Ok, why? If string theory is so different from other bits of cosmology then why is it that nobody can seemingly generate any testable predictions from it?
Although it has not been a success phenomenologically, it has led to many beautiful results in mathematics and field theory, such as Mirror Symmetry and AdS/CFT.
So you are saying it's generated some interesting math but hasn't been demonstrated to have any relationship to physical reality as we know it, even in theory? If so then it isn't science. If it cannot be falsified by experiment then it isn't science. (allowing for the fact that current technology may not yet permit testing of course) It's just pure mathematics. There is value in that but until it can be tied to observable phenomena then it's just a curiosity and possibly a false trail. So how do we prove that string theory is something more than mathematical masturbation?
These other "quantum gravity" approaches that Smolin champions are completely disconnected from any kind of real physics, and they have not led to any kind of deep mathematical insights.
Explain to me how string theory has been tied to any "real physics" in the sense that it has provided testable predictions. Even theoretically testable predictions if we don't have the technology yet. I have no dog in this fight and I'm certainly not a physicist but everything I know about string theory seems to indicate that it is purely abstract with (so far) no demonstrable relationship to anything we can measure. (Not that any of the alternatives have proven to be any better...) I could not care less whether it has led to "deep mathematical insights" which I read as mathematical proofs with no relationship to actual physics. I do care whether it will lead to a deeper understanding and better models of physics beyond the Standard Model and General Relativity.
Any law, any moral value which promotes "equality" is eugenics.
No it isn't unless it affects reproduction in a meaningful way. It is a HUGE stretch which you would have to support with actual evidence to show that something like an affirmative action program actually is a form of selective breeding. (and if you are arguing that... wow... just wow...) Furthermore whether or not you realize it you are arguing that the US Constitution is effectively a selective breeding program because it promotes equality under the law quite explicitly.
Nice tits is a desirable trait. Doesn't mean I'm practicing Eugenics when I chase the tits owner/operater.
"Nice tits" as you so quaintly put it, has evolved to be a desirable trait. It wasn't a conscious decision made by people. We don't need to practice selective breeding to promote that trait. It would be eugenics (selective breeding) if we started sterilizing people lacking that particular trait.
Eugenics practiced by society isn't bad just because the traits being bred for were wrong. It was bad because it put too much power in the hands of government, which can't be trusted.
It isn't the government that can't be trusted. It's the specific people charged with running it. A government is just an organization and organizations can demonstrably be constrained by rules. Organizations are tools and like any tool they can be used for good or bad purposes. That's why we have separation of powers and other limits on government. You run into problems when you get a person or group of people in positions of power who are determined to ignore those rules or when those rules are badly written. People claiming government can't be trusted are saying something that makes no sense. I have no problem with the fact that we have a President - it's a necessary and useful function and we've had some very good people in that job over the years. I have a HUGE problem with the idea of someone like Donald Trump specifically in that job. It's the specific person, not the role that is the fundamental problem. We constrain positions of power with laws to ensure that when we do get the inevitable douchebag in the job that we can limit the amount of damage they can do. We also know that power corrupts so we try to limit its corrosive influence. But ultimately it's about whether or not a specific person proves trustworthy in a position of power. Abraham Lincoln put it best when he said "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
This wouldn't lead to 100% logical consistency in policy, but it would surely be an improvement over the current system, don't you think?
Not necessarily. To use a simple example look at three strikes laws. They are logically consistent and simple but the knock on consequences of them are positively horrific. People get put in prison for life for stealing a pack of gum sort of lunacy. Logical consistency isn't always desirable. Sometimes we need a little heart in our laws even if it isn't perfectly rational.
Which country are you call in a theocracy? If you mean the US, I'm curious why you think it is one.
The US isn't a theocracy but there are a LOT of people in the US who would like to make it one. You know, the ones that want to teach creationism in science class, who want to institute prayer in public school, who make it illegal in numerous states for an atheist to hold public office, etc. The US isn't a theocracy but it isn't as far removed from one as many would like to believe. Anyone who proclaims that the US is a "christian nation" is one of these people who would like it to be a theocracy.
Ok, which bit is true? How do you propose to objectively prove it? How do you tell the difference between the "false" religions and the "true" one(s)?
Rhetorical questions of course. Religion by definition cannot be objectively true because it depends of belief in something which isn't falsifiable. If it cannot in principle be measured or observed (with past, existing or future technology) then it cannot be true.
(Here we begin a predictably unresolved debate about religion, rationity, what constitutes evidence, limits of human ability to reason soundly, straw men, etc.)
Nazi Germany based a lot of its policies on the treasure of science from the execution off crippled and mentally ill people who were scientifically shown to be a burden to society presently or in the future
Nazi Germany was hardly alone in experimenting with eugenics. The eugenics programs in the US preceded those in Germany and informed a lot of their decisions. By and large it was used as a means to enforce racism and related policies.
Eugenics is wrong because it presupposes, without evidence in.many cases, what a desirable or undesirable trait.
Not quite. It substitutes what a person thinks is a desirable trait (selective breeding) for what evolution would determine what is a desirable trait. Humans as it turns out are rather illogical and incompetent at determining traits that are actually best for our species. Heck we're not even very good at it for other species. Politics, religion, culture and other weird stuff tends to get mixed up in our decision making.
First stop politicizing science, then give me a call.
Science is already politicized and will be whether you like it or not. There is a role for people like Dr. Tyson to explain to the uninitiated what science means and just as important what it doesn't. Want to find out about our genetic code via embryonic stem cells? Better be ready to defend against irrational folks who think that means killing babies. Want to explore space? Better be ready to fight for funding which is a purely political battle.
Science is always political as soon as it gets used to justify policy decisions.
You don't have to trust them. They publish the protocol, people will audit it.
How do you propose to audit the implementation of the protocol? It's kind of like how it doesn't matter who votes - what matters is who counts the votes. I don't really see any way I could realistically trust Facebook to be a trusted intermediary. It doesn't matter what the protocol is if we can't be certain they are following it.
End-to-end means user-to-user. Even Facebook will not be able to read the messages.
In principle yes but do you really trust Facebook? Seems like a HUGE opportunity for man in the middle attacks here. Unless you control the encryption keys you really have no assurance that it will be secure and doing encryption and key exchange properly is actually pretty darn hard to do right.
Facebook announced Friday it would roll out optional "end to end encryption" for its Messenger application, following a trend aimed at stronger security and protection against snooping. The new feature will be known as "secret conversations" which can be read only by the sender and recipient.
That's great except that I don't actually trust Facebook so I'm not sure what this would get me. How can I be sure the message remained secure?
And "How dare the government demant FB pay its fair share..." is a rather tortured way of saying you think they should have to pay more taxes to the US for profits made overseas.
It's called sarcasm. Chuckle more. It's good for the soul. You don't have to agree with it.
But seriously, arguing that those profits were made overseas is a very murky question. I'm an accountant so I ought to know. Facebook like many other companies has set up what amounts to a legal fiction regarding where profits were actually made. They set up operations in a country where they do basically no significant labor and have minimal assets and merely run the money through that jurisdiction. Arguing that the profits were made there is to accept that legal fiction at face value. Facebook staff (mostly) isn't there, their servers (mostly) aren't there, the customers (mostly) aren't there and the advertisers (mostly) aren't there. In other circumstances we call that money laundering and that is a pretty fair description of what Facebook is doing. It might be legal but it's money laundering all the same.
There's nothing "fair" about what the ridiculously large mafia-style variable-rate kickbacks the IRS and US government is attempting to extract from enterprises and members of the public.
That's a rather tortured way of saying you don't think they should be obligated to pay taxes. Why not just come out and say it?
I say kudos to Facebook, and any company who manages to still exist in the US and provide jobs and valuable goods and services without being raped by the IRS.
So as a taxpayer I'm supposed to be ok with picking up the tax burden that Facebook is dodging because they found some sneaky loophole to get out of paying their tax bill? Maybe you're fine with that but I'm not. I don't give a shit if what they did is legal or not. We have a $17 TRILLION national debt and I think it's quite appropriate that Facebook help out with that. They enjoy the benefits of being a US corporation without the responsibilities.
This seems to be a case of Facebook going one step too far (and they deserve to be hunted down for it), however current laws mean for the most part their fair share is SFA or Zero.
I completely disagree that "fair share" equals what they are legally obligated to pay. Just because they found a clever loophole in the tax law doesn't mean what they are doing is fair or right. Just because what Facebook does complies with the law doesn't make it right. Or to use an extreme example are you arguing that things like Jim Crow were fair because they complied with the law of the day? Because that is basically what you are arguing (legal = fair = right). Sometimes the laws are poorly written but that doesn't make the law fair or compliance with the law right. All it really means is that if they are doing something legal but wrong that we should change the laws to outlaw it in the future.
tax laws need to change, lower corporate laws with harsher and stricter rules for moving assets offshore would help to fix this. It is far better to get 10% of billions than 30% of nothing.
Agreed that the tax laws need to change. Particularly the bits relating to transaction locations, locating intangible property, and probably taxation as a function of gross receipts instead of profits for multinational corporations. If a company finds it worthwhile to devote a large staff towards finding convoluted ways of minimizing their tax burden then something is clearly amiss with the tax laws.
I expect taxes will be gathered based on the location of the transacting individuals.
While it's probably the most elegant solution in theory, the challenge in that is that it runs afoul of innumerable existing tax laws and practical constraints. If I live in Ohio and I buy something from XYZ.com in Washington, the State of Washington is not allowed to tax me in Ohio and even if they were they have no mechanism to collect those taxes. It's even worse internationally because the US cannot collect taxes from a citizen of Ireland thanks to sovereignty. And for a company like Facebook they are selling things that intangible so it can be nearly impossible to know where the customer is actually located with any certainty unless the customer volunteers that information. At least with Amazon you typically have a tangible product with a source and a destination. Someone on Facebook could be located anywhere and even worse, Facebook could be located anywhere. So you can't pin down the customer location and Facebook could make it difficult to pin down the server location if they wanted to. Solving all this would require a huge rewrite of domestic and international tax law (including probably the US Constitution) plus require a huge amount of cooperation between sovereign states that to date haven't been all that cooperative.
So I agree with you in principle but I don't think you appreciate how difficult what you are proposing actually would be to implement.
Even better - regardless of where your headquarters are, if you make profit in a country with rules of law, stable government, etc. then you should pay that country's taxes on that profit.
This exactly illustrates why companies are able to get away with this crap. It is fairly trivial for an internet company to put the assets that are responsible for the profit in a different country and voila, the profit was made there and not here. If the customer in the US and the server is in France, the company is based in Ireland and the money is exchanged in Costa Rica, where was the profit made? This is not a trivial problem. Where profit is made is not as simple a concept as it seems and I'm a certified accountant so I ought to know.
The only way to solve these problems is to do two things A) big markets like the US and EU need to establish and enforce laws that within their markets force the companies to declare their profits in a way that makes it difficult to push profits to another country and B) they need to establish international trade agreements between those markets making it difficult to pull these sort of overly clever stunts by playing countries off against each other. If the US and EU governments were to cooperate on preventing these companies from playing shell games with tax money a lot of these problems would be mitigated. Even companies as big as Facebook need to do business in those places so if the governments of the US and EU start playing hardball there really is nowhere for them to run.
I just upgraded from the S4 to the S7 and it's by far the best phone I've had.
Umm, ok. Great. Sounding a little fanboi-ish but fair enough. One would hope that the new version was better than the old version or else what is the point of it?
Samsung pay is accepted 95% of the places I use it.
Really? You shop exclusively at these retailers? 1/3 of those retailers I've never even heard of much less shop at. Or are you saying that despite it being supposedly accepted at those places the transaction goes through 95% of the time you try to use it? Either way not much to get excited about.
The camera is almost perfect for a point and shoot. Its the first phone camera that is concisider good enough for photography use.
Smartphone cameras have been good enough for point and shoot photography for quite a while now. If you felt they weren't either you are a snob about your photography or you weren't paying attention. There is a reason sales of point and shoot cameras have fallen off a cliff in recent years.
I think he screwed up. 4K is actually a really shit resolution - it's onlly 8MP. What he meant to say was: try taking a 22MP file (around 5-6MB JPEG or 25-30MB RAW) at 10 fps for 20 seconds.
Same Sony A6300 camera can take 24megapixel jpegs ( 6000x4000 - about 25MB in size each) at a rate of 8-11fps. I haven't tried doing it for 20 seconds straight but it certainly can do it for a while because I've done it. It is limited by buffer size but in practice it hasn't been a problem yet. It also can capture 4K video at 100Mbps. And again there are some far more capable cameras out there. Mine is just a decent little enthusiast camera and not even particularly expensive.
Try taking 10+ pics/second in 4k on an SD. For 20 seconds. No SD can keep up with top end *current* cameras. The SD cards are THE limiting factor for what they can do right now.
I can do 4K video at 30fps on my Sony A6300 camera on an SD UHS III card. Works fine. You might want to actually check your facts. And my camera is no where near the most capable one out there.
But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).
First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?
In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards. There is no reason this thing couldn't share the same form factor and work (slowly) in slots for SD cards. They made it incompatible for no reason that benefits customers. Honestly from what I can see so far I hope it dies off quickly.
Here's what I think your argument is: It was negligent for Tesla to provide a feature that a reasonable person would foresee substantial misuse leading to death.
I think some lawyers will attempt to make an argument that closely resembles that, yes. It's pretty well trodden ground as far as product liability goes. Will be interesting to see how the inevitable lawsuits eventually play out.
I think the other part of it will be that there will be some corner cases where the system will malfunction in ways not anticipated by the engineers. Think stuff like the sensor's inability to detect problems under certain conditions. No matter how diligent the engineers were there will be some corner cases they miss and there will be lawsuits that result.
If you're the product engineer that is looking at the data that says when Autopilot is used correctly it's expected to save lives, and only adds to the accident rate if the feature is misused. That phenomenon pretty much describes every safety feature ever added to cars. ABS... great until you try to do the old fashioned pump the brakes. Air bags... awesome unless you put a child seat in the front seat.
It's not entirely clear that the autopilot is actually a safety feature, at least as implemented. It's really more like cruise control. While it might have some safety benefit in some cases, it's very much of a driver comfort aid. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad idea but you'll have a hard time proving that lives were saved by this feature but it will be screamingly obvious when people are killed by it.
Autonomous cars are going to produce some crazy case law!!
So not putting a card slot isn't something that Apple do to reduce the costs for the consumers, they do it to rape their wallets.
I don't recall saying anything about any savings being passed on to customers. Do not confuse cost to the manufacturer with the price they charge. Those are unrelated. Apple can decide to charge any price they feel appropriate from zero to infinity and anything in between. But since they aren't likely to charge less than what it costs to make the lower bound on the cost will generally be the cost to make the device. The cheaper this is the lower the minimum possible price can be.
In any case your cost argument fails to consider the cost of putting the removable storage hardware on the device itself. It's not just the cost of the SD card. You have the cost of the SD card reader, the cost of the engineering and testing to put it on the device, the cost of the warranty claims that will result, the cost of the more complex assembly, the cost of marketing and support, etc. You haven't considered any of those costs and they are very real. The device manufacturer in general will have to pass on these extra costs. Now in the case of Apple they seem to have just kept the savings but nevertheless there was a savings realized by eliminating a feature that pretty much only geeks like us on slashdot actually care about. Android device makers tend to sell their devices for lower margins but they could lower them still more by eliminating the removable storage.
Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?
How likely is that? You have been backing up your data right? If you run out of space on most devices (smartphones, etc) it's not that hard to offload some of the data to elsewhere. You're basing your thesis on a bunch of unlikely hypotheticals that are easily mitigated in other ways. I got worked up about Apple eliminating removable storage until I realized that I never once had ever removed it on any phone I had ever owned. I looked around and almost nobody else did either. So I got over it. All it was doing was adding cost and complexity without providing a real world benefit to all but a tiny handful of people. Don't get me wrong, I get that removable storage can be hugely useful for the right person in the right circumstance. But I remain unconvinced that many of the devices that have it really need it given the use cases they are applied to.
What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C?
Define "quickly". Even USB 2.0 is pretty darn fast. Also how often do you really need to get "all the data" off a device quickly? Are we still solving hypothetical problems that rarely occur in the real world?
Slashdot Mirror
But string theory is different.
Ok, why? If string theory is so different from other bits of cosmology then why is it that nobody can seemingly generate any testable predictions from it?
Although it has not been a success phenomenologically, it has led to many beautiful results in mathematics and field theory, such as Mirror Symmetry and AdS/CFT.
So you are saying it's generated some interesting math but hasn't been demonstrated to have any relationship to physical reality as we know it, even in theory? If so then it isn't science. If it cannot be falsified by experiment then it isn't science. (allowing for the fact that current technology may not yet permit testing of course) It's just pure mathematics. There is value in that but until it can be tied to observable phenomena then it's just a curiosity and possibly a false trail. So how do we prove that string theory is something more than mathematical masturbation?
These other "quantum gravity" approaches that Smolin champions are completely disconnected from any kind of real physics, and they have not led to any kind of deep mathematical insights.
Explain to me how string theory has been tied to any "real physics" in the sense that it has provided testable predictions. Even theoretically testable predictions if we don't have the technology yet. I have no dog in this fight and I'm certainly not a physicist but everything I know about string theory seems to indicate that it is purely abstract with (so far) no demonstrable relationship to anything we can measure. (Not that any of the alternatives have proven to be any better...) I could not care less whether it has led to "deep mathematical insights" which I read as mathematical proofs with no relationship to actual physics. I do care whether it will lead to a deeper understanding and better models of physics beyond the Standard Model and General Relativity.
Any law, any moral value which promotes "equality" is eugenics.
No it isn't unless it affects reproduction in a meaningful way. It is a HUGE stretch which you would have to support with actual evidence to show that something like an affirmative action program actually is a form of selective breeding. (and if you are arguing that... wow... just wow...) Furthermore whether or not you realize it you are arguing that the US Constitution is effectively a selective breeding program because it promotes equality under the law quite explicitly.
Nice tits is a desirable trait. Doesn't mean I'm practicing Eugenics when I chase the tits owner/operater.
"Nice tits" as you so quaintly put it, has evolved to be a desirable trait. It wasn't a conscious decision made by people. We don't need to practice selective breeding to promote that trait. It would be eugenics (selective breeding) if we started sterilizing people lacking that particular trait.
Eugenics practiced by society isn't bad just because the traits being bred for were wrong. It was bad because it put too much power in the hands of government, which can't be trusted.
It isn't the government that can't be trusted. It's the specific people charged with running it. A government is just an organization and organizations can demonstrably be constrained by rules. Organizations are tools and like any tool they can be used for good or bad purposes. That's why we have separation of powers and other limits on government. You run into problems when you get a person or group of people in positions of power who are determined to ignore those rules or when those rules are badly written. People claiming government can't be trusted are saying something that makes no sense. I have no problem with the fact that we have a President - it's a necessary and useful function and we've had some very good people in that job over the years. I have a HUGE problem with the idea of someone like Donald Trump specifically in that job. It's the specific person, not the role that is the fundamental problem. We constrain positions of power with laws to ensure that when we do get the inevitable douchebag in the job that we can limit the amount of damage they can do. We also know that power corrupts so we try to limit its corrosive influence. But ultimately it's about whether or not a specific person proves trustworthy in a position of power. Abraham Lincoln put it best when he said "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
This wouldn't lead to 100% logical consistency in policy, but it would surely be an improvement over the current system, don't you think?
Not necessarily. To use a simple example look at three strikes laws. They are logically consistent and simple but the knock on consequences of them are positively horrific. People get put in prison for life for stealing a pack of gum sort of lunacy. Logical consistency isn't always desirable. Sometimes we need a little heart in our laws even if it isn't perfectly rational.
Which country are you call in a theocracy? If you mean the US, I'm curious why you think it is one.
The US isn't a theocracy but there are a LOT of people in the US who would like to make it one. You know, the ones that want to teach creationism in science class, who want to institute prayer in public school, who make it illegal in numerous states for an atheist to hold public office, etc. The US isn't a theocracy but it isn't as far removed from one as many would like to believe. Anyone who proclaims that the US is a "christian nation" is one of these people who would like it to be a theocracy.
Not if some religion is true.
Ok, which bit is true? How do you propose to objectively prove it? How do you tell the difference between the "false" religions and the "true" one(s)?
Rhetorical questions of course. Religion by definition cannot be objectively true because it depends of belief in something which isn't falsifiable. If it cannot in principle be measured or observed (with past, existing or future technology) then it cannot be true.
(Here we begin a predictably unresolved debate about religion, rationity, what constitutes evidence, limits of human ability to reason soundly, straw men, etc.)
You're the one that brought it up...
Nazi Germany based a lot of its policies on the treasure of science from the execution off crippled and mentally ill people who were scientifically shown to be a burden to society presently or in the future
Nazi Germany was hardly alone in experimenting with eugenics. The eugenics programs in the US preceded those in Germany and informed a lot of their decisions. By and large it was used as a means to enforce racism and related policies.
Eugenics is wrong because it presupposes, without evidence in.many cases, what a desirable or undesirable trait.
Not quite. It substitutes what a person thinks is a desirable trait (selective breeding) for what evolution would determine what is a desirable trait. Humans as it turns out are rather illogical and incompetent at determining traits that are actually best for our species. Heck we're not even very good at it for other species. Politics, religion, culture and other weird stuff tends to get mixed up in our decision making.
First stop politicizing science, then give me a call.
Science is already politicized and will be whether you like it or not. There is a role for people like Dr. Tyson to explain to the uninitiated what science means and just as important what it doesn't. Want to find out about our genetic code via embryonic stem cells? Better be ready to defend against irrational folks who think that means killing babies. Want to explore space? Better be ready to fight for funding which is a purely political battle.
Science is always political as soon as it gets used to justify policy decisions.
You don't have to trust them. They publish the protocol, people will audit it.
How do you propose to audit the implementation of the protocol? It's kind of like how it doesn't matter who votes - what matters is who counts the votes. I don't really see any way I could realistically trust Facebook to be a trusted intermediary. It doesn't matter what the protocol is if we can't be certain they are following it.
End-to-end means user-to-user. Even Facebook will not be able to read the messages.
In principle yes but do you really trust Facebook? Seems like a HUGE opportunity for man in the middle attacks here. Unless you control the encryption keys you really have no assurance that it will be secure and doing encryption and key exchange properly is actually pretty darn hard to do right.
Facebook announced Friday it would roll out optional "end to end encryption" for its Messenger application, following a trend aimed at stronger security and protection against snooping. The new feature will be known as "secret conversations" which can be read only by the sender and recipient.
That's great except that I don't actually trust Facebook so I'm not sure what this would get me. How can I be sure the message remained secure?
And "How dare the government demant FB pay its fair share..." is a rather tortured way of saying you think they should have to pay more taxes to the US for profits made overseas.
It's called sarcasm. Chuckle more. It's good for the soul. You don't have to agree with it.
But seriously, arguing that those profits were made overseas is a very murky question. I'm an accountant so I ought to know. Facebook like many other companies has set up what amounts to a legal fiction regarding where profits were actually made. They set up operations in a country where they do basically no significant labor and have minimal assets and merely run the money through that jurisdiction. Arguing that the profits were made there is to accept that legal fiction at face value. Facebook staff (mostly) isn't there, their servers (mostly) aren't there, the customers (mostly) aren't there and the advertisers (mostly) aren't there. In other circumstances we call that money laundering and that is a pretty fair description of what Facebook is doing. It might be legal but it's money laundering all the same.
There's nothing "fair" about what the ridiculously large mafia-style variable-rate kickbacks the IRS and US government is attempting to extract from enterprises and members of the public.
That's a rather tortured way of saying you don't think they should be obligated to pay taxes. Why not just come out and say it?
I say kudos to Facebook, and any company who manages to still exist in the US and provide jobs and valuable goods and services without being raped by the IRS.
So as a taxpayer I'm supposed to be ok with picking up the tax burden that Facebook is dodging because they found some sneaky loophole to get out of paying their tax bill? Maybe you're fine with that but I'm not. I don't give a shit if what they did is legal or not. We have a $17 TRILLION national debt and I think it's quite appropriate that Facebook help out with that. They enjoy the benefits of being a US corporation without the responsibilities.
This seems to be a case of Facebook going one step too far (and they deserve to be hunted down for it), however current laws mean for the most part their fair share is SFA or Zero.
I completely disagree that "fair share" equals what they are legally obligated to pay. Just because they found a clever loophole in the tax law doesn't mean what they are doing is fair or right. Just because what Facebook does complies with the law doesn't make it right. Or to use an extreme example are you arguing that things like Jim Crow were fair because they complied with the law of the day? Because that is basically what you are arguing (legal = fair = right). Sometimes the laws are poorly written but that doesn't make the law fair or compliance with the law right. All it really means is that if they are doing something legal but wrong that we should change the laws to outlaw it in the future.
tax laws need to change, lower corporate laws with harsher and stricter rules for moving assets offshore would help to fix this. It is far better to get 10% of billions than 30% of nothing.
Agreed that the tax laws need to change. Particularly the bits relating to transaction locations, locating intangible property, and probably taxation as a function of gross receipts instead of profits for multinational corporations. If a company finds it worthwhile to devote a large staff towards finding convoluted ways of minimizing their tax burden then something is clearly amiss with the tax laws.
I expect taxes will be gathered based on the location of the transacting individuals.
While it's probably the most elegant solution in theory, the challenge in that is that it runs afoul of innumerable existing tax laws and practical constraints. If I live in Ohio and I buy something from XYZ.com in Washington, the State of Washington is not allowed to tax me in Ohio and even if they were they have no mechanism to collect those taxes. It's even worse internationally because the US cannot collect taxes from a citizen of Ireland thanks to sovereignty. And for a company like Facebook they are selling things that intangible so it can be nearly impossible to know where the customer is actually located with any certainty unless the customer volunteers that information. At least with Amazon you typically have a tangible product with a source and a destination. Someone on Facebook could be located anywhere and even worse, Facebook could be located anywhere. So you can't pin down the customer location and Facebook could make it difficult to pin down the server location if they wanted to. Solving all this would require a huge rewrite of domestic and international tax law (including probably the US Constitution) plus require a huge amount of cooperation between sovereign states that to date haven't been all that cooperative.
So I agree with you in principle but I don't think you appreciate how difficult what you are proposing actually would be to implement.
Even better - regardless of where your headquarters are, if you make profit in a country with rules of law, stable government, etc. then you should pay that country's taxes on that profit.
This exactly illustrates why companies are able to get away with this crap. It is fairly trivial for an internet company to put the assets that are responsible for the profit in a different country and voila, the profit was made there and not here. If the customer in the US and the server is in France, the company is based in Ireland and the money is exchanged in Costa Rica, where was the profit made? This is not a trivial problem. Where profit is made is not as simple a concept as it seems and I'm a certified accountant so I ought to know.
The only way to solve these problems is to do two things A) big markets like the US and EU need to establish and enforce laws that within their markets force the companies to declare their profits in a way that makes it difficult to push profits to another country and B) they need to establish international trade agreements between those markets making it difficult to pull these sort of overly clever stunts by playing countries off against each other. If the US and EU governments were to cooperate on preventing these companies from playing shell games with tax money a lot of these problems would be mitigated. Even companies as big as Facebook need to do business in those places so if the governments of the US and EU start playing hardball there really is nowhere for them to run.
I just upgraded from the S4 to the S7 and it's by far the best phone I've had.
Umm, ok. Great. Sounding a little fanboi-ish but fair enough. One would hope that the new version was better than the old version or else what is the point of it?
Samsung pay is accepted 95% of the places I use it.
Really? You shop exclusively at these retailers? 1/3 of those retailers I've never even heard of much less shop at. Or are you saying that despite it being supposedly accepted at those places the transaction goes through 95% of the time you try to use it? Either way not much to get excited about.
The camera is almost perfect for a point and shoot. Its the first phone camera that is concisider good enough for photography use.
Smartphone cameras have been good enough for point and shoot photography for quite a while now. If you felt they weren't either you are a snob about your photography or you weren't paying attention. There is a reason sales of point and shoot cameras have fallen off a cliff in recent years.
I think he screwed up. 4K is actually a really shit resolution - it's onlly 8MP. What he meant to say was: try taking a 22MP file (around 5-6MB JPEG or 25-30MB RAW) at 10 fps for 20 seconds.
Same Sony A6300 camera can take 24megapixel jpegs ( 6000x4000 - about 25MB in size each) at a rate of 8-11fps. I haven't tried doing it for 20 seconds straight but it certainly can do it for a while because I've done it. It is limited by buffer size but in practice it hasn't been a problem yet. It also can capture 4K video at 100Mbps. And again there are some far more capable cameras out there. Mine is just a decent little enthusiast camera and not even particularly expensive.
It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era.
So basically you're saying you haven't had to do it in the last decade. I think I can rest my case.
Try taking 10+ pics/second in 4k on an SD. For 20 seconds. No SD can keep up with top end *current* cameras. The SD cards are THE limiting factor for what they can do right now.
I can do 4K video at 30fps on my Sony A6300 camera on an SD UHS III card. Works fine. You might want to actually check your facts. And my camera is no where near the most capable one out there.
But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).
First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?
In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards. There is no reason this thing couldn't share the same form factor and work (slowly) in slots for SD cards. They made it incompatible for no reason that benefits customers. Honestly from what I can see so far I hope it dies off quickly.
Here's what I think your argument is: It was negligent for Tesla to provide a feature that a reasonable person would foresee substantial misuse leading to death.
I think some lawyers will attempt to make an argument that closely resembles that, yes. It's pretty well trodden ground as far as product liability goes. Will be interesting to see how the inevitable lawsuits eventually play out.
I think the other part of it will be that there will be some corner cases where the system will malfunction in ways not anticipated by the engineers. Think stuff like the sensor's inability to detect problems under certain conditions. No matter how diligent the engineers were there will be some corner cases they miss and there will be lawsuits that result.
If you're the product engineer that is looking at the data that says when Autopilot is used correctly it's expected to save lives, and only adds to the accident rate if the feature is misused. That phenomenon pretty much describes every safety feature ever added to cars. ABS... great until you try to do the old fashioned pump the brakes. Air bags... awesome unless you put a child seat in the front seat.
It's not entirely clear that the autopilot is actually a safety feature, at least as implemented. It's really more like cruise control. While it might have some safety benefit in some cases, it's very much of a driver comfort aid. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad idea but you'll have a hard time proving that lives were saved by this feature but it will be screamingly obvious when people are killed by it.
Autonomous cars are going to produce some crazy case law!!
Brother, you ain't kiddin...
So not putting a card slot isn't something that Apple do to reduce the costs for the consumers, they do it to rape their wallets.
I don't recall saying anything about any savings being passed on to customers. Do not confuse cost to the manufacturer with the price they charge. Those are unrelated. Apple can decide to charge any price they feel appropriate from zero to infinity and anything in between. But since they aren't likely to charge less than what it costs to make the lower bound on the cost will generally be the cost to make the device. The cheaper this is the lower the minimum possible price can be.
In any case your cost argument fails to consider the cost of putting the removable storage hardware on the device itself. It's not just the cost of the SD card. You have the cost of the SD card reader, the cost of the engineering and testing to put it on the device, the cost of the warranty claims that will result, the cost of the more complex assembly, the cost of marketing and support, etc. You haven't considered any of those costs and they are very real. The device manufacturer in general will have to pass on these extra costs. Now in the case of Apple they seem to have just kept the savings but nevertheless there was a savings realized by eliminating a feature that pretty much only geeks like us on slashdot actually care about. Android device makers tend to sell their devices for lower margins but they could lower them still more by eliminating the removable storage.
Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?
How likely is that? You have been backing up your data right? If you run out of space on most devices (smartphones, etc) it's not that hard to offload some of the data to elsewhere. You're basing your thesis on a bunch of unlikely hypotheticals that are easily mitigated in other ways. I got worked up about Apple eliminating removable storage until I realized that I never once had ever removed it on any phone I had ever owned. I looked around and almost nobody else did either. So I got over it. All it was doing was adding cost and complexity without providing a real world benefit to all but a tiny handful of people. Don't get me wrong, I get that removable storage can be hugely useful for the right person in the right circumstance. But I remain unconvinced that many of the devices that have it really need it given the use cases they are applied to.
What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C?
Define "quickly". Even USB 2.0 is pretty darn fast. Also how often do you really need to get "all the data" off a device quickly? Are we still solving hypothetical problems that rarely occur in the real world?