Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Finds Grass Greener In Ireland
theodp writes "Facebook announced it has chosen tax-haven Dublin for its international HQ, but not all are buying COO Sheryl Sandberg's line about local world-class talent being the motivation behind the move. The Irish Times recently reported that Irish subsidiaries owned by US multinationals are opting to convert to unlimited liability status, concealing the financial performance of their Irish operations from public view. They include Microsoft's incredibly profitable Irish subsidiaries Round Island One and Flat Island Company, Google Ireland Holdings, and a subsidiary of Apple Computer. The conversions have occurred as US tax authorities have increased their scrutiny of international mechanisms used by American multinationals to reduce their taxes at home."
is a politician's wet dream of byzantine unfairness and vote buying
It's the Guinness. Just tastes better the closer you are to St. James's Gate.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Viol8, you've been bitten by a zombie!
Click here to transfer all your private information to a untrusted 3rd party.
Don't you know, it's important for the economy to pass it as quickly as possible. Not because the economy would stop, but because a 2 day delay meant 400+ pages of unrelated pork and complications to the tax code.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Plus, Facebook has (at least) one fundamental flaw: it assumes you WANT everyone who you're "friends" with to indiscriminately know about everyone ELSE you're "friends" with. It ignores the fact that you don't necessarily WANT your kid brother (or coworkers, or parents) reading about your wild weekend (or at least not the full details you'd share with your best and closest friends).
What's needed is a social networking site with a concept of groups as containers for acquaintances and other groups, applying permissions in the order of default-deny, groups with permission, groups denied, individuals permitted, individuals denied. THEN, when you post something, you'd be able to specify its visibility scope across those groups... possibly, even creating fake or munged entries for some groups to see in lieu of "real" entries, and NO way for acquaintances to discern which group(s) they're in, or even which groups exist at all.
Then, you could create a safe, bland (semi-)public page for (almost) everyone to see, but let the appropriate acquaintances see things appropriate to their relationship with you... and possibly even maintain one or more "parallel universes" that completely override each other for people with two or more groups of friends that should (ideally) NEVER encounter each other (parents and drinking buddies being an obvious example). Ideally, you could even set up one or more "duress" passwords that logged you in as an admin for your profile with access to only a subset of your real one, in case someone like a girlfriend or family member coerced you into logging in with them present to "prove" something. By allowing an unlimited number of duress passwords with unlimited groups and parallel universes, you'd effectively achieve plausible deniability... nobody could ever force you to reveal things, because they could never know for sure whether you were logged in with a duress password or your real one.
The sad thing is, a feature like THIS would be the perfect way to monetize something like Facebook... keeping the current model free, but charging monthly or annual fees to add more sophisticated group management and/or depth.
They already have something like this. It's called the Internet. I can have my group of Facebook friends, my self-hosted blog where people know it's me, my self-hosted blog at a different registered domain under a pseudonym where I can post my propaganda, my Flickr stream, my Google Groups persona, my Slashdot persona, and my personas at any number of other forums/communities.
So, Ireland is smarter than us in how they go about attracting corporate dollars... ... and you fault THEM for it?
Maybe if we were a little more competitive companies wouldn't bother fleeing there. Just a thought.