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The problem is that these sorts of companies don't really lift anyone out of poverty over there. They don't have the same labor standards, they exploit their workers while paying the minimum they can get away with. Many "IT workers" moved from the farm to live in city slums while destroying the environment doing so.

Sure people over there need to eat there too but they're barely eating and corporate colonization is not a good solution. This is akin to saying "hey, don't worry about us outsourcing the cotton picking, those Africans need to eat too, they were dying in Africa to snake bites and lions, as slaves they get steady meals and a house to live in"

India has one of the largest growing middle class and is seeing economic growth in all economic strata. Link

Now how much of that $287 billion was paid by the top 1% of income earners. Sure, THEY are paying way more than they receive in services.

Okay, I'll bite.

What is the correct tax rate for the rich then so that they only pay for the service they actually receive? How do you calculate this number?

If you can't make a supportable estimate then you are blowing smoke when you imply the rich are "over taxed". Note the simple existence of a progressive tax system in which those who have more pay more (the rule everywhere in the world - ours is one of least progressive) does not demonstrate this supposed "over-taxing".

Recall that without a strong state-level economic infrastructure (roads, water, power, law enforcement, educated work force, etc., etc.) it is impossible for businesses and the individuals the own them (outright or through stock) to be successful.

A nice actual study of this issue for businesses which is updated annually is the one by Ernst & Young: http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Total-state-and-local-business-taxes-March-2010/$FILE/Total-state-and-local-business-taxes-March-2010.pdf

On pg. 8 you will see that California has one of the most favorable business tax receipt vs business benefiting expenditures in the nation. If education expenses are entirely excluded then only 5 states do better than California, and if half of education costs are allocated to the business support column (educated workforce and all) then California's spending ratio is actually in businesses' FAVOR (a ratio of 0.97).

But to extend that to the entire state, including the poor who vote Democrat?? It's ridiculous.

So why is it reasonable to treat the rich as an exploited demographic group and not a state? "Ridiculous" is not an argument. The point is some states are subsdidizing the economies of other states. That is a fact.

I know some people who run their own businesses proving you wrong. My sister is one of them, with friends of hers she started an accounting business. She used to work for Ernst & Young but no longer.

Falcon

>because I can give $5 to every person I talk to on a normal day and still not spend as much as I earn in that day.

That's very nice of you. However, most of us with above average jobs are earning, after taxes, $24,682.50 per person, or $49,365 per household (How to calculate: $67,600 applied to tax cacluator, $1 added to result, divided by two).

Average spending in Canada is listed here. If you remove the following optional components, along with taxes (as we are working with tax free money):

$3,975 - Recreation
$264 - Books
$1,157 - Education
$1,475 - Vices
$258 - Betting
$1,087 - Slush
$1,505 - Gifts
$13,634 - Taxes
-------
$23,355

$67,736 (total) - $23,355 (optional + taxes) = $44,381 required to live an average lifestyle without any optional needs.

$49,365 - $44,381 = $4,984 in excess money.

$4,984 - $600 (My guesstimate of a yearly cost of owning decent home theatre equipment, a computer, iPod, etc, including TV, sofa, DVD player, receiver) = $4,384 remaining.

So, lets suggest you like to listen to music in your 8 hours of "free time" a day (which an average person should have). 8 * 365 - (52 * 2 * 8) + (52 * 2 * 12) = 5,000 hours free time a year.

$1 per song, and you only have $4,384, and just the basics to live on. Even if you got an hour of playtime out of each song (that's as many as 20 plays for some songs), you will need to find another $616 to pay for it that year. I guess you will be spending plenty of time at the library as an average person.

But hey, warp your reality as you like. I base mine on hard stats. Clearly, you base yours on some crazy idea that people earn $100k+ a year, and those that don't are broke bums, which is provably false unless you want to present the ludicrous notion almost all people are broke bums.

Music is worth about $0.10 to $0.25 a song, at max. With those sort of number, it at least brings the cost into line with already overpriced/overvalued cable TV subscriptions.

That worldwide-tax.com table sucks. For example, it suggests you'll pay up to 29% income tax in Canada, when, in fact, that's generally where most people will start. Here's a tax calculator for Canada that is accurate. Put, say, $50,000 into it and you'll see 31% taxes in our most populous Province. It also doesn't take into account that many countries don't tax based on the family income, but individual income.

With that much variance, I can't even begin to imagine how badly the corporate taxes are off...

I am somewhat aghast that this incredibly ignorant comment was modded insightful. Many, many CPA's (full disclosure, including myself) specialize in tax strategy, planning and compliance. The tax advice you can receive from a CPA is often as good as, if not better than advice you could receive from an attorney.
For today's anecdotal fact, I provide tax expertise to several law firms and their clients. The fact that these firms outsource their work should give you an indication of the relative quality of our work.

http://www.ey.com/global/content.nsf/International/Services_-_Tax
http://www.pwc.com/extweb/service.nsf/docid/efee1aa2f6b3a99485256fbe0060ff96

But then once Windows actually boots, I have to wait a half-age for the IT installed update software and the anti-virus software and the firewall software and the IT policy checker to finish loading before I can actually use the machine. And once that's done, it's time for even more loading to start up the email client and IDE so I can actually, you know, work.

Good call.

You're definitely right about some of those points. So-called "black" payrolls are still very common in Russia. Companies will often sign an official contract with an employee for, say, USD 200 per month, pay taxes on that USD 200, and then pay the employee a monthly cash "bonus" off the books of, say, USD 800.

However, this practice is getting much rarer (it was "the standard" three years ago, but is more the exception to the rule today) and is only an issue in small and some medium-sized enterprises. Most of these companies cheat on their taxes for two reasons:

1) They think they can get away with it (and most can, for a while)
2) They're cheap (and managed by people I wouldn't ever call professional businessmen)

In any substantial medium-sized or large enterprise, "white" salaries are the rule.

I'm not a professional on taxes, so I may be wrong about some of the following:

Unlike in the USA, Russians don't personally pay any of their taxes out of their own pocket. The 13% personal income tax is paid by the employer, and the employee never sees it. It's automatically deducted before salaries are distributed. Most Russians never even know that it's been paid.

Employers also pay an additional 14%-27% per employee depending on the employee's salary. The more the employee makes, the lower this percentage. As a result, in total an employer actually pays between 27% and 40% per employee. If I remember correctly, for an employee making, say, USD 800 per month, that figure works out to around 31%-32%. Corporate gains and corporate profit tax are set at 24%, though there are some credits and lower tax rates available for companies working in specific industries or locations (for example government-sponsored tech parks, etc.).

VAT is levied at 18% for most sales, and 10% or 0% for some specific types of products (medicines, newspapers, magazines, children's goods, etc.). While a sales tax of 18% may seem insane to Americans, it's the standard rate in Europe.

In general, Russian taxes are actually quite simple. However, there's a very short history of tax precedent, so companies that adopt "aggressive" tax policies are regularly hit up with back tax claims (especially the telecoms industry, due to major reforms as of late).

In short, the basic tax rules are quite simple and tax rates aren't very high. However, when companies aggressively account, there are a lot of gray areas where a court still hasn't determined exactly when tax minimization transitions into tax avoidance and ultimately tax evasion.

P.S. Ernst & Young produce great English-language materials on doing business in Russia if you're interested. I'd start with this

>$30K is more than enough to put food on the table in most areas.

It is? Okay, let's work this out:

Rent: $800 a month in most areas for something not considered a health hazard. I will not consider owning a home, as few to no banks will legitimately approve a mortgage for a $30,000 income.
Utilities: $200 a month in most areas for water, electricity, etc.
Vehicle: $500 a month for gas, repairs, cost of the vehicle, insuranceetc. All but required in the vast majority (>75%) of the US and Canada, by area, and it wouldn't surprise me if more than 50% of the people by population have to drive to work.
Savings: At $30,000, about 9% of your income should be saved for retirement.
Food: $123.76 weekly, or about $530.40 monthly for 2.57 people. This works out to $206.38 monthly for an individual. Accounting for inflation (those were 2001 numbers) and that 1 person doesn't receive the same bulk discounts on merchandise as 2.57 people, and accounting for 14% sales taxes, this would be closer to $290 monthly now.
Entertainment: $3,537 yearly for an average household in 2002. Dividing by 2.57 for one person, then accounting for inflation and taxes, this becomes about $160 monthly. This would include TV and internet charges.
Telephone: The minimum is about $30 per month nowadays.
Other: $200 monthly to replace/upgrade goods, such as furniture, computers, etc.

This brings us to $2150. Now, let us adjust the $30,000 to reflect income after taxes and to reflect the 9% dedicated to a healthy retirement fund (a necessity, since I've never seen a $30k job include retirement).

$30,000 income leaves $25,493 in your pocket. Reducing this by 9% savings leaves you with $23,198.63. Per month this is $1933.22. You are left with a net deficit of $216.78 per month if you wish to live the lifestyle of an average person. This could, of course, come from any single thing, but that reduces your lifestyle to below average. Normally, this is recovered by not saving money. The fun part about this is that that is usually the best bet, since you can usually mooch off the government once retired if you are broke (you will be since all you own is furniture, computers, and a TV) and own no home (which you won't because we made no plans for that).

In the end, you're right, it puts food on the table, but it doesn't offer a sustainable lifestyle. The deficit incurred from this pay level comes at the expense of higher taxes for everyone else. Fun how that works, isn't it?!

I think there is too much equating Quebec with the rest of Canada. Quebec has some of the highest income taxes and the highest sales taxes in all of Canada. They also happen to have the highest debt in Canada so they cut social services more than anywhere else such as health care, parks and recreation, etc.

By the way, one thing almost everyone is forgetting is that the 52% is a gross exaggeration. Many people tend to forget that there is an automatic tax deduction of approximately $8,000 on which you don't pay taxes on, which reduces your tax obligation significantly. Check this link to see how much your taxes will be in each province (includes federal taxes). Also, don't pretend as though the US does not have huge tax burdens of its own. All gifts are taxable and each state, county and city can apply it's own sales tax to all goods and services. The amount of income tax you pay in BC is very close to the amount you would pay in California for example. Oh and yes, California has sales tax on all goods as well (7.75 in Santa Clara).

As for the US healthcare system, it sucks balls. Everybody is required to pay something like 1.5% of their income towards medicare which only covers people over 65 and a few others. In BC I only paid $60/month in MSP (healthcare premiums) compared to the US where I had to pay medicare AND my private insurance premiums which came to over $350/month. Still, even though I have "great" insurance provided as part of my corporate package, it sucks. Almost no non-essential services are covered and I have to pay 20% out of pocket plus a $20 co-pay to see a doctor and $250 for emergency care. Sounds like very little huh? Wrong!! If you get shot (chances are much higher in the US that you will) or if you get a heart attack, kidney failure or anything else, you can run a bill of $16,000 within a few days. With that you are $3200+$500deductible+$250co-pay out of your own pocket, just like that. Oh and if you have an HMO (the more common type of private insurance) and the ambulance takes you to a hospital which isn't part of their network, you have to pay the whole thing yourself. Insurance doesn't cover shit. Oh and another thing: If you lose your job you lose your benefits. So you're screwed if anything happens to you after that. Also, lets say you have diabetes, require dialysis or have cancer and decide you want to switch jobs? Not so fast! Most healthcare plans have pre-existing condition clauses that exclude coverage for illnesses and treatments which you are already undergoing. So basically, unless you are a millionaire, you have to declare bankruptcy and risk being denied treatment since the costs of these procedures in most US states can be in excess of $200,000.

So yes, you have to wait for your knee surgery or hip surgery or whatever. And yes you have to pay a LITTLE bit more tax. But in Canada, you're taken care of health wise no matter what, there is a MUCH lower crime rate, the streets are cleaner, the girls are hotter (WAY hotter), the roads are better (except in quebec where they are terrible), there are more public parks, there are more public recreational centers, the schools are better, university is less expensive, etc.

"If I buy a laptop that has "AMD Sempron 3000+" written on it, I would like to *know* that that's what it is - not an 900MHz Intel Celeron. Similarly, I want the video memory to be whats advertised, etc etc etc."

Agreed, but isn't this the exact same thing:

You're being sold "foo" when in reality it's "foobar".

In my example, "foo" is Italian Made Designer Shoe, and "foobar" is Chinese Made shoe imported into Italy.

In your example, "foo" is an AMD Sempron and "foobar" is an Intel Celeron.

In both cases it's not the method of deception thats important (trademark in one, origin of goods in another), its the deception itself.

What I think they should do is focus on origin of goods laws. That way fake Italian brands gain their protection by leveraging "Geox made in Italy", but in order to do that they have to actually make their brand in Italy! Otherwise they would be "Geox" with big "Made in China" labels stuck all over their adverts & boxes!

Geox BTW is an example brand, that manuafacturs in China, but is based in Italy and tells different stories to each side. For example they tell the Chinese this story:

"With a history of more than 300 years, the Geox company ranks first in Europe and eighth in the world in terms of its sales."

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-10/1 8/content_383303.htm

Which is bollocs because Geox is a fake brand created in the early 90's:

http://www.ey.com/GLOBAL/content.nsf/International /EGC_-_Events_-_WEoY_-_2003_Participants

"Italy
Winner: Mario Moretti Polegato, President
Company: Geox International S.r.L.S.p.A.
Description: In seven years, Geox has become the leader in the Italian shoes market. Founded in the early 90's, Geox designs, manufactures, and markets a rubber soled shoe, allowing the foot to breathe. Geox is now the world leader in the casual shoe segment. "

Sorry, but what are you talking about? The US is still very much the leader here too. The microarray was developed in the US, and the two major corporations in the field (Affymetrix & Agilent) are US companies. The major tools to analyze the data (Stanford/Longhorn Array Database) are from US universities. Anyway, what on earth does stem cell research have to do with microarray technology? Stem cell research is nifty to be sure, but it's certainly not the most important line of research in molecular biology. (RNAi anyone?)

Look, I don't mean to disparage the research done in the UK, Singapore, etc - there are after all some excellent centers and labs there. But the sheer amount of money spent in US dwarfs the resources in the others. This is why many many PhD students from abroad come to the US for postdocs, faculty positions, and industry positions. For example: http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/040119/brain/ story.html/ for academia and http://www.ey.com/global/content.nsf/International /Biotechnology_Reports_2004/ for industry.

Replying to my own article: they have gone mad.

Ernst & Young note on the regulations.

I wonder how they intend enforcing this. I can't see any way to do it unless there are agreements with the other countries involved.

Ernst & Young have a regular P3P Dashboard Report[PDF] that summarizes adoption of P3P by large Web sites.

Privacy is a difficult issue; P3P has been derided because it doesn't do enough (actively negotiate or protect your privacy), because it does too much (intrusion into the browser, difficult to implement) and generally because it's too complex.

As a result, it's a compromise that noone is 100% happy about, but it does give us something to work with. Standards that try to do everything for everyone almost always fail.

The W3C is, next week, holding a workshop to look at the future of P3P; I haven't had a chance to read the position papers yet, but the fact that they're holding a workshop shows that they know there's more work to do.

It was a joke, dude. I actually did purchase a copy of Delphi 4 Professional. But then I got a new job a few years back, primarily to do Delphi development, so now I just use one of my company's licensed copies. I believe in paying for commercial software if it is useful (eg., UltraEdit), just like I believe in using free software if it fills a need (eg., Mozilla).

If you have that kind of money you should look into some of the week long classes like Ernst and Young's eXtreme Hacking. Its a week long hands on class. Its a mix of lecture and lab excercises.
I know people that have gone and they say its pretty good. The thing with DefCon/Blackhat and such people only talk about 0-day exploit of the day. The Ernst and Young class is more for corporate america and the complex IT enviornment that admins face.

According to Ernst & Young Canada Tax Calculator, marginal rates in most provinces top out at around 40-50%.

If you're in CA (California) and making $US 75K, you're paying a marginal federal rate of 27%, plus 9.3% state taxes (on everything over $30000), plus 6.3% for the SS pyramid scheme (up to $86000 and increasing by 5% per year), plus another 1.5% for medicare taxes. Works out to a marginal rate of about 45%.

If you're in .ca (Canada) and making $CAD 75K, you've stopped paying into CPP (the Canadian version of the SS pyramid scheme) and EI (unemployment insurance) after C$35K or so. The marginal rates aren't really any different.

Of course, a $CAD is worth about $0.63 US, so your C$80K is only $50K. But the cost of living is much lower.

Got investments? Canada taxes capital gains at only half the marginal rates, and has no long-term vs. short-term rate difference. (In the US, you have to hold it for a year to qualify for the 20% "long-term" federal rate, and in CA, you're still paying that 9.3% CA income tax on it. So your long-term capital gains in California are taxed at 29.3%, and your short-term trades are at 40%. In Canada, all trades are taxed at about 20%.)

GST/PST? OK, compare 15% vs. 8.25%. But how much do you spend, vs. how much do you save? The better-off you are, the less a consumption tax hits you.

And if you have kids, what do you get for your money? In the US, you pretty much need a private school and university education costs are about double. And you have to pay for your own medical insurance. In Canada, the health care for Bad Stuff (cancer, etc) sucks ass, but for 90% of the population that only has to deal with colds, flu, and the occasional broken bone, it seems pretty good.

Bottom line - The US may be tax-competitive for an individual, but California sure as fuck ain't.

This will come off as a bit biased (which it is), but I work for a company that has written some software called Hailstorm that's very good at helping you test your own security. It's especially good in situations where you have written something custom, whether it be a CGI script or some sort of server program. It succeeds where security scanners fail, because it can help you find problems that are previously unknown. To see it in action analyzing IDS systems, check out the article at SecurityFocus. Good security consulting firms are VERY expenseive, so Hailstorm may be a good choice depending on what you are really looking for.

If you want to hire a security firm, I would suggest a few different companies: Securify, a division of Kroll-O'Gara; Guardent; Ernst & Young; @Stake; and Foundstone.

Also, if you are interested in trying out Hailstorm (which, for the time being, only runs on NT 4.0/W2K, although it can test applications on any OS), shoot me an email (removing the obvious part), and I'll help you out. A trial version can be downloaded at www.ClickToSecure.com.

Well, for personal stuff, I usually hit places like secure-me.

I'm currently in a "network security" grad class (someday I'll take a class where I don't know what's going on), and the instructor, who works for Ernst & Young, seems to really know his stuff...

Of course, there's no reason to take my word for it, even though I don't work for them and my grade in the class is already more or less a lock regardless of what I do.

--

It's sometimes called beha vioural marketing. It's also called knowing your customer. Supporting this kind of marketing is a burgeoning business for a lot of web companies. The idea is that you track what happens on your site via web, db, phone logs. You segment your visitors according to criteria you make up or you discern from your logs. Aand you devise promotions and marketing programs to attract and retain the customers you really want, and help them get beyond shopping to buying. Duh.

Amazon is not alone in pursuing this strategy. And the article offers almost devoid of factual data on the particulars of Amazon's program. If you want to boycott Amazon, go ahead. They won't care - unless you spend lots of time browsing but never buying. But doing it as a result of this non-information is pretty foolish.

There was a recent post on regarding security courses. The poster was kind enough to reply back to the list with a list of responses to his question. I've included some of that list below.. my hands hurt from typing all day, so I don't feel like typing out the rest. Maybe I will tomorrow..

http://www.isc2.org/
http://www.brainbench.com/
http://www.robertgraham.com/
http://www.r00tabega.com/
http://www.sans.org/
http://www.csc.com/
http://www.ey.com
http://www.securityfocus.com/
http://astalavista.box.sk/
http://neworder.box.sk/
http://blacksun.box.sk/tutorials.html
http://www.prosofttraining.com/

Don Head
Linux Mentor

> Well unfortunately there is no one book to sum
> up breaking into systems that is along the
> lines of Applied Cryptography.

Sure there is. Hacking Exposed. Its already been mentioned in this thread, but its a great resource. I'm a security manager for a large ISP that is responsible for penetration testing as well as a bunch of other stuff, and being that its rather hard to find qualified security people for reasonable salaries, hiring a good unix/nt guy and making him read that book has proved pretty effective at making people 'think secure'

Also, the content of that book comes out of the security practice at Ernst and Young, where they offer a great 5 day course called "Extreme Hacking" (as well as courses on Incident Reponse and Computer Forensics) , taught by some of the authers of "Hacking Exposed". Its $5000, but well worth it if you don't have the white or grey hat background. I haven't taken the course (my grey hat saved me $5k ;)) but I've heard many good things about it. And compared to the rest of the "security" classes out there, this is by far the best.

Another important point to consider is that you don't neccesarily need to have black hat skills to sucessfully secure a system. It helps, but you don't need it.