That doesn't mean that they'd be friendly or tolerant.
Japanese society after the arrival of the Black Fleet became quite interested in Western technology and manners. The same society later combined their significantly upgraded technology and resource-hungry industrial base with xenophobia and fanatical militarism.
One, there are a bloody lot of them and it's not worth the time to go after any unless they're very high profile.
Two, the wire services are different from most news providers in that there business does not depend primarily on eyeballs driven to their site, but instead subscriptions from other news services to be allowed to redistribute their content -- the right that Google is partly appropriating for free. The NYT cares about end-user eyeballs, but Reuters, AFP, AP and UPI care about newspaper editors.
Three, in various countries such as the United States merely quoting small excerpts for the purposes of editorial commentary may be protected. It's treated a lot differently than providing excerpts with NO comment or other treatment. Mere aggregation, IIRC, is not protected.
It's not personal use; it's being redistributed to the whole world.
It's not editorial use, because Google isn't writing -about- the articles.
It's not educational use, because there's no broader educational context in which Google can claim to be using this for teaching or research purposes.
And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.
You may want to have a look at "Space HoRSE", by Gilligames and published by Shrapnel Games. While I have neither M.U.L.E. nor Space HoRSE, there is supposed to be a very, very deliberate resemblance between them.
On the other hand, you may have cost Jasc the approximately $100 or so potential revenue they tend to charge for their competing product, and Adobe the same approximately $100 or so for Adobe PS Elements -- as both companies offer cheaper photo-editing software specifically for the market that wants to do photo editing but not pay for full Photoshop. Ditto Picture Window Pro and the bleedin' rest of the market. There is likely something else you -could- afford.
And it may be quite possible that you could afford $500 if you cut out other expenses. How often do you replace your computer or automobile, for instance? How much do you spend eating out rather than cooking for yourself? And so forth.
In the absence of the cheaper (and in this case illegal, but in practice the probability of actually suffering legal consequences approaches zero for anybody but a massive sharer or a business that gets raided) alternative, the willingness to pay a higher price for a legal product may drop remarkably.
Well, as the article notes, Amazon gets more information to work with if you're buying it and explicitly asking Amazon to gift wrap it or include a special message, or if you use particular keywords in a submitted review.
You probably aren't giftwrapping something bought for yourself, after all. Likewise, if the delivery address has a different name from the regular billing and shipping addresses... and depending on the nature of the gift and timing (e.g. habit of purchasing jewelry early February) there may be additional circumstantial information.
Your post is rather irrelevant, considering that this raid was regarding an instance of a/use/ of BitTorrent and not the concept or original system design of BitTorrent in general.
Actually, no. Nominally, you're also supposed to report illegal income to the IRS, and not doing so provides a bit of a fallback crime with which to charge otherwise untouchable people -- as Al Capone found out. The obligation to pay taxes on something does not imply permission.
You don't... unless you can compel merchants to report the information themselves -- and if states haven't successfully done this with Use Taxes yet, it's probably not for lack of trying.
You can look for noncompliance when auditing, and this might be particularly true of businesses doing substantial ordering through non-brick-and-mortar outlets, but your average individual will likely have little to fear on this front.
States don't care whether a tax is logically related to their expenditures, but only about usefulness and political viability. Untaxed commerce legally considered within their jurisdiction is a prima facie potential source of revenue to be tapped as eagerly as politically acceptable, especially when states are having budgetary problems. If the citizenry will stand for it, the government quite possibly will do it barring projections that it'll somehow backfire.
The bigger problem is that expecting people to honestly report their online purchases -- of either physical or intangible goods -- is for the most part silly. Businesses for which such purchases are a regular part of business may well do so due to the risk of audits and tips from disgruntled employees, but your average person is probably not so honest and dilligent as to accurately track and report the total.
And if you propose a tax for which legions of your hypothetical taxpayers will likely actually not pay, and then announce that you won't be looking very hard for noncompliance, and you don't require merchants to provide transaction records that might help you notice noncompliance, you may end up looking rather silly.
Already here: Use Taxes as found in many states apply to purchases made online or mail-order, including from completely out-of-state vendors. As with this proposal, reporting is generally the mandatory but usually unenforced duty of the purchaser.
"have to assess taxes paid on things you bought on vacation"
Already here: import duties. If you buy over a certain sum of non-exempt goods, you're expected to declare and pay tax as per customs forms.
"streamlining their expenses rather than finding more revenue"
Sometimes done, but not very willingly. It's easier to suppose that one solve problems by licensing and then taxing casinos, adding more sin or luxury taxes, or begging the next higher level of government for more money.
The land use of stores is merely an flimsy excuse; it is not the reason. The reason for taxation is that the government wants revenue, and it looks for politically palatable and otherwise legal methods of gaining revenue.
In some states, for instance, there may be no personal income tax; others, low or no sales tax; in others, no tax on property. It is not because of fundamentally different economic systems; political differences play a huge role in how and where taxes fall.
They don't have to justify it on the grounds that online transactions cost the state money. They merely have to find grounds on which it's politically acceptable. It's sometimes been politically acceptable to have additional taxes on expensive luxury goods, for instance, without needing to suggest that the purchase of a yacht costs the state more money than an equivalently expensive purchase of individual books or shoes.
Paying for broadband is paying for the service contract with the provider and maintainer of your broadband infrastructure.
Paying for downloads is paying somebody for the right and ability to download specific content; it's your consideration as part of a sales transaction. This deal is independent of the one from your broadband provider with respect to providing and maintaining connectivity.
Paying the government in either case is merely part of the cost of doing business. You pay taxes on both transactions because the same reasons apply to both independent transactions. It is in no way double taxation.
Fees are, in theory, supposed to pay for related programs. Taxes can be arbitrarily raised and spent on completely unrelated nonsense whenever the government wants more revenue, so long as they don't exceed their legal jurisdiction such as trespassing on Federal rights.
It would probably be perfectly legal for the Wisconsin legislature to raise personal income taxes to a flat 80% with no deductions and to spend the temporary windfall on raising their own salaries, unless their state constitution strictly prohibits this. Doesn't have to be remotely fair or logical unless their own laws force this.
You could have a state constitution that attempts to prevent this by requiring, say, that forcibly limits the growth in tax revenue or annual budget surpluses. But no state is required to; in general, it's the voters' job to wreak any necessary revenge and warn present and potential office-holders.
There'd be a line on your tax form to report your previously untaxed but taxable purchases, the same way many states currently do this for Use Taxes. Fill in whatever number you'd like.
It's not exactly the only thing that's on the honor system with regards to taxes. For instance, brokers are not currently required to report the duration or cost basis of an investment on an IRS 1099-B; while purchases may be reported on a IRS 1099-SUPPLEMENTAL, actually computing a cost basis may be more complicated due to multiple purchases over time or recapitalizations. It's possible to cheat the system by overstating cost basis to lower reported capital gains, or perhaps to overstate time of ownership to benefit from the capital gains rate instead of more general income marginal rates.
However, if you get audited, they're quite free to nail you for incomplete or otherwise incorrect statements. In this case, if they can show that you made an unreported, taxable purchase (perhaps through corroborating information from a merchant, or by credible information from disgruntled employees if you're a business) you're at risk of being held accountable.
I believe there are states which let you claim a tax refund in this instance.
In addition, many 'net vendors will NOT collect any sales tax if they do not have a physical presence in your state; in this case, it's left to you to pay the Sales/Use tax of your state.
The right to do something does not suddenly create existence of the ability. What, for instance, is the number of people that actually so thoroughly understand the Linux kernel to the point that they can be reliably counted upon for support including custom client-specific patches -- and would be willing to provide such support?
How many computer repair shops could you walk into that could diagnose a misconfiguration of your home-built BSD packet filter machine? How many would know how to do the same diagnosis on an off-the-shelf Cisco router?
To take it to an extreme, you could release plans for a private plane and let everybody build them to their heart's content -- but that still wouldn't mean that people actually would, or that you'd have an easier time getting spare parts than you could for a Cessna.
Since when does it take expensive prep schools and prep courses to do well, let alone 'legacies'? Sufficiently bright, motivated students with reasonably involved parents can do pretty damn well even from bland, mainstream middle-class public schools on their own merit.
Unless things have changed a lot... having grown up in a household with a stay-at-home parent instead of a two-income family my views may be skewed with respect to present demographics.
Bad analogy. Peeking at one's own acceptance or rejection letter does not affect the supply of said letter. The -only- state affected is the peeker's knowledge, which has increased if the peek is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't mean that they'd be friendly or tolerant.
Japanese society after the arrival of the Black Fleet became quite interested in Western technology and manners. The same society later combined their significantly upgraded technology and resource-hungry industrial base with xenophobia and fanatical militarism.
Try 'book king james version'. There's an 'Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha Bible'. Why that specific version, and not another?
*shrug* Google might know.
One, there are a bloody lot of them and it's not worth the time to go after any unless they're very high profile.
Two, the wire services are different from most news providers in that there business does not depend primarily on eyeballs driven to their site, but instead subscriptions from other news services to be allowed to redistribute their content -- the right that Google is partly appropriating for free. The NYT cares about end-user eyeballs, but Reuters, AFP, AP and UPI care about newspaper editors.
Three, in various countries such as the United States merely quoting small excerpts for the purposes of editorial commentary may be protected. It's treated a lot differently than providing excerpts with NO comment or other treatment. Mere aggregation, IIRC, is not protected.
I'm not at all positive that fair use applies.
It's not personal use; it's being redistributed to the whole world.
It's not editorial use, because Google isn't writing -about- the articles.
It's not educational use, because there's no broader educational context in which Google can claim to be using this for teaching or research purposes.
And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.
CNN and your local newspaper most likely subscribe to the wire services and have a deal that permits redistribution.
If Google does not, then by providing excerpts for a non-editorial, non-educational, and rather commercial purpose they may be unfairly infringing.
You may want to have a look at "Space HoRSE", by Gilligames and published by Shrapnel Games. While I have neither M.U.L.E. nor Space HoRSE, there is supposed to be a very, very deliberate resemblance between them.
S E/1.htm
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/gilligames/Space_HoR
Looks like there's a 42MB demo to download.
Don't know how much the resemblance is, nor if it IS close, how that got past the lawyers. *shrug*
All we freakin' need is for hordes of wannabe artists with less talent than ego spamming people looking for customers. Right.
On the other hand, you may have cost Jasc the approximately $100 or so potential revenue they tend to charge for their competing product, and Adobe the same approximately $100 or so for Adobe PS Elements -- as both companies offer cheaper photo-editing software specifically for the market that wants to do photo editing but not pay for full Photoshop. Ditto Picture Window Pro and the bleedin' rest of the market. There is likely something else you -could- afford.
And it may be quite possible that you could afford $500 if you cut out other expenses. How often do you replace your computer or automobile, for instance? How much do you spend eating out rather than cooking for yourself? And so forth.
Bogus argument.
In the absence of the cheaper (and in this case illegal, but in practice the probability of actually suffering legal consequences approaches zero for anybody but a massive sharer or a business that gets raided) alternative, the willingness to pay a higher price for a legal product may drop remarkably.
Well, as the article notes, Amazon gets more information to work with if you're buying it and explicitly asking Amazon to gift wrap it or include a special message, or if you use particular keywords in a submitted review.
You probably aren't giftwrapping something bought for yourself, after all. Likewise, if the delivery address has a different name from the regular billing and shipping addresses... and depending on the nature of the gift and timing (e.g. habit of purchasing jewelry early February) there may be additional circumstantial information.
Your post is rather irrelevant, considering that this raid was regarding an instance of a /use/ of BitTorrent and not the concept or original system design of BitTorrent in general.
Actually, no. Nominally, you're also supposed to report illegal income to the IRS, and not doing so provides a bit of a fallback crime with which to charge otherwise untouchable people -- as Al Capone found out. The obligation to pay taxes on something does not imply permission.
You don't... unless you can compel merchants to report the information themselves -- and if states haven't successfully done this with Use Taxes yet, it's probably not for lack of trying.
You can look for noncompliance when auditing, and this might be particularly true of businesses doing substantial ordering through non-brick-and-mortar outlets, but your average individual will likely have little to fear on this front.
States don't care whether a tax is logically related to their expenditures, but only about usefulness and political viability. Untaxed commerce legally considered within their jurisdiction is a prima facie potential source of revenue to be tapped as eagerly as politically acceptable, especially when states are having budgetary problems. If the citizenry will stand for it, the government quite possibly will do it barring projections that it'll somehow backfire.
The bigger problem is that expecting people to honestly report their online purchases -- of either physical or intangible goods -- is for the most part silly. Businesses for which such purchases are a regular part of business may well do so due to the risk of audits and tips from disgruntled employees, but your average person is probably not so honest and dilligent as to accurately track and report the total.
And if you propose a tax for which legions of your hypothetical taxpayers will likely actually not pay, and then announce that you won't be looking very hard for noncompliance, and you don't require merchants to provide transaction records that might help you notice noncompliance, you may end up looking rather silly.
"need to be taxed on every kind of purchase"
Already here: Use Taxes as found in many states apply to purchases made online or mail-order, including from completely out-of-state vendors. As with this proposal, reporting is generally the mandatory but usually unenforced duty of the purchaser.
"have to assess taxes paid on things you bought on vacation"
Already here: import duties. If you buy over a certain sum of non-exempt goods, you're expected to declare and pay tax as per customs forms.
"streamlining their expenses rather than finding more revenue"
Sometimes done, but not very willingly. It's easier to suppose that one solve problems by licensing and then taxing casinos, adding more sin or luxury taxes, or begging the next higher level of government for more money.
The land use of stores is merely an flimsy excuse; it is not the reason. The reason for taxation is that the government wants revenue, and it looks for politically palatable and otherwise legal methods of gaining revenue.
In some states, for instance, there may be no personal income tax; others, low or no sales tax; in others, no tax on property. It is not because of fundamentally different economic systems; political differences play a huge role in how and where taxes fall.
They don't have to justify it on the grounds that online transactions cost the state money. They merely have to find grounds on which it's politically acceptable. It's sometimes been politically acceptable to have additional taxes on expensive luxury goods, for instance, without needing to suggest that the purchase of a yacht costs the state more money than an equivalently expensive purchase of individual books or shoes.
Absurd.
Paying for broadband is paying for the service contract with the provider and maintainer of your broadband infrastructure.
Paying for downloads is paying somebody for the right and ability to download specific content; it's your consideration as part of a sales transaction. This deal is independent of the one from your broadband provider with respect to providing and maintaining connectivity.
Paying the government in either case is merely part of the cost of doing business. You pay taxes on both transactions because the same reasons apply to both independent transactions. It is in no way double taxation.
Actually, no.
Fees are, in theory, supposed to pay for related programs. Taxes can be arbitrarily raised and spent on completely unrelated nonsense whenever the government wants more revenue, so long as they don't exceed their legal jurisdiction such as trespassing on Federal rights.
It would probably be perfectly legal for the Wisconsin legislature to raise personal income taxes to a flat 80% with no deductions and to spend the temporary windfall on raising their own salaries, unless their state constitution strictly prohibits this. Doesn't have to be remotely fair or logical unless their own laws force this.
You could have a state constitution that attempts to prevent this by requiring, say, that forcibly limits the growth in tax revenue or annual budget surpluses. But no state is required to; in general, it's the voters' job to wreak any necessary revenge and warn present and potential office-holders.
Read the article. They won't be searching very hard for those who underreport, but you're still required to comply.
There'd be a line on your tax form to report your previously untaxed but taxable purchases, the same way many states currently do this for Use Taxes. Fill in whatever number you'd like.
It's not exactly the only thing that's on the honor system with regards to taxes. For instance, brokers are not currently required to report the duration or cost basis of an investment on an IRS 1099-B; while purchases may be reported on a IRS 1099-SUPPLEMENTAL, actually computing a cost basis may be more complicated due to multiple purchases over time or recapitalizations. It's possible to cheat the system by overstating cost basis to lower reported capital gains, or perhaps to overstate time of ownership to benefit from the capital gains rate instead of more general income marginal rates.
However, if you get audited, they're quite free to nail you for incomplete or otherwise incorrect statements. In this case, if they can show that you made an unreported, taxable purchase (perhaps through corroborating information from a merchant, or by credible information from disgruntled employees if you're a business) you're at risk of being held accountable.
I believe there are states which let you claim a tax refund in this instance.
In addition, many 'net vendors will NOT collect any sales tax if they do not have a physical presence in your state; in this case, it's left to you to pay the Sales/Use tax of your state.
The right to do something does not suddenly create existence of the ability. What, for instance, is the number of people that actually so thoroughly understand the Linux kernel to the point that they can be reliably counted upon for support including custom client-specific patches -- and would be willing to provide such support?
How many computer repair shops could you walk into that could diagnose a misconfiguration of your home-built BSD packet filter machine? How many would know how to do the same diagnosis on an off-the-shelf Cisco router?
To take it to an extreme, you could release plans for a private plane and let everybody build them to their heart's content -- but that still wouldn't mean that people actually would, or that you'd have an easier time getting spare parts than you could for a Cessna.
Since when does it take expensive prep schools and prep courses to do well, let alone 'legacies'? Sufficiently bright, motivated students with reasonably involved parents can do pretty damn well even from bland, mainstream middle-class public schools on their own merit.
Unless things have changed a lot... having grown up in a household with a stay-at-home parent instead of a two-income family my views may be skewed with respect to present demographics.
Bad analogy. Peeking at one's own acceptance or rejection letter does not affect the supply of said letter. The -only- state affected is the peeker's knowledge, which has increased if the peek is accurate.
Hm. What's your objection to the bill 24?