Client-side validation is needed to insure the data isn't corrupted in transit. e.g. You want to buy 2 tickets. A network glitch turns this into 128 tickets, and the server charges your card for 128 tickets. With client-side validation, the server sends the requested transaction back to the client for validation to make sure it's been received correctly. You see the system has glitched, and you stop the purchase before your card is charged for 128 tickets. (You could continue this in perpetuity, but with the low data corruption rates in modern networks, two validations is usually enough.)
Both the client and the server need to validate the transaction is legitimate and what they want. And only when they both agree that it's correct should the transaction be processed.
I think there's a fair middle ground here. A short-term copyright, say about 20 years, should be enough for creators to come up with ideas and profiting from them, while still promoting the sciences and arts in the long-term.
Oh, will you look at that. The original length of copyright was just 14 years. Gradually, over the centuries, it's been bastardized to the current ridiculous life plus 70-120 years. Can you imagine if we had to pay for other things for that long? We'd still be paying the progeny of the people who worked on building the Brooklyn Bridge.
Scale copyright's duration back down to about 20 years (or hell, even 40 years - average length of a career), and most of these problems disappear on their own. Yes you should get credit for and be able to profit from thinking up clever ideas. No you and your progeny should not be able to extract a toll from society in perpetuity for using the idea.
The problem isn't that corporations are demanding unreasonable things. The problem is that people just don't give a damn. Ideally people would tell an employer demanding a non-disparagement agreement to go take a hike. You assume the ideal must be true, so you assume the only way people would sign their rights away is if they're coerced. But employers don't have to coerce employees to sign non-disparagement agreements. People think of the situations where the agreement would kick in, and they're so rare that they think nothing of signing it. The exact same thing is happening in the privacy front. People are willingly trading their personal info for free web space and email service.
Thomas Jefferson said " the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." People concentrate on the "blood" part and assume it to mean that we must be willing to fight and die against tyrants who would take away our freedoms. I'm starting to think the "time to time" part is more important. If people don't occasionally experience living under tyranny, they grow complacent, start taking their freedoms for granted, and think nothing about signing them away. Only if you've had to fight and die for those freedoms do you truly appreciate their value.
"They have this mindless policy of everything having to be simultaneously streamed and released, which is obviously an untenable model for theatrical presentation.
If people really wanted to see movies in theaters, theaters would have no problem competing when movies are released simultaneously on streaming and in theaters. If this is an untenable model for theaters, and the only way they can survive is by prohibiting competition for 90 days, then he's admitting that theaters are obsolete and should be allowed to wither and die. The problem is the theaters, not Netflix.
Anyhow, I stream Netflix to my projector which throws the image onto a 150" screen. It's a 1080p projector right now, but as soon as 4k projector prices come down it's being upgraded. Sound is a mid-high end 7.1 speaker system played through a Yamaha DTS receiver whose sound field I've calibrated with the included microphone placed in the middle of the seating area. I play the chariot race scene from Ben Hur on it as a demo (very few people alive who got to see that in theaters), and people are just blown away by the visuals and sound. And the lack of screaming kids and annoying hecklers and sticky floors.
You haven't actually run a small business, have you? Deductions can't increase profit because to get a deduction you have to spend the money on something. So to avoid paying $3 in taxes, you have to spend $10 on something. Meaning you've got a net loss of $7 ($10 spent, $3 saved on taxes). You do gain whatever you bought with the $10, but if your business didn't need it, that's an inefficient use of funds.
Or to put it another way, why pay $10 for benefits for low-paid employees to get a $3 tax deduction, when you can just pay the employees $10 more (making them no longer low-paid and thus presumably much happier) and get the exact same $3 tax deduction because wages are also a deductible expense? (The actual answer is payroll taxes - Social Security and Medicare are subtracted from wages, but not from benefits. Nothing to do with deductions.)
Actually being a small business is very advantageous. While "rates" may be high, you can deduct pretty much anything. This is in stark contrast to an individual wage earner that has to bear nearly 100% of work related costs.
When you're an employee and earn a wage, you pay income tax on what you make.
When you own a company, you get paid two ways:
You earn a wage, which the company deducts as an expense and you pay income tax on, just like the employee wage owner.
And you pay corporate tax on the company's profit, plus income tax when you pay yourself with that profit. (In general; the reality is a lot more complicated.)
That last bullet point means unless you can figure out a way to pay zero corporate tax, the small business owner's overall tax rate is always higher than a wage earner's. This double taxation of small business owners compared to a wage earner discouraged wage earners from making the leap and starting their own business. Why start a business and incur all the headaches that come along with it just so you could be taxed more than when you're an employee? So to remove this impediment to the average Joe starting a small business, the government made LLCs (limited liability corporations). LLCs are pass-through entities for tax purposes - the LLC isn't taxed. Instead, any money the company makes is automatically considered your income. So you only end up paying income tax on it, not both corporate and income tax. (Partnerships are another option, but involve a lot more bookkeeping which generally isn't worth it unless you're actually partners with someone in the business and want the protections it provides.)
And if a wage-earner is paying for work-related expenses (isn't being reimbursed by their employer), those expenses are deductible on their personal income taxes.
Compared to all lobbying. Google, Apple, and Microsoft's 2016 revenue was $390 billion, and they spent $11.34 million on lobbying, or 2.9 cents per every $1000 of their revenue.
The pharmaceutical industry's revenue was about $446 billion, and they spent $246 million on lobbying. Or 56 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 19x more.
The telecom industry's revenue was about $750 billion, and they spent $86 million on lobbying, or 11 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 4x more.
The TV/movie/music industry's revenue is about $600 billion, and they spent $60 million on lobbying, or 10 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 3.4x more.
The Internet/software industry is just realizing that if they don't want the tail wagging the dog (e.g. Hollywood dictating the laws which govern them), they're going to have to spend an equitable amount on lobbying.
The problem is much simpler IMHO. Do you believe in taxation without representation? Most people don't.
Most people also believe in taxing corporations.
Now reconcile those two positions. If you want to tax corporations, then you have to give them some form of representation in government. Since corporations can't vote, the only avenue left is lobbying and political donations. Hence lobbying is legitimized.
IMHO we should just abolish all corporate taxes AND prohibit any type of lobbying, donations, or other form of influence on government by anyone/anything who can't vote. If a company is concerned a bill will destroy their business, they can explain it to their voting employees and customers, and they can impress upon the government why the bill is a bad idea.
There's no tax revenue lost by abolishing corporate taxes - corporations are pass-through entities. Corporate profits become dividends which are taxed when the owners/stockholders take distributions. Likewise, corporate taxes are passed on to employees as lower wages, and customers as higher prices. The corporation itself doesn't actually make or spend any money itself. It's just a paper entity - a dotted line drawn around the set of all its employees and owners.
The only reason I see to prefer Office to any other mail and calendaring solutions is because it's integrated into the company directory, and if the company would divorce its personnel directory from office, that advantage would disappear too.
This is correct, but companies love Outlook and Outlook server because it includes tools for corporate management of mail, scheduling, tasks, which no other software offers in a meaningfully competitive way. If LibreOffice would concentrate on what companies want (encrypted email management, admin management of mail accounts including retroactively wiping out a fired employee's access while retaining all his mail, etc), they'd get that last 2% and become a serious threat to Office. But alas most of the people working on LibreOffice are anti-corporation, and refuse to add features which would be useful to a company. And as a result, that 2% sticks with Office, forcing a large chunk of the 98% who interacts with that 2% to stick with Office.
Google's Gmail/Calendar/ToDo suite isn't as robust as Outlook, but it's the closest competitor. That's where I'm seeing the companies who don't want to pay the Microsoft Office tax migrating to, instead of LibreOffice.
Basically it sounds like Consumer Watchdog wants Amazon to incorporate camelcamelcamel's price history directly into Amazon. While that would be convenient (I have the extension on my main browser, but not on every browser like my phone), I don't see why Amazon should be singled out with this requirement when no other store has to do it.
The tools are out there. It's up to the buyer to use them. Part of the free market is that people more concerned about saving money by cross-checking prices (poor people who take the time to research and inform themselves) end up paying lower prices. Their purchases are effectively subsidized by people who don't care about price (rich people) and people who are too lazy to do price comparisons before buying; these people pay the regular price and help stores make up their margins so they can hold sales that get the well-informed poor shoppers to buy.
If Consumer Watchdog gets their way and basically forces Amazon to give a price history of every item, the result is not going to be what they hope it will be. The end of a sale would then result in a drop-off in purchases as everyone realizes they just missed a sale, and decide not to buy just because of the price increase, not because they don't like the current price. Consequently, the only way for Amazon to maintain their margins will be to hold fewer discounts and sales. Their average price on an item will be the same, but the delta between high and low will become smaller - no more sales, just the occasional market price correction. Poor people (who do their price research) will on average end up paying more than they used to, rich and lazy people who didn't care and just one-click purchased will on average end up paying less than they used to.
Can a society which espouses free speech as a fundamental principle actually survive?
Or are the jihadists correct that any society which wishes to survive must somehow control its citizens baser natural tendencies?
Protecting stuff you believe in is easy. Protecting stuff you disagree with is the true litmus test of how strong your principles are. The moment you stop protecting speech you disagree with, you've tacitly admitted that the principle of freedom of expression is a failure. You become a supporter only of points of views you agree with. The same as the jihadists you are purportedly fighting against - they only allow points of view they agree with. Evelyn Hall understood this when she wrote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
As far as US citizens working abroad, they do give you credit for any tax paid to a foreign government
That's only if the U.S. has a tax treaty with that country. If there is no treaty, you're double-taxed. And even with countries with tax treaties, the treaty doesn't cover everything. I (U.S. citizen) worked in Canada for a couple years. The tax treaty meant I just paid the higher income tax rate (Canadian), and applied those paid taxes as a credit to my U.S. income taxes. But the treaty didn't cover unearned income. My Canadian bank interest was double-taxed. If I'd owned any Canadian stock, the dividends would've been double-taxed. (U.S. stock was OK since the Canadian government isn't stupid enough to try to tax stuff you own outside of Canada if you're not living in Canada.)
Interesting aside, I had to rent a house in Washington state and commute across the border every day because I used to be a California resident. Californina's tax policies are as tenacious as the IRS'. I initially moved from California to British Columbia to work. But when I spoke with an international tax attorney, he pointed out that for the purposes of tax domicile, California only recognizes moves to other states. Because I moved straight to Canada, California still considered me a California citizen, and they would try to make me pay California income taxes on everything I earned in Canada. So I had to move to Washington and live there long enough to shed my California residency in the eyes of the California government. I talked with someone who ran into the same problem when they moved from California to the UK. California was trying to tax their UK income.
What makes you think that you can take the benefits of being a US citizen and not pay any taxes?
The U.S. and Eritrea are the only countries which tax based on citizenship. Most countries tax based on location. If you earned the money outside the country, they don't touch it. Others tax based on residency. If you earned the money while residing outside the country, they don't touch it. That's why Canadians working in the U.S. have to be careful about how much time they spend visiting Canada. Canada taxes based on residency, and if they spend more than a cumulative 182 days (half year) in Canada, the Canadian government reclassifies them as residing in Canada, and the money they earned in the U.S. becomes subject to the much higher Canadian taxes.
This can catch people holding dual U.S. citizenship hard if they're living outside the U.S. They can grow up all their lives in a foreign country blissfully unaware of this tax bomb, then they sell their house and the IRS demands a part of the profit.
Unlike money, productivity is conserved. The amount of stuff/services society consumes has to equal the amount it produces. (Actually the amount produced slightly exceeds the amount consumed due to inefficiencies. e.g. losses during transport due to accidents. But the amount consumed cannot exceed the amount produced.)
While creative tasks can experience increased productivity from shorter hours and longer breaks, they are the exception. The productivity of production and service jobs scales linearly with hours worked. If those workers work fewer hours, less stuff is produced, meaning less stuff can be consumed, meaning the society's standard of living decreases. The only way to increase productivity while decreasing hours with these tasks (thus increasing the standard of living) is through technological assistance and automation.
IIRC (this was the explanation I got back when iOS couldn't multi-task), a non-multi-tasked app in iOS put into the background has its memory state saved, and the app is dumped from RAM just as if you'd closed it. When you "switch back" to the app, the app is actually restarted and the memory state restored. That is how Apple faked multi-tasking without actually multi-tasking. The app is "frozen" in that it can't do anything because it's actually removed from RAM (except for its memory state, which depending on the app could be smaller or bigger than the app).
Android's model is to keep background apps in RAM until it runs out of RAM. Then it (originally) starts sending a kill command to the app which hasn't been used in the longest time. I believe they've changed the kill sequence, as the original sequence encouraged apps to be battery hogs and needlessly do stuff in the background to keep themselves from being killed first. When an app receives the kill command, it's up to the app to clean itself up, save its state if needed, and shut down gracefully.
A user-commanded force close kills the app without giving it the chance to do all this cleanup, and can result in lost data or state. I would imagine the same is true for iOS.
The energy of the "shot" delivered should drop with the square of the distance from the target.
Laser light is coherent and doesn't follow the inverse square law. A perfect laser would maintain its energy density at any range. Real world lasers suffer from slight incoherence causing it to slowly spread with distance, and from atmospheric absorption.
Nevertheless, this one shot cost at least $40 million +. The second will result in a cost of $20 million per shot. And, what's the lifetime of the hardware, replacement of end-of-life parts costs and other maintenance costs? It'll take many more than 40 million shots to get down to $1 per shot.
Typically, costs such as this are analyzed as static and dynamic. So a one-time acquisition cost of $40 million, plus $1 of electricity per shot. That allows you to easily compare to other systems (dunno the acquisition cost of a howitzer-type gun, but I do know the shells cost a few hundred dollars each). A crew of three sounds about the same as a regular small gun (one person to load, one to select and track a target, one to aim and fire), so there's no difference in cost there.
Moving targets can take a circuitous and rapidly change directions.
Irrelevant when the target's speed is much slower than the speed of light. Where you see the target is where it is, is where it will be when your laser beam reaches that location.
The article doesn't say whether this uses a pulse laser or a continuous laser. If pulsed, what's the recycle time? A fast moving target may reach its target during the recycle time if that's the case.
The wiki page says the laser is up to about 15-50 kW. There are efficiency losses, especially for high powered lasers. But that level of power should be trivial for a ship to continuously produce. This is also where a lot of spinoffs are going to come from. The R&D they've done to improve efficiency will probably be applicable to future technologies like laser movie projectors for in-home use.
The aiming system, presumably RADAR or some such, must be able to follow such a target and likely uses a mechanical motor driven gear system for that. Can the aiming system follow that spot during the target's travels
This problem was licked in the 1960s when they were trying to get film footage of target drones as they tried to shoot them down. They just stuck a camera on a tracking radar to see how much they'd have to modify the system. Turns out they didn't have to do anything - the drone was dead center in the frame.
How does this system work on targets obscured during rain, fog, cloudy weather or dusty conditions? Light beams become scattered under these conditions and the ability to deliver a destructive energy blast could be hampered.
What's the difference between someone who downloads a BitTorrent and someone who would never pay for the show if BitTorrent (or other options) weren't available? None.
I'm normally the last person to defend Hollywood, but there isn't a perfect overlap between those sets. Some people who download via BitTorrent would pay for the show if BitTorrent weren't available. Just like there are people who wouldn't pay for the show, who don't bother to download it.
It's not stealing, dumbfuck. Are you committing rape whenever you drive over the posted speed limit? There are different terms for different violations of the law for a reason.
Totally agreed. Stealing removes the item from the original owner's possession - the owner is no longer able to sell it. With copyright violation, the original owner still has still possession of the product - the original owner can continue to sell it.
Inconvenient, yes, but it was in response to specific intel that terrorists had been plotting to hide bombs aboard common electronics like laptops. Obama instituted a similar temporary ban on Iraqi immigrants in response to specific intel that terrorists were trying to infiltrate the country by posing as Iraqi immigrants. That they've lifted the ban presumably means they think they've captured/killed the terrorist groups working on this.
Trump's temporary ban on immigration from certain muslim countries is controversial because it isn't based on specific intel.
The class of ships is named after U.S. cities The USS Ponce is named after the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, which in turn is named after Juan Ponce de Leon, first governor of Puerto Rico. While English is its predominant language, U.S. place names are heavily influenced by the languages of other past colonial power (Spanish and French), immigrants (Italian, German, Dutch, etc.), and native American languages.
A voluntary agreement is not sufficient to form a contract. Contracts must also have consideration - something you receive in exchange for something else. Often it's money, but it can also be products or services. For a contract to be valid, there must be consideration given by both sides. e.g. A contract saying all you transfer all your assets to me and that you willingly become my slave until the day you die is invalid, even if you willingly want the contract. I'm getting everything of yours, but you're not getting anything from me. So you are not receiving any consideration, and thus the contract is invalid.
A non-compete requires the employee to give up something (their ability to work in their chosen field for a number of years) in exchange for nothing. If the company continued to pay you for the duration of the non-compete, then it could be valid. But because they company's lawyers are trying to get something for nothing, they refuse to give you any consideration in exchange for your non-compete, thus invalidating the non-compete as a legal contract.
2007 - You borrow $31k to go to school. You don't pay income taxes on it because you didn't make the money, you borrowed it. You will pay income taxes on it when you earn the $31k that you use to pay back the loan.
2017 - Creditor cancels the debt. You no longer have to pay it back. The money you received in 2007 now becomes income (just like winning the lottery) instead of a loan, and you owe taxes on it. The IRS is actually being generous by assessing taxes on it in 2017, instead of assessing it back in 2007 when you actually received the money.
Likewise from the lenders side:
2007 - You lend $31k to someone. You already paid income taxes on it because you earned that money previously and it was sitting in your bank account.
2017 - You cancel the debt. Since the money effectively vanished from your account, you shouldn't have had to have paid taxes on it when you earned it. Consequently, the IRS allows you to take a tax deduction for the loss, thereby canceling out the taxes you paid for the money when you first made it. The tax liability for the money is instead shifted over to the person who now has the money - the borrower whose debt was forgiven.
It's the responsibility of both. I'm a fiscal conservative and all for personal responsibility, but I have no sympathy for the lenders here. These were private loans. It was the personal responsibility of the lender to make sure the paperwork was in order and properly recorded before they loaned out the money (or paid to acquire the loan). If they fail to do that, well I guess their money wasn't really important to them in the first place.
Congrats to the borrowers - they got the equivalent to finding thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the ground because the lender wasn't careful to make sure their pocket didn't have a hole in it.
Yes, the ethical thing for the borrower to do is to pay back the loan. But if there's no clear documentation for the loan, the borrower can't be sure they're paying back the right person. They could pay someone $10,000, then next day some other collector calls saying they're the actual owner of the loan and the borrower needs to come up with another $10,000 to pay them. Faced with this possibility, the most ethical thing a borrower can do is "pay back" the loan by putting it into a savings account. And when someone can prove that they're really the actual one who is owed the money, the borrower can transfer the account over to them (minus interest).
Or perhaps most damning, it's only 3.5 years of interest on the debt. Every year, those of us insisting that we need to balance the budget get told to go for a hike. Well, here's a great example of what not balancing the budget is costing us. (Funny how everyone proclaiming we needed to go into deficit spending to help pull out of the recession is conspicuously silent now that the economy has picked up and it's time to pay back that extra debt we racked up.)
Ironically, Microsoft tried to get around this problem in Win 10 (maybe Win 8 as well) by not giving focus to notifications during Windows Update. Unfortunately they also didn't pop it up as the top window on your desktop. Several times I've had Windows Update "get stuck." I'd let the computer sit for several hours to see if it'd finish, but no progress. Eventually I'd give up and restart the computer. During shutdown all the program windows would close one by one. Just as the last one closes, it would briefly reveal a dialog box for Windows Update underneath it, waiting for me to hit OK before Update would continue. Then the computer would shutdown and restart.
Unlike Unix/Linux which has a well developed concept for focus (floating focus following your mouse cursor is my favorite), Microsoft has never quite gotten focus quite right. It used to be the top-most window always got focus, which was why we had the problem of a dialog box popping up as you were typing stealing 'space' or 'enter' as OK and immediately vanishing before you could read it. They're trying to address it, make it more Unix-like, but it seems some vestige of that old code is forcing notification dialogs to appear underneath other windows because they're insisting it not have focus.
Then you've got this stupid flat design trend in UI which makes it impossible to tell which window in a stack has focus. Stupid designers assume everyone uses "window on top has focus" when that's precisely what we need to move away from.
Normally that's what would happen. But I've noticed the USPS Amazon deliveries don't always coincide with regular mail deliveries. I've had a couple other packages show up in my mailbox in the afternoon, when my regular mail delivery is in the early morning. And one package showed up in my mailbox on a Sunday. (I thought it was odd Amazon sent me a notice saying my package was delivered at these times. It wasn't in front of my door, so I checked the mailbox and there it was.)
The USPS would still be making these rounds (I've gotten USPS deliveries from Newegg, Monoprice, and Cabelas). But not necessarily to my house if they weren't delivering the Amazon package. So there is some marginal cost associated with delivering some of these packages.
How about the lost raw video feed of the Apollo 11 moon landing? The existing video copy everyone has seen was made with a video camera pointed at a monitor displaying the raw feed. 1968-1972 covers exactly the time frame of this lost video. Anyone at NASA would have to be a fool to not at least check out what's on these tapes.
That's the drawback of paying month-to-month. If you sign up for a 5-, 10-, or even 30-year service contract, then you can negotiate the terms of that long-term contract. And when both parties have signed that contract, they can't change it for 5-, 10-, or 30-years without mutual consent.
What's that? You don't want to commit to a contract for that long? You want to be able to stop using the service at the end of the month if it no longer suits your needs? Well that works both ways. If the company offering the service decides at the end of the month that different terms of service suit their needs better, they can change it too. Flexibility for your benefit is also flexibility for the service provider's benefit.
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Client-side validation is needed to insure the data isn't corrupted in transit. e.g. You want to buy 2 tickets. A network glitch turns this into 128 tickets, and the server charges your card for 128 tickets. With client-side validation, the server sends the requested transaction back to the client for validation to make sure it's been received correctly. You see the system has glitched, and you stop the purchase before your card is charged for 128 tickets. (You could continue this in perpetuity, but with the low data corruption rates in modern networks, two validations is usually enough.)
Both the client and the server need to validate the transaction is legitimate and what they want. And only when they both agree that it's correct should the transaction be processed.
I think there's a fair middle ground here. A short-term copyright, say about 20 years, should be enough for creators to come up with ideas and profiting from them, while still promoting the sciences and arts in the long-term.
Oh, will you look at that. The original length of copyright was just 14 years. Gradually, over the centuries, it's been bastardized to the current ridiculous life plus 70-120 years. Can you imagine if we had to pay for other things for that long? We'd still be paying the progeny of the people who worked on building the Brooklyn Bridge.
Scale copyright's duration back down to about 20 years (or hell, even 40 years - average length of a career), and most of these problems disappear on their own. Yes you should get credit for and be able to profit from thinking up clever ideas. No you and your progeny should not be able to extract a toll from society in perpetuity for using the idea.
The problem isn't that corporations are demanding unreasonable things. The problem is that people just don't give a damn. Ideally people would tell an employer demanding a non-disparagement agreement to go take a hike. You assume the ideal must be true, so you assume the only way people would sign their rights away is if they're coerced. But employers don't have to coerce employees to sign non-disparagement agreements. People think of the situations where the agreement would kick in, and they're so rare that they think nothing of signing it. The exact same thing is happening in the privacy front. People are willingly trading their personal info for free web space and email service.
Thomas Jefferson said " the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." People concentrate on the "blood" part and assume it to mean that we must be willing to fight and die against tyrants who would take away our freedoms. I'm starting to think the "time to time" part is more important. If people don't occasionally experience living under tyranny, they grow complacent, start taking their freedoms for granted, and think nothing about signing them away. Only if you've had to fight and die for those freedoms do you truly appreciate their value.
If people really wanted to see movies in theaters, theaters would have no problem competing when movies are released simultaneously on streaming and in theaters. If this is an untenable model for theaters, and the only way they can survive is by prohibiting competition for 90 days, then he's admitting that theaters are obsolete and should be allowed to wither and die. The problem is the theaters, not Netflix.
Anyhow, I stream Netflix to my projector which throws the image onto a 150" screen. It's a 1080p projector right now, but as soon as 4k projector prices come down it's being upgraded. Sound is a mid-high end 7.1 speaker system played through a Yamaha DTS receiver whose sound field I've calibrated with the included microphone placed in the middle of the seating area. I play the chariot race scene from Ben Hur on it as a demo (very few people alive who got to see that in theaters), and people are just blown away by the visuals and sound. And the lack of screaming kids and annoying hecklers and sticky floors.
Or to put it another way, why pay $10 for benefits for low-paid employees to get a $3 tax deduction, when you can just pay the employees $10 more (making them no longer low-paid and thus presumably much happier) and get the exact same $3 tax deduction because wages are also a deductible expense? (The actual answer is payroll taxes - Social Security and Medicare are subtracted from wages, but not from benefits. Nothing to do with deductions.)
That last bullet point means unless you can figure out a way to pay zero corporate tax, the small business owner's overall tax rate is always higher than a wage earner's. This double taxation of small business owners compared to a wage earner discouraged wage earners from making the leap and starting their own business. Why start a business and incur all the headaches that come along with it just so you could be taxed more than when you're an employee? So to remove this impediment to the average Joe starting a small business, the government made LLCs (limited liability corporations). LLCs are pass-through entities for tax purposes - the LLC isn't taxed. Instead, any money the company makes is automatically considered your income. So you only end up paying income tax on it, not both corporate and income tax. (Partnerships are another option, but involve a lot more bookkeeping which generally isn't worth it unless you're actually partners with someone in the business and want the protections it provides.)
And if a wage-earner is paying for work-related expenses (isn't being reimbursed by their employer), those expenses are deductible on their personal income taxes.
Compared to all lobbying. Google, Apple, and Microsoft's 2016 revenue was $390 billion, and they spent $11.34 million on lobbying, or 2.9 cents per every $1000 of their revenue.
The pharmaceutical industry's revenue was about $446 billion, and they spent $246 million on lobbying. Or 56 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 19x more.
The telecom industry's revenue was about $750 billion, and they spent $86 million on lobbying, or 11 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 4x more.
The TV/movie/music industry's revenue is about $600 billion, and they spent $60 million on lobbying, or 10 cents per every $1000 of revenue. 3.4x more.
The Internet/software industry is just realizing that if they don't want the tail wagging the dog (e.g. Hollywood dictating the laws which govern them), they're going to have to spend an equitable amount on lobbying.
The problem is much simpler IMHO. Do you believe in taxation without representation? Most people don't.
Most people also believe in taxing corporations.
Now reconcile those two positions. If you want to tax corporations, then you have to give them some form of representation in government. Since corporations can't vote, the only avenue left is lobbying and political donations. Hence lobbying is legitimized.
IMHO we should just abolish all corporate taxes AND prohibit any type of lobbying, donations, or other form of influence on government by anyone/anything who can't vote. If a company is concerned a bill will destroy their business, they can explain it to their voting employees and customers, and they can impress upon the government why the bill is a bad idea.
There's no tax revenue lost by abolishing corporate taxes - corporations are pass-through entities. Corporate profits become dividends which are taxed when the owners/stockholders take distributions. Likewise, corporate taxes are passed on to employees as lower wages, and customers as higher prices. The corporation itself doesn't actually make or spend any money itself. It's just a paper entity - a dotted line drawn around the set of all its employees and owners.
This is correct, but companies love Outlook and Outlook server because it includes tools for corporate management of mail, scheduling, tasks, which no other software offers in a meaningfully competitive way. If LibreOffice would concentrate on what companies want (encrypted email management, admin management of mail accounts including retroactively wiping out a fired employee's access while retaining all his mail, etc), they'd get that last 2% and become a serious threat to Office. But alas most of the people working on LibreOffice are anti-corporation, and refuse to add features which would be useful to a company. And as a result, that 2% sticks with Office, forcing a large chunk of the 98% who interacts with that 2% to stick with Office.
Google's Gmail/Calendar/ToDo suite isn't as robust as Outlook, but it's the closest competitor. That's where I'm seeing the companies who don't want to pay the Microsoft Office tax migrating to, instead of LibreOffice.
Basically it sounds like Consumer Watchdog wants Amazon to incorporate camelcamelcamel's price history directly into Amazon. While that would be convenient (I have the extension on my main browser, but not on every browser like my phone), I don't see why Amazon should be singled out with this requirement when no other store has to do it.
The tools are out there. It's up to the buyer to use them. Part of the free market is that people more concerned about saving money by cross-checking prices (poor people who take the time to research and inform themselves) end up paying lower prices. Their purchases are effectively subsidized by people who don't care about price (rich people) and people who are too lazy to do price comparisons before buying; these people pay the regular price and help stores make up their margins so they can hold sales that get the well-informed poor shoppers to buy.
If Consumer Watchdog gets their way and basically forces Amazon to give a price history of every item, the result is not going to be what they hope it will be. The end of a sale would then result in a drop-off in purchases as everyone realizes they just missed a sale, and decide not to buy just because of the price increase, not because they don't like the current price. Consequently, the only way for Amazon to maintain their margins will be to hold fewer discounts and sales. Their average price on an item will be the same, but the delta between high and low will become smaller - no more sales, just the occasional market price correction. Poor people (who do their price research) will on average end up paying more than they used to, rich and lazy people who didn't care and just one-click purchased will on average end up paying less than they used to.
Can a society which espouses free speech as a fundamental principle actually survive?
Or are the jihadists correct that any society which wishes to survive must somehow control its citizens baser natural tendencies?
Protecting stuff you believe in is easy. Protecting stuff you disagree with is the true litmus test of how strong your principles are. The moment you stop protecting speech you disagree with, you've tacitly admitted that the principle of freedom of expression is a failure. You become a supporter only of points of views you agree with. The same as the jihadists you are purportedly fighting against - they only allow points of view they agree with. Evelyn Hall understood this when she wrote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
That's only if the U.S. has a tax treaty with that country. If there is no treaty, you're double-taxed. And even with countries with tax treaties, the treaty doesn't cover everything. I (U.S. citizen) worked in Canada for a couple years. The tax treaty meant I just paid the higher income tax rate (Canadian), and applied those paid taxes as a credit to my U.S. income taxes. But the treaty didn't cover unearned income. My Canadian bank interest was double-taxed. If I'd owned any Canadian stock, the dividends would've been double-taxed. (U.S. stock was OK since the Canadian government isn't stupid enough to try to tax stuff you own outside of Canada if you're not living in Canada.)
Interesting aside, I had to rent a house in Washington state and commute across the border every day because I used to be a California resident. Californina's tax policies are as tenacious as the IRS'. I initially moved from California to British Columbia to work. But when I spoke with an international tax attorney, he pointed out that for the purposes of tax domicile, California only recognizes moves to other states. Because I moved straight to Canada, California still considered me a California citizen, and they would try to make me pay California income taxes on everything I earned in Canada. So I had to move to Washington and live there long enough to shed my California residency in the eyes of the California government. I talked with someone who ran into the same problem when they moved from California to the UK. California was trying to tax their UK income.
The U.S. and Eritrea are the only countries which tax based on citizenship. Most countries tax based on location. If you earned the money outside the country, they don't touch it. Others tax based on residency. If you earned the money while residing outside the country, they don't touch it. That's why Canadians working in the U.S. have to be careful about how much time they spend visiting Canada. Canada taxes based on residency, and if they spend more than a cumulative 182 days (half year) in Canada, the Canadian government reclassifies them as residing in Canada, and the money they earned in the U.S. becomes subject to the much higher Canadian taxes.
This can catch people holding dual U.S. citizenship hard if they're living outside the U.S. They can grow up all their lives in a foreign country blissfully unaware of this tax bomb, then they sell their house and the IRS demands a part of the profit.
Unlike money, productivity is conserved. The amount of stuff/services society consumes has to equal the amount it produces. (Actually the amount produced slightly exceeds the amount consumed due to inefficiencies. e.g. losses during transport due to accidents. But the amount consumed cannot exceed the amount produced.)
While creative tasks can experience increased productivity from shorter hours and longer breaks, they are the exception. The productivity of production and service jobs scales linearly with hours worked. If those workers work fewer hours, less stuff is produced, meaning less stuff can be consumed, meaning the society's standard of living decreases. The only way to increase productivity while decreasing hours with these tasks (thus increasing the standard of living) is through technological assistance and automation.
IIRC (this was the explanation I got back when iOS couldn't multi-task), a non-multi-tasked app in iOS put into the background has its memory state saved, and the app is dumped from RAM just as if you'd closed it. When you "switch back" to the app, the app is actually restarted and the memory state restored. That is how Apple faked multi-tasking without actually multi-tasking. The app is "frozen" in that it can't do anything because it's actually removed from RAM (except for its memory state, which depending on the app could be smaller or bigger than the app).
Android's model is to keep background apps in RAM until it runs out of RAM. Then it (originally) starts sending a kill command to the app which hasn't been used in the longest time. I believe they've changed the kill sequence, as the original sequence encouraged apps to be battery hogs and needlessly do stuff in the background to keep themselves from being killed first. When an app receives the kill command, it's up to the app to clean itself up, save its state if needed, and shut down gracefully.
A user-commanded force close kills the app without giving it the chance to do all this cleanup, and can result in lost data or state. I would imagine the same is true for iOS.
Laser light is coherent and doesn't follow the inverse square law. A perfect laser would maintain its energy density at any range. Real world lasers suffer from slight incoherence causing it to slowly spread with distance, and from atmospheric absorption.
Typically, costs such as this are analyzed as static and dynamic. So a one-time acquisition cost of $40 million, plus $1 of electricity per shot. That allows you to easily compare to other systems (dunno the acquisition cost of a howitzer-type gun, but I do know the shells cost a few hundred dollars each). A crew of three sounds about the same as a regular small gun (one person to load, one to select and track a target, one to aim and fire), so there's no difference in cost there.
Irrelevant when the target's speed is much slower than the speed of light. Where you see the target is where it is, is where it will be when your laser beam reaches that location.
The wiki page says the laser is up to about 15-50 kW. There are efficiency losses, especially for high powered lasers. But that level of power should be trivial for a ship to continuously produce. This is also where a lot of spinoffs are going to come from. The R&D they've done to improve efficiency will probably be applicable to future technologies like laser movie projectors for in-home use.
This problem was licked in the 1960s when they were trying to get film footage of target drones as they tried to shoot them down. They just stuck a camera on a tracking radar to see how much they'd have to modify the system. Turns out they didn't have to do anything - the drone was dead center in the frame.
Dunno what wavelength they're using, but infrared and longer wavelengths aren't affected by rain, fog, clouds, or dust.
I'm normally the last person to defend Hollywood, but there isn't a perfect overlap between those sets. Some people who download via BitTorrent would pay for the show if BitTorrent weren't available. Just like there are people who wouldn't pay for the show, who don't bother to download it.
Totally agreed. Stealing removes the item from the original owner's possession - the owner is no longer able to sell it. With copyright violation, the original owner still has still possession of the product - the original owner can continue to sell it.
Inconvenient, yes, but it was in response to specific intel that terrorists had been plotting to hide bombs aboard common electronics like laptops. Obama instituted a similar temporary ban on Iraqi immigrants in response to specific intel that terrorists were trying to infiltrate the country by posing as Iraqi immigrants. That they've lifted the ban presumably means they think they've captured/killed the terrorist groups working on this.
Trump's temporary ban on immigration from certain muslim countries is controversial because it isn't based on specific intel.
The class of ships is named after U.S. cities The USS Ponce is named after the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, which in turn is named after Juan Ponce de Leon, first governor of Puerto Rico. While English is its predominant language, U.S. place names are heavily influenced by the languages of other past colonial power (Spanish and French), immigrants (Italian, German, Dutch, etc.), and native American languages.
A voluntary agreement is not sufficient to form a contract. Contracts must also have consideration - something you receive in exchange for something else. Often it's money, but it can also be products or services. For a contract to be valid, there must be consideration given by both sides. e.g. A contract saying all you transfer all your assets to me and that you willingly become my slave until the day you die is invalid, even if you willingly want the contract. I'm getting everything of yours, but you're not getting anything from me. So you are not receiving any consideration, and thus the contract is invalid.
A non-compete requires the employee to give up something (their ability to work in their chosen field for a number of years) in exchange for nothing. If the company continued to pay you for the duration of the non-compete, then it could be valid. But because they company's lawyers are trying to get something for nothing, they refuse to give you any consideration in exchange for your non-compete, thus invalidating the non-compete as a legal contract.
2007 - You borrow $31k to go to school. You don't pay income taxes on it because you didn't make the money, you borrowed it. You will pay income taxes on it when you earn the $31k that you use to pay back the loan.
2017 - Creditor cancels the debt. You no longer have to pay it back. The money you received in 2007 now becomes income (just like winning the lottery) instead of a loan, and you owe taxes on it. The IRS is actually being generous by assessing taxes on it in 2017, instead of assessing it back in 2007 when you actually received the money.
Likewise from the lenders side:
2007 - You lend $31k to someone. You already paid income taxes on it because you earned that money previously and it was sitting in your bank account.
2017 - You cancel the debt. Since the money effectively vanished from your account, you shouldn't have had to have paid taxes on it when you earned it. Consequently, the IRS allows you to take a tax deduction for the loss, thereby canceling out the taxes you paid for the money when you first made it. The tax liability for the money is instead shifted over to the person who now has the money - the borrower whose debt was forgiven.
It's the responsibility of both. I'm a fiscal conservative and all for personal responsibility, but I have no sympathy for the lenders here. These were private loans. It was the personal responsibility of the lender to make sure the paperwork was in order and properly recorded before they loaned out the money (or paid to acquire the loan). If they fail to do that, well I guess their money wasn't really important to them in the first place.
Congrats to the borrowers - they got the equivalent to finding thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the ground because the lender wasn't careful to make sure their pocket didn't have a hole in it.
Yes, the ethical thing for the borrower to do is to pay back the loan. But if there's no clear documentation for the loan, the borrower can't be sure they're paying back the right person. They could pay someone $10,000, then next day some other collector calls saying they're the actual owner of the loan and the borrower needs to come up with another $10,000 to pay them. Faced with this possibility, the most ethical thing a borrower can do is "pay back" the loan by putting it into a savings account. And when someone can prove that they're really the actual one who is owed the money, the borrower can transfer the account over to them (minus interest).
Why stop there? It's less than 8 months of entitlement spending.
Or perhaps most damning, it's only 3.5 years of interest on the debt. Every year, those of us insisting that we need to balance the budget get told to go for a hike. Well, here's a great example of what not balancing the budget is costing us. (Funny how everyone proclaiming we needed to go into deficit spending to help pull out of the recession is conspicuously silent now that the economy has picked up and it's time to pay back that extra debt we racked up.)
Ironically, Microsoft tried to get around this problem in Win 10 (maybe Win 8 as well) by not giving focus to notifications during Windows Update. Unfortunately they also didn't pop it up as the top window on your desktop. Several times I've had Windows Update "get stuck." I'd let the computer sit for several hours to see if it'd finish, but no progress. Eventually I'd give up and restart the computer. During shutdown all the program windows would close one by one. Just as the last one closes, it would briefly reveal a dialog box for Windows Update underneath it, waiting for me to hit OK before Update would continue. Then the computer would shutdown and restart.
Unlike Unix/Linux which has a well developed concept for focus (floating focus following your mouse cursor is my favorite), Microsoft has never quite gotten focus quite right. It used to be the top-most window always got focus, which was why we had the problem of a dialog box popping up as you were typing stealing 'space' or 'enter' as OK and immediately vanishing before you could read it. They're trying to address it, make it more Unix-like, but it seems some vestige of that old code is forcing notification dialogs to appear underneath other windows because they're insisting it not have focus.
Then you've got this stupid flat design trend in UI which makes it impossible to tell which window in a stack has focus. Stupid designers assume everyone uses "window on top has focus" when that's precisely what we need to move away from.
Normally that's what would happen. But I've noticed the USPS Amazon deliveries don't always coincide with regular mail deliveries. I've had a couple other packages show up in my mailbox in the afternoon, when my regular mail delivery is in the early morning. And one package showed up in my mailbox on a Sunday. (I thought it was odd Amazon sent me a notice saying my package was delivered at these times. It wasn't in front of my door, so I checked the mailbox and there it was.)
The USPS would still be making these rounds (I've gotten USPS deliveries from Newegg, Monoprice, and Cabelas). But not necessarily to my house if they weren't delivering the Amazon package. So there is some marginal cost associated with delivering some of these packages.
How about the lost raw video feed of the Apollo 11 moon landing? The existing video copy everyone has seen was made with a video camera pointed at a monitor displaying the raw feed. 1968-1972 covers exactly the time frame of this lost video. Anyone at NASA would have to be a fool to not at least check out what's on these tapes.
That's the drawback of paying month-to-month. If you sign up for a 5-, 10-, or even 30-year service contract, then you can negotiate the terms of that long-term contract. And when both parties have signed that contract, they can't change it for 5-, 10-, or 30-years without mutual consent.
What's that? You don't want to commit to a contract for that long? You want to be able to stop using the service at the end of the month if it no longer suits your needs? Well that works both ways. If the company offering the service decides at the end of the month that different terms of service suit their needs better, they can change it too. Flexibility for your benefit is also flexibility for the service provider's benefit.