Since we know patents stifle true innovation when applied to trivial hardware and software "inventions", this means that this should just slow down the pace of "improvement" by these companies. More power to patents!
You know... I can't believe I'm saying this but...
When I go home at night, after a long day of fixing this, helping unbreak that, designing this, blah blah blah... well, I'm not so sure that I wouldn't mind being a sheep as well.
I don't always want to download the latest Gentoo release and compile from scratch to surf the freaking internet. Or listen to my completely un-DRM'ed MP3 collection.
I'm a shepherd at work... but I wouldn't mind a rock-solid browser experience with my morning coffee...
With respect to non-profits, I believe that some of the other posts have done a good job of breaking down the different kinds of taxes and discussing how property taxes (not paid by non-profits) could be a good example of how tax-exempt status particularly matters. For example, consider the property holdings of some of the mainstream religions -> their accumulation of property is enabled by this.
Now, with respect to the following:
It's not just "you're taxed on gross minus employee salaries minus expenses". If that were the case, then no company would ever pay taxes, because they'd make sure to spend all their income.
Perhaps you could elaborate. In the US, you are taxed (both corporately and individually) on net profits (gross minus costs). For more detailed information, please refer to (googled link provided): http://taxguide.completetax.com/text/Q10_2026.asp
Labor is one of those costs. If you are a C corp, the corporate tax rate is applied after payouts of salary (and everything else), which gives the option of paying out most (if not all) of your proceeds as salary. The salary, in turn, is taxed at the individual tax rate.
Companies make profits so that they can pay some of those profits out to shareholders or expand (as you've pointed out). Regardless, tax is levied BEFORE profits, which is kinda handy for companies. As for needing profits to grow, at least for small companies, that isn't true at all. You could grow from 1 employee to 20 without making a dime. Corporate profits, while nice for the company, are in no way required for small business. Now, if you start talking about banking, lines of credit, and credit ratings of companies, maybe you'd have a point... but if you wear a hat, nobody will notice:-)
The reason that I find this germane to the discussion at hand is the fact that true non-profits shouldn't really be holding onto capital or making a profit. Some of the other comments allude to property tax, which are levied regardless of profits; I suspect that this is the real reason behind tax-exempt status. Other types of taxes which are periodically levied (or some some countries levied WRT gross proceeds) might also be a reason.
As for:
If that were the case, then no company would ever pay taxes, because they'd make sure to spend all their income.
If you operate a business, if you intend to cash out any money (e.g. use it for personal use), you are required to pay yourself, which is subject to individual taxes (in the US, anyway). As a matter of fact, MOST companies operate this way, if you're just relying on a count of businesses rather than their earnings.
This is small business in American, and, dare I say, most of these small businesses don't even bother to become C corps, they just operate via the Schedule C form for their taxes, which again, ONLY TAXES NET.
Wait, that doesn't make a great deal of sense to me.
If you are an organization taking in money, and then using that money either for charitable donations or direct charitable activity, there is no tax levied.
That, sir, is why your argument for tax-exempt status seems like a bogus argument: In the US, anyway, you only pay taxes on your net, NOT your gross, which is why I'm tired of hearing about how higher taxes destroy small businesses, when the majority of small businesses pay most (if not all) of their gross out in salary. The company pays little to no tax, and the tax is levied on the salary paid to employees, since the company is running at virtually no profit.
The same holds for religious organizations (or any organization or individual), unless you're not willing to account for your spending... that's when things get a little dicey, I suppose.
The problem that I see is this: both hulu and traditional cable / satellite have a different, not so fun problem. You're forced to choose between them.
Cable TV / Satellite plus a DVR lets you record anything, and then skip the commercials. The problem is that if you forget to record something, or are recommended to something after the fact, you really can't got get it (the on-demand offerings aren't sufficient, generally, IMHO).
Hulu lets you watch pretty much anything current (within the selection catalog, I realize), but you have to watch short ads while watching it.
In other words, you choose between a limited set of things that you remembered to record (w/o commercial interruption via DVR skipping), or you deal with hulu and short, annoying, highly repetitive interruptions (still better than TV without a DVR, though).
The real question is, how much would you pay for hulu, and would you be able to skip commercials completely for an added, premium price? I'll say this, there's no way I'd give them a dime if I had to spend ANYTIME watching commercials I couldn't skip. I already have better than that in my DVR, I'm not trading backward...
I AM A LOWLY CIVIL SERVENT RESPONSIBLE FOR CLEANING UP AFTER THE GLORIOUS OPERATION 'EAGLE CLAW' AND HAVE DETERMINED THAT YOU HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY DUPED INTO GIVING $ 77, 056 USD TO NIGERIAN SCAM OFFICER. AS A RESULT OF THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT TIRELESS SEARCH OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE, I AM HAPPY TO SAY THAT WE WILL BE RETURNING ALL OF YOUR MONEY.
PLEASE FAX US ALL OF YOUR CURRENT BANK ACCOUNT AND IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS TO 01-234-419-23222 AND WE WILL IMMEDIATELY BEGIN TO PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION, AS WELL AS ADDING A $5,061 DOLLAR REWARD FEE AS REQUIRED BY THE NIGERIAN FEDERAL COURT. TO FACILITATE THE PROCESSING OF YOUR INFORMATION, PLEASE INCLUDE THE ROUTING NUMBER, ACCOUNT NUMBER, AND SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR PRIMARY BANKING ACCOUNT (FAILING TO INCLUDE THIS NUMBER WILL DISQUALIFY YOU FROM CONSIDERATION FOR THE $5,061 REWARD).
How long has it been since you've had your well-patched system infected by something self-propagating (read: something you didn't run that you shouldn't have)?
Has anyone actually looked at what most anti-virus software does? If you look in a directory using Windows Explorer... yup, that's right, you scan every file in the directory. If there are zip files in that directory, yup, they are unzipped. If you have JAR's or WAR's... the same thing.
Don't even think about moving quickly today, you probably spend over half of your computing power on virus scanning the same stupid dll's... over and over.
Anti-virus software is a complete SCAM.
Do yourself a favor if you use anti-virus... download filemon from sysinternals, and run it constantly for a day. See how much your own virus scan slows you down. Your computer is NOT slow... your virus scan is.
Here's another one that just about killed me with McAfee... I was trying to find out why delete operations were taking so long when I was performing large clean, build, and deploy tasks in Eclipse... it takes your system certainly less than a second to delete an 80 MB WAR file in Java... however, with McAfee enabled under default scanning on-access rules, it takes me about 15 seconds to delete that file. Because it must first be scanned as a virus.
Who writes this stuff? Virus scan is for people how only use computers for reading email (and downloading the latest virus / Jessica Simpson porn) or your parents.
If you feel differently about your virus scan product, run filemon.exe for a day. You'll realize that (1) your system is bound by disk IO, not CPU and (2) your system isn't slow, your virus scan product is.
Bah!
Keep your Windows Update (or Mac-based Software Update) actually up to date, and you've got precious little to worry about.
I'm no RSS expert, and I don't spend that much time dealing with it, honestly.
However, I do spend a LOT of time dealing with XML. And many environments offer quite an elegant way of dealing with this: the catalog file.
The catalog file provides an alternative mapping between the public identifier and a local, system referenced file SO THIS SORT OF THING DOESN'T happen.
If the RSS standard is to be dependant on external doctype definitions, the RSS readers should either:
(1) Include the doctype hosted on their own system and change all of their doctype public URI's or
(2) The RSS readers should include the requisite files locally, and contain a catalog that maps the public URI's to the locally deployed model.
Like I said before, I'm not so into RSS, so I'm not sure which is applicable, but certainly, I don't think that Netscape should have to host this...
Just browsing slashdot for this article, I see an ad for Privacy Crusader hosted on slashdot, which gets a less than glowing review from McAfee Site Crusader (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/privacycrusader. com).
Forget meta-moderation... all is not well in the state of Denmark...
Just a quick comment here. I don't want to get involved in the entire technology discussion involving which codec, etc. is the best here. However, it is worth noting that the science of predicting coverage (particularly coverage in densely populated urban areas featuring closely knit buildings) is particulary difficult. In the middle 90's, there were quite a few government sponsored initiatives to assist in cellular phone tracking (prior to the invasion of widespread and cheap GPS) designed to assist in cellphone tracking and locating 911 calls). I'm sure that anti-terrorism was also involved in the government sponsorship.
These methods mostly fell by the wayside with GPS availability; tracing cell phone location is dicey in multi-path (urban) environments. This underscores, however, the problem of simply predicting cell phone coverage. Add to this the complexity different methods of transmission, different cell phone models (often, the carrier is blamed for inefficent antennas on a particular cell phone models).
In summary, I'd simply say that if person X says "Cingular (or Verizon or Sprint, etc.) SUCKS!", you really don't have a good idea of WHY their coverage sucks. Maybe their building is shadowed from reception. Perhaps their cell phone (the popular model sold by Company X) sucks due to design flaws. Perhaps they dropped their cell phone and the antenna is broken.
Why can't cell phone companies produce good coverage maps? At least in urban areas, because this is dependent upon multiple factors, some of which are largely dependent on the individual.
The solution? Try before you buy. 30 day trial periods. Nothing else is liable to be workable.
Hmm... back when I was a graduate student at Penn State in the 90's, we could often see the remote sensing teams testing LIDAR (think RADAR, but with laser light). The laser was quite powerful, seemed to extend all the way up to the heavens, and could be seen for miles around.
Perhaps I'm just a bit jaded that them "city folks" (aka The New York Times) seems to think that anyone beaming a laser into the sky must want to destroy stuff.
Hrmpth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR
Hmm.. I think that's a bit of a generalization. That 0.0001 K could be very significant if it were the difference between two very small temperatures (0.0004 and 0.0003). That's why most of these calculations are made using scientic notation (in the above example 0.4 x 10^-3 and 0.3 x 10^-3). One of the many reasons for using scientific notation is that significant figures are more readily apparent (digits in your measurement that are within the measurement range of the device that you're using).
Usually, when you see this type of measurement from astronomy or high-energy physicists, it's really due to averaged measurements taken over a long period of time or over many experiments. The idea is to average out the noise until you separate the wheat (your information) from the chaff (background noise, experimental variation, etc.).
I'd add two comments, agreeing with your point:
(1) Harm that hasn't happened yet is NOT "less harmful". It's just more nebulous, and in the future. This of course leads to point #2.
(2) Microsoft can #$#$@ shut off your OS if they detect that you have an invalid version? WHAT IF THEY ARE WRONG?
I work in professional services for a living. Many of the contracts that I work with in software development and product development include provisions that the software that is purchased by my clients (either in total as services work, in which the IP is transfered the client, or as product, in which case the client is merely buying a license) will not be time-bombed or made "not to function" in any way after the issuance of a license. This means that if a client steals the software, I'd have to resort to the courts to stop them from using it rather than just flipping a switch in my evil desert hideaway.
Here's the problem: The reason these provisions exist is to cover up MASSIVE security holes. If you work for a major pharmaceutical company and you're renegotiating your contract with Microsoft, does it become a factor that they could turn off your windows install base if negotiations don't go as planned?
Don't tell me I'm paranoid. In this line of work, we are paid to see the distant future. This is a horrible, horrible mistake.
My firm uses a product called Black Box to do some similar things in the.NET world. It detects exceptions (based on how you compile the application into your code) and allows both messaging to a host server as well as data collection for collecting data on exceptions that might occur in production environments.
AMEN!
The problem, it seems, is that Weird Al has a crappy record contract. That doesn't seem to me to be related to iTunes. Through a service like CDBaby, you can roll your own album and distribution and get significantly more than bands who want to deal with a record company.
If you get a record deal, you get all sorts of extras, like advances towards your tour (if you tour). That's a plus, and that's the type of thing that Weird Al has exchanged for his record deal. If you roll your own recording time (and it's not that much these days), you don't have to sign a record deal that gives you advances and promotion, etc.
Read what you sign... and deal with the consequences.
Hmm. Tell that to someone like RIM who has spent a great amount of time (and $) defending themselves from patent litigation where most of the patent claims have been invalidated. Another concern is pure patent warefare by companies doing nothing more than buying up ideas and sitting on them.
I'm no expert in patent litigation (shouldn't more people say this, really?), but I'm concerned about approaches to patents that involve litigation after the fact. This seems to map to the classic IT scenario where fixing bugs early in the development cycle leads to lowered development costs by orders of magnitude. It just seems to me that focusing on mitigating the effects of trivial patents already issued dimishes a focus on stopping the problem in the first place.
The only people that profit under patent warfare, where a bad patent has already been issued, are the lawyers arguing the details.
Just my humble opinion.
Certainly, someone needs to reign in the patents, but won't this lead to just more and more litigation?
The real problem, it seems, is that too many patents are being issued! I suppose this helps rescind them, but could lead to a clogged docket, IMHO.
Hmm... one reason that I can think of is for f-stop. I'm not intimately familiar with the latest SLR's, but the ability to preview the effects of f-stop on depth of focus is a rather big deal (which is why you need an SLR).
I'm consistently amazed at the ignorance of media companies and cell phone companies to drastically overestimate the prices that consumers will pay for various media types.
It's not that long ago that cell phone companies were proposing selling music on cell phones (not ring tones, mind you, but rather singles downloads) for between $2 and $3 a pop. Music companies are now moving towards the same model. I simply find myself amazed at the sheer ignorance of such a move (do these companies do market research? If they do, are the companies reputable?).
I've always figured that they've banked on two groups:
(1) The Young! They're stupid! They have disposable cash!
- of course, on the other hand, they have the sense to shop for the album on amazon and then rip it, or go to their local record store in their local college town.
(2) The Old! They're rich! They also have patience, and can wait to get to the album when it costs less...
Congrats to Apple for drawing the line on consistent, consumer-ready pricing for another year or two. Until the idiots in charge of licensing screw it up again..
Slashdot Mirror
Since we know patents stifle true innovation when applied to trivial hardware and software "inventions", this means that this should just slow down the pace of "improvement" by these companies. More power to patents!
Plus, you know, it's been rather hot outside. Waaayyyy outside.
You know... I can't believe I'm saying this but...
When I go home at night, after a long day of fixing this, helping unbreak that, designing this, blah blah blah... well, I'm not so sure that I wouldn't mind being a sheep as well.
I don't always want to download the latest Gentoo release and compile from scratch to surf the freaking internet. Or listen to my completely un-DRM'ed MP3 collection.
I'm a shepherd at work... but I wouldn't mind a rock-solid browser experience with my morning coffee...
Does that make me a sheep?
Looks like the verizon variant didn't last that long, either. http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2009-09/the-verizon-hub-has-been-discontinued/
With respect to non-profits, I believe that some of the other posts have done a good job of breaking down the different kinds of taxes and discussing how property taxes (not paid by non-profits) could be a good example of how tax-exempt status particularly matters. For example, consider the property holdings of some of the mainstream religions -> their accumulation of property is enabled by this.
Now, with respect to the following:
Perhaps you could elaborate. In the US, you are taxed (both corporately and individually) on net profits (gross minus costs). For more detailed information, please refer to (googled link provided):
:-)
http://taxguide.completetax.com/text/Q10_2026.asp
Labor is one of those costs. If you are a C corp, the corporate tax rate is applied after payouts of salary (and everything else), which gives the option of paying out most (if not all) of your proceeds as salary. The salary, in turn, is taxed at the individual tax rate.
Companies make profits so that they can pay some of those profits out to shareholders or expand (as you've pointed out). Regardless, tax is levied BEFORE profits, which is kinda handy for companies. As for needing profits to grow, at least for small companies, that isn't true at all. You could grow from 1 employee to 20 without making a dime. Corporate profits, while nice for the company, are in no way required for small business. Now, if you start talking about banking, lines of credit, and credit ratings of companies, maybe you'd have a point... but if you wear a hat, nobody will notice
The reason that I find this germane to the discussion at hand is the fact that true non-profits shouldn't really be holding onto capital or making a profit. Some of the other comments allude to property tax, which are levied regardless of profits; I suspect that this is the real reason behind tax-exempt status. Other types of taxes which are periodically levied (or some some countries levied WRT gross proceeds) might also be a reason.
As for:
If you operate a business, if you intend to cash out any money (e.g. use it for personal use), you are required to pay yourself, which is subject to individual taxes (in the US, anyway). As a matter of fact, MOST companies operate this way, if you're just relying on a count of businesses rather than their earnings.
This is small business in American, and, dare I say, most of these small businesses don't even bother to become C corps, they just operate via the Schedule C form for their taxes, which again, ONLY TAXES NET.
Wait, that doesn't make a great deal of sense to me.
If you are an organization taking in money, and then using that money either for charitable donations or direct charitable activity, there is no tax levied.
That, sir, is why your argument for tax-exempt status seems like a bogus argument: In the US, anyway, you only pay taxes on your net, NOT your gross, which is why I'm tired of hearing about how higher taxes destroy small businesses, when the majority of small businesses pay most (if not all) of their gross out in salary. The company pays little to no tax, and the tax is levied on the salary paid to employees, since the company is running at virtually no profit.
The same holds for religious organizations (or any organization or individual), unless you're not willing to account for your spending... that's when things get a little dicey, I suppose.
The problem that I see is this: both hulu and traditional cable / satellite have a different, not so fun problem. You're forced to choose between them.
Cable TV / Satellite plus a DVR lets you record anything, and then skip the commercials. The problem is that if you forget to record something, or are recommended to something after the fact, you really can't got get it (the on-demand offerings aren't sufficient, generally, IMHO).
Hulu lets you watch pretty much anything current (within the selection catalog, I realize), but you have to watch short ads while watching it.
In other words, you choose between a limited set of things that you remembered to record (w/o commercial interruption via DVR skipping), or you deal with hulu and short, annoying, highly repetitive interruptions (still better than TV without a DVR, though).
The real question is, how much would you pay for hulu, and would you be able to skip commercials completely for an added, premium price? I'll say this, there's no way I'd give them a dime if I had to spend ANYTIME watching commercials I couldn't skip. I already have better than that in my DVR, I'm not trading backward...
You know, I have no real idea. Wasn't thinking about it at the time... that's the secret to beating the system ;-)
I AM A LOWLY CIVIL SERVENT RESPONSIBLE FOR CLEANING UP AFTER THE GLORIOUS OPERATION 'EAGLE CLAW' AND HAVE DETERMINED THAT YOU HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY DUPED INTO GIVING $ 77, 056 USD TO NIGERIAN SCAM OFFICER. AS A RESULT OF THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT TIRELESS SEARCH OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE, I AM HAPPY TO SAY THAT WE WILL BE RETURNING ALL OF YOUR MONEY.
PLEASE FAX US ALL OF YOUR CURRENT BANK ACCOUNT AND IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS TO 01-234-419-23222 AND WE WILL IMMEDIATELY BEGIN TO PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION, AS WELL AS ADDING A $5,061 DOLLAR REWARD FEE AS REQUIRED BY THE NIGERIAN FEDERAL COURT. TO FACILITATE THE PROCESSING OF YOUR INFORMATION, PLEASE INCLUDE THE ROUTING NUMBER, ACCOUNT NUMBER, AND SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR PRIMARY BANKING ACCOUNT (FAILING TO INCLUDE THIS NUMBER WILL DISQUALIFY YOU FROM CONSIDERATION FOR THE $5,061 REWARD).
YOUR FAITHFUL CIVIL SERVANT,
MOGWAH MUBUGASHS
Hmm... let's see here..
Bad odor.... Check.
Laser beam directed INTO the brain.... uh... Check.
"Bad memories" induced.... err... Check.
And in other news... sugar tastes good.
How long has it been since you've had your well-patched system infected by something self-propagating (read: something you didn't run that you shouldn't have)?
Has anyone actually looked at what most anti-virus software does? If you look in a directory using Windows Explorer... yup, that's right, you scan every file in the directory. If there are zip files in that directory, yup, they are unzipped. If you have JAR's or WAR's... the same thing.
Don't even think about moving quickly today, you probably spend over half of your computing power on virus scanning the same stupid dll's... over and over.
Anti-virus software is a complete SCAM.
Do yourself a favor if you use anti-virus... download filemon from sysinternals, and run it constantly for a day. See how much your own virus scan slows you down. Your computer is NOT slow... your virus scan is.
Here's another one that just about killed me with McAfee... I was trying to find out why delete operations were taking so long when I was performing large clean, build, and deploy tasks in Eclipse... it takes your system certainly less than a second to delete an 80 MB WAR file in Java... however, with McAfee enabled under default scanning on-access rules, it takes me about 15 seconds to delete that file. Because it must first be scanned as a virus.
Who writes this stuff? Virus scan is for people how only use computers for reading email (and downloading the latest virus / Jessica Simpson porn) or your parents.
If you feel differently about your virus scan product, run filemon.exe for a day. You'll realize that (1) your system is bound by disk IO, not CPU and (2) your system isn't slow, your virus scan product is.
Bah!
Keep your Windows Update (or Mac-based Software Update) actually up to date, and you've got precious little to worry about.
I'm no RSS expert, and I don't spend that much time dealing with it, honestly.
However, I do spend a LOT of time dealing with XML. And many environments offer quite an elegant way of dealing with this: the catalog file.
The catalog file provides an alternative mapping between the public identifier and a local, system referenced file SO THIS SORT OF THING DOESN'T happen.
If the RSS standard is to be dependant on external doctype definitions, the RSS readers should either:
(1) Include the doctype hosted on their own system and change all of their doctype public URI's or (2) The RSS readers should include the requisite files locally, and contain a catalog that maps the public URI's to the locally deployed model.
Like I said before, I'm not so into RSS, so I'm not sure which is applicable, but certainly, I don't think that Netscape should have to host this...
Just browsing slashdot for this article, I see an ad for Privacy Crusader hosted on slashdot, which gets a less than glowing review from McAfee Site Crusader (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/privacycrusader. com).
Forget meta-moderation... all is not well in the state of Denmark...
Truth is, you really can't trust anyone.
Just a quick comment here. I don't want to get involved in the entire technology discussion involving which codec, etc. is the best here. However, it is worth noting that the science of predicting coverage (particularly coverage in densely populated urban areas featuring closely knit buildings) is particulary difficult. In the middle 90's, there were quite a few government sponsored initiatives to assist in cellular phone tracking (prior to the invasion of widespread and cheap GPS) designed to assist in cellphone tracking and locating 911 calls). I'm sure that anti-terrorism was also involved in the government sponsorship.
These methods mostly fell by the wayside with GPS availability; tracing cell phone location is dicey in multi-path (urban) environments. This underscores, however, the problem of simply predicting cell phone coverage. Add to this the complexity different methods of transmission, different cell phone models (often, the carrier is blamed for inefficent antennas on a particular cell phone models).
In summary, I'd simply say that if person X says "Cingular (or Verizon or Sprint, etc.) SUCKS!", you really don't have a good idea of WHY their coverage sucks. Maybe their building is shadowed from reception. Perhaps their cell phone (the popular model sold by Company X) sucks due to design flaws. Perhaps they dropped their cell phone and the antenna is broken.
Why can't cell phone companies produce good coverage maps? At least in urban areas, because this is dependent upon multiple factors, some of which are largely dependent on the individual.
The solution? Try before you buy. 30 day trial periods. Nothing else is liable to be workable.
Hmm... back when I was a graduate student at Penn State in the 90's, we could often see the remote sensing teams testing LIDAR (think RADAR, but with laser light). The laser was quite powerful, seemed to extend all the way up to the heavens, and could be seen for miles around.
Perhaps I'm just a bit jaded that them "city folks" (aka The New York Times) seems to think that anyone beaming a laser into the sky must want to destroy stuff.
Hrmpth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR
Hmm.. I think that's a bit of a generalization. That 0.0001 K could be very significant if it were the difference between two very small temperatures (0.0004 and 0.0003). That's why most of these calculations are made using scientic notation (in the above example 0.4 x 10^-3 and 0.3 x 10^-3). One of the many reasons for using scientific notation is that significant figures are more readily apparent (digits in your measurement that are within the measurement range of the device that you're using).
Usually, when you see this type of measurement from astronomy or high-energy physicists, it's really due to averaged measurements taken over a long period of time or over many experiments. The idea is to average out the noise until you separate the wheat (your information) from the chaff (background noise, experimental variation, etc.).
Oh wait, I thought that I was posting to the DRM group...
I'd add two comments, agreeing with your point:
(1) Harm that hasn't happened yet is NOT "less harmful". It's just more nebulous, and in the future. This of course leads to point #2.
(2) Microsoft can #$#$@ shut off your OS if they detect that you have an invalid version? WHAT IF THEY ARE WRONG? I work in professional services for a living. Many of the contracts that I work with in software development and product development include provisions that the software that is purchased by my clients (either in total as services work, in which the IP is transfered the client, or as product, in which case the client is merely buying a license) will not be time-bombed or made "not to function" in any way after the issuance of a license. This means that if a client steals the software, I'd have to resort to the courts to stop them from using it rather than just flipping a switch in my evil desert hideaway.
Here's the problem: The reason these provisions exist is to cover up MASSIVE security holes. If you work for a major pharmaceutical company and you're renegotiating your contract with Microsoft, does it become a factor that they could turn off your windows install base if negotiations don't go as planned?
Don't tell me I'm paranoid. In this line of work, we are paid to see the distant future. This is a horrible, horrible mistake.
My firm uses a product called Black Box to do some similar things in the .NET world. It detects exceptions (based on how you compile the application into your code) and allows both messaging to a host server as well as data collection for collecting data on exceptions that might occur in production environments.
AMEN!
The problem, it seems, is that Weird Al has a crappy record contract. That doesn't seem to me to be related to iTunes. Through a service like CDBaby, you can roll your own album and distribution and get significantly more than bands who want to deal with a record company.
If you get a record deal, you get all sorts of extras, like advances towards your tour (if you tour). That's a plus, and that's the type of thing that Weird Al has exchanged for his record deal. If you roll your own recording time (and it's not that much these days), you don't have to sign a record deal that gives you advances and promotion, etc.
Read what you sign... and deal with the consequences.
Hmm. Tell that to someone like RIM who has spent a great amount of time (and $) defending themselves from patent litigation where most of the patent claims have been invalidated. Another concern is pure patent warefare by companies doing nothing more than buying up ideas and sitting on them. I'm no expert in patent litigation (shouldn't more people say this, really?), but I'm concerned about approaches to patents that involve litigation after the fact. This seems to map to the classic IT scenario where fixing bugs early in the development cycle leads to lowered development costs by orders of magnitude. It just seems to me that focusing on mitigating the effects of trivial patents already issued dimishes a focus on stopping the problem in the first place. The only people that profit under patent warfare, where a bad patent has already been issued, are the lawyers arguing the details. Just my humble opinion.
oo I can feel the triple moderation boost kicking in. oo
Certainly, someone needs to reign in the patents, but won't this lead to just more and more litigation? The real problem, it seems, is that too many patents are being issued! I suppose this helps rescind them, but could lead to a clogged docket, IMHO.
Hmm... one reason that I can think of is for f-stop. I'm not intimately familiar with the latest SLR's, but the ability to preview the effects of f-stop on depth of focus is a rather big deal (which is why you need an SLR).
I'm consistently amazed at the ignorance of media companies and cell phone companies to drastically overestimate the prices that consumers will pay for various media types.
It's not that long ago that cell phone companies were proposing selling music on cell phones (not ring tones, mind you, but rather singles downloads) for between $2 and $3 a pop. Music companies are now moving towards the same model. I simply find myself amazed at the sheer ignorance of such a move (do these companies do market research? If they do, are the companies reputable?).
I've always figured that they've banked on two groups:
(1) The Young! They're stupid! They have disposable cash!
- of course, on the other hand, they have the sense to shop for the album on amazon and then rip it, or go to their local record store in their local college town.
(2) The Old! They're rich! They also have patience, and can wait to get to the album when it costs less...
Congrats to Apple for drawing the line on consistent, consumer-ready pricing for another year or two. Until the idiots in charge of licensing screw it up again..