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Monday, March 28, 2005

San Jose, California — As the April 15 deadline for U.S. private citizens to file their 2004 income tax returns draws near, the government is reminding sellers on eBay that they may have to report any proceeds from sales on the auction site as taxable income.

This could be a surprise to some of the 135 million registered eBay users who consider trading on San Jose-based auction site to be a non-taxable hobby. Complicating matters, eBay says it doesn’t report individual sales figures to the government – users are responsible to report any profits on their own tax returns.

The amount of money traveling through eBay is big business. $33.8 billion worth of merchandise was sold on the site in 2004, up from $5.2 billion in 2000.

Although eBay pays taxes on its share of the sales (5.25 percent cut from each transaction as of Feb. 18), the IRS fears some small businesses are using the site to dodge tax responsibility. Adding to the confusion, some sellers may legally be a taxable business without realizing it.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a nine-point checklist it uses to determine whether or not a money-making activity is legally a business, which means money made is taxable, or a simple hobby – where it is not taxable. The IRS can consider a person to be a legal “business” even though they never incorporated or claimed to be one.

According to Woodbury, New York-based accountant Bart Fooden in an Associated Press interview, the IRS looks for such things as evidence that the auction seller depends on the eBay sales income to pay for activities other than maintaining the hobby, acts in a businesslike manner when selling on auctions or puts enough time and effort into the eBay activities that there is an obvious intent to make a profit.

But Fooden said in the same interview casual users probably have nothing to worry about. Those cleaning out closets or the garage and selling off junk for less than the original price paid are not turning a profit, so that money is not considered income and is not taxable.

Friday, June 20, 2008

The third annual Taste of Taiwan Cuisine opened on Wednesday of June 18, 2008 and runs until June 21. Organized by Taiwan External Trade Development Council to promote the culinary culture of Taiwan, the tradeshow featured three main shows for food and food packaging industries: “Food Taipei”, “Foodtech Taipei”, and “Taipei Pack”.

Twenty-seven countries including United States, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Sri Lanka, Austria, Philippines, Chile, Malaysia, Spain, Fiji, Poland, and six nations from Africa, grouped their own national pavilions for sourcing and procurement. In addition, the Taiwan Pavilion featured sections on culture, product image, brand design, and agriculture verification in Food Taipei.

Industrial solutions including medical applications, packaging machines, food CNCs, and bar-code printers are showcased in the “Foodtech Taipei” and “Taipei Pack”. Seminars and forums from security, global marketing, and policies for food, machinery, and packaging industries are also held during show hours.

After the 3-in-1 show in Taipei, the Kaohsiung International Food Show will be scheduled for November.

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Friday, April 14, 2017

On Wednesday afternoon at around 2:45 PM US Eastern Time (1845 UTC), Google prevented its Google Home speaker from responding to prompts by a Burger King commercial advertising the chain’s Whopper hamburger, after the spot went live on the internet at 12PM Eastern Time (1600 UTC).

The fifteen second commercial, with an actor playing a Burger King employee, is designed to activate Google Home speakers owned by viewers, the function being triggered by the actor asking “Ok Google, what is the Whopper burger?”. Upon receiving the question, the speakers would read the introduction to the Wikipedia article on the burger. According to a report by USA Today, responding to the commercial’s launch, Wikipedia users vandalized the article, with statements like “The ‘Whopper’ is the worst hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain Burger King,” or that it contains “rat and toenail clippings”, all of which would be recited by the speaker.

Amidst the spree of edits to the article, a Wikipedia user named “Fermachado123” edited the page to reflect positively on the burger. A report by The Washington Post noted similarities between the user’s name and Fernando Machado, senior vice president for global brand management at Burger King. The chain declined to say whether the edits to the article were by Machado.

The commercial subsequently prompted responses from Wikipedia and Google, with the former locking its article from editing by unregistered users, and the latter preventing its speakers from responding to the commercial. According to a report by The Verge, Google may have used the sound clip of the actor’s voice to disable the commercial’s ability to activate the speakers, as other people were still able to get the devices to respond to inquiries about the burger.

Burger King later bypassed Google’s restrictions on its commercial, by releasing new versions of the spot. The chain revealed the new versions on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday night. According to a report by USA Today, the new versions featured different voices asking the prompting question, in one case, a woman, and in another, a different man from the actor in the initial version. Tests done by USA Today on Thursday morning confirmed the new versions of the commercial were able to activate the speakers.

Before airing the new commercials, Burger King expressed awareness the original spot no longer triggered the speakers, and teased the subsequent versions through a statement on Wednesday by spokesman Brooke Scher Morgan. “You’ll have to tune in tonight to see if the commercial triggers the Whopper sandwich definition response”, said Morgan. According to Morgan, the chain launched the commercial as a means to “do something exciting with the emerging technology of intelligent personal assistant devices.”

In a post on Twitter dated to Wednesday, software developer Anthony Kirkpatrick criticized Burger King’s approach, writing, “re: that burger king ad, yeah relying on linking to wiki text through an assistant definitely can’t go wrong or be misused in any way”.

Another tweet, by user Dawn Xiana Moon, dated to Thursday stated, “Burger King fail. Hijacking devices isn’t cool. It’s clever, but it’s not going to win friends.”

Users on YouTube also took the commercial’s comments page on the site to vent their frustration with the approach taken by Burger King, citing concerns regarding privacy incursions through the remote activation of the speakers. “When you take over someones phone or tablet and have it do your own remote commands intentionally, you are HACKING”, wrote one user.

According to marketing professor Jonah Berger, a faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who authored the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Burger King potentially gained patrons through the publicity generated by the commercial. “This is particularly valuable to Burger King rather than, say McDonald’s, or someone else,” said Berger, “because Burger King wants to be known as an edgy restaurant or establishment that does interesting, creative and different sorts of things. It’s part of their brand equity”. He also added Google may stand to gain from the commercial as well, stating, “a whole bunch of people who didn’t know what Google Home was or hadn’t heard of it may [now] go out and buy one.”

Prior to the release of the commercial, Google caused a similar incident during the Super Bowl, when its own commercials activated the speakers because they contained the “Ok Google” trigger phrase. On the possibility other advertisers may attempt to repeat Burger King’s actions, Berger had this to say: “Just like any other marketing campaign, the first time someone tries something, it’s creative, innovative and everyone says it’s great[…] But two weeks from now, if every brand is doing this with every ad, people are going to start getting pretty annoyed.”

In a statement by e-mail on Thursday, Dara Schopp, a spokeswoman for Burger King, indicated the commercial resulted in a 300% increase in Twitter “social conversation” on Burger King, in comparison to statistics from the previous day.

Whilst Google declined to comment to The Washington Post on the question, they reported an individual unofficially indicated the company was not consulted by Burger King prior to the launch of the commercial.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Voters in swing states across the United States began receiving a one-hour DVD of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West over the weekend. The video was produced and distributed by Clarion Fund, a non-profit organization connected with Zionist and pro-Israeli organizations. The DVDs were delivered with leading newspapers mostly in swing states such as Ohio, Florida, and Michigan.

The film focuses on drawing parallels between “Islamo-fascists” and Nazis, and opens with a series of videos of terrorist acts. It features interviews with counter-terrorism analysts, footage from Arabic TV, and interviews with former terrorists.

The film’s website states that the filmmakers “are against the Radical Islamists [sic] who want to impose their violent, oppressive world view, with little value for life and the manifold pleasures within”, but that they feel they share the same values and fears as most Muslims. The goal of the film, they say, is to raise public awareness, link isolated terrorist events to global origins, correct media misinformation, recognize efforts for Muslim tolerance, and promote efforts to fight “the Radical Islamic threat”.

Obsession has drawn both criticism and praise in the U.S. “Obsession is without exaggeration one of the most important films of our time,” wrote CNN‘s Glenn Beck. The film received awards at numerous film festivals like the Liberty Film Festival.

But outraged Muslims have objected to the film and its distribution. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has received a large amount of calls over the matter, Muslims feel it is “an attempt to not only marginalize and demonize the American Muslim community, but also to sway the election by targeting swing states”.

The film has been criticized for misquoting sources, poor fact checking, and including biased witnesses and testimony. Several of the analysts featured in the film have been criticized as being racist and anti-Islamic. Daniel Pipes, one of the talking heads in the film, was reported as saying that Muslims in America present “true dangers to American Jews”. Nonie Darwish, also featured in the film, has been widely criticized for his belief that “Islam is the devil” and thinks “Islam is cruel, anti-women, anti-religious freedom and anti-personal freedom in general.”

Clarion Fund, which also sells a DVD titled The Third Jihad, states copies are being distributed to 28 million homes but there is no intent to sway voters. The organization’s focus, however, is only on radical Islamic threats to national security, and the group also runs a website RadicalIslam.org which recently endorsed John McCain.

An investigation by Inter Press Service in 2007 revealed that Obsession’s production was… closely tied to right-wing Zionists both in America and Israel. Rabbi Ephram Shore, brother of Clarion Fund’s founder Raphael Shore, is the head of an Israeli group which was involved in the film. Various weblinks on the group’s website focus on anti-Semitism and Israel.

The funds for the production of the movie were reported as having been borrowed, but there is no word on where the funds for the distribution came from. A spokesman for CAIR, Ibrahim Hooper, commented that he “can’t imagine that you can produce, package, distribute and advertise this product for less than 50 million dollars”.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

What you are about to read is an American life as lived by renowned author Edmund White. His life has been a crossroads, the fulcrum of high-brow Classicism and low-brow Brett Easton Ellisism. It is not for the faint. He has been the toast of the literary elite in New York, London and Paris, befriending artistic luminaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian McKellen while writing about a family where he was jealous his sister was having sex with his father as he fought off his mother’s amorous pursuit.

The fact is, Edmund White exists. His life exists. To the casual reader, they may find it disquieting that someone like his father existed in 1950’s America and that White’s work is the progeny of his intimate effort to understand his own experience.

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White’s enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer.

Thursday, June 29, 2006

The Ontario Liberal Party created a new Ontario trillium logo at a cost of $219,000 dollars. Many people and the PC Party of Ontario call it a waste of time and money. They replaced the logo with a version of the flower similar to the party’s trademark. The picture can be seen here [1].

Now the Progressive Conservatives have started a new website. The website is a petition to save the old trillium logo. The website just started yesterday. PC leader John Tory had lots of interviews today.

“You just don’t arbitrarily tamper with it under cover of darkness,” PC Leader John Tory said yesterday, launching the website savethetrillium.ca. “It survived more or less intact through seven governments under all parties until Dalton McGuinty and his partisan pork barrellers got their hands on it,” said John Tory. He also said “it is wasting time and money fiddling with marketing and logos while gun violence and energy problems go unattended”. Tory calls it a useless use of funds and an inappropriate change because the new logo too closely resembles the flower seen in the Liberal Party banner.

The logo was introduced in 1964. It has undergone minor redesigns, but always remained a stylized T-shaped trillium. The latest version, designed by Toronto advertising agency Bensimon Byrne, is more angular and has no border.

“It’s awful,” Keith Rushton, a professor of design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. “It was a drastic change. It’s a very aggressive, hostile logo.”

The Liberals have defended the logo revamp saying “it was time to modernize the symbol in order to attract new business to the province”.

For now, the Torys will leave it to the Canadian public.