I'm familiar with that, Virginia also has a use tax. Most people don't pay it, and the state doesn't strong arm people into paying it, because they know they'd lose the battle it they ever took it all the way. If not at the Supreme court, then with the voters who would throw the bums out.
The constitution is pretty clear on this, and it doesn't meantion taxing one thing more heavily than another. It says:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
When I buy something from out of state, it's an import. (an impost is a tax) Even if the states are allowed to tax it, the profit from the tax is supposed to go to the Federal Treasury, not to the state to imposed the tax.
The Supreme court makes mistakes. Sometimes they correct them, sometimes Congress rewrites the law to make it more clear, and sometimes it takes a constitutional amendment to fix the problem.
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress
An "impost" is a tax. So if I order something from another state or country, it's an import, and the constitution specifically forbids the states from putting any tax on it. They can charge me to inspect it, except that any profit (net) goes to the Feds.
The states can petition congress to allow an import tax, but any money collected over what it costs to collect the taxes has to be sent to the Federal Government. That would go over well with the taxpayers/voters.
*Note to the pedantic. The word "controul" is a misspelling that's in the original document. Yes, the US Constitution, the Supreme Law of our Land, has misspellings.
From a bricks and mortar perspective, *stopping* the shipment of goods shipped over state lines would be a good thing. I can see many states setting up tax systems that are so complicated and expensive it effectively shuts down direct marketers. (internet and catalog)
The thing is, the constitution is clear on this. The states don't have a right to charge taxes on stuff shipped across state lines. Why are we even having this discussion?
So if I'm in Michigan, and I'm sitting in coffee shop A, and my computer accidently connects to bookstore B and neither shop has a spash page that a human can indentify where it came from, I'm breaking the law, because the bookstore didn't authorize me?
I've heard this happens all the time in apartment buildings. Someone buys a wifi access point and sets it up wrong. When they test it, they accidentally connect to their neighbor's wifi, it looks like everything is working and they surf away. Are you saying that, in Michigan, this is a felony?
The theory of "attractive nuisance" has to do with the ignorance and vulnerability of children, not the idea that failing to physically secure your property gives everyone the right to free use of it.
In this case the suspect, the cop, and the store owner were all ignorant of the law. The guy should have asked for a jury trial. His lawyer could have argued to the jury that this is a bad law. If you are in coffee shop A, and your computer connects to bookstore B's wifi, you are violating the law. How many regular people would know?
How many laws are on the books that you are violating right now? The only possible answer is, "I don't know", because their are too many laws for a reasonable person to keep track of. In this case, even a law enforcement officer didn't completely know the law.
The moral of the story: If a police officer asks you what you are doing, give him as little information as possible. Don't volunteer anything.
The US government is the world's largest publisher. During the cold war, we did ship tons to documents to the Soviets. (of course that's just the non-classified stuff) And they did go bankrupt.
Then came along that damn "Bill of Rights". The worry then, which has come to pass, was that by enumerating the rights, people would begin to think that these were the only rights they had. Even though the 9th explicitly says: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. " and the 10th says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." we still have people believing that your rights are only what is specifically spelled out.
The thing is, the existence of a statutory license is only a maximum that you would have to pay. If you were to hunt down the original owner of the material, you are still able to negotiate a smaller fee. You would do this if you wanted to make someone's music the theme song for a TV program. It would be hard for you to pay the standard rates everytime your program was shown in syndication, so you'd negotiate a better arangement. The music owner would make this deal in order to get a direct payment from you, and so you don't go with some other music.
Alternatively, you can broadcast 100% original music, and not have to pay anyone.
When I was in college radio in the '80s, the music companies would send us around 70 albums per week for free. All we did was publish our play lists, we didn't have to pay anyone. If a record company wanted money from us, we'd simply stop playing their stuff, while playing everyone else's. If you consider the expense record companies put into getting their stuff played on the air, you'd realize that it doesn't make sense for record companies to charge stations to play their stuff. Record execs over the years have regularly broken the law to get their stuff on the air, why would they start charging for it?
It interesting to note that in the SoundExchange FAQ under "Public Domain" and "Fair Use" they basically say "It's too complicated for mere mortals, please talk to a lawyer". Ack, the law, especially the law for something as important as fair use should never be too complicated for the ordinary citizen to understand. What happens when they start suing the Girl Scouts for singing around the campfire, or someone for whistling while walking down the street?
What's happening here, is that the record companies are worried that there sales are headed for zero. Thus, it doesn't matter whose stuff is played on the airwave, people are just going to copy it off digital radio or the internet. They're scrambling to have a revenue stream codified into law before their current revenue stream dries up. I don't think that's true. If there's good music, there will always be people willing to pay for it. Of course, in the future, there may not be a music company between the artist and the listener.
The hell they can't. Example. In most states, judges are allowed to "correct" trial transcripts at will with no oversite. If the judge were biased, and didn't want his ruling to be overturned on appeal...
Anyway, I'm sure that with a helpful judge, the witness relocation project has created tons of false court documents. As long as no one is convicted based on a falsified document, I'm not sure it's even illegal.
Besides the document wouldn't have to exist anywhere except for this site. You could even set up alarm bells that go off is anyone starts to search for certain bogus names in the court databases.
This has undercover agents and informants. A Janus list is specifically about double-agent spies. There's a subtle distinction between an informant and a double agent. An informant has information about one or a few crimes, and tells that to the cops in exchange for money or consideration. A double agent is actual inserted into the organization and used to extract information. Sometimes your double agent is already employeed by the adversary and you turn him to your purposes.
It's like the difference between a contractor and an employee, where the informant is more like a contractor brought in for a specific amount of time to do a specific job, while the double agent/employee is hired for a long time period to do multiple jobs.
If the excemption is passed, *all* radio stations will be more like college radio. The record companies will have to give the little know stuff away just to get air time. This could concievably level the playing field so that small bands could actually compete with "Madonna".
Radio Stations will adapt, and only play the expensive stuff during peak times when it will get them the most listens for their advertisers. During most of the day, and the evening hours they'll be able to play the free stuff from independent artists. It might even mean that stations will have to hire an actual program director to seek out local artists that appeal to locals.
Like any change, some stations won't be able to adapt and will wither and die, but there will be a bunch of kids with a vision to take their place. Imagine a station that only played music licensed by a creative commons license that allowed unlimited radio play.
When I was in college radio in the early '80s, the record companies would give us about 70 ablums (vinyl) a week. These were all little known bands like "The Android Sisters", "U2", and "REM". If we wanted a copy of the latest "Sting" album, we had to pay for it ourselves. Well, "U2" and "REM" became big, the "Android Sisters" faded into obscurity, and all was right with the world.
If the excemption is passed, *all* radio stations will be more like college radio. The record companies will have to give the little know stuff away just to get air time. This could concievably level the playing field so that small bands could actually compete with "Madonna".
Radio Stations will adapt, and only play the expensive stuff during peak times when it will get them the most listens for their advertisers. During most of the day, and the evening hours they'll be able to play the free stuff from independent artists. It might even mean that stations will have to hire an actual program director to seek out local artists that appeal to locals.
Because the "blow job" never happened. That whole story was just a lie to divert the country's attention from much more sinister stuff that was happening around the same time. (:-)
That sounds like good advice if your company is building a product, but if it's buying a product things are different.
If the VP that will make the purchase decision has been offered a board seat at company X, then it's a business decision to buy the product from company X, not the technically superior Y.
Unfortunately, the business people will never reveal everything that goes into their decision process, unlike technical people that like graphs, charts and pro vs. con arguments. You can't know what the salesman has offered the decision maker when you are asked the detail the differences between a proprietary product vs. free software. (Except you can be fairly certain that freeware didn't offer anything except functionallity and robustness.)
A contractor friend I once knew told me about living in a certain backwards part of the country. He said that in the culture there it was the way of the community to put down anyone who was trying to improve themselves because that meant they were "Trying to get above us". He said the putdowns were more subtle, rather than overt, but they were effective and all pervasive. The school systems in this culture worked the same way, and did their best to keep anyone from getting ahead.
I once had an earth science teacher who told the class that 200 foot lightning bolts were about 25,000 volts. I corrected him, and pointed to our book that gave a figure of 25,000,000. He said that the book isn't always right. I let it go, and didn't tell him that I was a high voltage hobbiest who regularly played with 40,000 volt arcs, and I had never seen one that could go more that about 2 inches.
My parents always wanted me to do better than they did, and as a parent, I want more for my children than I had. Unfortunatly not all parents feel this way.
Clever op-amp circuits and extra convergence coils to adjust the beams depending on the color and distance from the center. A real electrical engineer would be able to reverse engineer the math from the circuits. I'm just a software guy who can read a schematic or two, so I just marveled at the ingenuity of some unknown EE. It was enough for me to confirm that the display was indeed, a color vector display.
Interesting note: The display Tempest has a "resolution" of about 1024 by 4096, which is still high by today's standards. The thing is, it only allowed something like 256 total vectors to be displayed (maybe 1024), so it was rather limited in what is could show, but what it did was gorgeous. A well tuned vector display has a contrast ratio unlike anything else out there. Also part of the Tempest machine was a "Math Box", which was a 32 bit wide bit slice ALU made from the AMD2900 series. Tempest had about as much computation capability as a $100,000 VAX of the day. (but not the memory address space or any of the I/O) This is what allowed it to do the zooms of the board, even though it only had a 1.5 MHZ 6502 CPU. I've been told that it was programmed in Forth.
When I first saw an Atari Tempest machine at the local arcade, I said "That can't be done", because it looked like color vector graphics and the convergence problems were entirely different than with a TV. I even tried building my own color vector display and was unable to converge the colors. When I was in college around 1984 the arcade there was going out of business so I bought a Tempest machine from them for $300 just to find out how they did it. The arcade machine came with complete schematics, so I was finally able to see how it was done. I still have that machine in my basement and I fire it up every now and then.
Of course they can *build* one. Any kid in Junior High could build a Theremin, it's just a bunch of oscillators and mixers. From the rules, it sounded like they had to find one that was already built, by hand. (someone else's) Am I wrong here?
Theremins are sufficiently rare that I sure any one they did find would be "hand built". I built one as a kit many years ago, but no longer have it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin
Flood the Internet with bad information about everyone, so that *all* the job candidates a potential employer searches for have bad press.
I often wonder about people with non-unique names who are interviewed. When a potential employer googles "John Smith", does he just give up because there are too many hits, or does Mr. Smith become unemployable?
If the solution we decide upon is #2, then we need to start the flooding now. Any decent blog spam insertion software should be able to go through the phone book, and start entering names and misdeeds on a wide selection of blogs.
What he's saying is that without strong DRM (or the renamed version), the content providers will simply take their ball and bat and go home. Try to remove it, and the HBO mafia will come aknockin'. (You thought "The Sopranos" was based on fiction, wait 'til you see the real goon squad. (:-)
I actually saw that trailer in a movie theater before they replaced the directory and rewrote Alien 3. It was just the big egg on a black screen with the light and smoke coming out of the crack while the voiceover said the taglines. To bad they didn't make *that* movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The constitution is pretty clear on this, and it doesn't meantion taxing one thing more heavily than another. It says: When I buy something from out of state, it's an import. (an impost is a tax) Even if the states are allowed to tax it, the profit from the tax is supposed to go to the Federal Treasury, not to the state to imposed the tax.
The Supreme court makes mistakes. Sometimes they correct them, sometimes Congress rewrites the law to make it more clear, and sometimes it takes a constitutional amendment to fix the problem.
The states can petition congress to allow an import tax, but any money collected over what it costs to collect the taxes has to be sent to the Federal Government. That would go over well with the taxpayers/voters.
*Note to the pedantic. The word "controul" is a misspelling that's in the original document. Yes, the US Constitution, the Supreme Law of our Land, has misspellings.
From a bricks and mortar perspective, *stopping* the shipment of goods shipped over state lines would be a good thing. I can see many states setting up tax systems that are so complicated and expensive it effectively shuts down direct marketers. (internet and catalog)
The thing is, the constitution is clear on this. The states don't have a right to charge taxes on stuff shipped across state lines. Why are we even having this discussion?
Aren't there "cell" phones that will use a public wifi if they can find it? Would these devices even display a spash page if it were available?
So if I'm in Michigan, and I'm sitting in coffee shop A, and my computer accidently connects to bookstore B and neither shop has a spash page that a human can indentify where it came from, I'm breaking the law, because the bookstore didn't authorize me?
I've heard this happens all the time in apartment buildings. Someone buys a wifi access point and sets it up wrong. When they test it, they accidentally connect to their neighbor's wifi, it looks like everything is working and they surf away. Are you saying that, in Michigan, this is a felony?
How many laws are on the books that you are violating right now? The only possible answer is, "I don't know", because their are too many laws for a reasonable person to keep track of. In this case, even a law enforcement officer didn't completely know the law.
The moral of the story: If a police officer asks you what you are doing, give him as little information as possible. Don't volunteer anything.
The US government is the world's largest publisher. During the cold war, we did ship tons to documents to the Soviets. (of course that's just the non-classified stuff) And they did go bankrupt.
Then came along that damn "Bill of Rights". The worry then, which has come to pass, was that by enumerating the rights, people would begin to think that these were the only rights they had. Even though the 9th explicitly says: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. " and the 10th says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." we still have people believing that your rights are only what is specifically spelled out.
The fees are hardly "flat", see http://www.soundexchange.com/rates.html. You can pay per performance or by the aggregate hour.
The thing is, the existence of a statutory license is only a maximum that you would have to pay. If you were to hunt down the original owner of the material, you are still able to negotiate a smaller fee. You would do this if you wanted to make someone's music the theme song for a TV program. It would be hard for you to pay the standard rates everytime your program was shown in syndication, so you'd negotiate a better arangement. The music owner would make this deal in order to get a direct payment from you, and so you don't go with some other music. Alternatively, you can broadcast 100% original music, and not have to pay anyone.
When I was in college radio in the '80s, the music companies would send us around 70 albums per week for free. All we did was publish our play lists, we didn't have to pay anyone. If a record company wanted money from us, we'd simply stop playing their stuff, while playing everyone else's. If you consider the expense record companies put into getting their stuff played on the air, you'd realize that it doesn't make sense for record companies to charge stations to play their stuff. Record execs over the years have regularly broken the law to get their stuff on the air, why would they start charging for it?
It interesting to note that in the SoundExchange FAQ under "Public Domain" and "Fair Use" they basically say "It's too complicated for mere mortals, please talk to a lawyer". Ack, the law, especially the law for something as important as fair use should never be too complicated for the ordinary citizen to understand. What happens when they start suing the Girl Scouts for singing around the campfire, or someone for whistling while walking down the street?
What's happening here, is that the record companies are worried that there sales are headed for zero. Thus, it doesn't matter whose stuff is played on the airwave, people are just going to copy it off digital radio or the internet. They're scrambling to have a revenue stream codified into law before their current revenue stream dries up. I don't think that's true. If there's good music, there will always be people willing to pay for it. Of course, in the future, there may not be a music company between the artist and the listener.
The hell they can't. Example. In most states, judges are allowed to "correct" trial transcripts at will with no oversite. If the judge were biased, and didn't want his ruling to be overturned on appeal...
Anyway, I'm sure that with a helpful judge, the witness relocation project has created tons of false court documents. As long as no one is convicted based on a falsified document, I'm not sure it's even illegal.
Besides the document wouldn't have to exist anywhere except for this site. You could even set up alarm bells that go off is anyone starts to search for certain bogus names in the court databases.
This has undercover agents and informants. A Janus list is specifically about double-agent spies. There's a subtle distinction between an informant and a double agent. An informant has information about one or a few crimes, and tells that to the cops in exchange for money or consideration. A double agent is actual inserted into the organization and used to extract information. Sometimes your double agent is already employeed by the adversary and you turn him to your purposes.
It's like the difference between a contractor and an employee, where the informant is more like a contractor brought in for a specific amount of time to do a specific job, while the double agent/employee is hired for a long time period to do multiple jobs.
Couldn't the Feds poison the data on this site by posting information that mobster A ratted on modster B, who ratted on C, who ratted on A?
Also, won't they be subpoenaing the subscriber list real soon now?
If the excemption is passed, *all* radio stations will be more like college radio. The record companies will have to give the little know stuff away just to get air time. This could concievably level the playing field so that small bands could actually compete with "Madonna".
Radio Stations will adapt, and only play the expensive stuff during peak times when it will get them the most listens for their advertisers. During most of the day, and the evening hours they'll be able to play the free stuff from independent artists. It might even mean that stations will have to hire an actual program director to seek out local artists that appeal to locals.
Like any change, some stations won't be able to adapt and will wither and die, but there will be a bunch of kids with a vision to take their place. Imagine a station that only played music licensed by a creative commons license that allowed unlimited radio play.
When I was in college radio in the early '80s, the record companies would give us about 70 ablums (vinyl) a week. These were all little known bands like "The Android Sisters", "U2", and "REM". If we wanted a copy of the latest "Sting" album, we had to pay for it ourselves. Well, "U2" and "REM" became big, the "Android Sisters" faded into obscurity, and all was right with the world.
If the excemption is passed, *all* radio stations will be more like college radio. The record companies will have to give the little know stuff away just to get air time. This could concievably level the playing field so that small bands could actually compete with "Madonna".
Radio Stations will adapt, and only play the expensive stuff during peak times when it will get them the most listens for their advertisers. During most of the day, and the evening hours they'll be able to play the free stuff from independent artists. It might even mean that stations will have to hire an actual program director to seek out local artists that appeal to locals.
Because the "blow job" never happened. That whole story was just a lie to divert the country's attention from much more sinister stuff that was happening around the same time. (:-)
That sounds like good advice if your company is building a product, but if it's buying a product things are different.
If the VP that will make the purchase decision has been offered a board seat at company X, then it's a business decision to buy the product from company X, not the technically superior Y.
Unfortunately, the business people will never reveal everything that goes into their decision process, unlike technical people that like graphs, charts and pro vs. con arguments. You can't know what the salesman has offered the decision maker when you are asked the detail the differences between a proprietary product vs. free software. (Except you can be fairly certain that freeware didn't offer anything except functionallity and robustness.)
A contractor friend I once knew told me about living in a certain backwards part of the country. He said that in the culture there it was the way of the community to put down anyone who was trying to improve themselves because that meant they were "Trying to get above us". He said the putdowns were more subtle, rather than overt, but they were effective and all pervasive. The school systems in this culture worked the same way, and did their best to keep anyone from getting ahead.
I once had an earth science teacher who told the class that 200 foot lightning bolts were about 25,000 volts. I corrected him, and pointed to our book that gave a figure of 25,000,000. He said that the book isn't always right. I let it go, and didn't tell him that I was a high voltage hobbiest who regularly played with 40,000 volt arcs, and I had never seen one that could go more that about 2 inches.
My parents always wanted me to do better than they did, and as a parent, I want more for my children than I had. Unfortunatly not all parents feel this way.
Wow, if I ever had a teacher use that method when I was in school, my attitude would have improved dramatically.
Clever op-amp circuits and extra convergence coils to adjust the beams depending on the color and distance from the center. A real electrical engineer would be able to reverse engineer the math from the circuits. I'm just a software guy who can read a schematic or two, so I just marveled at the ingenuity of some unknown EE. It was enough for me to confirm that the display was indeed, a color vector display.
Interesting note: The display Tempest has a "resolution" of about 1024 by 4096, which is still high by today's standards. The thing is, it only allowed something like 256 total vectors to be displayed (maybe 1024), so it was rather limited in what is could show, but what it did was gorgeous. A well tuned vector display has a contrast ratio unlike anything else out there. Also part of the Tempest machine was a "Math Box", which was a 32 bit wide bit slice ALU made from the AMD2900 series. Tempest had about as much computation capability as a $100,000 VAX of the day. (but not the memory address space or any of the I/O) This is what allowed it to do the zooms of the board, even though it only had a 1.5 MHZ 6502 CPU. I've been told that it was programmed in Forth.
When I first saw an Atari Tempest machine at the local arcade, I said "That can't be done", because it looked like color vector graphics and the convergence problems were entirely different than with a TV. I even tried building my own color vector display and was unable to converge the colors. When I was in college around 1984 the arcade there was going out of business so I bought a Tempest machine from them for $300 just to find out how they did it. The arcade machine came with complete schematics, so I was finally able to see how it was done. I still have that machine in my basement and I fire it up every now and then.
Of course they can *build* one. Any kid in Junior High could build a Theremin, it's just a bunch of oscillators and mixers. From the rules, it sounded like they had to find one that was already built, by hand. (someone else's) Am I wrong here?
- Change your name.
- Flood the Internet with bad information about everyone, so that *all* the job candidates a potential employer searches for have bad press.
I often wonder about people with non-unique names who are interviewed. When a potential employer googles "John Smith", does he just give up because there are too many hits, or does Mr. Smith become unemployable?If the solution we decide upon is #2, then we need to start the flooding now. Any decent blog spam insertion software should be able to go through the phone book, and start entering names and misdeeds on a wide selection of blogs.
Have the content in the first place.
What he's saying is that without strong DRM (or the renamed version), the content providers will simply take their ball and bat and go home. Try to remove it, and the HBO mafia will come aknockin'. (You thought "The Sopranos" was based on fiction, wait 'til you see the real goon squad. (:-)
"In space, no one can hear you scream"
"On earth, everyone can..."
I actually saw that trailer in a movie theater before they replaced the directory and rewrote Alien 3. It was just the big egg on a black screen with the light and smoke coming out of the crack while the voiceover said the taglines. To bad they didn't make *that* movie.