratively sugarcoating their game with some arbitrarily less offensive graphics, the new graphics are, literally, images of sugar. That's not the figure of speech "sugarcoat", but the literal "a coating of sugar".
To quote the grandparent poster, "just because you're not actually pouring sugar over your fuckign iPhone doesn't make this use of sugarcoat (giving your gtame a candy theme) less literal". Perhaps you're going to argue next that a painting of a haystack doesn't "literally" depict haystacks, but only depicts them "figuratively", because it's not actually made out of hay?
If, for example, mandates like this end up requiring use of suspend-to-disk over suspend-to-RAM, increasing the unsuspend time, the likely effect is that more people will simply leave their computers fully powered on for more time, making the overall power usage worse than before.
A lot of modern business is predicated on coercion, though you're correct in that it's less coercive than actually, 100% forcing you to pay them. Usually, it's by manipulating markets so that you're limited to a choice of paying them or going entirely without the service, sometimes even forcing you to go without vaguely related services if you opt out. For example, the infamous "Microsoft tax" is an effective use of market power by Microsoft to coerce consumers into purchasing Microsoft products whether they want them or not, by requiring OEMs to bundle them with new PCs. The consumer still has the choice not to buy PCs from OEMs at all, but they don't have the choice to simply not buy the Microsoft product.
There's been a decades-long fight by activist shareholders to try to get corporations to actually answer to the shareholders. Especially in very large corporations with dilute control, it's not clear who management actually does answer to, if anyone. Perhaps the board, but then the boards are so terribly intermingled with management and between companies that they hardly constitute an effective advocate for the shareholder.
I don't know of any statistics professors who don't already know LaTeX. How would you publish? In my experience, most math and statistics journals either require or strongly encourage authors to submit their manuscripts formatted in LaTeX.
There's been questions raised when various non-U.S.-born white people have been given high government posts as well; for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski (Poland), or Madeleine Albright (Czechoslovakia).
Now, if an American-born person were considered unqualified for a post solely because they happened to be of Indian ancestry, that'd be another matter. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
As with much procurement, one of the big problems with IT in government is that it's more geared towards the profit needs of the contractors than towards the actual IT needs of the government---it buys what companies want to sell it.
It seems like a Cisco guy is pretty unlikely to put an end to that, since Cisco has a nice gravy train. Though I guess it's better than an Oracle guy.
If your tax-minimization strategy causes such a public uproar that your business stands to lose billions of dollars in public funds and be saddled with new regulations as a result, then you've failed in your fiduciary duty to stockholders by shooting yourself in the foot.
(In other words, management strategies that increase regulatory risk are imprudent.)
Although Mozilla's strong protection of their Firefox trademark has caused trouble with their unwillingness to grant a blanket license to organizations like Debian, one advantage it does have is that they can force these kinds of sites offline for trademark infringement.
Effectively, it's the minimum salary required to entice the owner-operator to operate the business. If someone's earning more than that (say, making millions) and hasn't yet been undercut, it's due to the market for one reason or another being uncompetitive.
Profit is market inefficiency due to lack of competition---someone selling a product for more than the marginal cost of production, which hasn't yet been exploited by an undercutting competitor, often due to difficulty of market access or strongly entrenched incumbents.
In a perfectly efficient, competitive market, profit goes to zero. Obviously companies don't want that, so it's in their interest to work against the establishment of a free-market economy.
Because of some hare-brained law (possibly an initiative---the only people who make worse laws than legislators are average voters), California posts warning signs on any public buildings that contain, or could possibly contain, virtually any amount of a chemical that has any sort of potential link with cancer. As a result, just about every public building has a warning about how it contains chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer". Since all buildings have it, the warning sign is of course useless.
If you already own stock and it goes up in value, then yes, you don't pay taxes on those capital gains until you sell the stock and the gains are realized.
However, if you receive stock, e.g. as in-kind payment for services, you have to value the stock and pay taxes on it as income when you receive it, not when you sell it.
I think the sticking point is over whether the virtual money should be assigned a value before you cash it out too. With other goods, even sometimes hard-to-value ones, it is: if someone pays your consulting bill with a rare baseball card, you have to value the baseball card and consider it income when you receive it, not just when you sell it.
If virtual money isn't taxed when it changes hands, then it can be used as a tax dodge. since a bunch of economic activity can go on using virtual money as a tax-free medium of exchange, with taxes only paid on the net that gets cashed out sometime later.
It's true that Mozilla providing a default search engine is a service that search-engine companies find valuable. On the other hand, having a useful default search engine is also something that Mozilla's users find valuable, so Mozilla is constrained in how they can sell that particular service.
If Some Guy's Horrible Search That Doesn't Work offered Mozilla a bazillion dollars for placement as the default search engine, they would likely have to turn it down, if they wanted their users to not hate them.
Now Yahoo or Microsoft Live aren't quite Some Guy's Horrible Search, but they are different, and in many ways not quite as good, as the status quo Firefox users expect. Basically, people use and expect Google Search, and will be annoyed if they don't get it. That means that if Google were so inclined, they could probably drive a hard bargain and reduce the amount they're paying for default-search placement, and Mozilla would likely grudgingly go along with it. At the very least, I would imagine that Microsoft or Yahoo would have to offer a considerable premium over Google's offer to make it worth the negative reactions of switching to them.
The Garth Brooks one is particularly ridiculous---the only similarity appears to be that both have, at various times, used a lowercase 'g' in an entirely unremarkable font as a logo. Yes, congratulations, two instances of a lowercase 'g' can look similar!
The rest aren't much more convincing. Google uses some simple arrangements of primary colors, and, amazingly enough, so do some other companies, even some other tech companies. But they don't even look particularly similar (especially the Windows one).
One way to increase recycling is to pay people to go around scavenging recyclable materials from litter, trash cans, etc. To do this cost-effectively, though, you don't really want to pay them more than a few bucks an hour, certainly not the minimum wage. So, enter the CRV, a way of paying bums a (very low) commission to do the work.
I use the reply-all button frequently, for ad-hoc small group discussions. If I have a document I want two people to review, I send it to both of them, and they send their comments back to both me and the other person I sent it to with reply-all, so we're all on the same page.
If the same group of people is frequently collaborating you can set up a mailing list, but it's a real pain in the ass to set up a mailing list every time you want a group of 3 or 4 people to exchange 5-10 emails.
Not to take away from some impressive stuff AMD has done, but AMD's glory days were also helped out by Intel shooting themselves in the foot. Back when AMD had the top-end x86s, invented AMD64, etc., Intel's 900-pound-gorilla R&D machine was off working on Itanium, running their x86 line mostly on autopilot. Once they mostly gave up on Itanium and swung their resources back to x86, AMD, as you might expect, has had a much harder time.
I'm a computer science academic, and so our department at one point got the brilliant idea that they could save money by greatly reducing the IT staff. After all, computer scientists have PhDs in Computer Stuff, so can run all their own IT, right? It turns out not really---and even when they can, it'd be a full-time job to do so, and they already have other full-time jobs (like writing papers and research grants and teaching classes and supervising grad students).
What's kept the whole thing running at all is that the reduced staff has two really excellent people who manage to pull things together, both of whom are much much better at their jobs than any numbers of CS PhDs would be at that job, because being a top-quality IT staff member and being a top-quality CS researcher just aren't the same job.
I suppose the change has sort of increased the respect the IT people around here get though: you definitely notice all the stuff that used to Just Work after the IT staff gets canned.
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There are a lot of aspiring competitors to YouTube, none of which have been able to get much traction. I'm sure one of them would agree to turn off their cookies for whitehouse.gov content in return for the publicity of being chosen to host whitehouse videos. Google might even agree to turn off cookies in the face of that sort of threat.
I'm not arguing that they have an obligation to provide me with specific goods or services; but that it reduces individual freedom and is a form of coercion if they attempt to prevent others from providing me goods or services unless I purchase their goods and services as well. This is particularly problematic when entities have monopoly power and so can coerce others into accepting such contracts.
In general, I only consider contracts valid when entered into by individuals with roughly equal bargaining power. A contract signed by a destitute man desperate for lunch, with a megacorporation who has achieved a monopoly on food supply, is not a "meeting of the mind".
Yes, they did also do the figurative meaning: they changed their game from being about selling drugs to being about selling something else in order to figuratively "sugarcoat" the subject.
But they did so by skinning the game with sugary graphics, which seems pretty "literally" sugar coating to me, in that rather than merely figuratively sugarcoating their game with some arbitrarily less offensive graphics, the new graphics are, literally, images of sugar. That's not the figure of speech "sugarcoat", but the literal "a coating of sugar".
To quote the grandparent poster, "just because you're not actually pouring sugar over your fuckign iPhone doesn't make this use of sugarcoat (giving your gtame a candy theme) less literal". Perhaps you're going to argue next that a painting of a haystack doesn't "literally" depict haystacks, but only depicts them "figuratively", because it's not actually made out of hay?
If, for example, mandates like this end up requiring use of suspend-to-disk over suspend-to-RAM, increasing the unsuspend time, the likely effect is that more people will simply leave their computers fully powered on for more time, making the overall power usage worse than before.
A lot of modern business is predicated on coercion, though you're correct in that it's less coercive than actually, 100% forcing you to pay them. Usually, it's by manipulating markets so that you're limited to a choice of paying them or going entirely without the service, sometimes even forcing you to go without vaguely related services if you opt out. For example, the infamous "Microsoft tax" is an effective use of market power by Microsoft to coerce consumers into purchasing Microsoft products whether they want them or not, by requiring OEMs to bundle them with new PCs. The consumer still has the choice not to buy PCs from OEMs at all, but they don't have the choice to simply not buy the Microsoft product.
There's been a decades-long fight by activist shareholders to try to get corporations to actually answer to the shareholders. Especially in very large corporations with dilute control, it's not clear who management actually does answer to, if anyone. Perhaps the board, but then the boards are so terribly intermingled with management and between companies that they hardly constitute an effective advocate for the shareholder.
I don't know of any statistics professors who don't already know LaTeX. How would you publish? In my experience, most math and statistics journals either require or strongly encourage authors to submit their manuscripts formatted in LaTeX.
My eastern-european friends didn't like being sent cryptically named .wav files containing the Starcraft audio "WE REQUIRE MORE VESPENE GAS", either.
There's been questions raised when various non-U.S.-born white people have been given high government posts as well; for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski (Poland), or Madeleine Albright (Czechoslovakia).
Now, if an American-born person were considered unqualified for a post solely because they happened to be of Indian ancestry, that'd be another matter. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
As with much procurement, one of the big problems with IT in government is that it's more geared towards the profit needs of the contractors than towards the actual IT needs of the government---it buys what companies want to sell it.
It seems like a Cisco guy is pretty unlikely to put an end to that, since Cisco has a nice gravy train. Though I guess it's better than an Oracle guy.
If your tax-minimization strategy causes such a public uproar that your business stands to lose billions of dollars in public funds and be saddled with new regulations as a result, then you've failed in your fiduciary duty to stockholders by shooting yourself in the foot.
(In other words, management strategies that increase regulatory risk are imprudent.)
Although Mozilla's strong protection of their Firefox trademark has caused trouble with their unwillingness to grant a blanket license to organizations like Debian, one advantage it does have is that they can force these kinds of sites offline for trademark infringement.
Effectively, it's the minimum salary required to entice the owner-operator to operate the business. If someone's earning more than that (say, making millions) and hasn't yet been undercut, it's due to the market for one reason or another being uncompetitive.
Profit is market inefficiency due to lack of competition---someone selling a product for more than the marginal cost of production, which hasn't yet been exploited by an undercutting competitor, often due to difficulty of market access or strongly entrenched incumbents.
In a perfectly efficient, competitive market, profit goes to zero. Obviously companies don't want that, so it's in their interest to work against the establishment of a free-market economy.
Because of some hare-brained law (possibly an initiative---the only people who make worse laws than legislators are average voters), California posts warning signs on any public buildings that contain, or could possibly contain, virtually any amount of a chemical that has any sort of potential link with cancer. As a result, just about every public building has a warning about how it contains chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer". Since all buildings have it, the warning sign is of course useless.
If you already own stock and it goes up in value, then yes, you don't pay taxes on those capital gains until you sell the stock and the gains are realized.
However, if you receive stock, e.g. as in-kind payment for services, you have to value the stock and pay taxes on it as income when you receive it, not when you sell it.
I think the sticking point is over whether the virtual money should be assigned a value before you cash it out too. With other goods, even sometimes hard-to-value ones, it is: if someone pays your consulting bill with a rare baseball card, you have to value the baseball card and consider it income when you receive it, not just when you sell it.
If virtual money isn't taxed when it changes hands, then it can be used as a tax dodge. since a bunch of economic activity can go on using virtual money as a tax-free medium of exchange, with taxes only paid on the net that gets cashed out sometime later.
It's true that Mozilla providing a default search engine is a service that search-engine companies find valuable. On the other hand, having a useful default search engine is also something that Mozilla's users find valuable, so Mozilla is constrained in how they can sell that particular service.
If Some Guy's Horrible Search That Doesn't Work offered Mozilla a bazillion dollars for placement as the default search engine, they would likely have to turn it down, if they wanted their users to not hate them.
Now Yahoo or Microsoft Live aren't quite Some Guy's Horrible Search, but they are different, and in many ways not quite as good, as the status quo Firefox users expect. Basically, people use and expect Google Search, and will be annoyed if they don't get it. That means that if Google were so inclined, they could probably drive a hard bargain and reduce the amount they're paying for default-search placement, and Mozilla would likely grudgingly go along with it. At the very least, I would imagine that Microsoft or Yahoo would have to offer a considerable premium over Google's offer to make it worth the negative reactions of switching to them.
The Garth Brooks one is particularly ridiculous---the only similarity appears to be that both have, at various times, used a lowercase 'g' in an entirely unremarkable font as a logo. Yes, congratulations, two instances of a lowercase 'g' can look similar!
The rest aren't much more convincing. Google uses some simple arrangements of primary colors, and, amazingly enough, so do some other companies, even some other tech companies. But they don't even look particularly similar (especially the Windows one).
One of the most successful indie games of 2008, Braid, was sold via XBox Live.
One way to increase recycling is to pay people to go around scavenging recyclable materials from litter, trash cans, etc. To do this cost-effectively, though, you don't really want to pay them more than a few bucks an hour, certainly not the minimum wage. So, enter the CRV, a way of paying bums a (very low) commission to do the work.
I use the reply-all button frequently, for ad-hoc small group discussions. If I have a document I want two people to review, I send it to both of them, and they send their comments back to both me and the other person I sent it to with reply-all, so we're all on the same page.
If the same group of people is frequently collaborating you can set up a mailing list, but it's a real pain in the ass to set up a mailing list every time you want a group of 3 or 4 people to exchange 5-10 emails.
Not to take away from some impressive stuff AMD has done, but AMD's glory days were also helped out by Intel shooting themselves in the foot. Back when AMD had the top-end x86s, invented AMD64, etc., Intel's 900-pound-gorilla R&D machine was off working on Itanium, running their x86 line mostly on autopilot. Once they mostly gave up on Itanium and swung their resources back to x86, AMD, as you might expect, has had a much harder time.
I'm a computer science academic, and so our department at one point got the brilliant idea that they could save money by greatly reducing the IT staff. After all, computer scientists have PhDs in Computer Stuff, so can run all their own IT, right? It turns out not really---and even when they can, it'd be a full-time job to do so, and they already have other full-time jobs (like writing papers and research grants and teaching classes and supervising grad students).
What's kept the whole thing running at all is that the reduced staff has two really excellent people who manage to pull things together, both of whom are much much better at their jobs than any numbers of CS PhDs would be at that job, because being a top-quality IT staff member and being a top-quality CS researcher just aren't the same job.
I suppose the change has sort of increased the respect the IT people around here get though: you definitely notice all the stuff that used to Just Work after the IT staff gets canned.