I don't see why these various states can not simply charge VAT on all sales, even those destined for export to other states (like the EU does).
Also as long as they keep the VAT rates not too much different, there is not much incentive to buy from another state - increase in shipping cost due to longer distance should cancel out most such advantages, unless you're talking about 10 percentage point differences.
So... if I want to sell you something and you're located in the US, you say I should pay US sales tax, even though my locality (Hong Kong) doesn't have a sales tax at all?
Doesn't sound exactly fair to me. And then I'm not even contemplating the nightmare of having to charge customers taxes, based on where they are located, and then manage to pay it to the relevant overseas governments.
"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."
That's a saying typically heard in Guangdong. Didn't know Baidu is from there. I do know there are for a long time already plenty of "underground banks" (more accurately: money exchangers) that make moving money between the mainland and Hong Kong fairly easy. And that's from well before Bitcoin made it possibly even easier.
However the fact that the is quite little liquidity in bitcoin (as proven by the volatile price) means that this bitcoin channel has highly limited capacity.
This dividing in ever smaller units is not a solution, it doesn't increase the number of bitcoins in existence. It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.
This until so many bitcoins are lost and being hoarded that there is not enough liquidity left to make it a viable currency.
Considering those long lines, six wounded and one killed should be seen as a poor result for such an attack (from the attackers pov, and assuming their goal is to kill/wound as many as possible).
However it's quite interesting that it can infect not only two different OSes, but also two different BIOSes. And that researcher happened to have the exact right version of both, for the malware to infect, and managed to get infected. Possible? Yes. Plausible? Not really.
OK, re-reading the summary (which you apparently also didn't read well): this 4.1% is for Windows Phone, which is afaik pretty much a Nokia-exclusive - I can't think of any other brands that use it. So this 4% market share is for Nokia's smart phones.
Actually I'm more surprised wiht Nokia taking 4.1% of the market.
While a small market share, 4.1% of a big market still means lots of phones. And for a single manufacturer to have >4% market share is pretty impressive, considering how they messed up their existing position.
I don't believe the whole thing for that very reason. It infected both an OSX and FreeBSD machine, which in itself is quite impressive. Two pretty tough systems with low market share, versus a single much weaker target with large market share: Windows.
Then it managed to infect two totally different BIOSes - hard to imagine the OSX and BSD machine were the exact same hardware. So it can handle various BIOSes, too.
And then there must be a quite complex bit of software that can talk to the network stack (there were packets flowing) and have these packets modulated and played over the sound device. And that, too, is working on two very different architectures.
If it went 3-4 times over the past 2-3 years, then doubling since 2012 quite plausible, meaning that a doubling of zombie titles means the ratio of zombie/not zombie remains the same. So no spectacular rise of zombie titles. It may even have been a decline in zombie titles, when compared to other books.
And of course, as always sex leads the pack Just like the abundant availability of porn has done a lot for the Internet as a whole (driving faster connections, improving payment/subscription systems, etc).
More interesting: how does this compare to the overall number of self-published e-books? Afaik self-publishing as a whole is growing fast, too. If the number of self-published titles has doubled, it's no wonder zombie-titles doubled too.
Learning reading comprehension helps, too. No issues for me understanding what they meant with that headline. And I'm not even a native English speaker.
Now if it were a sentence like "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" I'd understand your problem with it.
It is not that most advertisers have much choice than to trust their ad broker. Most web sites sell all their ad space to a single broker, and can't be bothered at all selling ad space directly.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Bill Gates was one of the main coders at Microsoft in its start-up phase, the main product of the company has always been software. Steve Jobs on the other hand was staring a hardware business, and hardware has always remained their main product, though of course they also developed their own software to operate it.
There's a reason most startup co-founders are "the charming ideas guy" paired with "the tech genius".
Of course, there is a reason for that. And it's not that programmers are dull weirdo's. That one statement totally undermines anything negative he has to say about coders. The guy with charming ideas is nothing without a genius coder to implement them. And the coder indeed needs the ideas guy to suggest what he's going to code, and how it's going to look like. One can't do without the other, and so it goes in so many fields of work.
Of course there is no need to make just everyone a skilled coder. I'd like to see schools teach at least the basics of coding, so kids know the existence of the field and what it's used for, but no need for more than that, unless the kid wants it.
And for being "dull weirdo's"? Well one thing what makes a good coder is the ability to concentrate deeply and focus on single subjects for a prolonged period of time. And that's exactly the quality that makes those people "dull" (thinking of just a single subject) and "weirdo" (being able to close one off from the outside world) in the eyes of people that do not have that specific quality.
It's like saying if we take away everyone's guns, we'll solve that pesky violence problem. The gun is just the tool.
Taking away (or sabotaging) the tools can make doing things a lot harder or less efficient.
A fist fight rarely results in people dying. A gun fight routinely leaves people dead. Take away the gun and while the violence may continue, it will become a lot less deadly.
Do you guys honestly think, for one second, that you can hide from these guys if they really want you?
(...)
Just about anything else and the data will be vulnerable at some point to a legal intercept of it.
.
What the NSA is doing, is outside the scope of the judiciary. Whether legal or not I don't want to discuss here, they do not use the judiciary to get warrants and all the proper stuff.
Yes if they REALLY target YOU, there is not much hiding going on. But face it, they don't really target many people specifically. They try to get as much data as they can get their hands on, and there are plenty of often simple ways for us to make it a lot harder and more expensive for them. There is no reason to not use those options.
Encrypting data is one. Then a simple wiretap doesn't do the job any more, they need to get direct access to a server that stores your data unencrypted. Make sure such a server is out of the USA, and not managed by a US company (i.e. not the Japanese-based servers of Amazon). Those two make it a lot harder for the NSA to get their hands on your data.
That should help keeping a lot of your data out of their dragnet. If they really want to target you, and put dedicated manpower to hack your server or go via the judiciary (hte latter of course unlikely) then of course you don't stand too much of a chance. But that doesn't mean you should just let them do what they want to do. Strong encryption is cheap and easy nowadays, and not too hard to set up securely.
Americans don't care. Really. You only have to look at the reaction to scandals in Japan compared to the US.
Americans don't care being spied upon by fellow Americans, because "it's for their own good, and helps keeping us safe in the War against Terrorism".
Compare the reaction of foreign countries of the real spying by NSA to the reactions of Americans to any news that there may be a back door in Chinese-produced computer equipment, like some router recently reported on Slashdot (sorry, too lazy to look it up).
This router back door could very well have been a stupidity by the manufacturer, who forgot to remove a test setting from production software. Yet Slashdot users fell over one another trying to be the first to condemn this evil, evil company from this evil, evil country.
And you're surprised we foreigners are kinda unhappy with the wholesale wire tapping by the NSA?!
US spy agency asks Japan to help them spy on a.o. Japanese people, and several other Asian countries. Japan refuses, Americans all go "wtf, why don't they help us?! "
Now imagine: Japanese spy agency asks the US to help them spy on a.o. American people. Will the Americans give it any consideration at all or simply reject it?
Customers are investors, and investment carries risk. Sometimes it's good investors see a good chunk of their money disappear, it makes them more careful about their money. This is not exactly the proper way of losing that money, of course.
I'm actually surprised that this company hasn't gone belly-up yet. It lost US$ 460 mln - that's enough to kill most companies if it's their own capital, and if it's their customers capital, those customers would likely take their losses and take their money to another company that doesn't make this kind of capital mistakes, and actually makes them some money instead.
They can be charged for gross negligence of their company or making known-bad decisions that ruins the business, but it's really hard to prove that they should have known better and are grossly negligent (sorry I don't know the formal terms here). And as such these cases are really rare.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why these various states can not simply charge VAT on all sales, even those destined for export to other states (like the EU does).
Also as long as they keep the VAT rates not too much different, there is not much incentive to buy from another state - increase in shipping cost due to longer distance should cancel out most such advantages, unless you're talking about 10 percentage point differences.
So... if I want to sell you something and you're located in the US, you say I should pay US sales tax, even though my locality (Hong Kong) doesn't have a sales tax at all?
Doesn't sound exactly fair to me. And then I'm not even contemplating the nightmare of having to charge customers taxes, based on where they are located, and then manage to pay it to the relevant overseas governments.
"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."
That's a saying typically heard in Guangdong. Didn't know Baidu is from there. I do know there are for a long time already plenty of "underground banks" (more accurately: money exchangers) that make moving money between the mainland and Hong Kong fairly easy. And that's from well before Bitcoin made it possibly even easier.
However the fact that the is quite little liquidity in bitcoin (as proven by the volatile price) means that this bitcoin channel has highly limited capacity.
This dividing in ever smaller units is not a solution, it doesn't increase the number of bitcoins in existence. It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.
This until so many bitcoins are lost and being hoarded that there is not enough liquidity left to make it a viable currency.
Considering those long lines, six wounded and one killed should be seen as a poor result for such an attack (from the attackers pov, and assuming their goal is to kill/wound as many as possible).
Doesn't solve this issue. Unless you have people come to the airport naked and without any luggage at hand.
they're pretty high quality, with good battery life, and stand up to a beating.
That sounds like a Nokia for sure. Those phones were indestructible.
You have a point there.
However it's quite interesting that it can infect not only two different OSes, but also two different BIOSes. And that researcher happened to have the exact right version of both, for the malware to infect, and managed to get infected. Possible? Yes. Plausible? Not really.
OK, re-reading the summary (which you apparently also didn't read well): this 4.1% is for Windows Phone, which is afaik pretty much a Nokia-exclusive - I can't think of any other brands that use it. So this 4% market share is for Nokia's smart phones.
Actually I'm more surprised wiht Nokia taking 4.1% of the market.
While a small market share, 4.1% of a big market still means lots of phones. And for a single manufacturer to have >4% market share is pretty impressive, considering how they messed up their existing position.
I don't believe the whole thing for that very reason. It infected both an OSX and FreeBSD machine, which in itself is quite impressive. Two pretty tough systems with low market share, versus a single much weaker target with large market share: Windows.
Then it managed to infect two totally different BIOSes - hard to imagine the OSX and BSD machine were the exact same hardware. So it can handle various BIOSes, too.
And then there must be a quite complex bit of software that can talk to the network stack (there were packets flowing) and have these packets modulated and played over the sound device. And that, too, is working on two very different architectures.
I call it a hoax.
If it went 3-4 times over the past 2-3 years, then doubling since 2012 quite plausible, meaning that a doubling of zombie titles means the ratio of zombie/not zombie remains the same. So no spectacular rise of zombie titles. It may even have been a decline in zombie titles, when compared to other books.
And of course, as always sex leads the pack Just like the abundant availability of porn has done a lot for the Internet as a whole (driving faster connections, improving payment/subscription systems, etc).
More interesting: how does this compare to the overall number of self-published e-books? Afaik self-publishing as a whole is growing fast, too. If the number of self-published titles has doubled, it's no wonder zombie-titles doubled too.
Learning reading comprehension helps, too. No issues for me understanding what they meant with that headline. And I'm not even a native English speaker.
Now if it were a sentence like "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" I'd understand your problem with it.
It is not that most advertisers have much choice than to trust their ad broker. Most web sites sell all their ad space to a single broker, and can't be bothered at all selling ad space directly.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Bill Gates was one of the main coders at Microsoft in its start-up phase, the main product of the company has always been software. Steve Jobs on the other hand was staring a hardware business, and hardware has always remained their main product, though of course they also developed their own software to operate it.
Interestingly he mentions:
There's a reason most startup co-founders are "the charming ideas guy" paired with "the tech genius".
Of course, there is a reason for that. And it's not that programmers are dull weirdo's. That one statement totally undermines anything negative he has to say about coders. The guy with charming ideas is nothing without a genius coder to implement them. And the coder indeed needs the ideas guy to suggest what he's going to code, and how it's going to look like. One can't do without the other, and so it goes in so many fields of work.
Of course there is no need to make just everyone a skilled coder. I'd like to see schools teach at least the basics of coding, so kids know the existence of the field and what it's used for, but no need for more than that, unless the kid wants it.
And for being "dull weirdo's"? Well one thing what makes a good coder is the ability to concentrate deeply and focus on single subjects for a prolonged period of time. And that's exactly the quality that makes those people "dull" (thinking of just a single subject) and "weirdo" (being able to close one off from the outside world) in the eyes of people that do not have that specific quality.
It's like saying if we take away everyone's guns, we'll solve that pesky violence problem. The gun is just the tool.
Taking away (or sabotaging) the tools can make doing things a lot harder or less efficient.
A fist fight rarely results in people dying. A gun fight routinely leaves people dead. Take away the gun and while the violence may continue, it will become a lot less deadly.
Do you guys honestly think, for one second, that you can hide from these guys if they really want you?
(...)
Just about anything else and the data will be vulnerable at some point to a legal intercept of it.
.
What the NSA is doing, is outside the scope of the judiciary. Whether legal or not I don't want to discuss here, they do not use the judiciary to get warrants and all the proper stuff.
Yes if they REALLY target YOU, there is not much hiding going on. But face it, they don't really target many people specifically. They try to get as much data as they can get their hands on, and there are plenty of often simple ways for us to make it a lot harder and more expensive for them. There is no reason to not use those options.
Encrypting data is one. Then a simple wiretap doesn't do the job any more, they need to get direct access to a server that stores your data unencrypted. Make sure such a server is out of the USA, and not managed by a US company (i.e. not the Japanese-based servers of Amazon). Those two make it a lot harder for the NSA to get their hands on your data.
That should help keeping a lot of your data out of their dragnet. If they really want to target you, and put dedicated manpower to hack your server or go via the judiciary (hte latter of course unlikely) then of course you don't stand too much of a chance. But that doesn't mean you should just let them do what they want to do. Strong encryption is cheap and easy nowadays, and not too hard to set up securely.
Americans don't care. Really. You only have to look at the reaction to scandals in Japan compared to the US.
Americans don't care being spied upon by fellow Americans, because "it's for their own good, and helps keeping us safe in the War against Terrorism".
Compare the reaction of foreign countries of the real spying by NSA to the reactions of Americans to any news that there may be a back door in Chinese-produced computer equipment, like some router recently reported on Slashdot (sorry, too lazy to look it up).
This router back door could very well have been a stupidity by the manufacturer, who forgot to remove a test setting from production software. Yet Slashdot users fell over one another trying to be the first to condemn this evil, evil company from this evil, evil country.
And you're surprised we foreigners are kinda unhappy with the wholesale wire tapping by the NSA?!
US spy agency asks Japan to help them spy on a.o. Japanese people, and several other Asian countries. Japan refuses, Americans all go "wtf, why don't they help us?! "
Now imagine: Japanese spy agency asks the US to help them spy on a.o. American people. Will the Americans give it any consideration at all or simply reject it?
Customers are investors, and investment carries risk. Sometimes it's good investors see a good chunk of their money disappear, it makes them more careful about their money. This is not exactly the proper way of losing that money, of course.
I'm actually surprised that this company hasn't gone belly-up yet. It lost US$ 460 mln - that's enough to kill most companies if it's their own capital, and if it's their customers capital, those customers would likely take their losses and take their money to another company that doesn't make this kind of capital mistakes, and actually makes them some money instead.
I think OP used Knight Capital's software to do this highly complex calculation.
They can be charged for gross negligence of their company or making known-bad decisions that ruins the business, but it's really hard to prove that they should have known better and are grossly negligent (sorry I don't know the formal terms here). And as such these cases are really rare.
Can you use that in a URL? Or is that filtered as well?