. . . . And it needs better commercial support (I have a plan).
Bruce
So Bruce, what is your plan for Debian support? Enquiring minds want to know . . .
I've seen him speak ...
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I am an academic economist and saw Nash give two lectures a couple of years ago. The one talk was not bad, he was trying to pick up where he left off but didn't realize that some of his "new" ideas had already been developed by others while he was "absent." The second talk was pretty nutty, although not entirely out of the range of the nutty ideas you sometimes see in economic seminars.
Here is one example of what he missed out on while he was mad. He had figured out that computers are now useful for numerical solutions to equations that would have been very difficult to characterize. However, his model had some greek letters in it and he thought that a computer could not ("of course") print out letters of a non-latin alphabet -- he was thinking of a simple typewriter style printer.
Like others, I wonder if the $9.95/month price is too high just for better download times. However, we should remember the basic theory of economic price discrimination (which is a morally neutral term in economics, by the way, unlike other forms of discrimination.)
The point of price discrimination is to divide your consumers into groups based on their willingness to pay. Let's say that the profit-maximizing price -- if only one price is offered -- is p0. Then if a firm offers two levels of service at p1 and p2 (with p2 the higher price), it is likely that optimal p1 is less than p0 and optimal p2 is greater than p0. The reason is that the higher-priced service is aimed at a particular group of service-sensitive/price-insensitive consumers, not at the "average" consumer.
Now, take p0 as the Microsoft price -- we would expect Ximian's p1 to be less that the MS price and it is: zero. Correspondingly, we might expect that p2 could be even higher than the MS price, as it arguably is. It seems to me that most consumers would prefer the Ximian solution -- at least you have a zero-price choice.
Of course, while this argument is in favor of a relatively "high" price for the premium service, the firm still has to worry that even the service-sensitive folks will "defect" to the low-price service. Unless they make the free service really bad, I still wonder if $9.95/month isn't too high. Perhaps they should go for a $10/quarter "Premium" service and a $10/month "Elite" that has further support benefits.
People here often complain about the inaccessibility of MS updates to bug fixes and security holes, but at least they're in one place, on one site (even if you have to dig to see them), and usually end up on WindowsUpdate
If you use a distribution like RedHat, you also get all your updates and security fixes in one place -- redhat.com. Further, you can pay for up2date, just like Ximian premium, or unlike Microsoft you can pay zero and just download yourself.
The biggest problem with Ximian is that it doesn't quite provide that sort of one-stop shopping. For Gnome software it does a great job, but in my experience it lags behind or completely misses other software. For me personally, $9.95 a month is too much for Gnome-plus-some-other-stuff but for others it may be an OK price.
Even with Microsoft, if you want to keep track of all your software you have to go many places. Microsoft obviously won't provide you with upgrades for Adobe software but RedHat will update your GIMP. It is actually more plausible that RedHat (and similar distros) will provide you one-stop stopping for all your software updates than Microsoft, which actually doesn't quite have a monopoly on *all* windows software.
They expect 40 [out of 50] of the markets to be cash positive by year end, with the entire company cash positive by mid 2003.
Either there's some interesting accounting going on, or they'r expecting to lose *lots* of money in the remaining 10 markets -- like over four times as much as the average profit from the profitable markets.
I bet you are right about the accounting. The probably have a lot of centralized costs that they don't allocate out to individual markets. These might include (re-financed) debt, marketing, management, etc. In that case all of their markets could be profitable and yet the company could be unprofitable over all.
Here is why they don't charge based on bandwidth . . . Any reasonable system of paying for bandwidth would have to be in the ballpark of $10/GB or less . . . and so the majority of users paying $40/month now would instead be paying $1/month. Ouch . . .
There is nothing to prevent them from implementing what is called a "two-part tariff" -- a fixed fee plus a modest amount per bandwidth use. That is, you could have a system of $35.00 plus $10/GB so (following your figures) a low-end bandwidth user would pay $36 but a real band-width hog would face some extra charges.
The two-part tariff system makes some sense from a cost point of view as well -- there really are substantial non-bandwidth fixed costs (like laying the cable in the first place.)
In most states, only "direct consumers" can sue for anti-trust damages -- e.g. typically this means Dell or Compaq, not the end-user. The suits involving these states are going to get thrown out anyway, so they are willing to settle for anything .
In CA (and some other places), indirect consumers can sue. So these states don't want to give in. But, MS cleverly made the settlement contingent on all suits being settled.
The class-action lawyers for the consumers in states that can't really sue are trying to force this settlement down the throats of the other groups. What will the judge say? Who knows.
The weakness is that the GPL would probably lose in court, to some degree.
Well, the Lawyer for the Free Software Foundation says he enforces the GPL all the time by threatening to sue and companies always back down because the GPL is so easy to enforce. The point is that the GPL grants the customer rights that do not exist under standard copyright law. If you re-distribute a work based on someone else's copyrighted code and you then challenge the GPL then you are in for a big-time copyright violation. If the GPL is invalid, you had no right to the code in the first place!
If the RAND patent proposal is adopted by the W3C, there has been much discussion in the open source/free software community about forking the standards process, to preserve patent-free web standards. This fork would create a new standards body as a competitor to the W3C.
Do you think such a fork is likely if the proposal passes?
If a fork does happen, what are the consequences for the web?
Should the W3C take the likelihood of a fork into account when considering this proposal?
As a Brit that has been living in the States for the last couple of months I've had the opportunity to experience the behaviour of the US media and the government first hand, and to be honest it makes me sick.
Odd, how nearly everything you say about the US applies to Britain as well, but that doesn't seem to bother you. Britain Special Forces did a huge amount of the training of the Afghan rebels agaisnt the USSR. Britain has a large cache of nuclear weapons and Britain has fought against Iraq toe-to-toe with the U.S.
I also note how you hate it when the US opposes dictators and hate it when the US attacks dictators. I guess it is the US you hate, but when your own country does it, it is all OK. European countries support and fund dictators whenever it suits their commercial purposes. France recently overthrew a democratically elected regime in Africa in order to get a contract for the French company Elf. When Europe does this it is "realistic". When the US does it, it is evil US imperialism.
You say the US should examine the causes of this attack. OK: the attact was by Fascist right-wing religious extremists who want to impose dictatorial "Islamic Emirates" in (at least) every country of the "Islamic World" from North Africa through Central Asia. They attack us because only we can stop them -- the Europeans (Brits aside) will sell out the entire world for a few oil contracts.
As an economist, it is pretty clear what is going on here. If a monopolist wants to maximize current profits, he will always price on an "elastic" portion of the demand curve. In looser language, you maximize profit by raising price until the point where you really are driving some substantial percentage of consumers away. (Why? Because at lower prices, price increases don't cost you much in terms of lost demand and they also reduce your costs.) You can prove a formal version of this mathematically.
However, in the past MS was worried not just about current sales, but also about future sales. This is called "dynamic pricing". MS's attitude toward dynamic pricing is changing because: [i] they have close to 100% share already, [ii] the number of PCs in not increasing as fast (and so future market share is no longer much more attractive relative to current market share) and [iii] the threat of anti-trust regulation makes the future less certain.
Thus, MS is turning to the question of how to squeeze out current profits. This involves driving some customers away in order to raise revenue and lower costs for existing customers.
The opportunity for competitors (including Linux) is obvious. MS may be moving away from dynamic pricing too soon, if there really is a threat to its future market share.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but the cockpit has a door that locks. Ideally, this door probably is designed to withstand a lot of force, so trying to force your way into the cockpit would be a bad idea mmmkaaay?
In Europe, the pilot's door is left open. In the US, the door is locked during flight, but it is not designed to withstand force. This has been controversial for a long time, but it is still true. Now, it may change.
Let's start to distinguish open source business models.
What doesn't work: a OS few hackers start-up a company with a vague plan to write great OS software and then "somehow" convert this software this into a revenue stream. Many folks claim they will "support software", but software support is a *tough business* that requires mucho consulting experience and back-office experience, not great hacker's chops.
What does work : the most successful Linux company today: IBM. They know how to consult and suppport, it has always been their strength. These aren't hackers teaching themselves the support business, these guys could teach anyone about support.
IBM says they are spending 1 billion dollars on Linux. Why? Because *they* can make money supporting Linux. They can understand the source code and therefore offer better support. They can change it if they need to (Linux on a mainframe, Linux on e-server, whatever.)
One profitable OS business model is to add open source to an already existing and profitable computer support business. I am not sure if there is any other.
Note the similarity to e-commerce: many surviving e-commerce sites are owned by older catalogue or brick-and-mortar stores. Why -- because these are the folks who understand *retail*.
Really? I bet that IBM is by far the largest OS company in terms of $$ spent on OS projects
($1,000,000,000, or so they say) and they seem to be doing pretty well. Everyone cries "Who will make a succesful service business that supports open source?" The answer: IBM.
Red Hat, which is by far the most successful of the group, has lost over 97% of its value and is trading at 1/8th its IPO price.
RedHat's IPO price was an insane reflection of the IPO bubble. IIRC, Red Hat claimed to be on the border of profitability just before the IPO. The IPO market (insanely) required them to up their "burn rate" to build for future expected profits. Now that the financial markets have returned to sanity, Red Hat looks to be returning to profitability, at least on a cash basis (the depreciated "good-will" accounting charge will haunt their official accounts for a while longer.)
Yes, I said tables . . . I'm unconvinced by your arguments about how hard they are to support, though. What is so difficult?
Well, try importing some Word tables into various office suites and see what happens. Many suites will put the right text into the right boxes, but the formating isn't exactly the same, so the table runs off the page margins or stuff that is supposed to be on one line breaks up and makes the table look like hell.
Now export that table back to Word (for your colleague who is a Microsoft-only guy) and repeat. The table turns into a hard to re-format mess.
And this happens with the *good* export/import filters. The problem is that WYSISYG word processors have delicate rules for formating. In text paragraphs, this is not so bad, as you can always re-align the "soft" line and page breaks. But in a table, that can really mess up the results.
Re:Red Hat remains in red: Posts $27.6M net loss
on
Red Hat In The Black
·
· Score: 5
Red Hat remains in red: Posts $27.6M net loss
If you go look at the actual figures, you will see that most of that loss is "depreciated goodwill" -- when Red Hat acquires a company they put "goodwill" on their books as an asset and then depreciate it according to very arbitrary accounting rules. In reality, Red Hat did not buy depreciating physical assets, but rather the skills and reputations, which are not depreciating.
On the other hand, the loss also contains several million in stock options, which really are an expense to the company. The "cash flow" number in headline ignores stock options. Therefore, Red Hat really is losing money, but nothing like $27 million.
Back in the olden days, people thought that giving your money to someone else to hold was risky. And sure enough, many banks did fail and took their depositor's funds with them. But over time, controls and standards were put in place. Now it's the people who keep their money at home in a mattress are the ones considered crazy.
Bank are trusted in large part because of a huge legal and regulatory structure that restricts their operations. In the States, there are disclosure rules, minimum financial reserves, etc., backed up by the FDIC and the the Federal Reserve Board, etc. Analogous rules for ASP's would require government audited off-site backups with independent access in the event of failure and so forth.
Without such rules, if you pick an ASP you are picking a 19th-century bank that could easily go bankrupt and leave you high and dry.
The article (and the original BetaNews article) do not say that AOL has agreed to exclusively support IE. It is just that IE is currently the browser in AOL 6.0. AOL 7.0 is still planned to support Gecko (but maybe not exclusively.)
There are a bunch of replies saying that AOL may be using Mozilla as a threat against Microsoft, but just as logically Microsoft is now offering AOL a place on the Windows XP CD so that AOL has something to lose down the line.
Contrary to other posts, there is a federal law that prohibits age discrimination. See the
EEOC page on age discrimination.
From that page:
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age. The ADEA's protections apply to both employees and job applicants. Under the ADEA, it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of his/her age with respect to any term, condition, or privilege of employment -- including, but not limited to, hiring, firing, promotion, layoff, compensation, benefits, job assignments, and training.
I agree that not everyone learns best in a classroom, but lectures work for a reason (and that is why textbooks haven't displaced them.) There is a social pressure to pay attention in class, so that class time acts as a way to committ yourself to learn (unlike that book you haven't read yet.) Like live theater versus the movies, there is a tension in a classroom that isn't present in a recorded or digital performance. A video recording of a live theater production is usually quite bad, as is a televised lecture by a supposedly good professor or a CSPAN broadcast of a hearing that may seemed tension-filled in person -- look at the glare on that Senator's face! -- but boring as hell on TV.
Also, the combination of listening and looking (at the blackboard, or at slides or at a powerpoint presentation) is effective for a lot of folks (not all.)
Section 9, clause 5 of the US constitution: "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
So, unless the internet tax is going to be a federal tax, the states cannot collect money from stuff imported from other states without amending the constitution. At least, that's how it appears to me.
Wrong, I think. Many states have a "use tax" on items purchased out of state. As long as that tax rate is the same as on in-state purchases, it doesn't discriminate against "exports" from other states and I believe that is why it doesn't violate the constitution.
The big issue is just in jurisdication of the tax. Do I pay Massachusettes sales tax when I live in Los Angeles and the merchant is in Boston? Or do I pay California sales tax? And, if it's California, does that mean that the merchant has to keep seperate books for all 50 states?
I believe the law is clear: you pay taxes based on where you live. Retailers have offered to provide free software to map zip codes to tax rates and so forth, so the "red tape" argument doesn't hold much water, either.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . . And it needs better commercial support (I have a plan). Bruce
So Bruce, what is your plan for Debian support? Enquiring minds want to know . . .
I am an academic economist and saw Nash give two lectures a couple of years ago. The one talk was not bad, he was trying to pick up where he left off but didn't realize that some of his "new" ideas had already been developed by others while he was "absent." The second talk was pretty nutty, although not entirely out of the range of the nutty ideas you sometimes see in economic seminars.
Here is one example of what he missed out on while he was mad. He had figured out that computers are now useful for numerical solutions to equations that would have been very difficult to characterize. However, his model had some greek letters in it and he thought that a computer could not ("of course") print out letters of a non-latin alphabet -- he was thinking of a simple typewriter style printer.
Like others, I wonder if the $9.95/month price is too high just for better download times. However, we should remember the basic theory of economic price discrimination (which is a morally neutral term in economics, by the way, unlike other forms of discrimination.)
The point of price discrimination is to divide your consumers into groups based on their willingness to pay. Let's say that the profit-maximizing price -- if only one price is offered -- is p0. Then if a firm offers two levels of service at p1 and p2 (with p2 the higher price), it is likely that optimal p1 is less than p0 and optimal p2 is greater than p0. The reason is that the higher-priced service is aimed at a particular group of service-sensitive/price-insensitive consumers, not at the "average" consumer.
Now, take p0 as the Microsoft price -- we would expect Ximian's p1 to be less that the MS price and it is: zero. Correspondingly, we might expect that p2 could be even higher than the MS price, as it arguably is. It seems to me that most consumers would prefer the Ximian solution -- at least you have a zero-price choice.
Of course, while this argument is in favor of a relatively "high" price for the premium service, the firm still has to worry that even the service-sensitive folks will "defect" to the low-price service. Unless they make the free service really bad, I still wonder if $9.95/month isn't too high. Perhaps they should go for a $10/quarter "Premium" service and a $10/month "Elite" that has further support benefits.
People here often complain about the inaccessibility of MS updates to bug fixes and security holes, but at least they're in one place, on one site (even if you have to dig to see them), and usually end up on WindowsUpdate
If you use a distribution like RedHat, you also get all your updates and security fixes in one place -- redhat.com. Further, you can pay for up2date, just like Ximian premium, or unlike Microsoft you can pay zero and just download yourself.
The biggest problem with Ximian is that it doesn't quite provide that sort of one-stop shopping. For Gnome software it does a great job, but in my experience it lags behind or completely misses other software. For me personally, $9.95 a month is too much for Gnome-plus-some-other-stuff but for others it may be an OK price.
Even with Microsoft, if you want to keep track of all your software you have to go many places. Microsoft obviously won't provide you with upgrades for Adobe software but RedHat will update your GIMP. It is actually more plausible that RedHat (and similar distros) will provide you one-stop stopping for all your software updates than Microsoft, which actually doesn't quite have a monopoly on *all* windows software.
Either there's some interesting accounting going on, or they'r expecting to lose *lots* of money in the remaining 10 markets -- like over four times as much as the average profit from the profitable markets.
I bet you are right about the accounting. The probably have a lot of centralized costs that they don't allocate out to individual markets. These might include (re-financed) debt, marketing, management, etc. In that case all of their markets could be profitable and yet the company could be unprofitable over all.
Here is why they don't charge based on bandwidth . . . Any reasonable system of paying for bandwidth would have to be in the ballpark of $10/GB or less . . . and so the majority of users paying $40/month now would instead be paying $1/month. Ouch . . .
There is nothing to prevent them from implementing what is called a "two-part tariff" -- a fixed fee plus a modest amount per bandwidth use. That is, you could have a system of $35.00 plus $10/GB so (following your figures) a low-end bandwidth user would pay $36 but a real band-width hog would face some extra charges.
The two-part tariff system makes some sense from a cost point of view as well -- there really are substantial non-bandwidth fixed costs (like laying the cable in the first place.)
IANAL, but . . .
In most states, only "direct consumers" can sue for anti-trust damages -- e.g. typically this means Dell or Compaq, not the end-user. The suits involving these states are going to get thrown out anyway, so they are willing to settle for anything .
In CA (and some other places), indirect consumers can sue. So these states don't want to give in. But, MS cleverly made the settlement contingent on all suits being settled.
The class-action lawyers for the consumers in states that can't really sue are trying to force this settlement down the throats of the other groups. What will the judge say? Who knows.
Well, the Lawyer for the Free Software Foundation says he enforces the GPL all the time by threatening to sue and companies always back down because the GPL is so easy to enforce. The point is that the GPL grants the customer rights that do not exist under standard copyright law. If you re-distribute a work based on someone else's copyrighted code and you then challenge the GPL then you are in for a big-time copyright violation. If the GPL is invalid, you had no right to the code in the first place!
If the RAND patent proposal is adopted by the W3C, there has been much discussion in the open source/free software community about forking the standards process, to preserve patent-free web standards. This fork would create a new standards body as a competitor to the W3C.
As a Brit that has been living in the States for the last couple of months I've had the opportunity to experience the behaviour of the US media and the government first hand, and to be honest it makes me sick.
Odd, how nearly everything you say about the US applies to Britain as well, but that doesn't seem to bother you. Britain Special Forces did a huge amount of the training of the Afghan rebels agaisnt the USSR. Britain has a large cache of nuclear weapons and Britain has fought against Iraq toe-to-toe with the U.S.
I also note how you hate it when the US opposes dictators and hate it when the US attacks dictators. I guess it is the US you hate, but when your own country does it, it is all OK. European countries support and fund dictators whenever it suits their commercial purposes. France recently overthrew a democratically elected regime in Africa in order to get a contract for the French company Elf. When Europe does this it is "realistic". When the US does it, it is evil US imperialism.
You say the US should examine the causes of this attack. OK: the attact was by Fascist right-wing religious extremists who want to impose dictatorial "Islamic Emirates" in (at least) every country of the "Islamic World" from North Africa through Central Asia. They attack us because only we can stop them -- the Europeans (Brits aside) will sell out the entire world for a few oil contracts.
As an economist, it is pretty clear what is going on here. If a monopolist wants to maximize current profits, he will always price on an "elastic" portion of the demand curve. In looser language, you maximize profit by raising price until the point where you really are driving some substantial percentage of consumers away. (Why? Because at lower prices, price increases don't cost you much in terms of lost demand and they also reduce your costs.) You can prove a formal version of this mathematically.
However, in the past MS was worried not just about current sales, but also about future sales. This is called "dynamic pricing". MS's attitude toward dynamic pricing is changing because: [i] they have close to 100% share already, [ii] the number of PCs in not increasing as fast (and so future market share is no longer much more attractive relative to current market share) and [iii] the threat of anti-trust regulation makes the future less certain.
Thus, MS is turning to the question of how to squeeze out current profits. This involves driving some customers away in order to raise revenue and lower costs for existing customers.
The opportunity for competitors (including Linux) is obvious. MS may be moving away from dynamic pricing too soon, if there really is a threat to its future market share.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but the cockpit has a door that locks. Ideally, this door probably is designed to withstand a lot of force, so trying to force your way into the cockpit would be a bad idea mmmkaaay?
In Europe, the pilot's door is left open. In the US, the door is locked during flight, but it is not designed to withstand force. This has been controversial for a long time, but it is still true. Now, it may change.
"Not a good day for Open Source Business Models"
Let's start to distinguish open source business models.
What doesn't work: a OS few hackers start-up a company with a vague plan to write great OS software and then "somehow" convert this software this into a revenue stream. Many folks claim they will "support software", but software support is a *tough business* that requires mucho consulting experience and back-office experience, not great hacker's chops.
What does work : the most successful Linux company today: IBM. They know how to consult and suppport, it has always been their strength. These aren't hackers teaching themselves the support business, these guys could teach anyone about support.
IBM says they are spending 1 billion dollars on Linux. Why? Because *they* can make money supporting Linux. They can understand the source code and therefore offer better support. They can change it if they need to (Linux on a mainframe, Linux on e-server, whatever.)
One profitable OS business model is to add open source to an already existing and profitable computer support business. I am not sure if there is any other.
Note the similarity to e-commerce: many surviving e-commerce sites are owned by older catalogue or brick-and-mortar stores. Why -- because these are the folks who understand *retail*.
All open source companies are doing badly.
Really? I bet that IBM is by far the largest OS company in terms of $$ spent on OS projects ($1,000,000,000, or so they say) and they seem to be doing pretty well. Everyone cries "Who will make a succesful service business that supports open source?" The answer: IBM.
Red Hat, which is by far the most successful of the group, has lost over 97% of its value and is trading at 1/8th its IPO price.
RedHat's IPO price was an insane reflection of the IPO bubble. IIRC, Red Hat claimed to be on the border of profitability just before the IPO. The IPO market (insanely) required them to up their "burn rate" to build for future expected profits. Now that the financial markets have returned to sanity, Red Hat looks to be returning to profitability, at least on a cash basis (the depreciated "good-will" accounting charge will haunt their official accounts for a while longer.)
Yes, I said tables . . . I'm unconvinced by your arguments about how hard they are to support, though. What is so difficult?
Well, try importing some Word tables into various office suites and see what happens. Many suites will put the right text into the right boxes, but the formating isn't exactly the same, so the table runs off the page margins or stuff that is supposed to be on one line breaks up and makes the table look like hell.
Now export that table back to Word (for your colleague who is a Microsoft-only guy) and repeat. The table turns into a hard to re-format mess.
And this happens with the *good* export/import filters. The problem is that WYSISYG word processors have delicate rules for formating. In text paragraphs, this is not so bad, as you can always re-align the "soft" line and page breaks. But in a table, that can really mess up the results.
Red Hat remains in red: Posts $27.6M net loss
If you go look at the actual figures, you will see that most of that loss is "depreciated goodwill" -- when Red Hat acquires a company they put "goodwill" on their books as an asset and then depreciate it according to very arbitrary accounting rules. In reality, Red Hat did not buy depreciating physical assets, but rather the skills and reputations, which are not depreciating.
On the other hand, the loss also contains several million in stock options, which really are an expense to the company. The "cash flow" number in headline ignores stock options. Therefore, Red Hat really is losing money, but nothing like $27 million.
Bank are trusted in large part because of a huge legal and regulatory structure that restricts their operations. In the States, there are disclosure rules, minimum financial reserves, etc., backed up by the FDIC and the the Federal Reserve Board, etc. Analogous rules for ASP's would require government audited off-site backups with independent access in the event of failure and so forth.
Without such rules, if you pick an ASP you are picking a 19th-century bank that could easily go bankrupt and leave you high and dry.
I just got LDAP auto-complete working. Very cool. Also, this is the first time that Java runs right out of the Mozilla installer for me. Very smooth.
This is looking great, the Mozilla team should be proud this time.
The write-up is just plain wrong.
The article (and the original BetaNews article) do not say that AOL has agreed to exclusively support IE. It is just that IE is currently the browser in AOL 6.0. AOL 7.0 is still planned to support Gecko (but maybe not exclusively.)
There are a bunch of replies saying that AOL may be using Mozilla as a threat against Microsoft, but just as logically Microsoft is now offering AOL a place on the Windows XP CD so that AOL has something to lose down the line.
International Business Machines Performs Act of Civil Disobedience to Promote Open Source Operating System . . . George Bush honored at Mensa ceremony
Actually, in real life George W. is getting an honorary Ph.D. from Yale today. Next up:
Temperatures in Hell drop sharply
I think I know some people who might disagree with you there. I know you're really proud of this software, but let's not be assholes, okay?
Geez, you might at least give the quote in context, which does not make them look like assholes at all:
" . . . other weblog software available for free, and written by us, and codenamed after a cartoon . . . "
From that page:
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age. The ADEA's protections apply to both employees and job applicants. Under the ADEA, it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of his/her age with respect to any term, condition, or privilege of employment -- including, but not limited to, hiring, firing, promotion, layoff, compensation, benefits, job assignments, and training.
I agree that not everyone learns best in a classroom, but lectures work for a reason (and that is why textbooks haven't displaced them.) There is a social pressure to pay attention in class, so that class time acts as a way to committ yourself to learn (unlike that book you haven't read yet.) Like live theater versus the movies, there is a tension in a classroom that isn't present in a recorded or digital performance. A video recording of a live theater production is usually quite bad, as is a televised lecture by a supposedly good professor or a CSPAN broadcast of a hearing that may seemed tension-filled in person -- look at the glare on that Senator's face! -- but boring as hell on TV.
Also, the combination of listening and looking (at the blackboard, or at slides or at a powerpoint presentation) is effective for a lot of folks (not all.)
Section 9, clause 5 of the US constitution: "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
So, unless the internet tax is going to be a federal tax, the states cannot collect money from stuff imported from other states without amending the constitution. At least, that's how it appears to me.
Wrong, I think. Many states have a "use tax" on items purchased out of state. As long as that tax rate is the same as on in-state purchases, it doesn't discriminate against "exports" from other states and I believe that is why it doesn't violate the constitution.
The big issue is just in jurisdication of the tax. Do I pay Massachusettes sales tax when I live in Los Angeles and the merchant is in Boston? Or do I pay California sales tax? And, if it's California, does that mean that the merchant has to keep seperate books for all 50 states?
I believe the law is clear: you pay taxes based on where you live. Retailers have offered to provide free software to map zip codes to tax rates and so forth, so the "red tape" argument doesn't hold much water, either.