A sale with a 10% discount is not the same as a sale with not discount. If they have to choose between selling you something with a discount or not selling it at all they'll be happy to give you the discount, however giving a discount to something who have bought the product anyway is just bad business.
whoever thought that was a good idea deserves a special hell.
sure, lets rely on the most stolen personal object as a security measure, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, the problem here is not that it's stolen, it's that the phones are being compromised.
SMS for security was a great idea when the phones where dumb.
And to reply to your point, while it's true that phones are often stolen the fact is also immediately noticed so the SIM cards are cancelled and replaced. Compare that to for example one of those cards with a grids of number (please enter number E4...). If I took one from your wallet (and nothing else) you probably wouldn't notice until it was too late.
I'm waiting for incognito mode not only not to leave track on the computer itself but also on the remote sites I visit. How is it incognito if I connect somewhere I've been before to and you send the cookies that were already saved for that site, for example?
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
reply-all aren't the problem. The problem is the (huge amount of) idiots who insist on CC'ing every one in the first place. If someone emails with a a tiny thing and for some reason CC's my boss of course I'm going to do a reply-all, and I reserve the right to CC his boss, too. And this is the problem.
If you remove reply-all then you will force me to add everyone manually (wasting a lot of time), and most likely leave someone important behind.
Instead of removing reply-all: Prevent people from being CC'ed in the first place *unless they are needed*.
In attracting FDI, are we having the same conversation here. Take the time to read and understand what's being said before tackling your keyboard.
In general - if you want to have any serious conversation, try not being disrespectful to the person you are conversating with. Just a matter of politeness. Thanks.
Did you miss the part where FDI creates large amounts of skilled employment in Ireland? All of those workers pay taxes too.
So? We're discussing corporate taxes here. Of course workers pay taxes. They would pay them anywhere in the Union.
Oh yeah, its not like Spain's poor economic performance threatens the very existence of the Eurozone or anything.
Well, you need to see why our debt could affect other countries. All this crap began with banks lending money to people who wouldn't pay them. But these (Spanish) banks took the money from other banks (mostly German it seems) which would now have a serious problem if we didn't pay.
Our (very corrupt) gov. wants to take European money (the famous bail out) to give it to the banks so they don't default. So they're converting private debt into public debt, rather than tell banks to fuck themselves since they accepted a risk when loaning money. But no, rather than take the hit instantly they prefer to keep the ball rolling and making the problem a lot worse by taking more and more money.
Oh hey I agree. Fuck the banks first last and forever. But don't hold up Ireland as some sort of villain - the country is doing what it must to compete, with very few assets, and is doing it successfully.
How is Ireland successful?
The Dutch, French, UK and other countries have tax havens of their own, probably Spain too.
We don't that I know of. But if we did, I'd be saying the exact same thing. I have nothing against the Irish themselves, just against their tax policies and the fact that we don't have any way to counteract them.
Maybe Spain with its massive unemployment should start looking at its own house before criticising others?
No, why? Ireland is a partner of Spain, and their tax policy is extremely hurtful to all (and all other European taxes). And not only it's hurtful, it's plain stupid because it's not even Irish companies that are saving money - it's mostly American.
And of course those companies are setting there just offices, that they take elsewhere as soon as it's convenient. It's not the kind of investment you want to bet on, knowing that once they're there they won't leave.
As for the massive unemployment over here, I fail to see the relevance on this discussion. Does our unemployment hurt Ireland or someone else in Europe? Doesn't seem that way, considering that our brightest people are going to Germany, France...
But since you mention it: If our European partners are annoyed about our unemployment, debt, or whatever they should just tell our gov. "Go fuck yourself and don't ask for help until there's no a single corrupt politician in office". Really, that's what would help. Not giving a lot of money to our banks who will in turn use it to pay their debts to German banks.
The day there's an unified tax law over Europe some non-European company will step up to replace Ireland.
That's fine. But there will be import taxes and duties, same as with anything that comes from say, China.
The problem here is that Ireland is distorting tax income in other European Union countries and these countries can't do anything about it.
Say you pay now a 30% income tax. I -legally- offer you to pay just 10% over here (but you still live wherever you are, and use the infrastructures and services over there). Do you take the offer or not? If you do, then you pay 1/3 of the taxes you should pay, you still get all the benefits (at someone else's expense), and I get 1/3 of your taxes for nothing.
Just because they can do that, doesn't make it right,.
It it isn't right it should be made illegal, period. Don't blame companies for trying to minimize their taxes, we all do that using whatever legal means (deductions, etc) are made available to us.
Plus of course a US company probably doesn't care much about the effects of paying less taxes in Australia. Hell, all these IT companies are based on a state with brownouts due to financial stress:-)
No they haven't been charged with tax evasion. However, as the Australian Taxation Office has seen claims of AU$1b in payments including GST to Google through the quarterly business activity statements that every registered business has to make, there is a very large discrepancy in how much Google are paying taxwise and how much they are earning in Australia.
Well, the thing is - you can easily put your earnings in any country you want. For example, here's what Apple does for Spain: Apple Ireland sells (all) devices to Apple Spain (however its legal form is) pretty much at the same price the devices are sold to consumers. Therefore Apple Spain makes no profit - in fact it can easily be at a loss they since have to pay to employees, leases and so on. All the profit is legally produced in Ireland where the taxes are a lot lower.
Problem here is that the European Union doesn't really want to fix it. If they wanted to, the problem would be solved rather quickly.
Ireland (and a few others) are just parasite states - their tax system is based on 'let's have foreign companies here by lowering their taxes a lot' even if they just means they're fucking the European partners which whom they share a market and a lot of other things. The day there's an unified tax law over Europe these problems will cease to exist.
Why is this a bad sign?
Why should people in their mid 50's or older not be perfectly happy to stop working while still being paid?
They can be happy of course. I'm sure it's great for them. I would take that option in a heartbeat, just so I could continue doing the stuff I'm interested in.
But for the company, it means the veterans would rather be doing something else. And it implies that it's not a great place to work.
The thing is, the patent system is supposed to cover everything. Not just phones, where you needs a zillion things to get even the most basic (useful) device.
Maybe he's right and the patent system is excellent for a lot of other areas where a patent covers one specific thing and it's indeed possible to invent something really new that doesn't step on anyone else's work.
Here we tend to piss on anything that relates to USPTO, but then again we have a tendency to believe that if they let us we'd fix lots of broken things in a heartbeat because the problem here is just a lack of geeks in the relevant power areas.
I hope this is not a 'vendetta' but a sound and fair business decision.
Probably Samsung's CEO thought "there's no way we can keep a long term relationship with these assholes so we should just milk them while we can [removes Tim from speed dial and moves Larry one number up]"
I completely and totally disagree with your seperation of roles.
I'm not separating roles. I'm pointing out their need if the business is to succeed. One role doesn't mean one person. You can have one person do more than one or need more than one person to do just one.
Those three roles are not at all mutually exclusive.
If you mean in the same person, no. However the OP says he won't be giving up his day job which means that he will need to find someone else to finance the operation, and also means that he doesn't have a lot of time.
The question of whether to involve more people depends on how much time it will take to do things.
It also depends on what your abilities are. If you aren't a people person then you just need someone else do to what a people person does, or the business just won't succeed, unless you are a small eBay seller.
Unless you really want to be a one person ISP, which seems like a recipe for disaster before you even begin, find someone else to help. To me it seems like there's 3 primary roles: a) Someone who bankrolls it, b) Someone how deals with bureaucracy (licenses of all kinds), and c) Someone who at least has some technical knowledge to figure everything out.
I guess you'll hear stuff like "leave it to the ones to know to do it", etc. Fuck that. If there's an opportunity, willingness to learn, etc, go for it. Worst case scenario you will fail but probably will be the "one who knows how to do it" the next time.
This behavior is primarily to protect against ID theft. They work under the assumption that if someone performs account actions in a country foreign from their home address, it's reasonably likely they are not actually there and someone has stolen their account information.
How the fuck is asking me to send someone I don't know at all a scanned copy of a picture ID *help* protect my ID? You really have it backwards.
Paypal Europe is a Luxembourg based Bank and regulated in the EU as such.
I keep hearing this. Maybe they should be regulated like one, but they definitely don't behave any different over here than they do over the US. I have an account in both places (I'm Spanish but used to live in the US) so I know quite well.
Paypal STILL abuses all they want. Just the other day, I applied for a *debit* card in my US account. It was denied instantly (possibly because I did it via a Spanish IP address). My account is now under supervision, and they want proof of SSN (which I had already sent years ago), picture ID, and more. If not, well, funds on hold, account useless and so on.
In general, using your perfectly fine account from overseas will cause problems. Serious ones. It's not like they call you to check things. They just put everything on hold and ask for documentation you may not have with you, and even if you did you may not want to share with them.
Don't forget the background checks where they spend six months or more interviewing your family and past employers. And the random drug tests. And polygraph tests. And the credit check. And...
I hear in some places you can just show proof that you are paypal verified which has the same requirement these days.
Well, if I was netflix I would just say that the the credits were left there *intentionally*, i.e. they didn't want to remove the author's signature.
But the summary says this: "How were they caught? NetFlix failed to remove references to the pirate site in the subtitles", i.e. the clever thing to do but have been to just remove the credits and be done it with. What would we be saying if this was code instead?
Also, did they just take a transcript or a translation? Not the same thing.
Well, ONE of everything that was requested... at least. It is better than 100,000 versions of Walking Dead being stored on their servers.
There's no such thing. There's lots of local programming, and even if we were talking of nationwide stations and shows, the commercials are different for example. My guess is that messing with commercials in any way would instantly lawyers smell blood...
Can someone please tell me what market these things are aimed at (or if any of them beside Tivo *do* actually support cablecards and SDV)?
Depending on the implementation it could allow to watch US TV from abroad as long as a US buddy is willing to help a bit...
Of course if I went out of my way to organize this so I could pay to watch US TV from Spain someone would still have the balls to call me a pirate. So preemptive fuck you.
For reasonable usage you don't need to upload in real time, you can just save locally and upload as the bandwidth allows.
I'll lay dollars to donuts that it doesn't upload what you record - they just have a master server which records *everything*
Well, everything for all markets? If you record a TV show in New York, play it later and you see some West Coast network logo you are going to notice for sure...
I hear the production IT department of a big trader had been drinking (something about the bonuses, don't know if they were celebrating or trying to forget) and started to play truth or dare.
The game was interrupted when the boss arrived (what he called "first thing in the morning").
Slashdot Mirror
A sale is a sale. Who cares who buys?
A sale with a 10% discount is not the same as a sale with not discount. If they have to choose between selling you something with a discount or not selling it at all they'll be happy to give you the discount, however giving a discount to something who have bought the product anyway is just bad business.
whoever thought that was a good idea deserves a special hell.
sure, lets rely on the most stolen personal object as a security measure, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, the problem here is not that it's stolen, it's that the phones are being compromised.
SMS for security was a great idea when the phones where dumb.
And to reply to your point, while it's true that phones are often stolen the fact is also immediately noticed so the SIM cards are cancelled and replaced. Compare that to for example one of those cards with a grids of number (please enter number E4...). If I took one from your wallet (and nothing else) you probably wouldn't notice until it was too late.
I'm waiting for incognito mode not only not to leave track on the computer itself but also on the remote sites I visit. How is it incognito if I connect somewhere I've been before to and you send the cookies that were already saved for that site, for example?
:-)
So basically, fix the thing
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
reply-all aren't the problem. The problem is the (huge amount of) idiots who insist on CC'ing every one in the first place. If someone emails with a a tiny thing and for some reason CC's my boss of course I'm going to do a reply-all, and I reserve the right to CC his boss, too. And this is the problem.
If you remove reply-all then you will force me to add everyone manually (wasting a lot of time), and most likely leave someone important behind.
Instead of removing reply-all: Prevent people from being CC'ed in the first place *unless they are needed*.
In attracting FDI, are we having the same conversation here. Take the time to read and understand what's being said before tackling your keyboard.
In general - if you want to have any serious conversation, try not being disrespectful to the person you are conversating with. Just a matter of politeness. Thanks.
Did you miss the part where FDI creates large amounts of skilled employment in Ireland? All of those workers pay taxes too.
So? We're discussing corporate taxes here. Of course workers pay taxes. They would pay them anywhere in the Union.
Oh yeah, its not like Spain's poor economic performance threatens the very existence of the Eurozone or anything.
Well, you need to see why our debt could affect other countries. All this crap began with banks lending money to people who wouldn't pay them. But these (Spanish) banks took the money from other banks (mostly German it seems) which would now have a serious problem if we didn't pay.
Our (very corrupt) gov. wants to take European money (the famous bail out) to give it to the banks so they don't default. So they're converting private debt into public debt, rather than tell banks to fuck themselves since they accepted a risk when loaning money. But no, rather than take the hit instantly they prefer to keep the ball rolling and making the problem a lot worse by taking more and more money.
Oh hey I agree. Fuck the banks first last and forever. But don't hold up Ireland as some sort of villain - the country is doing what it must to compete, with very few assets, and is doing it successfully.
How is Ireland successful?
The Dutch, French, UK and other countries have tax havens of their own, probably Spain too.
We don't that I know of. But if we did, I'd be saying the exact same thing. I have nothing against the Irish themselves, just against their tax policies and the fact that we don't have any way to counteract them.
Maybe Spain with its massive unemployment should start looking at its own house before criticising others?
No, why? Ireland is a partner of Spain, and their tax policy is extremely hurtful to all (and all other European taxes). And not only it's hurtful, it's plain stupid because it's not even Irish companies that are saving money - it's mostly American.
And of course those companies are setting there just offices, that they take elsewhere as soon as it's convenient. It's not the kind of investment you want to bet on, knowing that once they're there they won't leave.
As for the massive unemployment over here, I fail to see the relevance on this discussion. Does our unemployment hurt Ireland or someone else in Europe? Doesn't seem that way, considering that our brightest people are going to Germany, France...
But since you mention it: If our European partners are annoyed about our unemployment, debt, or whatever they should just tell our gov. "Go fuck yourself and don't ask for help until there's no a single corrupt politician in office". Really, that's what would help. Not giving a lot of money to our banks who will in turn use it to pay their debts to German banks.
The day there's an unified tax law over Europe some non-European company will step up to replace Ireland.
That's fine. But there will be import taxes and duties, same as with anything that comes from say, China.
The problem here is that Ireland is distorting tax income in other European Union countries and these countries can't do anything about it.
Say you pay now a 30% income tax. I -legally- offer you to pay just 10% over here (but you still live wherever you are, and use the infrastructures and services over there). Do you take the offer or not? If you do, then you pay 1/3 of the taxes you should pay, you still get all the benefits (at someone else's expense), and I get 1/3 of your taxes for nothing.
That's what Ireland is doing.
Just because they can do that, doesn't make it right, .
It it isn't right it should be made illegal, period. Don't blame companies for trying to minimize their taxes, we all do that using whatever legal means (deductions, etc) are made available to us. :-)
Plus of course a US company probably doesn't care much about the effects of paying less taxes in Australia. Hell, all these IT companies are based on a state with brownouts due to financial stress
No they haven't been charged with tax evasion. However, as the Australian Taxation Office has seen claims of AU$1b in payments including GST to Google through the quarterly business activity statements that every registered business has to make, there is a very large discrepancy in how much Google are paying taxwise and how much they are earning in Australia.
Well, the thing is - you can easily put your earnings in any country you want. For example, here's what Apple does for Spain: Apple Ireland sells (all) devices to Apple Spain (however its legal form is) pretty much at the same price the devices are sold to consumers. Therefore Apple Spain makes no profit - in fact it can easily be at a loss they since have to pay to employees, leases and so on. All the profit is legally produced in Ireland where the taxes are a lot lower.
Problem here is that the European Union doesn't really want to fix it. If they wanted to, the problem would be solved rather quickly.
Ireland (and a few others) are just parasite states - their tax system is based on 'let's have foreign companies here by lowering their taxes a lot' even if they just means they're fucking the European partners which whom they share a market and a lot of other things. The day there's an unified tax law over Europe these problems will cease to exist.
Why is this a bad sign? Why should people in their mid 50's or older not be perfectly happy to stop working while still being paid?
They can be happy of course. I'm sure it's great for them. I would take that option in a heartbeat, just so I could continue doing the stuff I'm interested in.
But for the company, it means the veterans would rather be doing something else. And it implies that it's not a great place to work.
The thing is, the patent system is supposed to cover everything. Not just phones, where you needs a zillion things to get even the most basic (useful) device.
Maybe he's right and the patent system is excellent for a lot of other areas where a patent covers one specific thing and it's indeed possible to invent something really new that doesn't step on anyone else's work.
Here we tend to piss on anything that relates to USPTO, but then again we have a tendency to believe that if they let us we'd fix lots of broken things in a heartbeat because the problem here is just a lack of geeks in the relevant power areas.
I hope this is not a 'vendetta' but a sound and fair business decision.
Probably Samsung's CEO thought "there's no way we can keep a long term relationship with these assholes so we should just milk them while we can [removes Tim from speed dial and moves Larry one number up]"
I completely and totally disagree with your seperation of roles.
I'm not separating roles. I'm pointing out their need if the business is to succeed. One role doesn't mean one person. You can have one person do more than one or need more than one person to do just one.
Those three roles are not at all mutually exclusive.
If you mean in the same person, no. However the OP says he won't be giving up his day job which means that he will need to find someone else to finance the operation, and also means that he doesn't have a lot of time.
The question of whether to involve more people depends on how much time it will take to do things.
It also depends on what your abilities are. If you aren't a people person then you just need someone else do to what a people person does, or the business just won't succeed, unless you are a small eBay seller.
Unless you really want to be a one person ISP, which seems like a recipe for disaster before you even begin, find someone else to help. To me it seems like there's 3 primary roles: a) Someone who bankrolls it, b) Someone how deals with bureaucracy (licenses of all kinds), and c) Someone who at least has some technical knowledge to figure everything out.
:-)
I guess you'll hear stuff like "leave it to the ones to know to do it", etc. Fuck that. If there's an opportunity, willingness to learn, etc, go for it. Worst case scenario you will fail but probably will be the "one who knows how to do it" the next time.
Good luck
This behavior is primarily to protect against ID theft. They work under the assumption that if someone performs account actions in a country foreign from their home address, it's reasonably likely they are not actually there and someone has stolen their account information.
How the fuck is asking me to send someone I don't know at all a scanned copy of a picture ID *help* protect my ID? You really have it backwards.
Paypal Europe is a Luxembourg based Bank and regulated in the EU as such.
I keep hearing this. Maybe they should be regulated like one, but they definitely don't behave any different over here than they do over the US. I have an account in both places (I'm Spanish but used to live in the US) so I know quite well.
Paypal STILL abuses all they want. Just the other day, I applied for a *debit* card in my US account. It was denied instantly (possibly because I did it via a Spanish IP address). My account is now under supervision, and they want proof of SSN (which I had already sent years ago), picture ID, and more. If not, well, funds on hold, account useless and so on.
In general, using your perfectly fine account from overseas will cause problems. Serious ones. It's not like they call you to check things. They just put everything on hold and ask for documentation you may not have with you, and even if you did you may not want to share with them.
Don't forget the background checks where they spend six months or more interviewing your family and past employers. And the random drug tests. And polygraph tests. And the credit check. And...
I hear in some places you can just show proof that you are paypal verified which has the same requirement these days.
Hang them from the yardarm by their lutefisks.
Well, if I was netflix I would just say that the the credits were left there *intentionally*, i.e. they didn't want to remove the author's signature.
But the summary says this: "How were they caught? NetFlix failed to remove references to the pirate site in the subtitles", i.e. the clever thing to do but have been to just remove the credits and be done it with. What would we be saying if this was code instead?
Also, did they just take a transcript or a translation? Not the same thing.
If they are in another country, contact that government and have them arrest them. If they won't, sanctions.
You're a fucking bully.
Well, everything for all markets?
Well, ONE of everything that was requested ... at least. It is better than 100,000 versions of Walking Dead being stored on their servers.
There's no such thing. There's lots of local programming, and even if we were talking of nationwide stations and shows, the commercials are different for example. My guess is that messing with commercials in any way would instantly lawyers smell blood...
Can someone please tell me what market these things are aimed at (or if any of them beside Tivo *do* actually support cablecards and SDV)?
Depending on the implementation it could allow to watch US TV from abroad as long as a US buddy is willing to help a bit...
Of course if I went out of my way to organize this so I could pay to watch US TV from Spain someone would still have the balls to call me a pirate. So preemptive fuck you.
Most people have dreadful upload rates anyway
For reasonable usage you don't need to upload in real time, you can just save locally and upload as the bandwidth allows.
I'll lay dollars to donuts that it doesn't upload what you record - they just have a master server which records *everything*
Well, everything for all markets? If you record a TV show in New York, play it later and you see some West Coast network logo you are going to notice for sure...
I hear the production IT department of a big trader had been drinking (something about the bonuses, don't know if they were celebrating or trying to forget) and started to play truth or dare.
The game was interrupted when the boss arrived (what he called "first thing in the morning").
THE NUMBER TWENTY-THREE!!
But why stop there where could you also add 2+3 and reach a 5???? No wonder this has been classified this long!!