"big budget entertainment will increasingly have to compete with more and more free and low-cost entertainment options on the internet"
By "free and low-cost entertainment options" do you mean pirated content? I do not see non-pirated content competing effectively with big-budget movies and television the way that non-pirated textual content (blogs, sites like HN) competes effectively with newspapers and magazines.
I wasn't specifically talking about pirated content, although piracy will continue to hurt them as well. As for non-pirated content, I agree, it doesn't compete effectively, but attention is a finite resource, and it's being stretched very thin. It's a far cry from the days when people had to go to the movies just to get in an air-conditioned building during the summer.
I saw compiler flags for OSX in the source tarball [1] but to install on OSX probably requires installing from source, and if my experience with using macports to install Conkeror and uzbl is any indication, installing all of the dependencies correctly is likely to be something that requires hours of tedious effort unless one is an expert. The reason for that is that luakit (and Conkeror and probably uzbl) rely on a very large stack of "non-Mac-like" software including the GTK toolkit and the X windowing system.
If you can get around in Linux, I would test drive the software on Linux to make sure it is as useful to you as you imagine it to be before doing the work of figuring out how to install it on OSX.
I will add that the difficulty of installing relatively unpopular Linux packages on OSX is one of the biggest disadvantages of OSX for me. (The unavailability of laptops in which everything Just Works is of the biggest disadvantages of Linux for me.).
I've tentatively given up on relying on software that requires X while I am using OSX: I plan to keep on test-driving such software (on Linux), and if I decide I have got to have access to it, I will switch back to Linux.
because the authorities have no control over the supply of cash, would never try to outlaw cash, or never require banks to report the withdrawal or deposit of cash.
When I saw "the Deaths of Four People Cost the U.S. Government $6.5 Billion" I imagined the government taking 6.5 billion from taxpayers and spending it extremely inefficiently. But I am not a journalist living in New York City (if the blogger wrote the headline or an editor for the New York Times if an editor wrote the headline of the blog post)! What the headline is really talking about is the government's failing to collect death taxes that it could have collected if Congress had voted differently.
So apparently according to this journalist every time the government fails to collect X dollars that it could have collected through the legitimate operation of elections, Congressional votes, etc, that failure "costs" the government X dollars. I am having trouble escaping the implication that the headline writer believes that any money that Congress could have voted to collect rightfully belongs to the government, and if the money remains in private hands, maybe that is worth a blog post in the New York Times!
Hi, can we please stop using the phrase "death tax"? It's called estate tax. Legally. Calling it a death tax does not change any of the underlying mechanics or reasons to support/oppose it.
Death tax is a term introduced by Republicans wishing to change the public perception of estate taxes. Obviously an effective move. Apparently it is hard to get people to vote against an estate tax.
It is scary how effectively Republicans are able to manipulate language and steer political discussion. The Democrats suck pretty badly at this.
Calling it a death tax does not change any of the underlying mechanics
Yes.
or reasons to support/oppose it.
Obviously, no :-)
That's why you're calling for people to stop using this emotionally loaded and inaccurate phrase. Calling it something it's not absolutely changes the reasons to oppose it, which is why we also have phrases like "Death Panels" and "Baby Killers" to describe Canada's (obviously horrific) health care system.
Sure, but I did it because the OP did it. Also, there's a good chance that Orwell would have just as much of a problem with "estate tax" as with "death tax", "estate tax" being the choice of people with an agenda after all.
It's taxing estates, not deaths. Every other tax is named after what it taxes. Income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax.. get the picture?
And that person with an agenda was Teddy Roosevelt who implemented it almost 100 years ago, back in simpler times when the lying in politics was mostly about people's mothers' moralities and lineages.
Let's say you are running a business which sells FooWidgets and you charge $100 for them.
Then for the holidays, you decide to only sell them for $50 each.
Doesn't the $50 in savings which you are passing on to your customers also represent $50 in potential revenue that you are not collecting, since you decided to be generous?
It's not that simple; you have to take into account the customers who would not have purchased at $100 but did at $50. Failing to account for price sensitivity is a major elementary economic mistake.
I was only talking about how the metaphor is actually radically more complicated that the thing it is putatively explaining. People mostly aren't timing their deaths (though history has shown it isn't quite the zero you might expect: http://www.nber.org/papers/w8158), and government taxing simply occurs, there's no customer participation. The metaphor, by introducing those concepts, actually goes wrong.
Well, now that Assange has demonstrated the effectiveness of using internet technologies in this way, yes, Assange is probably replaceable.
If (as I suspect) the technology to do what Assange did was available 10 years ago, that is evidence that if Assange had not acted then it might have take a lot longer for someone else to do what he did.
Good point. Before concluding that things have permanently changed, maybe we should wait for some large leaks for which the leaker does not get caught.
Because using code plus data where just data can be used introduces security risks and limits what people can do with the document. I would have hoped that the industry would have learned that already from PostScript, PDF, COM and the Microsoft Office formats.
"work with someone else, with each one being able to look at the other's monitor."
This trick works even when the other person is remote: for the last 6 weeks, I have spent about 25 or 30 hours a week using VNC to watch someone 11 time zones away while he in turn watches me. While we watch each other, we spend almost no time procrastinating.
We both work from home, do not have TV sets in our homes, and do almost all of our procrastination on the internet.
Both of us would like to increase the number of people using this trick, so if you are interested in trying this way of using VNC to reduce procrastination, write to vladimir.slepnev@gmail.com.
By that logic, you will not mind if I spam your mailbox since emails are cheap and skippable.