If he were a sole proprietorship-- a company that is the same as the person who owns it-- it would be.
In this situation, he is the sole owner of an S corp that is a separate legal entity from him. However, since it has no other shareholders and no other directors, it's a sham. It has steady income and predictable expenses, and almost no risk. Why an S corp doesn't require more than one shareholder I can't fathom, although raising the requirement to 2 would just end up making a lot of spouses, children, relatives and friends into paper shareholders.
C'mon, people, I know taxes are boring, but read the article.
Unlike Jobs or Schmidt, Watson was the sole shareholder and owner of the business in question. As a sole proprietor of his S corp, he was fully responsible for any profit or loss, as well as determining salary.
If this were organized as a sole proprietorship, there'd be no distinction whatsoever between his net profit and his income. Probably a bigger question here is why such organization is allowed.
At any rate, when Jobs gets $1 salary and then a profit bonus, it's because the board of directors approved that salary, and approved the bonus. No profit, no bonus. Since Watson's S corp has as its revenue stream steady income from the accounting firm and absolutely reliable expense forecasting, there was almost no chance of him posting a loss short of his arrangement with the firm being terminated, which is a far cry from Jobs being tasked with making sure Apple comes out with profitable products.
When used by an independent board of directors, representing shareholders, the low salary/profit bonus structure is a way of motivating executives.
When you are your own board, it's a tax dodge, and that's how the IRS saw it.
Why on God's green earth is "apps" an acceptable abbreviation for "appetizer" but not for "applications"? I've heard and used the latter far earlier and far more often than the former.
The law reads pretty much the same way in the US, specificially with regard to consent and intoxication and/or coercion. Disparity in power (as in employer-employee relations) can negate consent. Intoxication can negate consent. The problem here is not with the law, but with juries. One jury might recognize that intoxication negates consent, while another sees a drunk woman who was asking for it.
As for what happens in most situations-- maybe people should behave differently.
The kind of violent assault you describe is relatively rare, difficult to predict, and nearly impossible to prevent unless you never leave home and/or arm yourself. The other kind-- where consent is never validly given-- happens quite a bit, but is common, easy to predict, and simple to prevent. People simply choose not to bother.
I would like to propose a radical idea. (Someone else can program it, I'm the idea guy.)
When a story revolves around the juxtaposition of two words-- in this case, "idea" and "programming", try reversing the two. If your story makes as much, or very nearlyi as much, sense one way as the other, reconsider posting the story.
To wit:
'Many programmers,' observes Fallingward, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to writing the program. Ideas are a commodity, pulled out of a closet to give a well-constructed algorithm a purpose. It's just a small matter of the idea, right?' Wrong. 'Thinking of the idea is the ingredient the programmers are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could think up their own ideas.'"
Yes, a lot of self-described "idea guys" have lousy ideas and aren't interested in details like programming. Is perhaps the thesis here that idea guys can be taught to program, but mere programmers can't be taught to have ideas? Because that's a bit insulting.
Economies of scale (making each item cheaper to produce by producing more) doesn't work for the Volt: the batteries have a constant cost and making more only makes them MORE expensive if anything. This is because the resources to make them are limited and increasing demand causes prices to increase.
Therefore they can't overcome the cost penalty by making it up in volume. This move only makes sense for GM if the practice and market establishment of selling now will later be useful for them when making the cars is profitable.
You're ignoring the cost structure of the battery supplier. You're assuming that the price per unit is the same for an order of 10,000 units as it is for 100,000 units or more, and that's almost assuredly false.
The bottom line here is that GM is refusing to take a risk and commit to selling the Volt as a mass market automobile. If they were to manufacture a few hundred thousand they could very likely get a discount on the battery-- but if they can't move those cars they'll have to discount them or write them off. They're taking a smaller gamble on a smaller production run, and either hoping to have a small loss but at least demonstrate that the product can be sold in the marketplace, or raising the price to cover the higher per unit cost for parts like the battery.
That's what Tesla did as well-- making and selling their expensive, low production run roadster before attempting a mass market sedan.
No, it's still perfectly good for that. WinTel is a venn diagram that describes the subset of "IBM PC compatibles" where "runs a CPU by intel" intersects "runs the Windows operating system".
The term is now no less accurate, it's merely less inclusive-- although since Intel and Windows both dominate their respective markets, only marginally less inclusive.
Of course, machines that use AMD processors to run the Linux operating system never fell under either umbrella, so they have no impact on the accuracy of the term whatsoever. As the term was coined to define the "standard" combination for business PCs, a machine that conforms to neither (especially in not running Microsoft's Windows operating system) was never intended for inclusion anyway. That the machine *could* run it isn't particularly relevant-- neither is the fact that the chosen operating system, Linux, also runs on Intel processors.
Who is going to authorize the correctional facility to misuse licensed spectrum?
Who is going to indemnify the facility against liability when those prison-controlled towers interfere with nearby non-prison-originating traffic, prompting the operators to sue?
You are really an ass. This is why people (myself included) hate people from the U.S. so much. The United States of America is a SUBSET of all the states of America. It's rude to insult all Americans when typically it is just those from the U.S. that fuck things up so much. We desperately need a new adjective to refer to a person from the U.S. but until one formally exists, USian will have to do. Just don't ever use the word "American" unless you mean it to refer to everyone on this hemisphere.
This is ridiculous. I've met people from Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil and not one of them ever identified themselves to me, or anyone else I knew, as "Americans" or expressed the idea that they felt lumped in with things said about citizens of the USA because of the use of the term "American". They were Colombian, Mexican, or Brazilian, and those were the words you used to describe them.
You're just being pedantic. It is true that "America" is a continent rather than a country, and it is perhaps inaccurate, or at least incomplete, for people to have shortened "United States of America" to "America" but that is not particularly surprising, as it is the only state on that continent that uses the the continent's name in the name of the nation itself. The other areas to which you refer-- North America, Central America, and South America, are arbitrary geographic distinctions and not political ones. There's no country or political entity that is both contiguous and inclusive of "South America" or "Central America" or even "North America" (unless you count trade treaties).
I'm going to continue to use the word "American" the way most people understand it-- to mean citizens of the USA. Anything else is putting some kind of odd political agenda ahead of being understood.
You will if you really wanted to. But what I noticed with most geeks is that they don't care. They wouldn't mind it, but don't care enough to really go for it.
A fiercely competitive marketplace benefits consumers with -choices-, but not with support.
A fiercely competitive marketplace hurts the IT industry.
Non-sequitur. There is no basis on which to posit that the market is a zero-sum game where choice and support are fungible. That the philosophical dipoles of many of these debates tend towards MS Windows on one side (proprietary, closed source, centralized) and Linux on the other (open source, decentralized) on the other does not necessitate that it be so. There is no particular reason why a market could not have multiple vendors competing for share in operating systems and applications, and each provide robust support contracts as well, whether on a centralized or decentralized basis. In fact there's plenty of decentralized source for support on Microsoft products as well, either through endorsed or unendorsed sources.
pardon me for being selfish about my job. I'm perfectly happy knowing that being a windows-based IT professional guarantees me job prospects almost anywhere I go. The last thing I want to have to do is learn a dozen operating systems and office suites because I'm not sure what my next employer may use.
disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboy. I've got two linux systems, but that's for my own interest, not for work.
Will you be just as perfectly happy if being a Windows-based IT professional limited your choices? What if it eliminated them? It's nice that you've learned linux as a hobby, but isn't diversifying also a solid career move-- as a general principle?
Those whom for whatever reason have chosen or have fallen into situations where their primary system was a nondominant product (whether it be an operating system or application) know that there's safety in diversity and broader bases of knowledge. Those who are dependent on a single, dominant system will of course resist having to learn anything new-- and may suffer the most if and when it becomes necessary for everyone to learn something new.
It is? Doesn't Microsoft dominate the OS marketshare,
Yes. However, if you used to dominate OS marketshare more than you do now, this isn't judged to be good performance.
wasn't Windows 7 a huge hit,
Comparatively speaking? Perhaps not. Each successive version of Windows could be the "best selling ever" without actually being a "huge hit" if sales of Windows did not keep pace with or grow faster than the PC market itself. If one assumes the PC market grows every year, and every new PC after the new system's release comes with that OS, you could "beat" your previous OS sales record each and every year, but that isn't really any kind of improvement. In fact, you could slip in terms of growth and market share and still claim "best selling Windows ever"-- and this is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft claims.
isn't xbox 360 kicking ass right now,
Again, in what way? The first iteration was a distant second in a three horse race, barely edging out the GameCube by most metrics. Good show for a first attempt, and certainly better than other MS products have managed (I'm looking at you, Zune.)
The 360? A slightly less distant second in a three horse race, despite launching a year ahead of the competition. It does well in some areas (attach rate of games and accessories) but less well in others (poor hardware reliability leading to large one-time charges for replacement of faulty hardware).
I own a 360 and quite a few games and it's a pretty good project, albeit not without warts. If one considers that "kicking ass" then perhaps one needs to raise one's standards, because it's neither as dominant as Windows is in its own arena, nor as good a financial performer as other Microsoft products, despite charging for things the competitors give away for free.
or are we just judging Windows Phone 7? Cause if we are then i gotta say it's a bit early for that.
Heavens no, that wouldn't be fair. It's not as if anyone else came out with a touchscreen phone with handheld computer capabilities and launched it without cut and paste, but then added it later, all the while causing furor about whether or not it was necessary... oh, wait...
Come on CNN atleast don't make link baiting so obvious and Slashdot stop putting inaccurate shit on the front page.
Since Slashdot posted that this was a CNN story that says Microsoft's brand is dying, it isn't inaccurate. It is indeed a CNN story, and the story does indeed say that. Whether or not CNN's story is accurate is a second question, but the fact that CNN is willing to make that assertion is news in and of itself.
Besides, it's not that big a stretch. The idea that Microsoft would maintain its position as king of the hill forever is naive in the extreme. One day yet it may become Just Another Company, much as IBM is today, and a brand known more for its products of yesteryear than what they make today. It's never too early for amateur fortunetellers to start pointing out that they think they see the start of this process happening right now. One day, one of them will be right.
Perhaps because it's easier to show legitimate non-infringing use of a jailbroken phone (use on compatible but unofficially supported operators) than it is for the Xbox (use for unsupported video codecs).
Sure, people jailbreak both devices for illegitimate reasons: piracy of apps and games.
Sure, people jailbreak both devices for legitimate reasons: adding functionality.
I think the difference is that the iPhone is a quad band world phone. There's absolutely nothing to prevent it from working on the many, many compatible carriers worldwide except for Apple's contractual agreement with AT&T in the US, and the arbitrary and intentional restriction Apple has placed on the devices they sell in the US to support that agreement. Jailbreaking enables a fundamental freedom for the user: the ability to use on an operator of their choice, independent of Apple's contractual obligations.
It is less clear that the non-infringing alternative uses for the Xbox are as fundamental, or that the restrictions you can circumvent by jailbreaking it are as arbitrary. It's not as if the Xbox 360 contains support for a lot of codecs other than WMV, but that these have been hidden or disabled-- they were never put into the device in the first place, unlike the GSM radio in the iPhone which is capable of supporting other operators besides AT&T. It's not as if the many hobbyist applications to which an Xbox 360 may be put are fundamental to the purpose and use of the device-- unlike a phone owner's choice of network.
Phone jailbreaking enables a fundamental consumer choice that is part of having a free and transparent market for phones and phone service.
What essential consumer choice does jailbreaking a console enable? What role do jailbroken consoles play in the marketplace?
No, the solution is to find another business model. Stop expecting that there is a future in charging repeatedly for mere copies of collections of info, which with current technology anyone is quite capable of reproducing at extremely low cost.
This is exactly the kind of crazy that leads rightsholders to conclude there is no acceptable compromise that can be made, so they might as well charge as much as they can as often as they can, and leads middlemen that are trying to reach a compromise (like Amazon and Apple) to tear their hair out.
I have a tough time envisioning how the world would work if they only way to charge for a copy of a book was if that copy cost money to create.
From newspapers to books the justification for charging was never the cost of duplication or delivery. Those were only part of it. The more copies made, the more copies sold, and the lower the price of the work's initial creation for each person who bought an initial copy. Since each of the physical copies could only be in the hands of one person at a time, this created an incentive for people to buy their own copies.
With duplication and transmission prices dropped to near zero, the nightmare scenario is that with no practical or legal restrictions in place, no content provider can ever sell more than the first copy of a work. Once that copy hits the Internet and is available, unrestricted, for the cost of duplication-- you're done. That means that you must recover the entirety of the cost of the work's creation from the initial sale, or else you have to inhibit the creation of copies-- in other words, DRM.
The reality is that information is not a scarce resource. These dinosaurs are clinging hard to the recent past when information was tied to media that is a scarce resource and wasn't so easily copied. That has changed, big time. They hold back all kinds of progress, to the detriment of us all. Copying is not a sin, and no excuse need be made for it. The sins being committed and garbage excuses being made are the ones the content industries do to justify themselves.
Information is no less a scarce resource than it ever was. Copies of information are no longer scarce, but the entirety of the value in information was only ever partially in the creation of copies. It was in the initial gathering and collection as well. The problem is that the inherent difficulty of making copies that protected the investment in content creation has now been removed. In a world with only digital distribution of content, there is no way to cover the risk in investing in content creation, because there's no way of making more than a single sale, ever.
You know, I can think of a better way to pass the books to my offsprings after I die: They can just take my goddamn Kindle! I'm not going to be buried with it, you know. And I can add a PostIt note to my will with the password to my Amazon account.
Problem Solved!
Sure, because there's no chance Amazon will close the account once you're dead, right-- cutting off access to all the content?
No chance that Amazon's user agreement says a Kindle account is non-transferable, right-- meaning you can't give it to your offspring, as that's a transfer.
Use of the Application. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Amazon hereby grants you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to install and use the Application on your PC. You may use the Application only on your PC. You may not separate any individual component of the Application for use on another device or computer, may not transfer it for use on another device or use it, or any portion of it, over a network and may not sell, rent, lease, lend, distribute or sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Application in whole or in part.
Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.
Restrictions. Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon's own license for the Kindle software and the Kindle content prohibits what you have suggested. Whether they have ever, or actually will, terminate the Kindle accounts of deceased subscribers is another question, but they would be within the rights they reserve in the current agreement if they did so.
The license does say that it is "permanent" but it also says it's given to "you" and you may not transfer to a third party. It's unclear to me whether or not "permanent" wins out over "no third parties" or whether it's even possible to prohibit such a transfer in the event of death. After all, permanent or not, "you" don't exist at that point, so it's arguable you have no rights under the contract.
Certainly some Kindle subscriber must have died by this point. What happened to their content? Has anyone ever tried to transfer an Amazon account from a deceased relative to a living person?
1) I get paid, they take taxes. 2) I buy something like a house, I pay sales tax. 3) Then continuing to own that house, I pay a % of value on that house as a tax every year. 3.5) if I sell the house, and make a net profit over what I paid, I pay a tax on that profit as income" 4) if it's a valuable house/property, if I will it to my children on my death, they get hit with a massive estate tax.
It's a great system....if you're a government.
I sell my hammer to my neighbor, according to the government I should be paying taxes on that transaction. Why, again, are they entitled to that?
Because it is the government that creates and maintains the atmosphere and environment in which each and every one of those transactions is enabled.
You get paid for working. How do you know you will get paid? What happens if you don't get paid? Who maintains the courts and systems of laws that allow you to redress grievances if you don't receive your pay?
A house can be valuable in and of itself, but many are more valuable because of connections to public utilities, interconnected rights of way (roads) and services like public safety and waste removal. Where do those come from?
Capital gains are windfall gains that come from speculative activities. If income you make from the sweat of your brow is taxable, why should income from windfalls not be? Can you honestly say you want laborers to pay taxes, but speculators need not? What of companies and individuals whose entire income is derived from capital gains?
You paid taxes on your earnings. Your progeny get the benefits of the sweat of your brow without lifting a finger. What kind of society says that your labor is taxable, but their inherited wealth is not?
If your neighbor decides he doesn't want to pay you for the nice hammer he's just taken from you, and threatens to hit you with it instead, who are you going to call to protect yourself from him-- or should everyone just do that themselves?
The idea of taxing everything just once is ineffective, because eventually too much weatlh and property falls into the category of "already been taxed once" and flows through channels that aren't taxed. In general, the idea is to encourage transactions to happen and to take just enough from each of those transactions to support the environment that enables the transaction without actively discouraging the transaction. Reducing everything to a payroll tax and removing everything else provides a disincentive to work, and asymmetrically benefits all those whose income comes from sources other than traditional labor.
I run at least five flavors of Windows and hafter as many Linux distros, am pretty solidly in the Ubuntu camp. I have a Mac and an iPhone and am going to be buying more for a laundry list of reasons.
HOWEVER, the first thing that struck me about the Mac and the iPhone was how much they did NOT "just work." I was ready to be converted. Oh, please, let me for once just buy a !@#$ing box and be able to plug it in and start working. It was NO different to me than setting up a Windows or Ubuntu box. The OS wasn't fully configured or even current. I had to install everything myself only to find it wanted to automatically run 2.9GBs of patches, rebooting about six times in the process. I didn't have a working computer until the next day.
The difference is that Apple has an army of well trained baby sitters who will, for a fee, put up with this crap for you and coddle your ego telling you what a special, pretty smart and interesting person you are and then hand your shiny box back.
I refuse to pay for that sort of saccharine bullshit, so I'm left with a computer that is just as much a pain in my ass as any other.
You've constructed a nice straw man there in which "just works" means "comes magically preconfigured for my specific needs and never requires software updates".
Computers get put in boxes and within a few days they are out of date. The longer it sits in the box before it gets to you, the more updates it needs. Apple periodically refreshes its lineup and new models get the latest software, but yes, you're going to need some updates.
You may or may not be exaggerating the downloads or restarts required; I can't tell. I can only say that the numbers you quote are probably near the upper limits for what any buyer of a new, current model Apple computer is ever likely to experience. I don't think I've even come close to those figures in the last six months on OSX.
How that compares to installing Linux, where you have to download the entire operating system unless you bought a computer preconfigured with it, I don't know. You don't offer any comparisons, so I can only guess-- although you yourself say it's "no different" than an Ubuntu box.
"Just works" means that for the majority of tasks for which an average user requires a computer, the way in which the task is achieved is intuitive-- something that a user with minimal training can achieve without a lot of trial and error or consulting documentation. When referring to peripherals and accessories, it means that when one has a reasonable expectation that two devices should work together, that they do so with a minimum of trouble and effort, and in a way that matches the user's expectations.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with patches or configuration. The phrase "just works" was never intended by anyone to mean "doesn't require configuration" or "doesn't require updates".
Wimax isn't real 4G. Its just a crappy extension of Wifi. Hence the spottyness.
WiMax isn't "real 4G" because there is no "real 4G" because "4G" isn't defined-- just as "3G" was not defined by the ITU before it was used as a marketing term. At one point, even GPRS and Edge were called by some "3G", while others responded that it was more like "2.5G".
Furthermore, WiMax is not an "extension of Wifi" unless you want to attempt to reduce the significance of OFDMA to that of an "extension", in which case LTE is no more significant, given that it is also based on OFDMA. WiMax and LTE have more in common with each other than either has with wifi, and typical range for a WiMax base station is a kilometer or more-- with LOS, up to 8km.
You're calling out those describing WiMax as "4G" for confusing technical terms with marketing ones, but I think you've fallen prey to one yourself-- the near-ubiquitous description of WiMax as "wifi on steroids" which just means an IP-based WAN. WiMax coverage is spotty because providers don't deploy enough base stations compared to existing operators using other technologies.
True. Halo: ODST even left a sort of cliffhanger at the end to make it seem like there will be an ODST2..
I'd beg to differ. Both of the ending cutscenes in that game show how the ending of ODST leads towards the opening of Halo 3.
I suppose Microsoft's new in-house studio for handling Halo, 343 Industries, could pick up and make a sequel to ODST, showing what those characters are doing at a later point in the Halo 3 timeline, I don't think there's anything about the way that game ends that suggests there should be or needs to be such a sequel-- unlike, say, the ending of Halo 2, or even the "we're just getting started" remark at the end of Halo 1.
I think it's more likely, however, that 343 will pick up where Halo 3 ends and do Halo 4. That, Bungie left wide open-- no doubt at Microsoft's request and in full knowledge of what the future plan was-- to trade the franchise for their freedom, and do two more Halo games (ODST and Reach) for Microsoft and call it done.
Hahahaha. I haven't played more than 15 minutes of multiplayer in the past 5 years, and most of that was the Reach Beta. With all the griefers and racists, it's a waste of time.
Story is the most important thing... i.e. WHY am I trying to kill that blue alien, and why is he trying to kill me? Give me something to believe in and to engage my interest. Otherwise it's just a pointless series of reaction-time tests.
Have to agree. I don't necessarily need an epic, but some context is nice. I also like to know why I'm supposed to be shooting things. I know not everybody cares-- some people just want the action of shooting things, and the reasons are irrelevant. However, I like to have at least enough fiction to hang my hat on-- a reason why I'm supposed to be performing the actions the game wants me to perform.
The Halo 3 story line was a poached piece of shit. In order to understand 90% of what is going on in Halo 3, you need to read the short story in Halo: Evolutions by Karen Traviss, which, incidentally, is one of the better sci-fi short stories in that book. It touches on and develops some of the interesting bits of science that may go into developing and sustaining a smart AI, such as clock cycle length, and sensory input.
What?
I think I understand Halo 3's story pretty well, and I've never read that story. I think having played and paid attention to the cinematics in the previous two games is a lot more helpful and relevant. It may not be everybody's cup of tea-- even a lot of the fans are in it for the multiplayer and not the campaign-- but the games are the primary movers of the story here, not the spinoffs and the add-ons.
But yeah, Halo 3 was a rush release by Microsoft to milk the last $$'s from it's flagship product. Considering that they butchered the canon and time line established by Nylund in the original Halo trilogy of books, and simultaneously disrupted continuity through various weapons and technologies being present in Halo: Contact Harvest (part of the Halo 3 marketing campaign), I would wager that either Bungie, or Microsoft didn't give a damn about the story of Halo 3 at all. They just wanted to try to recreate the glory of Halo: CE as best they could.
Halo 2 was the rush, not Halo 3. Halo 3 was actually finished early.
Nylund is in no position to establish canon. He was hired to write novels for an established property. Bungie created Halo; now Microsoft owns it. Where the games and novels differ, the games are canon. Somehow I doubt Bungie went begging to Microsoft to get permission to publish some spinoff novels. Nylund did a great job and Fall of Reach is easily the best of the novelizations, but accusing the games of breaking established canon is putting the cart before the horse. Which came out first isn't the issue.
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
I have to disagree. The two situations are not comparable.
Incidental information such as who authored what entertainments can easily be lost, forgotten, or misconstrued. In this case, it also has limited importance, as there are a vanishingly small set of circumstances in which such a misapprehension has serious consequences.
If my mechanic knows he is not an expert on Shakespeare and accepts correction when presented with acceptable evidence-- let's say one copy of the complete collected works of Hans Christian Andersen, and another with the complete works of William Shakespeare-- then there well and truly is no problem, because my mechanic has demonstrated a faculty for absorbing new information, evaluating the credibility of sources, and the willingness to admit error. He has not adhered dogmatically to an incorrect conclusion.
If, however, he continues in his belief that Shakespeare authored the The Little Mermaid because this was somehow revealed to him by a supernatural, possibly omnipotent entity with anthropomorphic characteristics, who created the heaven and earth and tells human beings everything they need to know about natural history through a 3,000 year old text with serious fact checking errors and some questionable morals, then I'd have to start wondering about where he learned about cars, also.
I think most people, to some extent or other, have areas where they cling to irrational beliefs, for one reason or another. The more important and all-encompassing those areas of belief are, the less reliable I think those who hold them are.
Someone who, in this day and age, earnestly believes in geocentrism, and that heliocentrism is some kind of a giant conspiracy that only a few know the true nature of, is capable of believing-- and therefore perhaps also doing-- almost anything, under the proper circumstances, and their system of belief tells them that the more convincing the evidence against their belief, the more virtuous they are for believing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why isn't "profit" considered "income"?
Obvious. Because corporations aren't peo....
Err... Can I get back to you on that?
If he were a sole proprietorship-- a company that is the same as the person who owns it-- it would be.
In this situation, he is the sole owner of an S corp that is a separate legal entity from him. However, since it has no other shareholders and no other directors, it's a sham. It has steady income and predictable expenses, and almost no risk. Why an S corp doesn't require more than one shareholder I can't fathom, although raising the requirement to 2 would just end up making a lot of spouses, children, relatives and friends into paper shareholders.
C'mon, people, I know taxes are boring, but read the article.
Unlike Jobs or Schmidt, Watson was the sole shareholder and owner of the business in question. As a sole proprietor of his S corp, he was fully responsible for any profit or loss, as well as determining salary.
If this were organized as a sole proprietorship, there'd be no distinction whatsoever between his net profit and his income. Probably a bigger question here is why such organization is allowed.
At any rate, when Jobs gets $1 salary and then a profit bonus, it's because the board of directors approved that salary, and approved the bonus. No profit, no bonus. Since Watson's S corp has as its revenue stream steady income from the accounting firm and absolutely reliable expense forecasting, there was almost no chance of him posting a loss short of his arrangement with the firm being terminated, which is a far cry from Jobs being tasked with making sure Apple comes out with profitable products.
When used by an independent board of directors, representing shareholders, the low salary/profit bonus structure is a way of motivating executives.
When you are your own board, it's a tax dodge, and that's how the IRS saw it.
Why on God's green earth is "apps" an acceptable abbreviation for "appetizer" but not for "applications"? I've heard and used the latter far earlier and far more often than the former.
The law reads pretty much the same way in the US, specificially with regard to consent and intoxication and/or coercion. Disparity in power (as in employer-employee relations) can negate consent. Intoxication can negate consent. The problem here is not with the law, but with juries. One jury might recognize that intoxication negates consent, while another sees a drunk woman who was asking for it.
As for what happens in most situations-- maybe people should behave differently.
The kind of violent assault you describe is relatively rare, difficult to predict, and nearly impossible to prevent unless you never leave home and/or arm yourself. The other kind-- where consent is never validly given-- happens quite a bit, but is common, easy to predict, and simple to prevent. People simply choose not to bother.
I would like to propose a radical idea. (Someone else can program it, I'm the idea guy.)
When a story revolves around the juxtaposition of two words-- in this case, "idea" and "programming", try reversing the two. If your story makes as much, or very nearlyi as much, sense one way as the other, reconsider posting the story.
To wit:
'Many programmers,' observes Fallingward, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to writing the program. Ideas are a commodity, pulled out of a closet to give a well-constructed algorithm a purpose. It's just a small matter of the idea, right?' Wrong. 'Thinking of the idea is the ingredient the programmers are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could think up their own ideas.'"
Yes, a lot of self-described "idea guys" have lousy ideas and aren't interested in details like programming. Is perhaps the thesis here that idea guys can be taught to program, but mere programmers can't be taught to have ideas? Because that's a bit insulting.
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Economies of scale (making each item cheaper to produce by producing more) doesn't work for the Volt: the batteries have a constant cost and making more only makes them MORE expensive if anything. This is because the resources to make them are limited and increasing demand causes prices to increase.
Therefore they can't overcome the cost penalty by making it up in volume. This move only makes sense for GM if the practice and market establishment of selling now will later be useful for them when making the cars is profitable.
You're ignoring the cost structure of the battery supplier. You're assuming that the price per unit is the same for an order of 10,000 units as it is for 100,000 units or more, and that's almost assuredly false.
The bottom line here is that GM is refusing to take a risk and commit to selling the Volt as a mass market automobile. If they were to manufacture a few hundred thousand they could very likely get a discount on the battery-- but if they can't move those cars they'll have to discount them or write them off. They're taking a smaller gamble on a smaller production run, and either hoping to have a small loss but at least demonstrate that the product can be sold in the marketplace, or raising the price to cover the higher per unit cost for parts like the battery.
That's what Tesla did as well-- making and selling their expensive, low production run roadster before attempting a mass market sedan.
No, it's still perfectly good for that. WinTel is a venn diagram that describes the subset of "IBM PC compatibles" where "runs a CPU by intel" intersects "runs the Windows operating system".
The term is now no less accurate, it's merely less inclusive-- although since Intel and Windows both dominate their respective markets, only marginally less inclusive.
Of course, machines that use AMD processors to run the Linux operating system never fell under either umbrella, so they have no impact on the accuracy of the term whatsoever. As the term was coined to define the "standard" combination for business PCs, a machine that conforms to neither (especially in not running Microsoft's Windows operating system) was never intended for inclusion anyway. That the machine *could* run it isn't particularly relevant-- neither is the fact that the chosen operating system, Linux, also runs on Intel processors.
Canal + is a French company. This has nothing to do with the US or its dick.
Who is going to authorize the correctional facility to misuse licensed spectrum?
Who is going to indemnify the facility against liability when those prison-controlled towers interfere with nearby non-prison-originating traffic, prompting the operators to sue?
You are really an ass. This is why people (myself included) hate people from the U.S. so much. The United States of America is a SUBSET of all the states of America. It's rude to insult all Americans when typically it is just those from the U.S. that fuck things up so much. We desperately need a new adjective to refer to a person from the U.S. but until one formally exists, USian will have to do. Just don't ever use the word "American" unless you mean it to refer to everyone on this hemisphere.
This is ridiculous. I've met people from Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil and not one of them ever identified themselves to me, or anyone else I knew, as "Americans" or expressed the idea that they felt lumped in with things said about citizens of the USA because of the use of the term "American". They were Colombian, Mexican, or Brazilian, and those were the words you used to describe them.
You're just being pedantic. It is true that "America" is a continent rather than a country, and it is perhaps inaccurate, or at least incomplete, for people to have shortened "United States of America" to "America" but that is not particularly surprising, as it is the only state on that continent that uses the the continent's name in the name of the nation itself. The other areas to which you refer-- North America, Central America, and South America, are arbitrary geographic distinctions and not political ones. There's no country or political entity that is both contiguous and inclusive of "South America" or "Central America" or even "North America" (unless you count trade treaties).
I'm going to continue to use the word "American" the way most people understand it-- to mean citizens of the USA. Anything else is putting some kind of odd political agenda ahead of being understood.
You will if you really wanted to. But what I noticed with most geeks is that they don't care. They wouldn't mind it, but don't care enough to really go for it.
Meh. Computers are more predictable.
Is that supposed to be a virtue?
A fiercely competitive marketplace benefits consumers with -choices-, but not with support.
A fiercely competitive marketplace hurts the IT industry.
Non-sequitur. There is no basis on which to posit that the market is a zero-sum game where choice and support are fungible. That the philosophical dipoles of many of these debates tend towards MS Windows on one side (proprietary, closed source, centralized) and Linux on the other (open source, decentralized) on the other does not necessitate that it be so. There is no particular reason why a market could not have multiple vendors competing for share in operating systems and applications, and each provide robust support contracts as well, whether on a centralized or decentralized basis. In fact there's plenty of decentralized source for support on Microsoft products as well, either through endorsed or unendorsed sources.
pardon me for being selfish about my job. I'm perfectly happy knowing that being a windows-based IT professional guarantees me job prospects almost anywhere I go. The last thing I want to have to do is learn a dozen operating systems and office suites because I'm not sure what my next employer may use.
disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboy. I've got two linux systems, but that's for my own interest, not for work.
Will you be just as perfectly happy if being a Windows-based IT professional limited your choices? What if it eliminated them? It's nice that you've learned linux as a hobby, but isn't diversifying also a solid career move-- as a general principle?
Those whom for whatever reason have chosen or have fallen into situations where their primary system was a nondominant product (whether it be an operating system or application) know that there's safety in diversity and broader bases of knowledge. Those who are dependent on a single, dominant system will of course resist having to learn anything new-- and may suffer the most if and when it becomes necessary for everyone to learn something new.
It is? Doesn't Microsoft dominate the OS marketshare,
Yes. However, if you used to dominate OS marketshare more than you do now, this isn't judged to be good performance.
wasn't Windows 7 a huge hit,
Comparatively speaking? Perhaps not. Each successive version of Windows could be the "best selling ever" without actually being a "huge hit" if sales of Windows did not keep pace with or grow faster than the PC market itself. If one assumes the PC market grows every year, and every new PC after the new system's release comes with that OS, you could "beat" your previous OS sales record each and every year, but that isn't really any kind of improvement. In fact, you could slip in terms of growth and market share and still claim "best selling Windows ever"-- and this is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft claims.
isn't xbox 360 kicking ass right now,
Again, in what way? The first iteration was a distant second in a three horse race, barely edging out the GameCube by most metrics. Good show for a first attempt, and certainly better than other MS products have managed (I'm looking at you, Zune.)
The 360? A slightly less distant second in a three horse race, despite launching a year ahead of the competition. It does well in some areas (attach rate of games and accessories) but less well in others (poor hardware reliability leading to large one-time charges for replacement of faulty hardware).
I own a 360 and quite a few games and it's a pretty good project, albeit not without warts. If one considers that "kicking ass" then perhaps one needs to raise one's standards, because it's neither as dominant as Windows is in its own arena, nor as good a financial performer as other Microsoft products, despite charging for things the competitors give away for free.
or are we just judging Windows Phone 7? Cause if we are then i gotta say it's a bit early for that.
Heavens no, that wouldn't be fair. It's not as if anyone else came out with a touchscreen phone with handheld computer capabilities and launched it without cut and paste, but then added it later, all the while causing furor about whether or not it was necessary... oh, wait...
Come on CNN atleast don't make link baiting so obvious and Slashdot stop putting inaccurate shit on the front page.
Since Slashdot posted that this was a CNN story that says Microsoft's brand is dying, it isn't inaccurate. It is indeed a CNN story, and the story does indeed say that. Whether or not CNN's story is accurate is a second question, but the fact that CNN is willing to make that assertion is news in and of itself.
Besides, it's not that big a stretch. The idea that Microsoft would maintain its position as king of the hill forever is naive in the extreme. One day yet it may become Just Another Company, much as IBM is today, and a brand known more for its products of yesteryear than what they make today. It's never too early for amateur fortunetellers to start pointing out that they think they see the start of this process happening right now. One day, one of them will be right.
Why?
Perhaps because it's easier to show legitimate non-infringing use of a jailbroken phone (use on compatible but unofficially supported operators) than it is for the Xbox (use for unsupported video codecs).
Sure, people jailbreak both devices for illegitimate reasons: piracy of apps and games.
Sure, people jailbreak both devices for legitimate reasons: adding functionality.
I think the difference is that the iPhone is a quad band world phone. There's absolutely nothing to prevent it from working on the many, many compatible carriers worldwide except for Apple's contractual agreement with AT&T in the US, and the arbitrary and intentional restriction Apple has placed on the devices they sell in the US to support that agreement. Jailbreaking enables a fundamental freedom for the user: the ability to use on an operator of their choice, independent of Apple's contractual obligations.
It is less clear that the non-infringing alternative uses for the Xbox are as fundamental, or that the restrictions you can circumvent by jailbreaking it are as arbitrary. It's not as if the Xbox 360 contains support for a lot of codecs other than WMV, but that these have been hidden or disabled-- they were never put into the device in the first place, unlike the GSM radio in the iPhone which is capable of supporting other operators besides AT&T. It's not as if the many hobbyist applications to which an Xbox 360 may be put are fundamental to the purpose and use of the device-- unlike a phone owner's choice of network.
Phone jailbreaking enables a fundamental consumer choice that is part of having a free and transparent market for phones and phone service.
What essential consumer choice does jailbreaking a console enable? What role do jailbroken consoles play in the marketplace?
No, the solution is to find another business model. Stop expecting that there is a future in charging repeatedly for mere copies of collections of info, which with current technology anyone is quite capable of reproducing at extremely low cost.
This is exactly the kind of crazy that leads rightsholders to conclude there is no acceptable compromise that can be made, so they might as well charge as much as they can as often as they can, and leads middlemen that are trying to reach a compromise (like Amazon and Apple) to tear their hair out.
I have a tough time envisioning how the world would work if they only way to charge for a copy of a book was if that copy cost money to create.
From newspapers to books the justification for charging was never the cost of duplication or delivery. Those were only part of it. The more copies made, the more copies sold, and the lower the price of the work's initial creation for each person who bought an initial copy. Since each of the physical copies could only be in the hands of one person at a time, this created an incentive for people to buy their own copies.
With duplication and transmission prices dropped to near zero, the nightmare scenario is that with no practical or legal restrictions in place, no content provider can ever sell more than the first copy of a work. Once that copy hits the Internet and is available, unrestricted, for the cost of duplication-- you're done. That means that you must recover the entirety of the cost of the work's creation from the initial sale, or else you have to inhibit the creation of copies-- in other words, DRM.
The reality is that information is not a scarce resource. These dinosaurs are clinging hard to the recent past when information was tied to media that is a scarce resource and wasn't so easily copied. That has changed, big time. They hold back all kinds of progress, to the detriment of us all. Copying is not a sin, and no excuse need be made for it. The sins being committed and garbage excuses being made are the ones the content industries do to justify themselves.
Information is no less a scarce resource than it ever was. Copies of information are no longer scarce, but the entirety of the value in information was only ever partially in the creation of copies. It was in the initial gathering and collection as well. The problem is that the inherent difficulty of making copies that protected the investment in content creation has now been removed. In a world with only digital distribution of content, there is no way to cover the risk in investing in content creation, because there's no way of making more than a single sale, ever.
Didn't you hear? Previously you couldn't lend a book to someone and now, with technology you can!
Seriously, the restrictions of 14 days and lending only once is so ridiculous that it should push people over to the side of sharers.
How many books could one roundtrip of the sneakernet fit?
I'll admit that this scheme, as described, is far from ideal.
On the other hand, I think there's an advantage to a book that automatically returns itself after 2 weeks and cannot possibly be lost.
You know, I can think of a better way to pass the books to my offsprings after I die: They can just take my goddamn Kindle! I'm not going to be buried with it, you know. And I can add a PostIt note to my will with the password to my Amazon account.
Problem Solved!
Sure, because there's no chance Amazon will close the account once you're dead, right-- cutting off access to all the content?
No chance that Amazon's user agreement says a Kindle account is non-transferable, right-- meaning you can't give it to your offspring, as that's a transfer.
Use of the Application. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Amazon hereby grants you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to install and use the Application on your PC. You may use the Application only on your PC. You may not separate any individual component of the Application for use on another device or computer, may not transfer it for use on another device or use it, or any portion of it, over a network and may not sell, rent, lease, lend, distribute or sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Application in whole or in part.
Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.
Restrictions. Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon's own license for the Kindle software and the Kindle content prohibits what you have suggested. Whether they have ever, or actually will, terminate the Kindle accounts of deceased subscribers is another question, but they would be within the rights they reserve in the current agreement if they did so.
The license does say that it is "permanent" but it also says it's given to "you" and you may not transfer to a third party. It's unclear to me whether or not "permanent" wins out over "no third parties" or whether it's even possible to prohibit such a transfer in the event of death. After all, permanent or not, "you" don't exist at that point, so it's arguable you have no rights under the contract.
Certainly some Kindle subscriber must have died by this point. What happened to their content? Has anyone ever tried to transfer an Amazon account from a deceased relative to a living person?
I'd love it if I was only taxed twice.
1) I get paid, they take taxes.
2) I buy something like a house, I pay sales tax.
3) Then continuing to own that house, I pay a % of value on that house as a tax every year.
3.5) if I sell the house, and make a net profit over what I paid, I pay a tax on that profit as income"
4) if it's a valuable house/property, if I will it to my children on my death, they get hit with a massive estate tax.
It's a great system....if you're a government.
I sell my hammer to my neighbor, according to the government I should be paying taxes on that transaction. Why, again, are they entitled to that?
Because it is the government that creates and maintains the atmosphere and environment in which each and every one of those transactions is enabled.
You get paid for working. How do you know you will get paid? What happens if you don't get paid? Who maintains the courts and systems of laws that allow you to redress grievances if you don't receive your pay?
A house can be valuable in and of itself, but many are more valuable because of connections to public utilities, interconnected rights of way (roads) and services like public safety and waste removal. Where do those come from?
Capital gains are windfall gains that come from speculative activities. If income you make from the sweat of your brow is taxable, why should income from windfalls not be? Can you honestly say you want laborers to pay taxes, but speculators need not? What of companies and individuals whose entire income is derived from capital gains?
You paid taxes on your earnings. Your progeny get the benefits of the sweat of your brow without lifting a finger. What kind of society says that your labor is taxable, but their inherited wealth is not?
If your neighbor decides he doesn't want to pay you for the nice hammer he's just taken from you, and threatens to hit you with it instead, who are you going to call to protect yourself from him-- or should everyone just do that themselves?
The idea of taxing everything just once is ineffective, because eventually too much weatlh and property falls into the category of "already been taxed once" and flows through channels that aren't taxed. In general, the idea is to encourage transactions to happen and to take just enough from each of those transactions to support the environment that enables the transaction without actively discouraging the transaction. Reducing everything to a payroll tax and removing everything else provides a disincentive to work, and asymmetrically benefits all those whose income comes from sources other than traditional labor.
Baloney...
I run at least five flavors of Windows and hafter as many Linux distros, am pretty solidly in the Ubuntu camp. I have a Mac and an iPhone and am going to be buying more for a laundry list of reasons.
HOWEVER, the first thing that struck me about the Mac and the iPhone was how much they did NOT "just work." I was ready to be converted. Oh, please, let me for once just buy a !@#$ing box and be able to plug it in and start working. It was NO different to me than setting up a Windows or Ubuntu box. The OS wasn't fully configured or even current. I had to install everything myself only to find it wanted to automatically run 2.9GBs of patches, rebooting about six times in the process. I didn't have a working computer until the next day.
The difference is that Apple has an army of well trained baby sitters who will, for a fee, put up with this crap for you and coddle your ego telling you what a special, pretty smart and interesting person you are and then hand your shiny box back.
I refuse to pay for that sort of saccharine bullshit, so I'm left with a computer that is just as much a pain in my ass as any other.
You've constructed a nice straw man there in which "just works" means "comes magically preconfigured for my specific needs and never requires software updates".
Computers get put in boxes and within a few days they are out of date. The longer it sits in the box before it gets to you, the more updates it needs. Apple periodically refreshes its lineup and new models get the latest software, but yes, you're going to need some updates.
You may or may not be exaggerating the downloads or restarts required; I can't tell. I can only say that the numbers you quote are probably near the upper limits for what any buyer of a new, current model Apple computer is ever likely to experience. I don't think I've even come close to those figures in the last six months on OSX.
How that compares to installing Linux, where you have to download the entire operating system unless you bought a computer preconfigured with it, I don't know. You don't offer any comparisons, so I can only guess-- although you yourself say it's "no different" than an Ubuntu box.
"Just works" means that for the majority of tasks for which an average user requires a computer, the way in which the task is achieved is intuitive-- something that a user with minimal training can achieve without a lot of trial and error or consulting documentation. When referring to peripherals and accessories, it means that when one has a reasonable expectation that two devices should work together, that they do so with a minimum of trouble and effort, and in a way that matches the user's expectations.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with patches or configuration. The phrase "just works" was never intended by anyone to mean "doesn't require configuration" or "doesn't require updates".
Wimax isn't real 4G. Its just a crappy extension of Wifi. Hence the spottyness.
WiMax isn't "real 4G" because there is no "real 4G" because "4G" isn't defined-- just as "3G" was not defined by the ITU before it was used as a marketing term. At one point, even GPRS and Edge were called by some "3G", while others responded that it was more like "2.5G".
Furthermore, WiMax is not an "extension of Wifi" unless you want to attempt to reduce the significance of OFDMA to that of an "extension", in which case LTE is no more significant, given that it is also based on OFDMA. WiMax and LTE have more in common with each other than either has with wifi, and typical range for a WiMax base station is a kilometer or more-- with LOS, up to 8km.
You're calling out those describing WiMax as "4G" for confusing technical terms with marketing ones, but I think you've fallen prey to one yourself-- the near-ubiquitous description of WiMax as "wifi on steroids" which just means an IP-based WAN. WiMax coverage is spotty because providers don't deploy enough base stations compared to existing operators using other technologies.
True. Halo: ODST even left a sort of cliffhanger at the end to make it seem like there will be an ODST2. .
I'd beg to differ. Both of the ending cutscenes in that game show how the ending of ODST leads towards the opening of Halo 3.
I suppose Microsoft's new in-house studio for handling Halo, 343 Industries, could pick up and make a sequel to ODST, showing what those characters are doing at a later point in the Halo 3 timeline, I don't think there's anything about the way that game ends that suggests there should be or needs to be such a sequel-- unlike, say, the ending of Halo 2, or even the "we're just getting started" remark at the end of Halo 1.
I think it's more likely, however, that 343 will pick up where Halo 3 ends and do Halo 4. That, Bungie left wide open-- no doubt at Microsoft's request and in full knowledge of what the future plan was-- to trade the franchise for their freedom, and do two more Halo games (ODST and Reach) for Microsoft and call it done.
Hahahaha. I haven't played more than 15 minutes of multiplayer in the past 5 years, and most of that was the Reach Beta. With all the griefers and racists, it's a waste of time.
Story is the most important thing... i.e. WHY am I trying to kill that blue alien, and why is he trying to kill me? Give me something to believe in and to engage my interest. Otherwise it's just a pointless series of reaction-time tests.
Have to agree. I don't necessarily need an epic, but some context is nice. I also like to know why I'm supposed to be shooting things. I know not everybody cares-- some people just want the action of shooting things, and the reasons are irrelevant. However, I like to have at least enough fiction to hang my hat on-- a reason why I'm supposed to be performing the actions the game wants me to perform.
That's the way I feel about it. Halo's soundtracks have all been exceptional, and campaign coop is my favorite way to play.
The Halo 3 story line was a poached piece of shit. In order to understand 90% of what is going on in Halo 3, you need to read the short story in Halo: Evolutions by Karen Traviss, which, incidentally, is one of the better sci-fi short stories in that book. It touches on and develops some of the interesting bits of science that may go into developing and sustaining a smart AI, such as clock cycle length, and sensory input.
What?
I think I understand Halo 3's story pretty well, and I've never read that story. I think having played and paid attention to the cinematics in the previous two games is a lot more helpful and relevant. It may not be everybody's cup of tea-- even a lot of the fans are in it for the multiplayer and not the campaign-- but the games are the primary movers of the story here, not the spinoffs and the add-ons.
But yeah, Halo 3 was a rush release by Microsoft to milk the last $$'s from it's flagship product. Considering that they butchered the canon and time line established by Nylund in the original Halo trilogy of books, and simultaneously disrupted continuity through various weapons and technologies being present in Halo: Contact Harvest (part of the Halo 3 marketing campaign), I would wager that either Bungie, or Microsoft didn't give a damn about the story of Halo 3 at all. They just wanted to try to recreate the glory of Halo: CE as best they could.
Halo 2 was the rush, not Halo 3. Halo 3 was actually finished early.
Nylund is in no position to establish canon. He was hired to write novels for an established property. Bungie created Halo; now Microsoft owns it. Where the games and novels differ, the games are canon. Somehow I doubt Bungie went begging to Microsoft to get permission to publish some spinoff novels. Nylund did a great job and Fall of Reach is easily the best of the novelizations, but accusing the games of breaking established canon is putting the cart before the horse. Which came out first isn't the issue.
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
I have to disagree. The two situations are not comparable.
Incidental information such as who authored what entertainments can easily be lost, forgotten, or misconstrued. In this case, it also has limited importance, as there are a vanishingly small set of circumstances in which such a misapprehension has serious consequences.
If my mechanic knows he is not an expert on Shakespeare and accepts correction when presented with acceptable evidence-- let's say one copy of the complete collected works of Hans Christian Andersen, and another with the complete works of William Shakespeare-- then there well and truly is no problem, because my mechanic has demonstrated a faculty for absorbing new information, evaluating the credibility of sources, and the willingness to admit error. He has not adhered dogmatically to an incorrect conclusion.
If, however, he continues in his belief that Shakespeare authored the The Little Mermaid because this was somehow revealed to him by a supernatural, possibly omnipotent entity with anthropomorphic characteristics, who created the heaven and earth and tells human beings everything they need to know about natural history through a 3,000 year old text with serious fact checking errors and some questionable morals, then I'd have to start wondering about where he learned about cars, also.
I think most people, to some extent or other, have areas where they cling to irrational beliefs, for one reason or another. The more important and all-encompassing those areas of belief are, the less reliable I think those who hold them are.
Someone who, in this day and age, earnestly believes in geocentrism, and that heliocentrism is some kind of a giant conspiracy that only a few know the true nature of, is capable of believing-- and therefore perhaps also doing-- almost anything, under the proper circumstances, and their system of belief tells them that the more convincing the evidence against their belief, the more virtuous they are for believing it.
That's scary.