News flash: Many of the engineers who design things like the iPad, "flip" cell phones, etc., are Star Trek fans, and probably designed those things in either conscious or unconscious imitation of fictional technologies they'd seen on the show. Film at 11:00. Seriously, Star Trek in its various incarnations has been a pretty big influence on pop culture. Characters like Mr. Spock (cold, rational) and Captain Kirk (swaggering, arrogant, yet having plenty of competence to back up the braggadocio) have become archetypes. "Beam me up, Scotty", "Engage!", "Make it so", and so on have become catchphrases in mainstream culture. The first space shuttle was named Enterprise because thousands of Star Trek fans wrote letters to NASA, their Congressperson, etc. I bet when our culture finally does design a starship, it'll end up looking as much like the Enterprise as engineering considerations will allow: saucer-shaped hull + a cigar-shaped hull + 2 engine nacelles out on pylons.
Yeah, there's a lot of the USA where there's either no broadband access at all, or the only broadband provider is the local franchised cable monopoly. What are those people going to do?
Funny thing is, if the merchants made a concerted effort to sell the stuff at slightly higher margin,
Colluding with your competitors to set minimum sale prices or minimum profit margins is usually called "price fixing" and, with a handful of narrowly-drawn exceptions, it's illegal in the US,and probably most other places in the First World as well. Or did I completely misread the intent of your post?
I agree. I don't, in general, object to advertising. Content, after all, must be paid for. However, all too much online advertising has "dancing bologna" written in javascript and flash that's unbelieveably distracting at best (I'm trying to read a *news article*, I do not want to "hit the bouncing chimp and win a free iPod") or wedges my web browser at worst. *That* sort of nonsense is why I run AdBlock.
Google does ads right: they're unobtrusive, text ads. If more online advertisers went that route, there'd be much less of an incentive for me to run AdBlock.
Sales tax doesn't just vary state to state in the US. Some states have a uniform statewide tax. Others allow counties and/or municipalities to enact "piggyback" sales taxes on top of the state levy. (For example, Pennsylvania, IIRC, charges 6% sales tax, and the City of Philadelphia levies an additional 1% on top of that for a total of 7%.)
So online and mail-order vendors don't just have 50 or so online taxing jurisdictions to worry about, they have hundreds.
Also, what items are taxed varies by state. Most states with sales tax don't tax food and clothing but some do. Massachusetts taxes single items of clothing over $175, but only the amount over $175 is taxable. (E.g. if you buy a coat worth $200, you pay sales tax on $25.) Furthermore, there are a lot of weird corner cases in various state definitions of what's taxable and what isn't. Most states tax "prepared" foods--but the definition of "prepared" varies widely. I remember for a long time NJ taxed meals eaten in a restaurant but not the exact same meal packaged as takeaway. (We're talking 30+ years ago, IIRC, and I think that's changed since.) If you walk into a convenience store, pick up a frozen burrito, and heat it in the store microwave, does that count as "prepared"? What if I just pay for the burrito and take it home and heat it up at home? If I walk into a motorcycle shop in Mass. and buy a pair of leather riding gloves, that counts as "sporting goods" and is taxable. But if I walk into a department store and buy a pair of general-purpose leather gloves, that counts as "clothing" and isn't. If you tried to figure all of this out, I can guarantee you your brain would hurt after a few hours.
Bottom line, if you're an online vendor who ships to all 50 states, D.C., and various U.S. possessions, and US Military APO/FPO addresses, you could have guaranteed employment for a small army of lawyers and accountants figuring out what is and isn't taxable and how much tax is due based on the nature of the item and the destination jurisdiction.
If you were going to buy GTA IV, and on this news now won't, please post. I mean they've lost my $50.
Yeah, that'd be me. I loved GTA:VC and GTA:SA; was looking forward to GTA4 in the worst way. Being the law-abiding, boy-scout-ish sort, I'm not gonna do piracy. (And besides, I don't wanna get sued.)
Honestly, I"m thinking of migrating to a gaming console for gaming anyway. I'm tired of having to upgrade video cards and CPU year after year in order to play games. And as much fun as building a bleeding-edge PC is, I just don't need that kind of horsepower to do lightweight stuff like surf the web, read email, and chat over IM--which is what I do with my PC during the 90% of the time that I'm in front of it and not playing games.
Unfortunately, that's the current general trend: pass a broad and overreaching law in response to some social issue, then wait for some court somewhere to strike down all or part of it as unconstitutional. The politicians look to the electorate like they're Doing Something to resolve whatever social issue is at hand, and get to place the blame on "activist judges" for quashing a law that should never have been passed.
They could have avoided the charade of mortgages, etc, and just called it welfare and subsidized housing.
They did try that, decades ago. "Public housing", a la Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe, was the result. The "ownership society", fueled by government-backed loans to enable the down-payment and credit-challenged to buy homes, was supposed to fix all that. What we got instead was predatory lending and city neighborhoods full of foreclosures.
"Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."
I haven't seen very many of these lately, but some while ago there were a bunch of those online memes like "What's your pornstar name?", "What's your rapper name?", etc., where you put in stuff like the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on into a form to come up with the screen name you should use as a pornstar or something. On occasion there's some CGI code that produces a somewhat-randomized answer using your input as the seed. The intent is for you to cut-n-paste the sometimes-humorous answer into your LiveJournal or Facebook or MySpace for your friends to giggle at and possibly follow up with answers of their own.
Have you ever noticed that many of the questions those things ask you are the same things that websites use for "secret questions"?
Many people register for the DNC list precisely because they know they have difficulty refusing telephone sales pitches. Therefore, the DNC list may represent a list of people who are actually more likely than average to buy whatever a telemarketer is offering.
Seriously, I've been hearing this as long as I've been on the 'net (early 1990s). It's been going around since Vint Cerf first hooked two computers together.
Yup, those are all good examples of the sort of anti-intellectualism I'm talking about. It goes way back, too. America's cultural heroes, at least as far as practical invention goes, are people like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who lacked formal education and who succeeded by doing things contrary to the conventional and accepted wisdom of people who had formal education.
This is what happens when a culture has a profound anti-intellectual streak, and when those who epitomize dogma and religious faith start winning out in the court of public opinion over those who believe in science and empiricism.
Consider:
creationism vs. evolution
abstinence-only sex education
the war on drugs, which emphasizes prohibition (based mostly on dogma) over harm reduction (based on empiricism--"what works")
Indeed. I really wish there were some procedural way to penalize legislators who pass blatantly unconstitutional legislation. As you say, there's a tendency on the part of Congress to pass this sort of crap to make it look like Someone Is Doing Something and let the courts sort it out later. The problem is, SCOTUS doesn't get a case until someone's directly adversely affected by the law. That "someone" also has to be a good test case. (Sympathetic-appearing defendant, facts clearly on the defendant's side, law clearly open to misinterpretation/misapplication, etc.) Meanwhile there will be a lot of other "someones" out there who get screwed over who don't have the resources to pursue things through the courts to that level and/or whose cases are a lot more ambiguous.
This is a piece of backlash that should have happened when XP replaced Win2K. Seriously, what did XP add that Win2K didn't have, other than the kiddie-toy "My First Computer" window-dressing and the "phone-home" validation behavior--both of which are non-features as far as I'm concerned?
I ran Word Perfect 4.2 on my PC/XT back in college days (1985-ish). It did about 90% of what I needed, and still need, a word processor to do, even today. Basic document formatting, footnotes, and the ability to change text easily.
Microsoft's continual "revision" of MS Office by adding features that no one asked for or needs and making file formats unreadable by previous versions of the software is the software equivalent of the college textbook racket, where they change a few of the homework problems and call it the "twenty-third edition" so that last year's "twenty-second edition" is no longer usable.
Slashdot Mirror
News flash: Many of the engineers who design things like the iPad, "flip" cell phones, etc., are Star Trek fans, and probably designed those things in either conscious or unconscious imitation of fictional technologies they'd seen on the show. Film at 11:00. Seriously, Star Trek in its various incarnations has been a pretty big influence on pop culture. Characters like Mr. Spock (cold, rational) and Captain Kirk (swaggering, arrogant, yet having plenty of competence to back up the braggadocio) have become archetypes. "Beam me up, Scotty", "Engage!", "Make it so", and so on have become catchphrases in mainstream culture. The first space shuttle was named Enterprise because thousands of Star Trek fans wrote letters to NASA, their Congressperson, etc. I bet when our culture finally does design a starship, it'll end up looking as much like the Enterprise as engineering considerations will allow: saucer-shaped hull + a cigar-shaped hull + 2 engine nacelles out on pylons.
"Snails on Speed" is a card in the game Munchkin. Life imitates art.
Yeah, there's a lot of the USA where there's either no broadband access at all, or the only broadband provider is the local franchised cable monopoly. What are those people going to do?
Usually that's the approach networks take with shows they want to kill off--move it around the schedule, pre-empt it a lot, etc.
Funny thing is, if the merchants made a concerted effort to sell the stuff at slightly higher margin,
Colluding with your competitors to set minimum sale prices or minimum profit margins is usually called "price fixing" and, with a handful of narrowly-drawn exceptions, it's illegal in the US,and probably most other places in the First World as well. Or did I completely misread the intent of your post?
Judging by the vehicles I see around Somerville MA, your Prius will do just dandy.
I agree. I don't, in general, object to advertising. Content, after all, must be paid for. However, all too much online advertising has "dancing bologna" written in javascript and flash that's unbelieveably distracting at best (I'm trying to read a *news article*, I do not want to "hit the bouncing chimp and win a free iPod") or wedges my web browser at worst. *That* sort of nonsense is why I run AdBlock.
Google does ads right: they're unobtrusive, text ads. If more online advertisers went that route, there'd be much less of an incentive for me to run AdBlock.
More importantly, if they jiggle the handel, will it jiggle bach? After all, the toilet *is* baroquen.
Sales tax doesn't just vary state to state in the US. Some states have a uniform statewide tax. Others allow counties and/or municipalities to enact "piggyback" sales taxes on top of the state levy. (For example, Pennsylvania, IIRC, charges 6% sales tax, and the City of Philadelphia levies an additional 1% on top of that for a total of 7%.)
So online and mail-order vendors don't just have 50 or so online taxing jurisdictions to worry about, they have hundreds.
Also, what items are taxed varies by state. Most states with sales tax don't tax food and clothing but some do. Massachusetts taxes single items of clothing over $175, but only the amount over $175 is taxable. (E.g. if you buy a coat worth $200, you pay sales tax on $25.) Furthermore, there are a lot of weird corner cases in various state definitions of what's taxable and what isn't. Most states tax "prepared" foods--but the definition of "prepared" varies widely. I remember for a long time NJ taxed meals eaten in a restaurant but not the exact same meal packaged as takeaway. (We're talking 30+ years ago, IIRC, and I think that's changed since.) If you walk into a convenience store, pick up a frozen burrito, and heat it in the store microwave, does that count as "prepared"? What if I just pay for the burrito and take it home and heat it up at home? If I walk into a motorcycle shop in Mass. and buy a pair of leather riding gloves, that counts as "sporting goods" and is taxable. But if I walk into a department store and buy a pair of general-purpose leather gloves, that counts as "clothing" and isn't. If you tried to figure all of this out, I can guarantee you your brain would hurt after a few hours.
Bottom line, if you're an online vendor who ships to all 50 states, D.C., and various U.S. possessions, and US Military APO/FPO addresses, you could have guaranteed employment for a small army of lawyers and accountants figuring out what is and isn't taxable and how much tax is due based on the nature of the item and the destination jurisdiction.
If you were going to buy GTA IV, and on this news now won't, please post. I mean they've lost my $50.
Yeah, that'd be me. I loved GTA:VC and GTA:SA; was looking forward to GTA4 in the worst way. Being the law-abiding, boy-scout-ish sort, I'm not gonna do piracy. (And besides, I don't wanna get sued.)
Honestly, I"m thinking of migrating to a gaming console for gaming anyway. I'm tired of having to upgrade video cards and CPU year after year in order to play games. And as much fun as building a bleeding-edge PC is, I just don't need that kind of horsepower to do lightweight stuff like surf the web, read email, and chat over IM--which is what I do with my PC during the 90% of the time that I'm in front of it and not playing games.
Unfortunately, that's the current general trend: pass a broad and overreaching law in response to some social issue, then wait for some court somewhere to strike down all or part of it as unconstitutional. The politicians look to the electorate like they're Doing Something to resolve whatever social issue is at hand, and get to place the blame on "activist judges" for quashing a law that should never have been passed.
Does it whistle "In the Hall of the Mountain King"?
It's working for me, if slowly.
They could have avoided the charade of mortgages, etc, and just called it welfare and subsidized housing.
They did try that, decades ago. "Public housing", a la Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe, was the result. The "ownership society", fueled by government-backed loans to enable the down-payment and credit-challenged to buy homes, was supposed to fix all that. What we got instead was predatory lending and city neighborhoods full of foreclosures.
"Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."
I haven't seen very many of these lately, but some while ago there were a bunch of those online memes like "What's your pornstar name?", "What's your rapper name?", etc., where you put in stuff like the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on into a form to come up with the screen name you should use as a pornstar or something. On occasion there's some CGI code that produces a somewhat-randomized answer using your input as the seed. The intent is for you to cut-n-paste the sometimes-humorous answer into your LiveJournal or Facebook or MySpace for your friends to giggle at and possibly follow up with answers of their own.
Have you ever noticed that many of the questions those things ask you are the same things that websites use for "secret questions"?
At least he'll be able to get good wi-fi.
Many people register for the DNC list precisely because they know they have difficulty refusing telephone sales pitches. Therefore, the DNC list may represent a list of people who are actually more likely than average to buy whatever a telemarketer is offering.
Seriously, I've been hearing this as long as I've been on the 'net (early 1990s). It's been going around since Vint Cerf first hooked two computers together.
nope. I remember 1987, too.
Yup, those are all good examples of the sort of anti-intellectualism I'm talking about. It goes way back, too. America's cultural heroes, at least as far as practical invention goes, are people like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who lacked formal education and who succeeded by doing things contrary to the conventional and accepted wisdom of people who had formal education.
Consider:
Indeed. I really wish there were some procedural way to penalize legislators who pass blatantly unconstitutional legislation. As you say, there's a tendency on the part of Congress to pass this sort of crap to make it look like Someone Is Doing Something and let the courts sort it out later. The problem is, SCOTUS doesn't get a case until someone's directly adversely affected by the law. That "someone" also has to be a good test case. (Sympathetic-appearing defendant, facts clearly on the defendant's side, law clearly open to misinterpretation/misapplication, etc.) Meanwhile there will be a lot of other "someones" out there who get screwed over who don't have the resources to pursue things through the courts to that level and/or whose cases are a lot more ambiguous.
This is a piece of backlash that should have happened when XP replaced Win2K. Seriously, what did XP add that Win2K didn't have, other than the kiddie-toy "My First Computer" window-dressing and the "phone-home" validation behavior--both of which are non-features as far as I'm concerned?
I ran Word Perfect 4.2 on my PC/XT back in college days (1985-ish). It did about 90% of what I needed, and still need, a word processor to do, even today. Basic document formatting, footnotes, and the ability to change text easily.
Microsoft's continual "revision" of MS Office by adding features that no one asked for or needs and making file formats unreadable by previous versions of the software is the software equivalent of the college textbook racket, where they change a few of the homework problems and call it the "twenty-third edition" so that last year's "twenty-second edition" is no longer usable.
Yeah, I'm wondering if Brian May has set some sort of record for being ABD.