Ah, a history question! When Vancouver was established in 1824 it was under joint occupation by the U.S. and Britain, per the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. Along with the rest of the Oregon Territory, it became officially part of the U.S. in 1846 per the Oregon Treaty. It has been ever since. So, the answer is actually somewhat complicated, it was jointly occupied by the U.S. since 1824, but has been unambiguously part of the U.S since 1846.
Many years later, in 1886 the townsite of Granville in the British Dominion of Canada was incorporated to become the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia. Of course, Canada itself wouldn't become a nation for many more years.
That would greatly facilitate the process of buying votes! A great 'weakness' of the current system is anonymity of voting, which makes it difficult for the purchaser to verify that someone selling their vote has voted as requested. When a large corporation purchases someone's vote under your system, all they would need to do to verify that the voter 'stayed bought' would be to have them use a corporate email account as 'their' secret code. We could get rid of all the political advertising and simply make it possible to buy votes directly- it would be much more efficient!
Interesting, I wasn't aware that the energy of the SN1987A neutrinos had been measured. As an aside, I'm not at all sure that "rest mass" is the right phrase if they are indeed tachyons - perhaps "infinite speed mass?"
Let's roll with it, though, and assume they're really tachyons- how sure are we that we're observing the same kind of neutrinos? If the SN1987A tachyons had less than 10^-10 of the imaginary "rest mass" than the ones from CERN then they might travel closer to the speed of light even with much less total energy.
Two things: since the velocity of tachyonic neutrinos would depend on their energy it's plausible that the ones from a supernova were very high energy indeed, and thus traveled very close to the speed of light, albeit very very slightly faster rather than very very slightly slower.
The second thing is that it may well be that we don't understand the chronology of events within a supernova very well- what if the burst of neutrinos actually happened some time after the burst of light, but then outran it? After all, our current supernova models were designed to try to fit the data that appeared at the time to indicate that the neutrinos were emitted first...
There's a simpler and more paranoid explanation available. This is an alien home planet, and it's actually emitting huge amounts of various types of light. Our astronomical instruments, however, have been hacked to not show any of that- we're not supposed to know about alien civilizations, as it would stunt our development. Somealien didn't think this through and simply removed all the light from our data on that planet, resulting in an anomalously dark appearance. It's a software bug. Perhaps it'll be fixed by the next time we look at that planet, and it'll appear as a boring planet of standard appearance.
Every losing candidate, with the possible exception of sitting presidents, looks weak in retrospect. Let's look at a few more of them: Dole, Dukakis, Mondale - all of them now perceived as weak candidates.
This isn't a grand coincidence that one party always happens to nominate a weak candidate, but a byproduct of the fact that the process and result of losing the election makes them be perceived as much weaker in retrospect than they actually were during the campaign.
The grandparent was discussing war- your link does not address the topic. The US Constitution is quite specific about the process required to declare war, and the last time the United States declared war was June 5, 1942. The "Korean War", the "Vietnam War", heck even the absurdly named "War on Poverty", "War on Drugs", and "War on Terrorism" - none of them are war under the constitution. Note that the subject under discussion was the interpretation of the law, so the legal definition of "war" is precisely the point.
No, as of 2005 Chernobyl killed fewer than 50 people. See the WHO report.. It's likely more will die from possibly related causes but 20 years on the cause and effect is getting arguable.
That was Jason Wyngarde, aka Mastermind. It wasn't mind control, exactly. He could put people into a sort of sleepwalking dream state and then control what they perceived and what they remembered as their own backstory. It was a slow-burn power, but cumulative - he was lousy at quick mind control, but after a few weeks under his influence it was very effective control even for a powerful telepath.
What I am saying is that companies should obey their local tax laws, but should be indifferent to laws in other states that do not apply to them. Your claim that this is facilitation of tax avoidance is obvious nonsense- as I mentioned, Amazon actively collects the appropriate state taxes from me and other residents here in the state of Washington where they are incorporated.
You are correct that residents of other states (such as California) are obligated to follow their local laws regarding use taxes. California may enforce its laws on its citizens as appropriate. Amazon is and should be completely indifferent to this process, it is not their role or obligation to either enforce or prevent taxation in other states from taking place. If California were to announce that it was going to enforce its Use Tax laws on its citizens I would have no problem with that, provided the methods used to enforce its law were appropriate. For California to blame people in other states for not enforcing its laws for it is arrogant and pathetic.
If California believes that it can force people in other states to act as its agents to enforce its laws, requiring them to collect and remit taxes on its behalf at no cost, it's interfering with interstate commerce and acting as a leech on other states. I'm afraid that it does appear that California is setting up its business with criminal (that is to say unconstitutional) intent.
Amazon seems to be doing fine here in Washington. We have a sales tax, but of course Amazon collects sales tax on all purchases by Washington State residents, and always has. It's state law, after all.
It's just when some other state decides to mandate that out-of-state companies should act as their agents to enforce their tax laws that there's a problem.
Such a contract would not be enforceable in the United States. Indentured Servitude is quite illegal, a contract pledging it cannot be made binding. It's possible to write penalties for quitting into a contract, but you can't contract to never quit at all.
The states have the right to impose a sales tax, yes. They do not have the right to force out-of-state companies to act as their tax collectors. That's what this bill appears to be attempting to do.
It's an unfortunate fact that State governments want to be freeloaders, and force corporations in other states to collect taxes for them. If Texas(for example) wants to impose a sales tax on its residents, Texas may choose to do so and use appropriate means at its disposal to collect that tax. Texas may not require corporations that are not in Texas to act as its tax collectors. It simply lacks the authority to compel non-Texan companies to do the job of tax collection for them. Amazon is correct in resisting the unwanted role of Tax Collector for a state it does not have a nexus in.
Taxes often vary on a smaller level than that, many cities have their own sales tax, at least here in Washington State.
While I would welcome your proposed decrease in the sales tax I pay when purchasing products from Amazon from the current 9% or so to 4%, why would the Federal Government interfere in Washington State law in that way?
I used to work doing single-crystal X-ray crystallography, one part of the job was mounting a crystal onto the tip of a tiny glass rod. I was looking for a single crystal no larger than 0.5 mm in any direction, and hopefully at least 0.1mm in the smallest dimension, though at times they were smaller than that if they were needles or thin planes. I would sometimes work under a not particularly powerful magnifying glass, though it's quite possible to see a crystal that size with the naked eye, even colorless, transparent crystals as most of these were. Being quite nearsighted was actually a plus, as I could take off my glasses and at 5 cm or so away see objects of that size quite well with the naked eye.
I've been there, I've coded some Fortran for computational chemistry. There's a lot of old stuff out there... I didn't work with it as long ago as you did, but at least parts of the code we used were almost in that era, still formatted like it had been for cards, with comments dated from the 1970s.
In 2003 or so, I really quite wanted to use some recursion features that had been introduced with Fortran90. It took me quite some time to convince my boss at the time that we could lose full Fortran 77 backwards compatibility. It was like pulling teeth to get him to upgrade from the 26-year old version of the language to the 13-year old version...
This technology is nothing new- I had a set of the Peril Sensitive Sunglasses that came with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy video game. Those high-tech gadgets became opaque whenever you were in peril, so that you would avoid the urge to panic.
It's entirely legal to ebay a physical CD(at least, one legally created by the holder of copyright and purchased legitimately). Your example is a specific problem with songs 'purchased' from iTunes, not a general problem with purchased copies of music.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two kinds of people: 1. Those who finish lists
Ah, a history question! When Vancouver was established in 1824 it was under joint occupation by the U.S. and Britain, per the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. Along with the rest of the Oregon Territory, it became officially part of the U.S. in 1846 per the Oregon Treaty. It has been ever since. So, the answer is actually somewhat complicated, it was jointly occupied by the U.S. since 1824, but has been unambiguously part of the U.S since 1846.
Many years later, in 1886 the townsite of Granville in the British Dominion of Canada was incorporated to become the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia. Of course, Canada itself wouldn't become a nation for many more years.
That would greatly facilitate the process of buying votes! A great 'weakness' of the current system is anonymity of voting, which makes it difficult for the purchaser to verify that someone selling their vote has voted as requested. When a large corporation purchases someone's vote under your system, all they would need to do to verify that the voter 'stayed bought' would be to have them use a corporate email account as 'their' secret code. We could get rid of all the political advertising and simply make it possible to buy votes directly- it would be much more efficient!
Interesting, I wasn't aware that the energy of the SN1987A neutrinos had been measured. As an aside, I'm not at all sure that "rest mass" is the right phrase if they are indeed tachyons - perhaps "infinite speed mass?"
Let's roll with it, though, and assume they're really tachyons- how sure are we that we're observing the same kind of neutrinos? If the SN1987A tachyons had less than 10^-10 of the imaginary "rest mass" than the ones from CERN then they might travel closer to the speed of light even with much less total energy.
Two things: since the velocity of tachyonic neutrinos would depend on their energy it's plausible that the ones from a supernova were very high energy indeed, and thus traveled very close to the speed of light, albeit very very slightly faster rather than very very slightly slower.
The second thing is that it may well be that we don't understand the chronology of events within a supernova very well- what if the burst of neutrinos actually happened some time after the burst of light, but then outran it? After all, our current supernova models were designed to try to fit the data that appeared at the time to indicate that the neutrinos were emitted first...
It would appear that you do not live, for example, in a part of Ohio that tends to vote for a Democratic candidate. See this article.
There's a simpler and more paranoid explanation available. This is an alien home planet, and it's actually emitting huge amounts of various types of light. Our astronomical instruments, however, have been hacked to not show any of that- we're not supposed to know about alien civilizations, as it would stunt our development. Somealien didn't think this through and simply removed all the light from our data on that planet, resulting in an anomalously dark appearance. It's a software bug. Perhaps it'll be fixed by the next time we look at that planet, and it'll appear as a boring planet of standard appearance.
Every losing candidate, with the possible exception of sitting presidents, looks weak in retrospect. Let's look at a few more of them: Dole, Dukakis, Mondale - all of them now perceived as weak candidates.
This isn't a grand coincidence that one party always happens to nominate a weak candidate, but a byproduct of the fact that the process and result of losing the election makes them be perceived as much weaker in retrospect than they actually were during the campaign.
The grandparent was discussing war- your link does not address the topic. The US Constitution is quite specific about the process required to declare war, and the last time the United States declared war was June 5, 1942. The "Korean War", the "Vietnam War", heck even the absurdly named "War on Poverty", "War on Drugs", and "War on Terrorism" - none of them are war under the constitution. Note that the subject under discussion was the interpretation of the law, so the legal definition of "war" is precisely the point.
9000? You massively exaggerate the death toll from Chernobyl. In 2005, the WHO found that it was less than 50.
No, as of 2005 Chernobyl killed fewer than 50 people. See the WHO report.. It's likely more will die from possibly related causes but 20 years on the cause and effect is getting arguable.
Surely you meant the actual movie, Bad Taste. Peter Jackson's first film!
That was Jason Wyngarde, aka Mastermind. It wasn't mind control, exactly. He could put people into a sort of sleepwalking dream state and then control what they perceived and what they remembered as their own backstory. It was a slow-burn power, but cumulative - he was lousy at quick mind control, but after a few weeks under his influence it was very effective control even for a powerful telepath.
What I am saying is that companies should obey their local tax laws, but should be indifferent to laws in other states that do not apply to them. Your claim that this is facilitation of tax avoidance is obvious nonsense- as I mentioned, Amazon actively collects the appropriate state taxes from me and other residents here in the state of Washington where they are incorporated.
You are correct that residents of other states (such as California) are obligated to follow their local laws regarding use taxes. California may enforce its laws on its citizens as appropriate. Amazon is and should be completely indifferent to this process, it is not their role or obligation to either enforce or prevent taxation in other states from taking place. If California were to announce that it was going to enforce its Use Tax laws on its citizens I would have no problem with that, provided the methods used to enforce its law were appropriate. For California to blame people in other states for not enforcing its laws for it is arrogant and pathetic.
If California believes that it can force people in other states to act as its agents to enforce its laws, requiring them to collect and remit taxes on its behalf at no cost, it's interfering with interstate commerce and acting as a leech on other states. I'm afraid that it does appear that California is setting up its business with criminal (that is to say unconstitutional) intent.
Amazon seems to be doing fine here in Washington. We have a sales tax, but of course Amazon collects sales tax on all purchases by Washington State residents, and always has. It's state law, after all.
It's just when some other state decides to mandate that out-of-state companies should act as their agents to enforce their tax laws that there's a problem.
The arcade game referred to came out in 1987, it's also known as 1943: The Battle of Midway.
Notice that the 13 westernmost states votes' total to 12-14 against. What's wrong with the rest of the country?
Such a contract would not be enforceable in the United States. Indentured Servitude is quite illegal, a contract pledging it cannot be made binding. It's possible to write penalties for quitting into a contract, but you can't contract to never quit at all.
The states have the right to impose a sales tax, yes. They do not have the right to force out-of-state companies to act as their tax collectors. That's what this bill appears to be attempting to do.
It's an unfortunate fact that State governments want to be freeloaders, and force corporations in other states to collect taxes for them. If Texas(for example) wants to impose a sales tax on its residents, Texas may choose to do so and use appropriate means at its disposal to collect that tax. Texas may not require corporations that are not in Texas to act as its tax collectors. It simply lacks the authority to compel non-Texan companies to do the job of tax collection for them. Amazon is correct in resisting the unwanted role of Tax Collector for a state it does not have a nexus in.
Taxes often vary on a smaller level than that, many cities have their own sales tax, at least here in Washington State.
While I would welcome your proposed decrease in the sales tax I pay when purchasing products from Amazon from the current 9% or so to 4%, why would the Federal Government interfere in Washington State law in that way?
I used to work doing single-crystal X-ray crystallography, one part of the job was mounting a crystal onto the tip of a tiny glass rod. I was looking for a single crystal no larger than 0.5 mm in any direction, and hopefully at least 0.1mm in the smallest dimension, though at times they were smaller than that if they were needles or thin planes. I would sometimes work under a not particularly powerful magnifying glass, though it's quite possible to see a crystal that size with the naked eye, even colorless, transparent crystals as most of these were. Being quite nearsighted was actually a plus, as I could take off my glasses and at 5 cm or so away see objects of that size quite well with the naked eye.
I've been there, I've coded some Fortran for computational chemistry. There's a lot of old stuff out there... I didn't work with it as long ago as you did, but at least parts of the code we used were almost in that era, still formatted like it had been for cards, with comments dated from the 1970s.
In 2003 or so, I really quite wanted to use some recursion features that had been introduced with Fortran90. It took me quite some time to convince my boss at the time that we could lose full Fortran 77 backwards compatibility. It was like pulling teeth to get him to upgrade from the 26-year old version of the language to the 13-year old version...
This technology is nothing new- I had a set of the Peril Sensitive Sunglasses that came with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy video game. Those high-tech gadgets became opaque whenever you were in peril, so that you would avoid the urge to panic.
It's entirely legal to ebay a physical CD(at least, one legally created by the holder of copyright and purchased legitimately). Your example is a specific problem with songs 'purchased' from iTunes, not a general problem with purchased copies of music.