So, it's not a tax, but it is a tax. Which one is it?
You left out the sentence directly following...
That label cannot control whether the payment is a tax for purposes of the Constitution, but it does determine the application of the Anti-Injunction Act.
Article One Section 8, and 26 USC 7421 have different definitions of a tax. Pp 14 and 15 go into depth on how the court found the difference. Shorter:
The Affordable Care Act does not require that the penalty for failing to comply with the individual mandate be treated as a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act.The Anti-Injunction Act therefore does not apply to this suit....
It's just words, but laws are all about words. The Anti-Injunction Act uses a narrower definition of "tax" than the Constitution does.
This argument you're making boils down to "My Lysenkoism is better than your Lysenkoism," you make no positive defense of what's in A Beka's science books.
The problem with the Coelacanth is that its existence doesn't really disprove anything with regard to evolution. Arguing that it does, in the breezy, flip style of a Chick Tract, is meant to normalize in the mind of readers that evidence is less important than having a good, truthy story.
“Never more than at this moment in the modern era have we needed a profound reminder of the colossally important and exciting role that science, space exploration and the human quest for knowledge must continue to play in our development as a species,” said MacFarlane.
Quite a serious side to the man. Clearly, menstruation and holocaust jokes are just his day job.
"Playing nice" in this instance doesn't mean making Google, Microsoft or indie developers happy. It means shaking hands with Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and the Co-Op Interbank Network. Google Wallet plays extremely nice, this doesn't make it successful.
Apple was completely capable of "playing nice" with the record labels, and continues to play nice with the entertainment conglomerates, publishing houses and most software developers (the ones without a political agenda, at least). Technical interoperability or open standards aren't very relevant to this task, banks like their standards as obtuse and proprietary as possible, and they don't want anybody on their data feed but them.
The tough nut for this problem isn't the payor, it's the payee. You can put NFC in everyone's pocket but the killer app will be getting it at every POS -- it'd also be nice if they came up with a system that didn't require a credit card (like Google) or all transactions to a party to be accountholders at the same bank. None of these are problems a technology company can solve. The technology is simple, making the deal is hard.
Sadly, no, the fundamentalists are not trolling, they honestly believe a fairy tale disproves science.
It's not about "proving" anything, it's about giving young people a compelling story until they get older and grow out of dinosaurs, and into Thomist exegesis and pre-Tribulationist doctrine.
It's not about evidence, it's about conditioning children to accept fairy stories as valid epistemology. Once that's done, the story is changed to suit whatever purpose is required.
If Apple were selling a tablet that cost 4 times the cost of an equivalent competing tablet, I guess this comparison would make some kind of sense; also if Samsung or Asus's consumer electronics divisions were as remotely profitable as Apple, it might make sense too. In the context of your observation, Ferrari (Apple) is actually the company making "more money" (by multiples), while the companies that make products for "real people" are the ones losing their shirt and only selling into niches.
All of this is immaterial to Google, of course, since they are primarily concerned with ads and traffic, and, like Amazon, they don't really have any economic incentive to profit from the equipment itself.
We would be remiss not to point out that Ferrari is a subsidiary of Fiat, which does not clear Ford-level revenues but, like Ford, makes cars for "real people," just not Americans. Also, people who own and maintain their Fix-Or-Repair-Daily vehicles can always tell their friends "Yeah it's in the shop a lot, but not as much as a Fiat!" (Both reputations at this point are probably unearned.)
The fact remains, however, that while many people drive Fords, it's not much of ride, and while very few people drive Ferraris, everybody wants to at least try.
Of course, your dts or DD track will be perfectly able to render the same sound. But for some reason, both tracks will sound terribly different and the 62.2 track will sound better.
Considering, if current trends continue, you're not going to be watching the your movie at home on Blu-ray, you're going to be streaming the movie off Netflix/Hulu/iTunes, your multichannel rendition will probably the least of your concerns.
In the white paper on the website, it indicates that the DCP deliverable can contain the Atmos bitstream alongside 5.1 or 7.1 deliverables anyway, it's just another chunk that the reproduction system can select.
The thing they're implying in TFA is that the format would allow mix once, play everywhere, for n speakers. Other systems make this promise too, for example ITU BS-775 has a spec for crashing a 5.1 mix down to stereo in a simple non-proprietary manner, but in general, if the delivery medium gives them the opportunity to fine-tune the mix for a particular format, they'll take it.
Having the Atmos mix is a win for archival, because it's a self-contained format that embeds tons of metadata and alternate mixes, and is supported by a company that won't disappear tomorrow. However, making new deliverables for new future formats will still require taking this material, listening to how it translates into the future format in question, and then tweaking. There's always tweaking, for feature films we never let boxes downmix for us, there's too much opportunity for shenanigans.
If the source material provides a.1 channel, having two subs allows you to achieve a 6dB to 10dB (depending on placement - take advantage of acoutic coupling with the walls and put the woofers a half wavelength apart and you can achieve a 10dB increase in output) increase in volume very easily.
The problem with this technique is that it's not controllable or practical to reproduce, it depends too much on the construction of the room and can only work if the dimensions of the space, it's absorptive properties, angles and modes are just so. You get awesome bass but what you're hearing isn't remotely what the director or the sound mixer intended it to sound like.
Also, bass is not totally nondirectional, so there is some audible directional cueing.
The wavelength at 20 Hz is 18 meters, the wavelength around the standard Dolby crossover of 85 Hz is over 4 meters. If the room you're listening in is smaller than 5-10 meters along the axis the subs are positioned, you're not going to get any localization at any useful power level. It's justified in theaters but for home theaters it's almost always a wash.
Up to 128 discrete inputs into the system, up to 62.2 discrete outputs, with the condition that many of the 128 channels might be occupied by multi-channel "background" sounds that are pre-panned and spatially static, and the theater may not necessarily be equipped with 62.2 speakers. The smaller the theater, the fewer the speakers you need, since the white paper defines all speaker placement in terms of angles from a broad sweet zone in the room.
The system is a lot less like a classic recording format and more like a hybrid video game sound engine -- it has 128 "sources" or "voices" and it uses procedural techniques to decide which speakers they should play in.
The other was that the movie would ship with a sound "container", which would contain not only the sound objects, but professional downmixes to 22.1, 11.1, 7.1, 5.1, 4.0 and 2.0 tracks for full backward compatibility with the less capable systems.
This might happen on some low-budget and TV productions, but theatrical motion pictures always make human-tweaked and human-approved discrete downmixes for the most popular home theater formats.
I've seen some busy input/output panels on home stereo equipment, but 62 channels is too many for my interconnect budget. Still, overhead sound seems like a good idea for some kinds of movie.
That's not how this system works, it supports "up to" 62 channels in the encoded signal; these are panned with metadata in the channel bitstream, and then the decoder in the theater (or home) does the math of placing the sound in the space, using prior knowledge of how many speakers you have, and their position in the room. "62.2" doesn't mean 64 speakers, it means that the format supports "up to" that many, and the theater might not have that many actual channels wired, or it might have significantly more if it's a large room, or significantly less -- they can add more speakers to get more directional resolution.
62.2 also doesn't imply that the guy who mixed the thing was using more than 5 or 6. I'm a sound designer in Los Angeles -- just finished Men in Black 3, starting Zero Dark Thirty in a few weeks, and this is the first time I've heard of any of this. This sort of system will require software support from workstation and console vendors, and I'm dubious people will be using it for some time, even though it promises great backwards-compatiblity.
This system appears to be an attempt to get ambisonic-like flexibility without the costs of ambisonics, principally, ambisonic encoding's inability to cope with pan divergence, the problem of "how do I send the same sound to the left and right side of the rooms simultaneously, without it going anywhere else?" It's impossible to do this in ambisonics without adding tons of second-order channels and playing with signal phase. This system might also suffer from one of ambisonic's other problems, namely, it may rely on extremely accurate speaker placement and speaker placement information.
This system also appears to be a shot across the bow of IOSONO, which is a very different process that achieves high horizontal fidelity through a completely different technique of dubious creative utility.
Note- IMAX has overhead sound as well, or at least a "screen-top" channel, but lacks a subwoofer channel and only has point-source surround speakers.
B5 loses me the moment they cut to a VFX shot. So chincy.
Also I reject shows that use telepaths as the rule rather than the exception -- if you're going to put telepaths in your show you might as well have unicorns and the Nazgul. TNG's only saving grace is that Troi was a rather attenuated telepath, she seems to tell Picard exactly what any human with half a brain could have guessed, and her ability never saves the day, to the point that the writers seem to forget she has the power at all after season 5 -- except to make her a victim or the object of abuse, something DS9's writers have a nasty habit of doing to Dax in early seasons.
Representations about the sort of split artists have with "middle men" are casually fraudulent and slanted pro-Free Content propaganda. "Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.
What the fuck does an "Android, C#, Ron Paul" fanboy know about music industry contracts?
In order to make this argument, you have to concede that the creators are entitled to be paid for their work, and that your problem is only over the mechanics of delivery and price discovery. Is that right?
Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year; I assure you Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber aren't hurting, it's the session musicians and engineers and the 99% that get cut out. Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
If you're trying to be anti-establishment, you're doing it wrong. If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.
I wonder where the quotes around "people who made the thing" come from. Is there some sort of debate about that? I admit my perspective on this is a little cockeyed, I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.
I am aware that Google occasionally partakes in collecting AdWords revenue off of someone else's movie.
Just remember, you're paying $50 month for the Internet, you paid $1000 for the computer, people are constantly collecting money from advertisers based on what you see, all of this money is going to billion-dollar mega-corporations, and not a dime of it is going to the people who made the thing you're looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out the sentence directly following ...
Article One Section 8, and 26 USC 7421 have different definitions of a tax. Pp 14 and 15 go into depth on how the court found the difference. Shorter:
It's just words, but laws are all about words. The Anti-Injunction Act uses a narrower definition of "tax" than the Constitution does.
This argument you're making boils down to "My Lysenkoism is better than your Lysenkoism," you make no positive defense of what's in A Beka's science books.
The problem with the Coelacanth is that its existence doesn't really disprove anything with regard to evolution. Arguing that it does, in the breezy, flip style of a Chick Tract, is meant to normalize in the mind of readers that evidence is less important than having a good, truthy story.
From Hollywood Reporter:
Quite a serious side to the man. Clearly, menstruation and holocaust jokes are just his day job.
"The world" already has mobile payments.
"Playing nice" in this instance doesn't mean making Google, Microsoft or indie developers happy. It means shaking hands with Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and the Co-Op Interbank Network. Google Wallet plays extremely nice, this doesn't make it successful.
Apple was completely capable of "playing nice" with the record labels, and continues to play nice with the entertainment conglomerates, publishing houses and most software developers (the ones without a political agenda, at least). Technical interoperability or open standards aren't very relevant to this task, banks like their standards as obtuse and proprietary as possible, and they don't want anybody on their data feed but them.
The tough nut for this problem isn't the payor, it's the payee. You can put NFC in everyone's pocket but the killer app will be getting it at every POS -- it'd also be nice if they came up with a system that didn't require a credit card (like Google) or all transactions to a party to be accountholders at the same bank. None of these are problems a technology company can solve. The technology is simple, making the deal is hard.
NFC isn't a feature, use-anywhere mobile payments is a feature. NFC+Google Wallet doesn't deliver use-anywhere.
Delivering universal mobile payments is not a technology problem, it's a business problem.
It's not about "proving" anything, it's about giving young people a compelling story until they get older and grow out of dinosaurs, and into Thomist exegesis and pre-Tribulationist doctrine.
It's not about evidence, it's about conditioning children to accept fairy stories as valid epistemology. Once that's done, the story is changed to suit whatever purpose is required.
Yeah the kids are buying that little subcompact hipster Minicooper-esque model. It's a big deal that Fiat is back in the US market.
Depends on if the Toyotas have sticky throttles.
If Apple were selling a tablet that cost 4 times the cost of an equivalent competing tablet, I guess this comparison would make some kind of sense; also if Samsung or Asus's consumer electronics divisions were as remotely profitable as Apple, it might make sense too. In the context of your observation, Ferrari (Apple) is actually the company making "more money" (by multiples), while the companies that make products for "real people" are the ones losing their shirt and only selling into niches.
All of this is immaterial to Google, of course, since they are primarily concerned with ads and traffic, and, like Amazon, they don't really have any economic incentive to profit from the equipment itself.
We would be remiss not to point out that Ferrari is a subsidiary of Fiat, which does not clear Ford-level revenues but, like Ford, makes cars for "real people," just not Americans. Also, people who own and maintain their Fix-Or-Repair-Daily vehicles can always tell their friends "Yeah it's in the shop a lot, but not as much as a Fiat!" (Both reputations at this point are probably unearned.)
The fact remains, however, that while many people drive Fords, it's not much of ride, and while very few people drive Ferraris, everybody wants to at least try.
We usually don't use the live sound for an animated film. Nowadays all you get are mouse clicks.
Simpsons did it: "Animated programs are rarely aired live, it's very hard on the animator's wrists."
Considering, if current trends continue, you're not going to be watching the your movie at home on Blu-ray, you're going to be streaming the movie off Netflix/Hulu/iTunes, your multichannel rendition will probably the least of your concerns.
Your head is a critical component to your sound localization..`
In the white paper on the website, it indicates that the DCP deliverable can contain the Atmos bitstream alongside 5.1 or 7.1 deliverables anyway, it's just another chunk that the reproduction system can select.
The thing they're implying in TFA is that the format would allow mix once, play everywhere, for n speakers. Other systems make this promise too, for example ITU BS-775 has a spec for crashing a 5.1 mix down to stereo in a simple non-proprietary manner, but in general, if the delivery medium gives them the opportunity to fine-tune the mix for a particular format, they'll take it.
Having the Atmos mix is a win for archival, because it's a self-contained format that embeds tons of metadata and alternate mixes, and is supported by a company that won't disappear tomorrow. However, making new deliverables for new future formats will still require taking this material, listening to how it translates into the future format in question, and then tweaking. There's always tweaking, for feature films we never let boxes downmix for us, there's too much opportunity for shenanigans.
The problem with this technique is that it's not controllable or practical to reproduce, it depends too much on the construction of the room and can only work if the dimensions of the space, it's absorptive properties, angles and modes are just so. You get awesome bass but what you're hearing isn't remotely what the director or the sound mixer intended it to sound like.
The wavelength at 20 Hz is 18 meters, the wavelength around the standard Dolby crossover of 85 Hz is over 4 meters. If the room you're listening in is smaller than 5-10 meters along the axis the subs are positioned, you're not going to get any localization at any useful power level. It's justified in theaters but for home theaters it's almost always a wash.
Up to 128 discrete inputs into the system, up to 62.2 discrete outputs, with the condition that many of the 128 channels might be occupied by multi-channel "background" sounds that are pre-panned and spatially static, and the theater may not necessarily be equipped with 62.2 speakers. The smaller the theater, the fewer the speakers you need, since the white paper defines all speaker placement in terms of angles from a broad sweet zone in the room.
The system is a lot less like a classic recording format and more like a hybrid video game sound engine -- it has 128 "sources" or "voices" and it uses procedural techniques to decide which speakers they should play in.
This might happen on some low-budget and TV productions, but theatrical motion pictures always make human-tweaked and human-approved discrete downmixes for the most popular home theater formats.
Actually after reading Dolby's page the system supports up to 128 discrete pannable audio streams, but no more than 64 speakers.
That's not how this system works, it supports "up to" 62 channels in the encoded signal; these are panned with metadata in the channel bitstream, and then the decoder in the theater (or home) does the math of placing the sound in the space, using prior knowledge of how many speakers you have, and their position in the room. "62.2" doesn't mean 64 speakers, it means that the format supports "up to" that many, and the theater might not have that many actual channels wired, or it might have significantly more if it's a large room, or significantly less -- they can add more speakers to get more directional resolution.
62.2 also doesn't imply that the guy who mixed the thing was using more than 5 or 6. I'm a sound designer in Los Angeles -- just finished Men in Black 3, starting Zero Dark Thirty in a few weeks, and this is the first time I've heard of any of this. This sort of system will require software support from workstation and console vendors, and I'm dubious people will be using it for some time, even though it promises great backwards-compatiblity.
This system appears to be an attempt to get ambisonic-like flexibility without the costs of ambisonics, principally, ambisonic encoding's inability to cope with pan divergence, the problem of "how do I send the same sound to the left and right side of the rooms simultaneously, without it going anywhere else?" It's impossible to do this in ambisonics without adding tons of second-order channels and playing with signal phase. This system might also suffer from one of ambisonic's other problems, namely, it may rely on extremely accurate speaker placement and speaker placement information.
This system also appears to be a shot across the bow of IOSONO, which is a very different process that achieves high horizontal fidelity through a completely different technique of dubious creative utility.
Note- IMAX has overhead sound as well, or at least a "screen-top" channel, but lacks a subwoofer channel and only has point-source surround speakers.
B5 loses me the moment they cut to a VFX shot. So chincy.
Also I reject shows that use telepaths as the rule rather than the exception -- if you're going to put telepaths in your show you might as well have unicorns and the Nazgul. TNG's only saving grace is that Troi was a rather attenuated telepath, she seems to tell Picard exactly what any human with half a brain could have guessed, and her ability never saves the day, to the point that the writers seem to forget she has the power at all after season 5 -- except to make her a victim or the object of abuse, something DS9's writers have a nasty habit of doing to Dax in early seasons.
Representations about the sort of split artists have with "middle men" are casually fraudulent and slanted pro-Free Content propaganda. "Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.
What the fuck does an "Android, C#, Ron Paul" fanboy know about music industry contracts?
In order to make this argument, you have to concede that the creators are entitled to be paid for their work, and that your problem is only over the mechanics of delivery and price discovery. Is that right?
Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year; I assure you Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber aren't hurting, it's the session musicians and engineers and the 99% that get cut out. Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
If you're trying to be anti-establishment, you're doing it wrong. If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.
I wonder where the quotes around "people who made the thing" come from. Is there some sort of debate about that? I admit my perspective on this is a little cockeyed, I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.
I am aware that Google occasionally partakes in collecting AdWords revenue off of someone else's movie.
Just remember, you're paying $50 month for the Internet, you paid $1000 for the computer, people are constantly collecting money from advertisers based on what you see, all of this money is going to billion-dollar mega-corporations, and not a dime of it is going to the people who made the thing you're looking for.
Beware of anybody that makes a living in skilled hand trades in a world with replicators.