Exactly, because operating a terrorist organization or selling drugs to kids is one thing, but evading the 'bank tax' is unconscionable and must be stopped at all costs!
What bank tax? I don't pay any money for my use of banks. The reason for the monitoring of bank transactions is to catch people who are operating illegal businesses.
The best money laundering vehicle remains the USD denominated in good old $100 greenbacks.
Right, because when you show up with a briefcase full of $100 bills and say you want to buy a house, no one will have any problem with it.
Untraceable funds is exactly the problem that money laundering is intended to solve. In order to be able to spend your ill-gotten income, you need to be able to somehow make it traceable to some sort of legitimate origin. Greenbacks are no help at all. Oh, sure, you can buy groceries and beer and stuff with them easily enough, but trying to buy large-ticket items with cash raises all sorts of red flags.
Google doesn't comply with law enforcement requests. They do comply with court orders (they have no choice, really), but that's much less prone to abuse.
No, the standard defines the bool specialization, which must be space-efficient. There are some issues with std::vector, in that it behaves a bit differently from all other std::vectors, but the space-efficiency requirement is why it does that.
The only downside to C++ vs C, IMO, is the C++ learning curve. You have to learn all of both language, and how their respective constructs get translated to machine code and when to use what. However, once you've done that, and internalized it all, you can write highly efficient code at a much higher level of abstraction, making you much more productive. And you can also drop down to low-level bit-twiddling when you need to, wrapping it in a higher-level abstraction or not, as appropriate.
If you have staff with the capability and education to use C++ effectively, it's a far better choice than C. If you're struggling to find good people... stick to Java or C#.
When I realized that my array of Boolean objects in C++ was an order of magnitude more memory intensive than the bit-arrays I could create in C
Dude, std::vector<bool>. All of the iterable, dynamically-resizable, type-safe goodness of a real array type with very nearly all the efficiency (time and space) of hand management of packed bit arrays. The only downside is that you do have a little extra bookkeeping info (an int) to support the dynamic resizing. If you need to avoid even that, there's also std::bitset, which has a length fixed at compile time. Odds are that code using std::bitset will be more efficient than what you'd write, and you don't have to waste brain cycles on "keeping track of the fact that it's a pointer to a bunch of bits".
There are some reasons to prefer C over C++, but your example is decidedly not one of them. In fact, it strongly favors C++.
Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this)
I don't personally count as such a math geek, but I know some who do, and the consensus is that, no, the NSA does not. Academic cryptographers who regularly collaborate with NSA cryptographers have the general impression that while it's likely that the NSA knows a number of tricks that academic cryptographers don't, that in many areas the NSA is learning a great deal from published work. In other words, the NSA may still be ahead, but not by that much.
With that in mind, put yourself in the shoes of the NSA. Suppose that you know that Rijndael is looking likely to be chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard, and that you know how to break it. Do you shoot it down or allow it to become the standard?
If you allow it to become the standard, you have to be very, very certain that no one in the world knows the trick that you know that allows you to break it. Now, if your cryptographers are decades ahead of everyone else -- and by that I mean everyone, including the secret agencies of foreign governments as well as all of the public researchers -- then you can do that, and you'll have a powerful tool to peek into whatever gets encrypted with it. Of course, the data you most want to look at won't be encrypted with AES, but oh, well.
However, for that to make sense you have to have an extremely high degree of certainty that no one else can duplicate your work, because if you're wrong several very bad things can happen. If a foreign spy agency learns to crack AES, they can start reading the files and mail of lots and lots of US companies, which will do untold billions in damage to US economic interests. Remember that the NSA considers the economy to be a national security concern. If criminals learn to crack it, they can steal tremendous amounts of money. Again a big problem. If academic cryptographers crack it then most electronic business must cease until systems can be rebuilt with a new cipher (and that cipher has to be selected!), which will again cost a tremendous amount.
Weighing the potential damage of a weak cipher against the potential advantage of a weak cipher that no one knows is weak comes down pretty heavily against allowing US companies to use a weak cipher unless the NSA has an unbelievably huge advantage over the rest of the world in cryptanalysis and has some reason to know they really do have that much of an advantage.
So the consensus is that there's no way the NSA is that far ahead, and really no way they're ballsy enough even if they are that far ahead, to support wide dependence by US companies on a cipher they know to be weak. Ergo, they can't break AES.
Zuckerberg loses a LOT of money if there is a massive sell off.
True, but does he care? He's already pulled so much cash out that he has far more money than he can ever spend. He may care anyway, if he's the sort who's more interested in money as a way to keep score rather than for its own sake (and I suspect he is), but then again he may not. If he's more interested in having his company and running the way he wants, whatever that may be, then he's certainly in a financial position to shrug off the personal loss even if his stock gets de-listed.
Can I just say "dear Mark; Class; you make Billy boy Gates look like a choir boy. Make sure you have some good lawyers".
How the hell does he get away with that.
It's an old, and fairly common, way of setting up the voting structure of media companies. By "old", I mean 100+ years. The theory, in the case of the newspaper companies where it started, is that the company needs "editorial freedom". You wouldn't want a newspaper to be told what news to print by its biggest shareholders, so a stock voting structure that leaves control of the paper in the hands of some people who are considered to be trustworthy is a good idea.
In the context of tech companies, Google pioneered the use of the dual-class structure, as far as I know. It's possible Google wasn't really the first, but they were the first to make a big splash doing it. Part of Google's argument was that it was important that search results also have editorial freedom, that Google not be in a position to be forced by big shareholders to remove or bury search results that they don't like, or promote results they do like. Even more, Google argued that being beholden to shareholders was bad for fast-moving companies, because it forced them to focus on short-term profitability to the exclusion of all else. Google's founders wanted the freedom to ignore short-term profitability where they thought it was more important to focus on the long term, or even to focus on other issues entirely. So, for those reasons Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt have a controlling interest in Google, able to collectively outvote the rest of the shareholders combined.
In fact, they recently recognized that employee stock grants and some future desire to raise more capital by offering more stock on the public markets might at some point dilute their ownership, so they have announced a plan to do a two-for-one split, essentially, with all of the newly-created shares being non-voting. This third class of stock, which has no votes at all, will be used rather than the common one-vote-per-share stock for employee bonuses and possibly for additional public offerings. There are also some provisions in the agreement that require the founders to sell their 10-vote shares rather than others if they want to sell any stock (though the shares convert to one-vote shares when sold), in order to motivate them to retain their ownership stake if they want to retain their control. I don't know if the SEC has signed off on the plan or not, yet, but it's unlikely to be denied. Of course, the change had to pass a shareholder vote, but Larry, Sergey and Eric outvote the rest of the shareholders combined, so that was no problem.
After Google did it, many other web-focused technology companies have adopted dual-class voting structures in their IPOs, and Facebook followed suit.
So, no lawyers will be necessary. Or not for very long, anyway. The legality of this structure has been firmly established for many decades. The bottom line is that shareholders knew all of this when they decided to buy in, so the shareholders have already signed off on the structure.
You'd be surprised. One of the most pleasant discoveries I made when I joined Google (at age 41) was that I work with a lot of guys with gray hair. There are a fair number of kids straight out of school, but out of my 50-person extended team, there are at least a dozen of us in our 40s, a handful in their 50s and a couple of people in their 60s. The median age is probably in the late 30s.
What is kind of odd is that most of the "senior" engineers in the company are people who joined the company early when it only hired straight out of school, nearly all of the senior technical people I work with are in their 30s. Further, since all engineering managers at Google are former engineers, nearly all of them are young as well. In fact, if you look up my management chain, I'm older than my manager, who is older than his manager, who may be older than her manager. I believe I'm older than every person above me, actually, including Larry Page. But nobody cares; Google is as close to a pure meritocracy as I've ever seen.
This is mere marketroid speak for life insurance.
My company, in the finanacial sector, subsidizes almost-free life insurance (~$20/month) that pays out 5x my salary - which is more or less 50% over tens years.
Google does that, too. This survivor salary benefit is on top of that, at no additional cost.
This is basically what Google is doing with term life insurance, except that the $20 per month they charge sounds rather stingy in comparison
What $20 per month? There is no employee cost for the survivor benefit discussed in the article. Google also offers traditional life insurance, which is fully paid by the company in some amount and can be increased with an employee contribution, and it's quite cheap compared to other term life policies I've looked at.
+1 for changing it up. Get a standing desk and a tall chair (or a motorized desk that you can raise and lower; that's what I have) and switch back and forth regularly, plus take occasional walks, and if you're really working long hours maybe even occasionally go find somewhere to lie down and take a nap. I'm a bit spoiled because I have a small gym just a few yards from my desk, including showers, and a nap room with couches, so I can really do a wide variety of things to keep going if I need to.
Of course, if you have to work long hours with any kind of frequency, I strongly suggest you find a new job so you can "change it up" by going home at a reasonable hour.
It's pretty obvious Microsoft intends to emulate Apple
Not very well. Have you ever heard Apple discussing the next version of their product before the current version ships? No, Apple is much too smart to do that. Every new Apple product is the greatest thing ever and all focus is on that greatness and how everyone needs to get that greatness now. Even as the last product ages and it becomes clear to everyone that Apple must be getting close to releasing the next version, they keep it mum until they can announce it with huge fanfare as the new greatest thing ever, and start shipping it immediately. Further, they carefully hold that announcement until inventory of the previous model is depleted so they're not left holding unsaleable units.
I know that's not what you were referring to, but talking about Surface 2 right now is a bonehead move that Apple wouldn't have made.
Hmm let me think - because different applications are for different purposes and therefore one size fits all (you tell the browser running all those apps the ONE configuration that has to fit them all) is not the greatest idea on earth?
Nothing says the browser has to use the same settings for all applications. Configurations per-site are perfectly feasible.
the reason stated (only about an hour ago)? "security". it's "not secure" to give information to web browsers, because people *might* write applications that abuse that information.
Makes sense to me.
the fact that a UI popup could be made which says "do you wish to give this web site access to the list of audio devices?" then "do you wish to give this web site access to audio device N" were completely ignored.
Why would you want to put this into the web site? If the browser is doing the selection, put the device selection in the browser configuration. Done. Users can pick what they want, web sites don't gain any visibility into what user hardware looks like and users don't have the crappy user experience of having every web site implement the device selection in their own unique (and, usually, uniquely brain-dead) way. Of course, if users really like being asked what devices to use every time, there's no reason the browser can't implement that, too, or a browser extension.
The other arguments about the advantages of Microsoft's format-negotiation protocol over WebRTC's less-flexible may have merit (though the counter-arguments that format negotiation isn't useful without widely-standardized formats also has merit), but your argument is just silly. There are security issues here, and there's nothing a web site could do with respect to device selection that the browser couldn't do just as well -- or better.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, because operating a terrorist organization or selling drugs to kids is one thing, but evading the 'bank tax' is unconscionable and must be stopped at all costs!
What bank tax? I don't pay any money for my use of banks. The reason for the monitoring of bank transactions is to catch people who are operating illegal businesses.
And yes, folks have been working on this. It's all up on the G+.
What G+ page?
The best money laundering vehicle remains the USD denominated in good old $100 greenbacks.
Right, because when you show up with a briefcase full of $100 bills and say you want to buy a house, no one will have any problem with it.
Untraceable funds is exactly the problem that money laundering is intended to solve. In order to be able to spend your ill-gotten income, you need to be able to somehow make it traceable to some sort of legitimate origin. Greenbacks are no help at all. Oh, sure, you can buy groceries and beer and stuff with them easily enough, but trying to buy large-ticket items with cash raises all sorts of red flags.
Google doesn't comply with law enforcement requests. They do comply with court orders (they have no choice, really), but that's much less prone to abuse.
No, the standard defines the bool specialization, which must be space-efficient. There are some issues with std::vector, in that it behaves a bit differently from all other std::vectors, but the space-efficiency requirement is why it does that.
+1
The only downside to C++ vs C, IMO, is the C++ learning curve. You have to learn all of both language, and how their respective constructs get translated to machine code and when to use what. However, once you've done that, and internalized it all, you can write highly efficient code at a much higher level of abstraction, making you much more productive. And you can also drop down to low-level bit-twiddling when you need to, wrapping it in a higher-level abstraction or not, as appropriate.
If you have staff with the capability and education to use C++ effectively, it's a far better choice than C. If you're struggling to find good people... stick to Java or C#.
When I realized that my array of Boolean objects in C++ was an order of magnitude more memory intensive than the bit-arrays I could create in C
Dude, std::vector<bool>. All of the iterable, dynamically-resizable, type-safe goodness of a real array type with very nearly all the efficiency (time and space) of hand management of packed bit arrays. The only downside is that you do have a little extra bookkeeping info (an int) to support the dynamic resizing. If you need to avoid even that, there's also std::bitset, which has a length fixed at compile time. Odds are that code using std::bitset will be more efficient than what you'd write, and you don't have to waste brain cycles on "keeping track of the fact that it's a pointer to a bunch of bits".
There are some reasons to prefer C over C++, but your example is decidedly not one of them. In fact, it strongly favors C++.
An imminently logical choice.
Is that a choice that's just about to become logical?
Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this)
I don't personally count as such a math geek, but I know some who do, and the consensus is that, no, the NSA does not. Academic cryptographers who regularly collaborate with NSA cryptographers have the general impression that while it's likely that the NSA knows a number of tricks that academic cryptographers don't, that in many areas the NSA is learning a great deal from published work. In other words, the NSA may still be ahead, but not by that much.
With that in mind, put yourself in the shoes of the NSA. Suppose that you know that Rijndael is looking likely to be chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard, and that you know how to break it. Do you shoot it down or allow it to become the standard?
If you allow it to become the standard, you have to be very, very certain that no one in the world knows the trick that you know that allows you to break it. Now, if your cryptographers are decades ahead of everyone else -- and by that I mean everyone, including the secret agencies of foreign governments as well as all of the public researchers -- then you can do that, and you'll have a powerful tool to peek into whatever gets encrypted with it. Of course, the data you most want to look at won't be encrypted with AES, but oh, well.
However, for that to make sense you have to have an extremely high degree of certainty that no one else can duplicate your work, because if you're wrong several very bad things can happen. If a foreign spy agency learns to crack AES, they can start reading the files and mail of lots and lots of US companies, which will do untold billions in damage to US economic interests. Remember that the NSA considers the economy to be a national security concern. If criminals learn to crack it, they can steal tremendous amounts of money. Again a big problem. If academic cryptographers crack it then most electronic business must cease until systems can be rebuilt with a new cipher (and that cipher has to be selected!), which will again cost a tremendous amount.
Weighing the potential damage of a weak cipher against the potential advantage of a weak cipher that no one knows is weak comes down pretty heavily against allowing US companies to use a weak cipher unless the NSA has an unbelievably huge advantage over the rest of the world in cryptanalysis and has some reason to know they really do have that much of an advantage.
So the consensus is that there's no way the NSA is that far ahead, and really no way they're ballsy enough even if they are that far ahead, to support wide dependence by US companies on a cipher they know to be weak. Ergo, they can't break AES.
Zuckerberg loses a LOT of money if there is a massive sell off.
True, but does he care? He's already pulled so much cash out that he has far more money than he can ever spend. He may care anyway, if he's the sort who's more interested in money as a way to keep score rather than for its own sake (and I suspect he is), but then again he may not. If he's more interested in having his company and running the way he wants, whatever that may be, then he's certainly in a financial position to shrug off the personal loss even if his stock gets de-listed.
Can I just say "dear Mark; Class; you make Billy boy Gates look like a choir boy. Make sure you have some good lawyers".
How the hell does he get away with that.
It's an old, and fairly common, way of setting up the voting structure of media companies. By "old", I mean 100+ years. The theory, in the case of the newspaper companies where it started, is that the company needs "editorial freedom". You wouldn't want a newspaper to be told what news to print by its biggest shareholders, so a stock voting structure that leaves control of the paper in the hands of some people who are considered to be trustworthy is a good idea.
In the context of tech companies, Google pioneered the use of the dual-class structure, as far as I know. It's possible Google wasn't really the first, but they were the first to make a big splash doing it. Part of Google's argument was that it was important that search results also have editorial freedom, that Google not be in a position to be forced by big shareholders to remove or bury search results that they don't like, or promote results they do like. Even more, Google argued that being beholden to shareholders was bad for fast-moving companies, because it forced them to focus on short-term profitability to the exclusion of all else. Google's founders wanted the freedom to ignore short-term profitability where they thought it was more important to focus on the long term, or even to focus on other issues entirely. So, for those reasons Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt have a controlling interest in Google, able to collectively outvote the rest of the shareholders combined.
In fact, they recently recognized that employee stock grants and some future desire to raise more capital by offering more stock on the public markets might at some point dilute their ownership, so they have announced a plan to do a two-for-one split, essentially, with all of the newly-created shares being non-voting. This third class of stock, which has no votes at all, will be used rather than the common one-vote-per-share stock for employee bonuses and possibly for additional public offerings. There are also some provisions in the agreement that require the founders to sell their 10-vote shares rather than others if they want to sell any stock (though the shares convert to one-vote shares when sold), in order to motivate them to retain their ownership stake if they want to retain their control. I don't know if the SEC has signed off on the plan or not, yet, but it's unlikely to be denied. Of course, the change had to pass a shareholder vote, but Larry, Sergey and Eric outvote the rest of the shareholders combined, so that was no problem.
After Google did it, many other web-focused technology companies have adopted dual-class voting structures in their IPOs, and Facebook followed suit.
So, no lawyers will be necessary. Or not for very long, anyway. The legality of this structure has been firmly established for many decades. The bottom line is that shareholders knew all of this when they decided to buy in, so the shareholders have already signed off on the structure.
Eventually the shareholders will hold the board's feet to the fire
How will they do that? Zuckerberg outvotes them all, thanks to the dual-class stock structure.
You'd be surprised. One of the most pleasant discoveries I made when I joined Google (at age 41) was that I work with a lot of guys with gray hair. There are a fair number of kids straight out of school, but out of my 50-person extended team, there are at least a dozen of us in our 40s, a handful in their 50s and a couple of people in their 60s. The median age is probably in the late 30s.
What is kind of odd is that most of the "senior" engineers in the company are people who joined the company early when it only hired straight out of school, nearly all of the senior technical people I work with are in their 30s. Further, since all engineering managers at Google are former engineers, nearly all of them are young as well. In fact, if you look up my management chain, I'm older than my manager, who is older than his manager, who may be older than her manager. I believe I'm older than every person above me, actually, including Larry Page. But nobody cares; Google is as close to a pure meritocracy as I've ever seen.
Except that this benefit is in addition to the normal company-paid life insurance policy.
This is mere marketroid speak for life insurance. My company, in the finanacial sector, subsidizes almost-free life insurance (~$20/month) that pays out 5x my salary - which is more or less 50% over tens years.
Google does that, too. This survivor salary benefit is on top of that, at no additional cost.
This is basically what Google is doing with term life insurance, except that the $20 per month they charge sounds rather stingy in comparison
What $20 per month? There is no employee cost for the survivor benefit discussed in the article. Google also offers traditional life insurance, which is fully paid by the company in some amount and can be increased with an employee contribution, and it's quite cheap compared to other term life policies I've looked at.
THIS response is not even worth a response (I see the contradiction in my behavior - it is intended).
No contradiction -- to make a real response you have to say something. If you have something to say, spit it out.
+1 for changing it up. Get a standing desk and a tall chair (or a motorized desk that you can raise and lower; that's what I have) and switch back and forth regularly, plus take occasional walks, and if you're really working long hours maybe even occasionally go find somewhere to lie down and take a nap. I'm a bit spoiled because I have a small gym just a few yards from my desk, including showers, and a nap room with couches, so I can really do a wide variety of things to keep going if I need to.
Of course, if you have to work long hours with any kind of frequency, I strongly suggest you find a new job so you can "change it up" by going home at a reasonable hour.
It's pretty obvious Microsoft intends to emulate Apple
Not very well. Have you ever heard Apple discussing the next version of their product before the current version ships? No, Apple is much too smart to do that. Every new Apple product is the greatest thing ever and all focus is on that greatness and how everyone needs to get that greatness now. Even as the last product ages and it becomes clear to everyone that Apple must be getting close to releasing the next version, they keep it mum until they can announce it with huge fanfare as the new greatest thing ever, and start shipping it immediately. Further, they carefully hold that announcement until inventory of the previous model is depleted so they're not left holding unsaleable units.
I know that's not what you were referring to, but talking about Surface 2 right now is a bonehead move that Apple wouldn't have made.
Broadest will be measured by which protocol is used to implement Skype first.
Ah, so your definition of best is "that which Microsoft does". That's certainly simple and unambiguous.
Hmm let me think - because different applications are for different purposes and therefore one size fits all (you tell the browser running all those apps the ONE configuration that has to fit them all) is not the greatest idea on earth?
Nothing says the browser has to use the same settings for all applications. Configurations per-site are perfectly feasible.
You might have to double-check on that, it is Googles primary source of income.
Nonsense. Google's primary source of income is AdWords, which does not involve giving information to any third party.
the reason stated (only about an hour ago)? "security". it's "not secure" to give information to web browsers, because people *might* write applications that abuse that information.
Makes sense to me.
the fact that a UI popup could be made which says "do you wish to give this web site access to the list of audio devices?" then "do you wish to give this web site access to audio device N" were completely ignored.
Why would you want to put this into the web site? If the browser is doing the selection, put the device selection in the browser configuration. Done. Users can pick what they want, web sites don't gain any visibility into what user hardware looks like and users don't have the crappy user experience of having every web site implement the device selection in their own unique (and, usually, uniquely brain-dead) way. Of course, if users really like being asked what devices to use every time, there's no reason the browser can't implement that, too, or a browser extension.
The other arguments about the advantages of Microsoft's format-negotiation protocol over WebRTC's less-flexible may have merit (though the counter-arguments that format negotiation isn't useful without widely-standardized formats also has merit), but your argument is just silly. There are security issues here, and there's nothing a web site could do with respect to device selection that the browser couldn't do just as well -- or better.
Define "most pleasing", and specify how you're going to measure "broadest".
Another option is to add "filetype:torrent" to your query.