It's a particular FOSSy proclivity of making any and all applications into operating-system-like meta-platforms. You haven't written a proper Open application until you've provided SWIG bindings and a console that runs Scheme one-liners.
If you're a user, absolutely. If you're the webmaster, hell no.
This little piggy uses a RESTful API, this one uses XML-RPC, this little piggy only has a PHP library, this one only uses javascript, this one allows customization of interface, this one doesn't, this one costs money, this one requires me to enter a partnership agreement, this one responds with 500 a lot, this one never responds to support emails...
iPad requires an active dongle to connect to an SD card: ridiculous! N900 requires an active dongle to connect to a TV: completely acceptable!*
Macbook Air requires a dongle to use wired ethernet: bondage! Podunk Clock Radio Corp. has to use an integrated USB or BT chipset in order to get a line-level output: totally obvious!**
I know it's not necessarily the same people complaining, but really.
* Are we sure a phone's USB 2.0 can push an HD image at 30fps? Not just an H.264 stream, because we want to run games on it too.
** Using headphone lines for external devices is crappy engineering -- the impedance is low voltage and neither mic level nor line level, and the receiving device is dependent on the phone's volume setting.
Just to complete the thought, you should read more about ground rents and the problem of retierism in general. Economists of the 19th century were the first to become dimly aware of the fact that people were able to extract wealth by buddying-up with the government, and they realized that the most important way they did this was by taking control of land freehold. They saw the institution of land title as the original form of rent seeking, because it allowed the owner to charge money for nothing -- they lived in an era where a landowner would charge a renter for land that was completely undeveloped, many of these economists attacked tax-free landholding the way people on slashdot attack eternal copyright. It's basically the same mechanism. Nowadays land is developed and rent value is based on the level of development, so ground rents aren't as visible to most people anymore -- though they still come up, and they absolutely exist under other circumstances, like copyright. Basically, whenever the government declares something is ownable, it creates the potential for rents, and policy comes down to how well the government balances these rights against the unavoidable waste and inefficiencies.
PS. Marx, directly following Adam Smith's program, went on to apply the principle to labor with the Labor Theory of Value, but it's not clear labor really works that way or that an employer "owns" employment openings in the same way that a landowner owns land, or that surplus labor-power is really a form of rent.
But here, Adam Smith fails economics: as many modern economists recognize, taxes on business (which includes rental) are inevitably passed on to the consumer.
Eh are you sure about that? Tax incidence is dependent on the price elasticity of the taxed good. If a good has inelastic supply, or elastic demand, a seller is limited to the extent that he can pass-on taxes, because higher price points will simply cause the buyers to purchase less. If the demand for a a good in inelastic, like gasoline, all of the cost can be passed on because the consumer lacks the bargaining power to seek alternatives. That's what happens if you follow the deadweight losses, anyways.
This is why physiocrats and Georgists believed that a Single Tax on land was the only truly enlightened form of taxation, because undeveloped land has a perfectly inelastic supply and there is, thus, 100% of the tax is passed on and there is zero deadweight loss. It's a perfectly neutral tax, in that it neither encourages nor discourages any economic activity -- a landowner has to pay tax on his land, but if he were a renter his cost situation would be identical, except for premium rents charged for development on the land, which are priced in the open market. It never really took off because most of the people on Earth that own land are also relatively powerful politically:) Adam Smith wasn't a Georgist, but he inspired many of their ideas.
The idea that companies uniformly pass on all their taxes to their customers is little more than corporate propaganda, and not grounded in any economic theory. It is sometimes the case but the truth is much more complicated.
Oh, crooksandliars.com - well there's a credible, non-partisan source of information, for sure.
I admit they lack the requisite number of bald eagles, statues of liberty, and flag porn that you'd expect from a reputable information source.
I don't know where your block quote comes from, it's not in the linked document. The linked chart shows the trend of corrections to the CBO baseline over the last ten years, meaning, that $1.1 trillion for the EGTRRA isn't the cost of EGTRRA, but how much it cumulatively affected the "Clinton" surplus -- it's a delta, not an absolute. The total cost is not here, Ronald Reagan's former budget director estimates it was about $3.2 trillion including interest (this is, of course, for a tax cut that was supposed to grow the economy and produce zero revenue fall-off).
The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
There is an argument that this quote is taken out of context, in that it appears in a long passage where Smith denigrates various methods of tax collection, but most people agree that even if he is opposed to a tax on income, he is supportive of a tax regime which is progressive in effect, regardless of how it's collected.
Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.
The counterargument to this is that the text systematically rejects any mechanism by which a state could operate such a system, only that it should "help to organize" such a system. So I guess it depends on your sense of the term "help."
Incorporating yourself is one thing, I'm incorporated.
Putting shares of your private equity firm into your IRA by claiming they have a paper value of 1 penny is somewhat different by degree, as is arranging for 100% of your compensation to be paid from the appreciation of a restricted stock class (which we're informed is supposed to expose you to downside risk, but never does). Or finagling a board of directors into giving you multi-year, six-figure sinecure.
At a certain point it just starts to look like people scratching each others' backs with money. And that's not what people believe in.
The guy above has a chart of spending, you have a chart of deficits. The last Democratic congress had a large deficit because tax revenue fell off in the recession, and they refused to cut programs or raise taxes to bring the budget back into line, a policy the Republican congress has basically affirmed. They propose austerity budgets but they do so secure in the knowledge they won't get passed as long as the President and the Senate are controlled by Democrats, they're designed to be rejected and to "clarify" the choice for voters.
Most of the increased spending in the last four years has been non-discretional, which means a congress, regardless of who controls is, can't stop it without cutting an existing program, and it automatically gets bigger during recessions, by design. Food stamps and unemployment benefits aren't rationed, they are paid to people who qualify, regardless of how many people qualify in a year.
a rent seeking parasite will talk about capitalism a lot, but what they really want is their monopoly or oligopoly preserved.
Never trust someone who says he "believes in capitalism" unless he's been bankrupt at least once.
Rich people too easily to confuse capitalism with "everything that's making me rich at this moment." Everybody basically sees themselves as a good person, and as long as rich people are rich, they're going to generally believe that they "deserve" it on some kind of moral level, even though a political economy cannot be simultaneously free by a libertarian's definition and reward social virtue, the two are orthogonal. Most philosophers have recognized this for hundreds of years, which is why thoughtful free-marketers at least as far back as Adam Smith generally advocated progressive taxation and transfers, Friedrich Hayek believed in government health insurance, etc.
The fact is, nobody really believes in capitalism in extremis, what they really fight for is the right to make money the way they remember their parents did, and to a lesser extent how they know previous generations did, based on prevailing historical narrative.
1) Create software that expert support in order to support or customize for just about any commercial purpose
2) Give software away for free
3) Profit
I don't see how this model would work for games, or really any kind of software the "indie" developer would write. You could still make money if you were a platform vendor, but really, in the end, you're talking about the end of third-party application business as a commercial enterprise (unless you can convince every mom and pop user to sign support contracts for your distro of AbiWord, and Inkscape...).
There are many competitors trying to implement PageRank and blocked by Google? That's first time I hear that.
I'm not sure if that makes a difference for the purpose of the argument, the point is that anyone could reimplement PageRank and then use this precedent as a defense. Honestly, I don't think that's a positive outcome.
The more offensive aspect of the argument is that it analogizes humans to baseband chipsets and networking equipment. UIs are actually "protocols" in their account, mediating communication between "agents." How am I not surprised that Google would propose a legal argument based on the underlying proposition that human beings are just a special kind of network endpoint?
Hold the phone! Is PageRank a technology essential for web search? It's certainly as essential as a slide-to-unlock or a force-accelerating scrolling view-- as in, it isn't, unless you're trying to make a workalike alternative. Maybe Google should be licensing PageRank out on FRAND terms to competitors.
Either that, or they invent new modes of user interaction, instead of maintaining that Apple's way is basically the only way it can be done-- this was never true and it's disingenuous to claim. Their motive is to be able to offer feature parity with iOS, not compatibility with iOS. User interfaces aren't protocols, human beings do not "interoperate" with their equipment, such that seeing one phone in a TV ad renders them unable to use a phone that works in a different way.
But that only applies when actual physical film is used, which is becoming increasingly less common in the era of digital projectors
That's not how that works. Motion blur is a function of shutter speed and subject motion. Digital cameras have shutters like any other camera. Cameras sample finite spans of time, not instants of time.
The service was shut down in January when authorities in New Zealand raided Dotcom's $24 million compound in Coatesville, a small town not far from Auckland.
So basically, this guy bought a $24 million house by selling ad space and premium accounts to media that he neither made, nor owned, nor invested in, nor had a legal right (as dubious as those may be) to distribute? I get that you can't stop people from sharing, but anyone can see the negative repercussions of people making millions of dollars off of the transaction, when he is neither the sharer, the viewer, nor the author. He's a middleman and this money was ill-gotten; he's happy to play the victim to you guys but it's not about your right to copy, not remotely. It's about his right to make money off copying.
It's really no different than someone pulling code from the Linux kernel and using it in a closed-source commercial product: the author has rights, and the distributor violated those rights because it was profitable.
(And yes I know Megaupload had legitimate uses, if you think that's why it managed to cleared over $100 million in ad and subscription fees in its lifetime from legitimate, author-sourced file distro, you're hopelessly naive.)
Now, I have some experience with this having recently test drove all of these -- I bought a 328, so I guess I'm part of the problem:) *
A Mercedes C-class (like a 250) can actually be leased about $50 cheaper than the equivalent BMW (a base 328), and this is actually cheaper than an Audi A4 presently. This is probably just a local and temporary phenomenon, but they've been pushing these.
*(I work in Hollywood and own Apple gear too, you can save your abuse. On the Slashdot moral continuum I'm somewhere between Bill Gates and Ed Gein.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a particular FOSSy proclivity of making any and all applications into operating-system-like meta-platforms. You haven't written a proper Open application until you've provided SWIG bindings and a console that runs Scheme one-liners.
If you're a user, absolutely. If you're the webmaster, hell no.
This little piggy uses a RESTful API, this one uses XML-RPC, this little piggy only has a PHP library, this one only uses javascript, this one allows customization of interface, this one doesn't, this one costs money, this one requires me to enter a partnership agreement, this one responds with 500 a lot, this one never responds to support emails...
They don't, which is why the original argument is without merit.
One exclamation point is emphasis, two is coincidence, three is enemy action. Or sarcasm. One of those!!!
Valve makes its money off a locked-down, DRM'd and cloud-backed merchandising platform.
National Instruments sells hardware.
You wouldn't be running Grig Software if you were on a platform that had rsync(1)
Piriform, Norton and McAfee make money, but that's like saying breaking everyone's windows makes money for the glazier.
Wow, need any help prying your eyebrows from the ceiling?
That's the great thing about single sign-ons: there are so many to choose from!
iPad requires an active dongle to connect to an SD card: ridiculous! N900 requires an active dongle to connect to a TV: completely acceptable!*
Macbook Air requires a dongle to use wired ethernet: bondage! Podunk Clock Radio Corp. has to use an integrated USB or BT chipset in order to get a line-level output: totally obvious!**
I know it's not necessarily the same people complaining, but really.
* Are we sure a phone's USB 2.0 can push an HD image at 30fps? Not just an H.264 stream, because we want to run games on it too.
** Using headphone lines for external devices is crappy engineering -- the impedance is low voltage and neither mic level nor line level, and the receiving device is dependent on the phone's volume setting.
Shit I use the word "basically" a lot.
Just to complete the thought, you should read more about ground rents and the problem of retierism in general. Economists of the 19th century were the first to become dimly aware of the fact that people were able to extract wealth by buddying-up with the government, and they realized that the most important way they did this was by taking control of land freehold. They saw the institution of land title as the original form of rent seeking, because it allowed the owner to charge money for nothing -- they lived in an era where a landowner would charge a renter for land that was completely undeveloped, many of these economists attacked tax-free landholding the way people on slashdot attack eternal copyright. It's basically the same mechanism. Nowadays land is developed and rent value is based on the level of development, so ground rents aren't as visible to most people anymore -- though they still come up, and they absolutely exist under other circumstances, like copyright. Basically, whenever the government declares something is ownable, it creates the potential for rents, and policy comes down to how well the government balances these rights against the unavoidable waste and inefficiencies.
PS. Marx, directly following Adam Smith's program, went on to apply the principle to labor with the Labor Theory of Value, but it's not clear labor really works that way or that an employer "owns" employment openings in the same way that a landowner owns land, or that surplus labor-power is really a form of rent.
Eh are you sure about that? Tax incidence is dependent on the price elasticity of the taxed good. If a good has inelastic supply, or elastic demand, a seller is limited to the extent that he can pass-on taxes, because higher price points will simply cause the buyers to purchase less. If the demand for a a good in inelastic, like gasoline, all of the cost can be passed on because the consumer lacks the bargaining power to seek alternatives. That's what happens if you follow the deadweight losses, anyways.
This is why physiocrats and Georgists believed that a Single Tax on land was the only truly enlightened form of taxation, because undeveloped land has a perfectly inelastic supply and there is, thus, 100% of the tax is passed on and there is zero deadweight loss. It's a perfectly neutral tax, in that it neither encourages nor discourages any economic activity -- a landowner has to pay tax on his land, but if he were a renter his cost situation would be identical, except for premium rents charged for development on the land, which are priced in the open market. It never really took off because most of the people on Earth that own land are also relatively powerful politically :) Adam Smith wasn't a Georgist, but he inspired many of their ideas.
The idea that companies uniformly pass on all their taxes to their customers is little more than corporate propaganda, and not grounded in any economic theory. It is sometimes the case but the truth is much more complicated.
I admit they lack the requisite number of bald eagles, statues of liberty, and flag porn that you'd expect from a reputable information source.
I don't know where your block quote comes from, it's not in the linked document. The linked chart shows the trend of corrections to the CBO baseline over the last ten years, meaning, that $1.1 trillion for the EGTRRA isn't the cost of EGTRRA, but how much it cumulatively affected the "Clinton" surplus -- it's a delta, not an absolute. The total cost is not here, Ronald Reagan's former budget director estimates it was about $3.2 trillion including interest (this is, of course, for a tax cut that was supposed to grow the economy and produce zero revenue fall-off).
This stuff's been floating around for years:
Yer Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations:
There is an argument that this quote is taken out of context, in that it appears in a long passage where Smith denigrates various methods of tax collection, but most people agree that even if he is opposed to a tax on income, he is supportive of a tax regime which is progressive in effect, regardless of how it's collected.
Hayek in Road to Serfdom:
The counterargument to this is that the text systematically rejects any mechanism by which a state could operate such a system, only that it should "help to organize" such a system. So I guess it depends on your sense of the term "help."
Incorporating yourself is one thing, I'm incorporated.
Putting shares of your private equity firm into your IRA by claiming they have a paper value of 1 penny is somewhat different by degree, as is arranging for 100% of your compensation to be paid from the appreciation of a restricted stock class (which we're informed is supposed to expose you to downside risk, but never does). Or finagling a board of directors into giving you multi-year, six-figure sinecure.
At a certain point it just starts to look like people scratching each others' backs with money. And that's not what people believe in.
The guy above has a chart of spending, you have a chart of deficits. The last Democratic congress had a large deficit because tax revenue fell off in the recession, and they refused to cut programs or raise taxes to bring the budget back into line, a policy the Republican congress has basically affirmed. They propose austerity budgets but they do so secure in the knowledge they won't get passed as long as the President and the Senate are controlled by Democrats, they're designed to be rejected and to "clarify" the choice for voters.
Most of the increased spending in the last four years has been non-discretional, which means a congress, regardless of who controls is, can't stop it without cutting an existing program, and it automatically gets bigger during recessions, by design. Food stamps and unemployment benefits aren't rationed, they are paid to people who qualify, regardless of how many people qualify in a year.
In the end, you have to attribute debt to the actual laws passed by whatever congress passed them. And by far, the single largest contributor to the national debt over the past 20 years would be a certain set of tax cuts that were passed in 2001 by a Republican senate, under reconciliation rules (thus no supermajority for cloture required), without matching spending cuts.
Never trust someone who says he "believes in capitalism" unless he's been bankrupt at least once.
Rich people too easily to confuse capitalism with "everything that's making me rich at this moment." Everybody basically sees themselves as a good person, and as long as rich people are rich, they're going to generally believe that they "deserve" it on some kind of moral level, even though a political economy cannot be simultaneously free by a libertarian's definition and reward social virtue, the two are orthogonal. Most philosophers have recognized this for hundreds of years, which is why thoughtful free-marketers at least as far back as Adam Smith generally advocated progressive taxation and transfers, Friedrich Hayek believed in government health insurance, etc.
The fact is, nobody really believes in capitalism in extremis, what they really fight for is the right to make money the way they remember their parents did, and to a lesser extent how they know previous generations did, based on prevailing historical narrative.
This phenomenon is very similar to the fight over gay marriage: gay marriage opponents claim they're fighting for a sanctified, thousand-year-old tradition, when in fact they're really fighting for the institution as it existed, religiously and socially, circa 1975, around the time their parents were married.
1) Create software that expert support in order to support or customize for just about any commercial purpose
2) Give software away for free
3) Profit
I don't see how this model would work for games, or really any kind of software the "indie" developer would write. You could still make money if you were a platform vendor, but really, in the end, you're talking about the end of third-party application business as a commercial enterprise (unless you can convince every mom and pop user to sign support contracts for your distro of AbiWord, and Inkscape...).
There are many competitors trying to implement PageRank and blocked by Google? That's first time I hear that.
I'm not sure if that makes a difference for the purpose of the argument, the point is that anyone could reimplement PageRank and then use this precedent as a defense. Honestly, I don't think that's a positive outcome.
The more offensive aspect of the argument is that it analogizes humans to baseband chipsets and networking equipment. UIs are actually "protocols" in their account, mediating communication between "agents." How am I not surprised that Google would propose a legal argument based on the underlying proposition that human beings are just a special kind of network endpoint?
Hold the phone! Is PageRank a technology essential for web search? It's certainly as essential as a slide-to-unlock or a force-accelerating scrolling view-- as in, it isn't, unless you're trying to make a workalike alternative. Maybe Google should be licensing PageRank out on FRAND terms to competitors.
Either that, or they invent new modes of user interaction, instead of maintaining that Apple's way is basically the only way it can be done-- this was never true and it's disingenuous to claim. Their motive is to be able to offer feature parity with iOS, not compatibility with iOS. User interfaces aren't protocols, human beings do not "interoperate" with their equipment, such that seeing one phone in a TV ad renders them unable to use a phone that works in a different way.
No, the Street amortized the slamming over the last 12 years. Price on December 31, 1999: $58 3/8s.
That's not how that works. Motion blur is a function of shutter speed and subject motion. Digital cameras have shutters like any other camera. Cameras sample finite spans of time, not instants of time.
I won't get into the legalities, but I don't think a "fixer" is entitled to 100% of the profit.
So basically, this guy bought a $24 million house by selling ad space and premium accounts to media that he neither made, nor owned, nor invested in, nor had a legal right (as dubious as those may be) to distribute? I get that you can't stop people from sharing, but anyone can see the negative repercussions of people making millions of dollars off of the transaction, when he is neither the sharer, the viewer, nor the author. He's a middleman and this money was ill-gotten; he's happy to play the victim to you guys but it's not about your right to copy, not remotely. It's about his right to make money off copying.
It's really no different than someone pulling code from the Linux kernel and using it in a closed-source commercial product: the author has rights, and the distributor violated those rights because it was profitable.
(And yes I know Megaupload had legitimate uses, if you think that's why it managed to cleared over $100 million in ad and subscription fees in its lifetime from legitimate, author-sourced file distro, you're hopelessly naive.)
Now, I have some experience with this having recently test drove all of these -- I bought a 328, so I guess I'm part of the problem :) *
A Mercedes C-class (like a 250) can actually be leased about $50 cheaper than the equivalent BMW (a base 328), and this is actually cheaper than an Audi A4 presently. This is probably just a local and temporary phenomenon, but they've been pushing these.
*(I work in Hollywood and own Apple gear too, you can save your abuse. On the Slashdot moral continuum I'm somewhere between Bill Gates and Ed Gein.)
WTF are you talking about?
As someone with a degree in Russian studies, I can tell ya that Russians love semantic cop-outs.