Once again, the answer lies somewhere in Internet distribution. Cut the risk-averse publisher out of the equation and get some nontraditional sources of capital, and the developer (with grassroots marketing support) is free to explore new avenues of creativity. If a game turns out to be successful through Internet distribution, then the developer can contract with a distributor to make hard copies of the game for brick-and-mortar sales.
The first part of your definition is a great start at stamping out the most insidious instances of spyware. Legitimate web designers aren't foisting this crap on their users, so it's easy to stay in compliance.
The second part, while desirable for many of us, would probably be an undue burden on software publishers, creating a legal hoop that any developer (even some individual IANAL guy in the OSS movement) would have to make sure they jump through when distributing their software. There could be tons of inadvertent noncompliance even among legitimate software developers.
OTOH, forbidding the transmission of *personally-identifiable information* without express consent of the user is a good idea. Anyone collecting such information *should* already have a privacy policy in place, meaning they already most likely have some sort of legal consult available. In other words, it doesn't overburden Joe Hobbyist or put him at risk of accidental noncompliance.
See, it's that mindset that has had politics stuck in the gutter since the 1960s.
Why the hell do you (as a political candidate) need to advertise on TV? Why can't you travel from state to state - maybe even in a car, with your spouse and kids, talking to the local citizens and the local media? Why do you have to mass-mail millions of campaign flyers, or have grotesque decorations at huge fundraising dinners? If everyone else is on an even footing, then you don't.
And if you (as a supporter of a candidate) really support that candidate, why not exercise actual free speech instead of free throwing-money-around? Get out there and tell your neighbors about your candidate. Make up some signs yourself for your neighbors to put on their lawns. Take things to the grassroots level, affecting those over whom you have the most influence, rather than trying to do everything at once with a gigantic campaign contribution. If a candidate has even 1% of their supporters willing to go to bat for them with actual *effort* rather than just writing a check, then the campaign practically runs itself, with actual speech instead of money.
On a real TV or movie set, the actors' union, along with the writers' union, the Teamsters, and whatever other unions are involved in the careers of the cast and crew all go to bat for one another, to ensure that a union shop is union to the core.
Where's this support in the games industry? Why isn't SAG lobbying EA employees to get them to unionize? Why are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians regarded as second-class citizens by SAG as compared to the writers, directors, set designers, cinematographers, and foley artists of the screen entertainment domain?
When someone creates an inheritance and passes it on to his heirs, isn't there utility derived from that?
Well, the heirs do gain utility they personally didn't have before. If there is a sales tax rather than an income tax/estate tax, then any of the property (real, personal, whatever) owned by the deceased was presumably paid for and taxed at the time it was purchased. However, FairTax doesn't tax second-hand purchases, only first-sale retail purchases, so it's the same situation as if the heirs *bought* the property second-hand rather than inheriting it. Any non-property assets (i.e., cash) inherited would eventually be taxed once the heirs spend it.
You can't have income without having an expenditure.
You mean an expenditure by the employer for the person's wage? That's the whole point here, to shift the tax burden from wage expenditures to consumer expenditures. The worker derives utility only *indirectly* from their wage, when they spend it; their employer doesn't derive utility because they aren't consuming anything, they're producing.
I would think the measure of a person's worth would be to measure that person's worth (assets minus liabilities). That has nothing to do with income or expenditures.
My assertion here is that there's a difference between "cash/stocks/bonds" and "personal property or utility derived from services consumed". Money has no intrinsic utility until it is used to purchase and consume something. That's why I'm saying the government should switch to considering "worth" to be based on consumption rather than income. At that point, the colloquial meaning of "worth" doesn't really apply, but that's just getting into another semantic argument, so you could call it Fred if you wanted to.
In any case, as I said, I don't think the purpose of a traditional IRA is to tax people more fairly because of some notion of taxing only utility.
I will concede this, but I would note that I wasn't asserting that claim in the first place. Rather, I was asserting that once traditional IRAs had been created (regardless of the original intention), they effectively allowed a person to shift some of their taxation from their income to their consumption.
campaign contributions which really is free speech in action
This was the biggest mistake the Supreme Court ever made, equating "money" with "speech". The second biggest was equating "corporation" with "person".
Democracy and communism are ostensibly not that far apart in theory (in execution thus far, this has not proven true, of course). If ever there was a part of American life in need of the communist way of doing things (and in my conservative-leaning opinion, this is the only one), it's the process of running for political office.
Running for President would work something like this: Get your petition signatures, apply for government funding, get your $100k, and spend it wisely, because that's all you're allowed to spend on your campaign. Fortunately, everyone else is dealing with the same $100k budget that you are, and finally it becomes a contest of who has the best ideas, rather than the loudest ones.
Maybe Microsoft and AoE3 are better, juicier journalistic targets, but Rome: Total War attempts to make a larger overture toward historical correctness.
It did fall a bit short, though. Most notable was the inclusion of three separate Roman factions which fight alongside each other until a civil war erupts among them. While giving the Romans three factions, versus every other nation's one, allows the Empire to spread swiftly across the map, the historical accuracy of having three factions came under harsh scrutiny.
This (and other issues) led to the formation of an independent mod group which released Rome: Total Realism, which alters the normal R:TW game in order to enhance the historical accuracy of the game. It's a very popular mod, and most people who use the mod like it so well that they don't play the unmodded game afterwards.
Does R:TW/RTR educate? Yes, some. It does teach you about how war was waged around 200 BC, including the use of mixed forces, the devastating power and the horrid weakness of the phalanx, city siege, and the importance of soldier morale on the battlefield. You also learn (some) geography since the entire game is spent poring over a map of Europe and the ancient Near East. As for the grander history lesson, it's difficult for a game to include a textbook historical message that really sticks with the player. While R:TW does make occasional references to important historical events, and it does provide several scenarios which recreate major battles of the day, there's no contiguous historical lesson present.
Sure, you can redefine "regressive" to mean something that doesn't apply.
How does utility not apply? I'm arguing that a tax should be based on the actual utility a person gains in life, not merely the *potential* for utility gain. That means taxing expenditures instead of income. Once the basis for taxation is actual utility gain, a sales tax is no longer regressive, and since the FairTax proposal says that people get a prebate of the bottom portion of the taxes on their expenditures, that tax is actually progressive.
This is more than a semantic argument, which is all your comments seem to be addressing. This is about fundamentally changing what the federal government considers to be a measure of a person's worth, from potential utility gain (or money) to actual utility gain (goods and services purchased with that money).
At least one flaw in that argument is that once you turn 59 1/2 you must start withdrawing the money. Also, traditional IRAs cannot be passed on from generation to generation tax free.
The example of the traditional IRA was meant to indicate that the concept of not taxing potential utility gain was already present in our economy. It wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy to the sales tax. Actually, a better argument on your part would have been that Roth IRAs are generally more popular these days *because* they are taxed up front while leaving the gains on investment tax-free.
Mathematically regressive, perhaps, when you look at income earned versus expenditures.
But when you look at *utility gained* versus expenditures, a sales tax isn't regressive anymore. It's equitable, and some might even say it's progressive if you consider the necessities of life (shelter, food, etc.) to have a higher per dollar utility value than luxury goods.
Sure, that person earns $1M and spends $125k, and gets taxed $31.5k or 3.15% of their income. But what's that other $875k doing? Are they papering their house with it? Stuffing their pillows? Wiping their ass? No, they're socking it away in savings, mostly in investments, thus allowing other people to benefit from it for a time.
Money by itself, in the absence of something to buy with it, serves no purpose and has no value. Why should a person get taxed on the money they don't spend and don't get any real benefit from? That's already a concept implemented in traditional IRAs, where money saved in the IRA is not taxed, but when the money is withdrawn (presumably, when you are about to spend it) you pay taxes then.
But if the mole states that I am sharing Britney Spears music files, then it *is* an untrue statement. I call as a witness an RIAA rep (someone who was involved in handling their case against me), and by his testimony in my lawsuit he gets to choose whether I keep suing Jimmy Freshman or turn around and countersue the RIAA instead.
Exactly. I'm not interfering with the process of justice as long as the police/feds aren't investigating. Unless little Jimmy Freshman across the hall is on the FBI's payroll, there's definitely no justice going on to interfere with.
Ah, come on, you'd seen him before at least once. Boxleitner was Tron!
Don't forget that Peter Jurasik, aka Londo Mollari in B5, was also in Tron. He played Crom, the Compound Interest Program that got out of breath when he had to figure out T-bill rates.
In the first season, David Warner (Ed Dillinger / Sark, in Tron) played a guest role on B5. Warner also played a few Star Trek roles - he played the Federation ambassador in ST:V, and did a fantastic job portraying Chancellor Gorkon in ST:VI. He also appeared on TNG as Picard's torturer Gul Madred in the "There... are.... FOUR... lights!" two-part episode.
And if you haven't stopped reading at this point, IMDb indicates that a fellow named Vince Deadrick played "Warrior #2" in Tron, and appeared in two different fifth-season B5 episodes. This is where my post gets back on-topic, because Deadrick appeared in two Enterprise episodes, where he was credited as "Klingon #3" and "Crewman On Fire".;)
That's a potentially dangerous thing to do. Suppose I run a honeypot p2p with fake-named files (e.g., the filename says Britney Spears but doesn't have her crap music in it), and one of these overzealous stool pigeons rats me to the RIAA. The RIAA sues me, and during discovery I find out how they got the information on the files I was sharing. Then, when I find out who finked on me, I sue their ass for my court costs in the first case.
It was mentioned above that the test code contained errors that made it not conform to the CSS standard, and that this was intentional. It still leaves the question wide open as to whether or not the test code was "correct" for generating the desired image. Is the renderer they used for the reference image proven to conform to the standard in every way, with no bugs? That's really the only way to know for certain that the test isn't flawed.
For that matter, if there *is* a renderer out there that works properly, why aren't any web browsers using it?
"We've built these features into the operating system," said Brian Croll, Apple's senior director software product marketing. "You can't do what we've done with add-on software."
This was another quote in reference to Dashboard and Spotlight. Why exactly can't you do with add-on software what they've done in the OS? Maybe I'm wrong, but at first blush it sounds like a trick out of the Microsoft bag.
People will also pay for "fill dirt", or dirt taken from a construction site where they dug a big hole in the building process.
But the thing is, there's a reason that people will pay for dirt or manure or whatever. Dirt and turds have legitimate uses. If you have a big hole in your yard after tearing down the old shed out back, you need some fill dirt to fill in that hole. If you need to fertilize a field, go buy yourself some animal feces. People pay money for these because making enough dirt or crap themselves is prohibitively inconvenient (do you really feel like raising chickens or cows yourself just for their excrement?).
On the other hand, browser extensions - which appear to be all this new company offers - are much easier either to create by oneself or to find a free version that someone else has created. Yes, the usefulness might still be there in some cases, but when you eliminate the prohibitive inconvenience of self-production, it reduces the value of the commodity tremendously.
The only way I can see this company succeeding is if they have a lot of capital available to buy the extensions that other people have created in order to lock down the market, as well as to tie people up in farcical legal battles over patents and copyrights.
Yep, Starcade for a time was hosted by Geoff Edwards, who was at least twice the age of every contestant on the show. The contestants played a variety of arcade games for a ridiculously short amount of time in an effort to get the highest score possible. The format worked well enough for games like Galaga, but having only 30 seconds of gameplay made the oft-featured Dragon's Lair seem pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
And here I thought Microsoft already had us by the thumbs.
Once again, the answer lies somewhere in Internet distribution. Cut the risk-averse publisher out of the equation and get some nontraditional sources of capital, and the developer (with grassroots marketing support) is free to explore new avenues of creativity. If a game turns out to be successful through Internet distribution, then the developer can contract with a distributor to make hard copies of the game for brick-and-mortar sales.
Coming soon to a Western democracy near you....
And one to actually do some useful work.
You mean you can use computers to do useful work?
Huh. I guess you really do learn something new every day!
The first part of your definition is a great start at stamping out the most insidious instances of spyware. Legitimate web designers aren't foisting this crap on their users, so it's easy to stay in compliance.
The second part, while desirable for many of us, would probably be an undue burden on software publishers, creating a legal hoop that any developer (even some individual IANAL guy in the OSS movement) would have to make sure they jump through when distributing their software. There could be tons of inadvertent noncompliance even among legitimate software developers.
OTOH, forbidding the transmission of *personally-identifiable information* without express consent of the user is a good idea. Anyone collecting such information *should* already have a privacy policy in place, meaning they already most likely have some sort of legal consult available. In other words, it doesn't overburden Joe Hobbyist or put him at risk of accidental noncompliance.
See, it's that mindset that has had politics stuck in the gutter since the 1960s.
Why the hell do you (as a political candidate) need to advertise on TV? Why can't you travel from state to state - maybe even in a car, with your spouse and kids, talking to the local citizens and the local media? Why do you have to mass-mail millions of campaign flyers, or have grotesque decorations at huge fundraising dinners? If everyone else is on an even footing, then you don't.
And if you (as a supporter of a candidate) really support that candidate, why not exercise actual free speech instead of free throwing-money-around? Get out there and tell your neighbors about your candidate. Make up some signs yourself for your neighbors to put on their lawns. Take things to the grassroots level, affecting those over whom you have the most influence, rather than trying to do everything at once with a gigantic campaign contribution. If a candidate has even 1% of their supporters willing to go to bat for them with actual *effort* rather than just writing a check, then the campaign practically runs itself, with actual speech instead of money.
On a real TV or movie set, the actors' union, along with the writers' union, the Teamsters, and whatever other unions are involved in the careers of the cast and crew all go to bat for one another, to ensure that a union shop is union to the core.
Where's this support in the games industry? Why isn't SAG lobbying EA employees to get them to unionize? Why are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians regarded as second-class citizens by SAG as compared to the writers, directors, set designers, cinematographers, and foley artists of the screen entertainment domain?
If only someone could sound like sean connery...
I'll get you yet, Trebek!!
When someone creates an inheritance and passes it on to his heirs, isn't there utility derived from that?
Well, the heirs do gain utility they personally didn't have before. If there is a sales tax rather than an income tax/estate tax, then any of the property (real, personal, whatever) owned by the deceased was presumably paid for and taxed at the time it was purchased. However, FairTax doesn't tax second-hand purchases, only first-sale retail purchases, so it's the same situation as if the heirs *bought* the property second-hand rather than inheriting it. Any non-property assets (i.e., cash) inherited would eventually be taxed once the heirs spend it.
You can't have income without having an expenditure.
You mean an expenditure by the employer for the person's wage? That's the whole point here, to shift the tax burden from wage expenditures to consumer expenditures. The worker derives utility only *indirectly* from their wage, when they spend it; their employer doesn't derive utility because they aren't consuming anything, they're producing.
I would think the measure of a person's worth would be to measure that person's worth (assets minus liabilities). That has nothing to do with income or expenditures.
My assertion here is that there's a difference between "cash/stocks/bonds" and "personal property or utility derived from services consumed". Money has no intrinsic utility until it is used to purchase and consume something. That's why I'm saying the government should switch to considering "worth" to be based on consumption rather than income. At that point, the colloquial meaning of "worth" doesn't really apply, but that's just getting into another semantic argument, so you could call it Fred if you wanted to.
In any case, as I said, I don't think the purpose of a traditional IRA is to tax people more fairly because of some notion of taxing only utility.
I will concede this, but I would note that I wasn't asserting that claim in the first place. Rather, I was asserting that once traditional IRAs had been created (regardless of the original intention), they effectively allowed a person to shift some of their taxation from their income to their consumption.
campaign contributions which really is free speech in action
This was the biggest mistake the Supreme Court ever made, equating "money" with "speech". The second biggest was equating "corporation" with "person".
Democracy and communism are ostensibly not that far apart in theory (in execution thus far, this has not proven true, of course). If ever there was a part of American life in need of the communist way of doing things (and in my conservative-leaning opinion, this is the only one), it's the process of running for political office.
Running for President would work something like this: Get your petition signatures, apply for government funding, get your $100k, and spend it wisely, because that's all you're allowed to spend on your campaign. Fortunately, everyone else is dealing with the same $100k budget that you are, and finally it becomes a contest of who has the best ideas, rather than the loudest ones.
Maybe Microsoft and AoE3 are better, juicier journalistic targets, but Rome: Total War attempts to make a larger overture toward historical correctness.
It did fall a bit short, though. Most notable was the inclusion of three separate Roman factions which fight alongside each other until a civil war erupts among them. While giving the Romans three factions, versus every other nation's one, allows the Empire to spread swiftly across the map, the historical accuracy of having three factions came under harsh scrutiny.
This (and other issues) led to the formation of an independent mod group which released Rome: Total Realism, which alters the normal R:TW game in order to enhance the historical accuracy of the game. It's a very popular mod, and most people who use the mod like it so well that they don't play the unmodded game afterwards.
Does R:TW/RTR educate? Yes, some. It does teach you about how war was waged around 200 BC, including the use of mixed forces, the devastating power and the horrid weakness of the phalanx, city siege, and the importance of soldier morale on the battlefield. You also learn (some) geography since the entire game is spent poring over a map of Europe and the ancient Near East. As for the grander history lesson, it's difficult for a game to include a textbook historical message that really sticks with the player. While R:TW does make occasional references to important historical events, and it does provide several scenarios which recreate major battles of the day, there's no contiguous historical lesson present.
Sure, you can redefine "regressive" to mean something that doesn't apply.
How does utility not apply? I'm arguing that a tax should be based on the actual utility a person gains in life, not merely the *potential* for utility gain. That means taxing expenditures instead of income. Once the basis for taxation is actual utility gain, a sales tax is no longer regressive, and since the FairTax proposal says that people get a prebate of the bottom portion of the taxes on their expenditures, that tax is actually progressive.
This is more than a semantic argument, which is all your comments seem to be addressing. This is about fundamentally changing what the federal government considers to be a measure of a person's worth, from potential utility gain (or money) to actual utility gain (goods and services purchased with that money).
At least one flaw in that argument is that once you turn 59 1/2 you must start withdrawing the money. Also, traditional IRAs cannot be passed on from generation to generation tax free.
The example of the traditional IRA was meant to indicate that the concept of not taxing potential utility gain was already present in our economy. It wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy to the sales tax. Actually, a better argument on your part would have been that Roth IRAs are generally more popular these days *because* they are taxed up front while leaving the gains on investment tax-free.
For thousands of years, man thought the moon was made of cheese.
Then we went there and found out it was made of rock.
We haven't been back since.
Behold the power of Cheese.
Mathematically regressive, perhaps, when you look at income earned versus expenditures.
But when you look at *utility gained* versus expenditures, a sales tax isn't regressive anymore. It's equitable, and some might even say it's progressive if you consider the necessities of life (shelter, food, etc.) to have a higher per dollar utility value than luxury goods.
Sure, that person earns $1M and spends $125k, and gets taxed $31.5k or 3.15% of their income. But what's that other $875k doing? Are they papering their house with it? Stuffing their pillows? Wiping their ass? No, they're socking it away in savings, mostly in investments, thus allowing other people to benefit from it for a time.
Money by itself, in the absence of something to buy with it, serves no purpose and has no value. Why should a person get taxed on the money they don't spend and don't get any real benefit from? That's already a concept implemented in traditional IRAs, where money saved in the IRA is not taxed, but when the money is withdrawn (presumably, when you are about to spend it) you pay taxes then.
But if the mole states that I am sharing Britney Spears music files, then it *is* an untrue statement. I call as a witness an RIAA rep (someone who was involved in handling their case against me), and by his testimony in my lawsuit he gets to choose whether I keep suing Jimmy Freshman or turn around and countersue the RIAA instead.
Slander, of course.
Exactly. I'm not interfering with the process of justice as long as the police/feds aren't investigating. Unless little Jimmy Freshman across the hall is on the FBI's payroll, there's definitely no justice going on to interfere with.
Ah, come on, you'd seen him before at least once. Boxleitner was Tron!
;)
Don't forget that Peter Jurasik, aka Londo Mollari in B5, was also in Tron. He played Crom, the Compound Interest Program that got out of breath when he had to figure out T-bill rates.
In the first season, David Warner (Ed Dillinger / Sark, in Tron) played a guest role on B5. Warner also played a few Star Trek roles - he played the Federation ambassador in ST:V, and did a fantastic job portraying Chancellor Gorkon in ST:VI. He also appeared on TNG as Picard's torturer Gul Madred in the "There... are.... FOUR... lights!" two-part episode.
And if you haven't stopped reading at this point, IMDb indicates that a fellow named Vince Deadrick played "Warrior #2" in Tron, and appeared in two different fifth-season B5 episodes. This is where my post gets back on-topic, because Deadrick appeared in two Enterprise episodes, where he was credited as "Klingon #3" and "Crewman On Fire".
That's a potentially dangerous thing to do. Suppose I run a honeypot p2p with fake-named files (e.g., the filename says Britney Spears but doesn't have her crap music in it), and one of these overzealous stool pigeons rats me to the RIAA. The RIAA sues me, and during discovery I find out how they got the information on the files I was sharing. Then, when I find out who finked on me, I sue their ass for my court costs in the first case.
I don't know about you, bust almost EVERYONE I know would find it far easier to make a turd than a browser extension.
And sometimes, people make both at the same time.
It was mentioned above that the test code contained errors that made it not conform to the CSS standard, and that this was intentional. It still leaves the question wide open as to whether or not the test code was "correct" for generating the desired image. Is the renderer they used for the reference image proven to conform to the standard in every way, with no bugs? That's really the only way to know for certain that the test isn't flawed.
For that matter, if there *is* a renderer out there that works properly, why aren't any web browsers using it?
"We've built these features into the operating system," said Brian Croll, Apple's senior director software product marketing. "You can't do what we've done with add-on software."
This was another quote in reference to Dashboard and Spotlight. Why exactly can't you do with add-on software what they've done in the OS? Maybe I'm wrong, but at first blush it sounds like a trick out of the Microsoft bag.
Some tried to point out the flaws in home-made ice.
....Oh, crap."
An ice company executive, 70-ish years ago:
"Those pitiful cubes are so puny you could fit a bunch of them in a glass!
People will also pay for "fill dirt", or dirt taken from a construction site where they dug a big hole in the building process.
But the thing is, there's a reason that people will pay for dirt or manure or whatever. Dirt and turds have legitimate uses. If you have a big hole in your yard after tearing down the old shed out back, you need some fill dirt to fill in that hole. If you need to fertilize a field, go buy yourself some animal feces. People pay money for these because making enough dirt or crap themselves is prohibitively inconvenient (do you really feel like raising chickens or cows yourself just for their excrement?).
On the other hand, browser extensions - which appear to be all this new company offers - are much easier either to create by oneself or to find a free version that someone else has created. Yes, the usefulness might still be there in some cases, but when you eliminate the prohibitive inconvenience of self-production, it reduces the value of the commodity tremendously.
The only way I can see this company succeeding is if they have a lot of capital available to buy the extensions that other people have created in order to lock down the market, as well as to tie people up in farcical legal battles over patents and copyrights.
Come to think of it, maybe they could hit Microsoft up for some investment prospects.
Yep, Starcade for a time was hosted by Geoff Edwards, who was at least twice the age of every contestant on the show. The contestants played a variety of arcade games for a ridiculously short amount of time in an effort to get the highest score possible. The format worked well enough for games like Galaga, but having only 30 seconds of gameplay made the oft-featured Dragon's Lair seem pointless.