Game developers, especially pvp game developers need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to present information to the player, and one thing you find out, is that there are as many ways to represent data as there are players. In car navigation presents the same problem, and by the way, the games business can try a lot more radical stuff, because if it fails, well, patch in something new.
Think about how data is presented on minimaps in any or all off skyrim, WoW, SWTOR, call of duty, mass effect, grand theft auto (iv probably) etc. and then you get into mods for WoW especially. How you want information presented depends very much on what you're trying to do with that information, how far ahead you need your path to be, how big the rest of your display is etc. I'm not suggesting that in car nav systems will necessarily want to duplicate video game controls, but video game developers are putting a lot of thought into essentially the same problem, in simulations which have similar performance requirements (if you take your eyes of the centre of the screen for 100ms you've lost 3 frames and some amount of action, vs a car moving 100 Km/h having moved 3.6 metres). The difference in say, star craft, between someone managing 50 APM (actions per minute) and someone only managing 40 is the difference between an awesome player and a mediocre one, and that's not losing 10ths of a second on each action, or less because of the time wasted reorienting when you change your view of the world, which is the same problem as trying to reorient on a navigation system.
Same people who buy ipods for 20-50 dollars. You know full well there is something sketchy going on, but it's still cheaper than buying a full blown device if you aren't up for another 'free' phone on your contract.
Not if it was being sent by Franco from within spain. Maybe Gibraltar or a ship offshore could eavesdrop, but not necessarily, and even if they could, it supposes that the UK cared particularly, which it might not have.
I'm leading an android development project at the moment at a university. We're adding several major new components to the universities existing mobile app, last year my students did the blackberry and android versions of the existing iphone app, this year they're doing new features but in android, because for some reason none of them wanted to touch iOS.
What do I mean by how Nokia and MS want things to be, is that this was in reply to a question of why Nokia went with MS. They have a vision as to how the user experience should be which is very different than the clusterfuck that is android. Thank you for proving my point, ICS has been out for 5 months, one phone, which is basically the same as another phone has ICS, but the Galaxy S II only has it in some countries as of last week when I looked, some tablets have it, others don't, even if they run nearly identical hardware, and yes, there will be ICS rollouts on various hardware this coming year, but compared to Apple, who say "this update is going out, for these phones, and you'll have it on this date which is usually about a week from now" or the Microsoft desktop experience which is everyone on windows 7 gets the same updates at the same time, android is just confusing. Nokia don't want that experience for their customers and MS aims to do something akin to apple's software pushes, but on to any of a huge selection of phones.
And I agree, generally there isn't a backwards compatibility problem with android. Which makes the ICS stuff, where things that work in 2.3.x don't work in 4.0.3 really annoying (my particular peeve was the video recording not working, and some microSD card issues). And yes, you're going to correctly tell me that if I dig around XDA enough I can find solutions. That goes to my whole point about user experience. Android is a giant inconsistent mess, and you need the technical know how to get the most out of it. Intentionally so, and that's arguably their intended selling point, but there's room in the market for a middle ground between having to live in the reality distortion bubble of apple, and having to install your own firmware manually because you don't want the carriers garbage, and they haven't rolled out an update for your phone anywhere other than finland yet.
That would seem to pose the same basic problem that taxes in the US/Canada have (where we file our own). Self employment income, some small business income, and income from things like garage sales would still need to be reported, and would basically junk all of the calculations they already did.
So right now I'm in canada, and a grad student. We file our own taxes, but the government gets copies of all of our income statements from actual companies. So what do I have: Employment: Income as a Teaching assistant, Income as a software developer (for a company) Scholarships and grants Research assistantship (which is paid as a research grant rather than an education grant) Tax deductions for student housing, books, and tuition.
Not all that complicated. Except that any computer parts I buy are tax deductible as part of the research grant assuming they are for a computer used in research or in support of it, which is all of them. So even though my income is really low, when you take out the scholarships (not taxable) my income is like 15 or 16k/year (9k TAing, 4 or 5 software developer + other stuff the university counts as 'work'), and I wouldn't have to pay taxes because I earn credits for education expenses, I still have to go and basically correct all of their maths, because if I make 500 dollars in cash doing IT work, and buy 500 dollars in computer parts on the research grant basically everything on the forms they have is wrong, and it's up to me to honestly disclose everything to correct that.
Which pretty much seems like Norway would have the same problem. They're only going to know official income from companies. Everyone else is still stuck doing their taxes. Not that doing taxes is hard, but it's still a waste of my time.
Well lets see, the NYT is a hell of a lot bigger than the Illinois times, and has a much larger readership. The Illinois times probably also has a partnership with a bigger outfit for more national stories, if they cover them at all. Narrow focus, less expensive staff, not being based in New York all help the bottom line somewhat.
To extend your comparison: The student newspaper at the university I'm at is solvent. Does that mean that the NYT should be solvent?
If you're the Illinois times you have a very captive audience of advertisers too, those guys would be drowned out on the NYT, or any big national news outfit, but the big national outfits probably have very low uptake on their advertising because most of it is either brand recognition adds. I'm not in the US, I'm never going to have any reason to click on an ad in the Illinois times, ever, but I'm not going to read it either. On the other hand I probably still won't click on an ad on the NYT, because they're mostly US ads, but I will click on their articles, because those might say something insightfully relevant to me.
I have no inside information as to whether or not WP8 will work on existing nokia handsets. You'd think it probably would, but I really have no idea.
Deride it all you want, that might be their plan. And it might be good. They need the vision to make it good, and I'm not confident they have that. But the first iPhone, if you weren't in the reality distortion bubble was pretty bad. It takes a while to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure, and to figure out how you're going to carve your niche in the market.
I *think* we've seen that with WP7 already. Live tiles, xbox integration, works with windows. Seems to make sense generally. But your apps don't just work on regular windows. I'd expect WP8 will change that. But you can't just test your phone inside MS and nokia offices. You need to put it out there, tell people you're in the game (even if you aren't) and see if it gets any traction. A strategy for... I'm guessing Windows 8 will be october ish, and wp8 will if they're smart be about the same, that might be a good strategy. That doesn't mean microsoft and or nokia won't fuck it up catastrophically, but I think there's a lot of room in the market for a very cool windows 8 phone, that plays nice with windows 8, and next year will form the mobile component of the Xbox strategy, which will have a TV connected xbox 3, a mobile phone, and a desktop OS all running the same basic software.
Espionage agencies are lawfully chartered. The activities they undertake in other countries are usually illegal in those countries, but so what, you do it to us, we do it to you, when you catch one of ours, we catch one of yours, trade, and back to business.
In the case of the french bombing a ship in new zealand that was illegal, even though New Zealand would be a "NATO Partner" in the parlance of TFA. Two of the agents were caught, and charged.
Of course had they got back to france (like the rest of the team) likely nothing would have happened to them, although with a more valuable ally like the UK that may not hold true. Countries act in their own interests, and if they're smart they are under no illusion about having any friends.
The reason people still remember the rainbow warrior incident is because it was a major scandal in france, and might not even have been legal in france. Depends on the agreements they had with New Zealand.
As someone who produces information for a living, whether that's research papers, books, source code or the like, I like eating. The fact that the government pays me to write code and papers that can be published for all to see (or at least, anyone who will pay for the journal in some cases) means I'm ok with free. But if I was actually paid per view of a paper, or my lecture notes or something, I'd be out of business very quickly with people not paying.
Newspapers employ a hell of a lot of people in some cases, who are the sources of that information. They all need to be paid or the source of information dries up. The NYT tried free, and it couldn't pay for the production costs, advertising wasn't worth enough. Nor apparently, anywhere near enough. Hence they want 15 bucks a month for the cheapest sub.
That's seems to lack certain objectivity. What reviews have you read that suggest windows phones is bad to deal with, or in some way worse than android/iOS (Which are basically copies of each other on usability). Given that all the android manufacturers have dual core phones, and Nokia is still shilling a single core as it's top end what evidence do you have that they would perform competitively with other handset makers?
Just because you didn't like windows 95 doesn't mean windows 7 is good or bad, and has whatever you think of those has nothing to do with whether windows phone 7.5 is any good. I'm not sure it's actually good myself, but its certainly a different take on things, live tiles are very cool, but the lack of apps hurts. Being on an android phone requires you have a lot of technical know how to keep it updated on your own, and apple locks you into their reality distortion bubble store, unless you have technical know how.
Which is I think where MS is trying to go with this shared kernel windows app store strategy. It's very compelling to make apps for desktop, mobile, and tablet all at once without having to run very divergent code paths. That doesn't really work with WP7. But Windows 8 and WP8 that seems to be the plan (which may fail spectacularly).
Because if they decide the windows strategy is going to fail they can always change to android later. Microsoft offered them cash up front, and entering the android space against competitors like Samsung was probably not a great plan.
As an overall experience android is pretty weak compared to how Nokia and MS want things to be, or even compared to iPhone. I think they figured they'd have more success with MS than with android in the long run, and they might. Just look at the clusterfuck that has been ICS. ICS itself is sort of fine, but source has been out for months, some handsets have it officially, some don't yet, sometimes features that worked in 2.x don't work in 4 etc.. The great selling point of android is that 1: it's not locked down to apple and 2: if you are technically capable you can do all sorts of great stuff with it that is a pain on iphone. The problem with this plan is that most customers aren't technically capable, so there's a market there for easy to upgrade, plays nice with windows and isn't apple. But MS hasn't really got it together. The iPhone works in part because Apple did a giant FU to the carriers and does its own thing without them, MS should do the same, but google by nature of not actually being the ones releasing the OS for the phones really can't. A
Unfortunately microsoft hasn't really delivered with WP7. Everyone I've used and everyone I know that has one thinks it's good. But they don't seem to have congealed the ecosystem or built any killer apps, it's good, but why would I buy it when android has 50 bazillion apps. Which might be why we've only seen a trickle from MS and Nokia product wise. Whether they're really aiming for Windows 8 and this is just learning and transition time, or they're just never going to pull it together I don't know. My uninformed guess is that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will be the big push, write once, works on desktop and mobile, plays nice with all your business apps, plays nice with xbox games or something along those lines.
If they had gone with android they'd probably be in far worse shape than they are now. Being just another handset maker, in a market where Samsung is going to announce a quad core phone in a month, and you're still selling single core cpus as a flagship isn't a good plan.
MS could have the best product on the market. They don't, but they certainly could, the freedom of living outside the reality distortion bubble, with the compatibility of windows talking to windows rather than one of many different desktop controllers for android. One version (like iPhone) that can just be pushed out to everyone, fuck the carriers. I doubt it will materialize, because ballmer doesn't get it, but one could always hope.
And the point is a polite reminder that they can't get enough advertising to cover the cost of the content you want, so if you want the content you should pay them.
There are a lot of ways around the paywall. I don't think they are deeply serious about making it half free, half subscription, because people who don't want to pay really won't, and they may come up with a relatively bad scheme to make the NYT involuntarily free if they can't simply circumvent it. I'd rather those who know just delete cookies, than start doing a daily/hourly torrent dump of my website or something. If you annoy pirates enough they'll come up with such and easy way to pirate that no one will ever pay. The NYT seems to have fairly successfully (for the moment) found a middle ground between getting people to pay, while giving away content to those who absolutely wouldn't pay anyway.
North korea is starving while their supposed great friends are growing their economy at 10% a year, with no apparent spill over to the DRPK. The north koreans could easily become very jealous and resentful of their chinese neighbour, especially compared to south korea who have benefited enormously from the US. The North Korean leadership must know and recognize this.
what we don't know is if that meant that the US wanted conditions (the most obvious being 'you cannot keep selling missiles to unstable regimes and you have to cough up full technical information on all missiles already sold'), if the russians were genuine, or just wanted in so they could build counter measures to sell, or if the US Bush/Obama/Clinton were just being dumb.
My money is on 'dumb' but I could easily be wrong.
Therein lies the problem. Russia and China should be buying into the ABM system, not the other way around. Who knows what crazy thing will happen if north korea goes to the next level of crazy, or pakistan or saudi or egypt, algeria, or the like.
An ABM system isn't so much a problem for today. It's a problem for '10 years from now the next guy in charge of somewhere could be completely mental and we can't risk them shooting first'.
In 1930 the nazi's weren't in power, or, well, in anything. 10 years later they were dancing in Warsaw and Paris. One of these days Iran, North korea, algeria, egypt, saudi are all going to suffer dramatic political upheaval. I have no idea what that upheaval will translate into (which is sort of what's going on in algeria and egypt at the moment) and nor does anyone else. But a nuclear armed north korea, that decides it wants to blame their friends in china and russia for whatever is wrong with them this week is far more dangerous to the world than a north korea who are pointing big guns at south koreas big guns. Iran, under the ayatollahs may be willing to play by MAD rules (with israel and saudi) but if that government starts to fall can you still count on that? Will they go down in a blaze of glory and take the conspirators (Saudi) and the infidels (Israel) with them? Will they be replaced by someone for not being conservative enough and for having not launched a war with israel?
The world can play out in very strange ways. ABM might be a waste of money. But it might not. And that can be said of fire trucks, aircraft carriers and police body armour. How much ABM should be 'worth' in the grand scheme of things I really don't know, but I'd tend to think it should be more than a few grad students pontificating on forum posts when they should be working (says the grad student pontificating on a forum post).
That doesn't mean ABM is the only measure we should ever rely on, or that ABM won't be so absurdly expensive that it can't work. But I don't really know what the crossover point is on cost, or how much more or less value you get against a relatively abstract potential future threat.
as per the articles I linked, small business and self income are regularly under reporting income. Tips, manual labour (auto mechanic, tradeskills type stuff), or small shops that can keep the cash off the books. It's not just illegal immigrants.
Also, in Europe especially, the governments and banks aren't exactly separate entities. The bank of france was fined for overcharging on cheque transactions, but it's the government owned state bank of france, so it paid the fine to the government... that owns it. Brilliant I know.
Governments borrow money for a lot of reasons. Not all of them remotely good. But you can't pay bills by printing money, you decrease the buying power of your money in doing so, which leads to a downward spiral of not being able to pay off money borrowed. They borrow from 'private' banks in some cases (not all governments do this btw) because it provides a stable investment for the bank, and because the government doesn't want to manage the details of issuing bonds in $1000 amounts when they're borrowing billions at a time. They borrow a billion dollars from a bank, and the bank in turn lends a million people 1000 dollars each sort of thing.
On 2) specifically: Well they have to pay the interest on money borrowed. Theres a degree of crony-ism going on absolutely. When the people lending money to the government were aristocrats it was a way of giving them some kickback. Now it also helps stabilize financial markets and pension plans. The US government borrows from social security, and in turn social security gets a guaranteed ROI. I'm not suggesting that's a good or sane system, but it has nothing to do with paper, metal or fiat money, in fact, as far as I know, that has survived all 3 systems.
Banks can only 'create' money if they are so chartered. In the US I guess this is the reserve banks, but I'm not in the US so I'm not sure. In canada it would be "bank of canada' which is a government owned corporation that can create money. They don't do commercial banking functions at all (like the "Royal Bank of Canada" which is one of the commercial banks). In Europe it is the European central bank, which is an arms length independent but not private entity which controls the money supply (and is sort of like the US fed in that it is composed of the various european national central banks). Their goal is to, by law and charter, control inflation. So the current economic crisis in europe, whereby decreasing the value of the currency a bit might help, the ECB has only done I think one round of quantitative easy, for around 500 billion Euros, when it should have been about 4x that.
And yes, i agree, there are a lot of americans living in a fantasy land of cash = freedom. It's freedom in the same way in india you have to bribe a government official to get him to talk to you long enough to sell you a licence to own a TV, on top of which you need to pay another bribe, and it's freedom to have to bribe the train conductor to let you on the train even if you have a ticket. Yes, that happens. And yes, the prices for the bribes are even posted on signs. Cash transactions are a bugger to track, especially when the person assigned to tracking the cash can be handed a handful of cash to conveniently lose the trail.
What does the IRS and federal reserve have to do with anything? Every country in the world has some sort of banking system (the US took a few tries to get there, but the UK has the Bank of England, Europe has the ECB, etc. etc. ), and every country has some agency that is responsible for the collection of Tax. In the UK it's HM Customs and Revenue, which is both internal and external, in canada it's the "Canada revenue agency" who are both internal and external. In the US you have split into internal and external, but that's more a matter of which drawer it is filed in.
Whether you're using metal, paper money, fiat currency or electronic currency the government can still screw you over. You haven't really made a case that electronic money is any different. Sure, the mechanism might be slightly different, but if you're caught with 'too much cash" the government can seize it on suspicion of being used for drug trafficking or illegal currency trading. And if you're collecting all of your money in cash from a job you're basically way over that threshold anyway. Or, you're putting the money in a bank, to buy things other people have acquired with the help of banks, and in the end it's back to electronic anyway. As per the articles I linked, there's less than 3000 dollars per US person in physical cash even in existence. Also, collecting your paycheque in cash only seems like a great way to get the government to knock on your door and ask what is going on.
Cane is working for brazillians because they have climate and soil that can grow a lot of it, for a relatively poor country. It's completely unrealistic most other places. You'd never have enough land for that to work in say India or china, and corn ethanol is horribly inefficient compared to cane.
Also, research is new, novel and doesn't always work as well as you'd hope. It's not engineering where they know what the outcome will be. On the scale of things 20 billion dollars for one research project is basically nothing. To build one nuclear power plant (not reactor, but power plant) will probably cost more than that. If it works there will be hundreds of 'fusion plants' worth building eventually.
Er... no. This is 'unintended consequences'. I don't want you to drive drunk, so what I'm going to do is ban cars from parking within 8Km of an establishment that serves alcohol would be an example of 'unintended consequences'.
I can't really judge the spillover effect in detail, not being an indian economist, but it seems unlikely to accomplish any of its goals, and is just bad law. This wouldn't be the first bad idea for a law ever proposed after all.
actually... as per the article, heavy cash use on average equates to heavy corruption (which is itself a form of tax evasion). That might mean that one minister of state is collecting 10 million dollars in cash and responsible for 99% of the corruption or it might mean that 10 million people each get $1 in corruption, or somewhere in between. It's not a personal accusation. It's just an objective look at the data, and I'm sure quite a lot of economists go to quite a lot of effort to study in detail how cash use correlates to graft. I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say in Japan heavy cash use is probably not much different than electronic money use, because japan is a generally honest well ordered society, in Europe that isn't as much the case. In fact a google scholar search for "cash use correlation to corruption" produces as one of the first hits a study on just this effect in sweden, from 2007, which conveiently places it just before the effect the TFA is discussing. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1022024
Also, "they can catch tax cheats with good old fashioned detective work" is completely false. They have always failed miserably at it. How many federal agents do you want patting you down at the airport to make sure you're paying the right import duties? That's why they've had all of these horribly bad tax systems in the past, the government by virtue of its control of access points at ports (and airports) could put import and export taxes on everything and monitor everything going through. That is exactly what they do, is a massive pervasive documentation of where all of those good were going to or from. The problem of course is that really messes up trade, and income tax provides a much more regular income stream and can be tuned to be less horribly biased in who it effects. So then your employer is obliged to provide the government with records of how much they paid you, your bank is required to give them records of monies you collected etc.etc. etc. The business you pay cash to are obliged to provide records of all their pay, business expenses etc. The tracking may not specifically personally track you, but they are doing exactly what you said they should do, which is good old fashioned detective work, and electronic transactions give them very good tools for that, so they can actually catch people everywhere.
Also, even if you aren't trying to use cash for graft, the person you're paying may be taking it as an opportunity. That tip you gave a delivery guy, well if it was in cash he can just pocket some of it and his boss and the government are none the wiser right? One of my friends just bought a car with cash (as in roll of money cash), he gets paid a lot in cash for hourly one off contract work, so 50 bucks here, 200 bucks there, over 2 years it can add up. That's almost impossible for the sales guy to try and dodge tax with. The car sale itself goes through layers of paperwork, and as the guy buying the car you need official paperwork for warranty and insurance purposes. Even if you sell hundreds of cars it's pretty hard to hide from the layers of management that you bought 500 cars this year, 50 are on the lot, 3 were stolen and 446 were sold, well.. wheres the other one? But how about getting your bathroom done? Or your lawn mowed. Ever call a plumber, electrician or gone to a mom and pop automotive shop?
Right, so presuming a heavy use of cash is somehow illegal or fraudulent can be very very believable, I can even provide you more studies that look at that in more detail if you're not capable of entering basic terms in google scholar before you speak again. If you were in india, and with a name like Vijay that's not a huge stretch, I would say with about 99% certainty you were using cash to dodge tax. If you were in japan I'd be about 1% certain. Greece, Italy... somewhere in between. US.. not quite japan, and not quite Greece or Italy either. The US (and up until recently germany) also have legalized, institutionalized corruption,
As per the article: so do the greeks and italians (and outside the euro zone, indians, arabs, bangladeshi's, pakistani's etc).
Cash sounds like a wonderful privacy tool. It's so wonderful that you can use it to dodge tax. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/goa-education-minister-detained-with-10-mn/770712/ For example.
That's kind of the thrust of the article, cash based societies are more corrupt than electronic ones, because with electronic ones you can actually track where the money is going to and from.
From TFA:
"If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities," says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.
In Italy — where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman — Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under euro1,000 ($1,300), down from euro2,500 before.
. . . Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden's first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
"One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time," he says."
So fair enough, you think your privacy is being invaded by using electronic payments. But the government thinks you're using cash to dodge legally required taxes. And if you're both right who wins? The only way this is going to play out is asking for privacy rules surrounding the record keeping on transactions, because it's not fair to anyone when people dodge taxes, and if there's a way to track that, governments will (as they should).
why would it matter? All of the components are coming from the same places likely, whether 1% of the cost of the device in final assembly and packaging is done in one location or another doesn't really change that the CPU is probably made in one of a handful of foundaries in the world, same with the mobo, hard drive etc.
You're thinking like a poor person. When you're rich, you buy at whatever price, but you buy enough to drive the price up even more, usually with someone else's money first, and then you sell.
In the case of Apple and their 100 billion dollar cash on hand, they're pretty much right in principle on this though. 100 billion dollars cash on hand isn't giving enough ROI, and people can make better use of that money themselves than Apple can, if apple could use 100 billion dollars for something it wouldn't have it lying around collecting interest on overnight bonds and crap like that.
The stock buyback is pretty normal, use some of the corporate cash to drive up the paper value of the company, thereby enriching shareholders without them having to pay tax. Paying a dividend of 1.7% of the value of the stock seems like they're trying to ease into this.
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Game developers, especially pvp game developers need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to present information to the player, and one thing you find out, is that there are as many ways to represent data as there are players. In car navigation presents the same problem, and by the way, the games business can try a lot more radical stuff, because if it fails, well, patch in something new.
Think about how data is presented on minimaps in any or all off skyrim, WoW, SWTOR, call of duty, mass effect, grand theft auto (iv probably) etc. and then you get into mods for WoW especially. How you want information presented depends very much on what you're trying to do with that information, how far ahead you need your path to be, how big the rest of your display is etc. I'm not suggesting that in car nav systems will necessarily want to duplicate video game controls, but video game developers are putting a lot of thought into essentially the same problem, in simulations which have similar performance requirements (if you take your eyes of the centre of the screen for 100ms you've lost 3 frames and some amount of action, vs a car moving 100 Km/h having moved 3.6 metres). The difference in say, star craft, between someone managing 50 APM (actions per minute) and someone only managing 40 is the difference between an awesome player and a mediocre one, and that's not losing 10ths of a second on each action, or less because of the time wasted reorienting when you change your view of the world, which is the same problem as trying to reorient on a navigation system.
do you seriously believe a contentious current figure, in a secretive state is going to get an honest rap from Wikipedia?
Anyone in the echelons of power is an elitist, or crazy, it's a matter of degree, and what you're trying to do with that power.
Same people who buy ipods for 20-50 dollars. You know full well there is something sketchy going on, but it's still cheaper than buying a full blown device if you aren't up for another 'free' phone on your contract.
Not if it was being sent by Franco from within spain. Maybe Gibraltar or a ship offshore could eavesdrop, but not necessarily, and even if they could, it supposes that the UK cared particularly, which it might not have.
I'm leading an android development project at the moment at a university. We're adding several major new components to the universities existing mobile app, last year my students did the blackberry and android versions of the existing iphone app, this year they're doing new features but in android, because for some reason none of them wanted to touch iOS.
What do I mean by how Nokia and MS want things to be, is that this was in reply to a question of why Nokia went with MS. They have a vision as to how the user experience should be which is very different than the clusterfuck that is android. Thank you for proving my point, ICS has been out for 5 months, one phone, which is basically the same as another phone has ICS, but the Galaxy S II only has it in some countries as of last week when I looked, some tablets have it, others don't, even if they run nearly identical hardware, and yes, there will be ICS rollouts on various hardware this coming year, but compared to Apple, who say "this update is going out, for these phones, and you'll have it on this date which is usually about a week from now" or the Microsoft desktop experience which is everyone on windows 7 gets the same updates at the same time, android is just confusing. Nokia don't want that experience for their customers and MS aims to do something akin to apple's software pushes, but on to any of a huge selection of phones.
And I agree, generally there isn't a backwards compatibility problem with android. Which makes the ICS stuff, where things that work in 2.3.x don't work in 4.0.3 really annoying (my particular peeve was the video recording not working, and some microSD card issues). And yes, you're going to correctly tell me that if I dig around XDA enough I can find solutions. That goes to my whole point about user experience. Android is a giant inconsistent mess, and you need the technical know how to get the most out of it. Intentionally so, and that's arguably their intended selling point, but there's room in the market for a middle ground between having to live in the reality distortion bubble of apple, and having to install your own firmware manually because you don't want the carriers garbage, and they haven't rolled out an update for your phone anywhere other than finland yet.
That would seem to pose the same basic problem that taxes in the US/Canada have (where we file our own). Self employment income, some small business income, and income from things like garage sales would still need to be reported, and would basically junk all of the calculations they already did.
So right now I'm in canada, and a grad student. We file our own taxes, but the government gets copies of all of our income statements from actual companies. So what do I have:
Employment: Income as a Teaching assistant, Income as a software developer (for a company)
Scholarships and grants
Research assistantship (which is paid as a research grant rather than an education grant)
Tax deductions for student housing, books, and tuition.
Not all that complicated. Except that any computer parts I buy are tax deductible as part of the research grant assuming they are for a computer used in research or in support of it, which is all of them. So even though my income is really low, when you take out the scholarships (not taxable) my income is like 15 or 16k/year (9k TAing, 4 or 5 software developer + other stuff the university counts as 'work'), and I wouldn't have to pay taxes because I earn credits for education expenses, I still have to go and basically correct all of their maths, because if I make 500 dollars in cash doing IT work, and buy 500 dollars in computer parts on the research grant basically everything on the forms they have is wrong, and it's up to me to honestly disclose everything to correct that.
Which pretty much seems like Norway would have the same problem. They're only going to know official income from companies. Everyone else is still stuck doing their taxes. Not that doing taxes is hard, but it's still a waste of my time.
Well lets see, the NYT is a hell of a lot bigger than the Illinois times, and has a much larger readership. The Illinois times probably also has a partnership with a bigger outfit for more national stories, if they cover them at all. Narrow focus, less expensive staff, not being based in New York all help the bottom line somewhat.
To extend your comparison: The student newspaper at the university I'm at is solvent. Does that mean that the NYT should be solvent?
If you're the Illinois times you have a very captive audience of advertisers too, those guys would be drowned out on the NYT, or any big national news outfit, but the big national outfits probably have very low uptake on their advertising because most of it is either brand recognition adds. I'm not in the US, I'm never going to have any reason to click on an ad in the Illinois times, ever, but I'm not going to read it either. On the other hand I probably still won't click on an ad on the NYT, because they're mostly US ads, but I will click on their articles, because those might say something insightfully relevant to me.
I have no inside information as to whether or not WP8 will work on existing nokia handsets. You'd think it probably would, but I really have no idea.
Deride it all you want, that might be their plan. And it might be good. They need the vision to make it good, and I'm not confident they have that. But the first iPhone, if you weren't in the reality distortion bubble was pretty bad. It takes a while to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure, and to figure out how you're going to carve your niche in the market.
I *think* we've seen that with WP7 already. Live tiles, xbox integration, works with windows. Seems to make sense generally. But your apps don't just work on regular windows. I'd expect WP8 will change that. But you can't just test your phone inside MS and nokia offices. You need to put it out there, tell people you're in the game (even if you aren't) and see if it gets any traction. A strategy for... I'm guessing Windows 8 will be october ish, and wp8 will if they're smart be about the same, that might be a good strategy. That doesn't mean microsoft and or nokia won't fuck it up catastrophically, but I think there's a lot of room in the market for a very cool windows 8 phone, that plays nice with windows 8, and next year will form the mobile component of the Xbox strategy, which will have a TV connected xbox 3, a mobile phone, and a desktop OS all running the same basic software.
Espionage agencies are lawfully chartered. The activities they undertake in other countries are usually illegal in those countries, but so what, you do it to us, we do it to you, when you catch one of ours, we catch one of yours, trade, and back to business.
In the case of the french bombing a ship in new zealand that was illegal, even though New Zealand would be a "NATO Partner" in the parlance of TFA. Two of the agents were caught, and charged.
Of course had they got back to france (like the rest of the team) likely nothing would have happened to them, although with a more valuable ally like the UK that may not hold true. Countries act in their own interests, and if they're smart they are under no illusion about having any friends.
The reason people still remember the rainbow warrior incident is because it was a major scandal in france, and might not even have been legal in france. Depends on the agreements they had with New Zealand.
As someone who produces information for a living, whether that's research papers, books, source code or the like, I like eating. The fact that the government pays me to write code and papers that can be published for all to see (or at least, anyone who will pay for the journal in some cases) means I'm ok with free. But if I was actually paid per view of a paper, or my lecture notes or something, I'd be out of business very quickly with people not paying.
Newspapers employ a hell of a lot of people in some cases, who are the sources of that information. They all need to be paid or the source of information dries up. The NYT tried free, and it couldn't pay for the production costs, advertising wasn't worth enough. Nor apparently, anywhere near enough. Hence they want 15 bucks a month for the cheapest sub.
That's seems to lack certain objectivity. What reviews have you read that suggest windows phones is bad to deal with, or in some way worse than android/iOS (Which are basically copies of each other on usability). Given that all the android manufacturers have dual core phones, and Nokia is still shilling a single core as it's top end what evidence do you have that they would perform competitively with other handset makers?
Just because you didn't like windows 95 doesn't mean windows 7 is good or bad, and has whatever you think of those has nothing to do with whether windows phone 7.5 is any good. I'm not sure it's actually good myself, but its certainly a different take on things, live tiles are very cool, but the lack of apps hurts. Being on an android phone requires you have a lot of technical know how to keep it updated on your own, and apple locks you into their reality distortion bubble store, unless you have technical know how.
Which is I think where MS is trying to go with this shared kernel windows app store strategy. It's very compelling to make apps for desktop, mobile, and tablet all at once without having to run very divergent code paths. That doesn't really work with WP7. But Windows 8 and WP8 that seems to be the plan (which may fail spectacularly).
Because if they decide the windows strategy is going to fail they can always change to android later. Microsoft offered them cash up front, and entering the android space against competitors like Samsung was probably not a great plan.
As an overall experience android is pretty weak compared to how Nokia and MS want things to be, or even compared to iPhone. I think they figured they'd have more success with MS than with android in the long run, and they might. Just look at the clusterfuck that has been ICS. ICS itself is sort of fine, but source has been out for months, some handsets have it officially, some don't yet, sometimes features that worked in 2.x don't work in 4 etc.. The great selling point of android is that 1: it's not locked down to apple and 2: if you are technically capable you can do all sorts of great stuff with it that is a pain on iphone. The problem with this plan is that most customers aren't technically capable, so there's a market there for easy to upgrade, plays nice with windows and isn't apple. But MS hasn't really got it together. The iPhone works in part because Apple did a giant FU to the carriers and does its own thing without them, MS should do the same, but google by nature of not actually being the ones releasing the OS for the phones really can't. A
Unfortunately microsoft hasn't really delivered with WP7. Everyone I've used and everyone I know that has one thinks it's good. But they don't seem to have congealed the ecosystem or built any killer apps, it's good, but why would I buy it when android has 50 bazillion apps. Which might be why we've only seen a trickle from MS and Nokia product wise. Whether they're really aiming for Windows 8 and this is just learning and transition time, or they're just never going to pull it together I don't know. My uninformed guess is that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will be the big push, write once, works on desktop and mobile, plays nice with all your business apps, plays nice with xbox games or something along those lines.
If they had gone with android they'd probably be in far worse shape than they are now. Being just another handset maker, in a market where Samsung is going to announce a quad core phone in a month, and you're still selling single core cpus as a flagship isn't a good plan.
MS could have the best product on the market. They don't, but they certainly could, the freedom of living outside the reality distortion bubble, with the compatibility of windows talking to windows rather than one of many different desktop controllers for android. One version (like iPhone) that can just be pushed out to everyone, fuck the carriers. I doubt it will materialize, because ballmer doesn't get it, but one could always hope.
And the point is a polite reminder that they can't get enough advertising to cover the cost of the content you want, so if you want the content you should pay them.
There are a lot of ways around the paywall. I don't think they are deeply serious about making it half free, half subscription, because people who don't want to pay really won't, and they may come up with a relatively bad scheme to make the NYT involuntarily free if they can't simply circumvent it. I'd rather those who know just delete cookies, than start doing a daily/hourly torrent dump of my website or something. If you annoy pirates enough they'll come up with such and easy way to pirate that no one will ever pay. The NYT seems to have fairly successfully (for the moment) found a middle ground between getting people to pay, while giving away content to those who absolutely wouldn't pay anyway.
North korea is starving while their supposed great friends are growing their economy at 10% a year, with no apparent spill over to the DRPK. The north koreans could easily become very jealous and resentful of their chinese neighbour, especially compared to south korea who have benefited enormously from the US. The North Korean leadership must know and recognize this.
What they do about it could be very very bizarre.
what we don't know is if that meant that the US wanted conditions (the most obvious being 'you cannot keep selling missiles to unstable regimes and you have to cough up full technical information on all missiles already sold'), if the russians were genuine, or just wanted in so they could build counter measures to sell, or if the US Bush/Obama/Clinton were just being dumb.
My money is on 'dumb' but I could easily be wrong.
Therein lies the problem. Russia and China should be buying into the ABM system, not the other way around. Who knows what crazy thing will happen if north korea goes to the next level of crazy, or pakistan or saudi or egypt, algeria, or the like.
An ABM system isn't so much a problem for today. It's a problem for '10 years from now the next guy in charge of somewhere could be completely mental and we can't risk them shooting first'.
In 1930 the nazi's weren't in power, or, well, in anything. 10 years later they were dancing in Warsaw and Paris. One of these days Iran, North korea, algeria, egypt, saudi are all going to suffer dramatic political upheaval. I have no idea what that upheaval will translate into (which is sort of what's going on in algeria and egypt at the moment) and nor does anyone else. But a nuclear armed north korea, that decides it wants to blame their friends in china and russia for whatever is wrong with them this week is far more dangerous to the world than a north korea who are pointing big guns at south koreas big guns. Iran, under the ayatollahs may be willing to play by MAD rules (with israel and saudi) but if that government starts to fall can you still count on that? Will they go down in a blaze of glory and take the conspirators (Saudi) and the infidels (Israel) with them? Will they be replaced by someone for not being conservative enough and for having not launched a war with israel?
The world can play out in very strange ways. ABM might be a waste of money. But it might not. And that can be said of fire trucks, aircraft carriers and police body armour. How much ABM should be 'worth' in the grand scheme of things I really don't know, but I'd tend to think it should be more than a few grad students pontificating on forum posts when they should be working (says the grad student pontificating on a forum post).
That doesn't mean ABM is the only measure we should ever rely on, or that ABM won't be so absurdly expensive that it can't work. But I don't really know what the crossover point is on cost, or how much more or less value you get against a relatively abstract potential future threat.
as per the articles I linked, small business and self income are regularly under reporting income. Tips, manual labour (auto mechanic, tradeskills type stuff), or small shops that can keep the cash off the books. It's not just illegal immigrants.
Also, in Europe especially, the governments and banks aren't exactly separate entities. The bank of france was fined for overcharging on cheque transactions, but it's the government owned state bank of france, so it paid the fine to the government... that owns it. Brilliant I know.
Governments borrow money for a lot of reasons. Not all of them remotely good. But you can't pay bills by printing money, you decrease the buying power of your money in doing so, which leads to a downward spiral of not being able to pay off money borrowed. They borrow from 'private' banks in some cases (not all governments do this btw) because it provides a stable investment for the bank, and because the government doesn't want to manage the details of issuing bonds in $1000 amounts when they're borrowing billions at a time. They borrow a billion dollars from a bank, and the bank in turn lends a million people 1000 dollars each sort of thing.
On 2) specifically: Well they have to pay the interest on money borrowed. Theres a degree of crony-ism going on absolutely. When the people lending money to the government were aristocrats it was a way of giving them some kickback. Now it also helps stabilize financial markets and pension plans. The US government borrows from social security, and in turn social security gets a guaranteed ROI. I'm not suggesting that's a good or sane system, but it has nothing to do with paper, metal or fiat money, in fact, as far as I know, that has survived all 3 systems.
Banks can only 'create' money if they are so chartered. In the US I guess this is the reserve banks, but I'm not in the US so I'm not sure. In canada it would be "bank of canada' which is a government owned corporation that can create money. They don't do commercial banking functions at all (like the "Royal Bank of Canada" which is one of the commercial banks). In Europe it is the European central bank, which is an arms length independent but not private entity which controls the money supply (and is sort of like the US fed in that it is composed of the various european national central banks). Their goal is to, by law and charter, control inflation. So the current economic crisis in europe, whereby decreasing the value of the currency a bit might help, the ECB has only done I think one round of quantitative easy, for around 500 billion Euros, when it should have been about 4x that.
And yes, i agree, there are a lot of americans living in a fantasy land of cash = freedom. It's freedom in the same way in india you have to bribe a government official to get him to talk to you long enough to sell you a licence to own a TV, on top of which you need to pay another bribe, and it's freedom to have to bribe the train conductor to let you on the train even if you have a ticket. Yes, that happens. And yes, the prices for the bribes are even posted on signs. Cash transactions are a bugger to track, especially when the person assigned to tracking the cash can be handed a handful of cash to conveniently lose the trail.
What does the IRS and federal reserve have to do with anything? Every country in the world has some sort of banking system (the US took a few tries to get there, but the UK has the Bank of England, Europe has the ECB, etc. etc. ), and every country has some agency that is responsible for the collection of Tax. In the UK it's HM Customs and Revenue, which is both internal and external, in canada it's the "Canada revenue agency" who are both internal and external. In the US you have split into internal and external, but that's more a matter of which drawer it is filed in.
Whether you're using metal, paper money, fiat currency or electronic currency the government can still screw you over. You haven't really made a case that electronic money is any different. Sure, the mechanism might be slightly different, but if you're caught with 'too much cash" the government can seize it on suspicion of being used for drug trafficking or illegal currency trading. And if you're collecting all of your money in cash from a job you're basically way over that threshold anyway. Or, you're putting the money in a bank, to buy things other people have acquired with the help of banks, and in the end it's back to electronic anyway. As per the articles I linked, there's less than 3000 dollars per US person in physical cash even in existence. Also, collecting your paycheque in cash only seems like a great way to get the government to knock on your door and ask what is going on.
Cane is working for brazillians because they have climate and soil that can grow a lot of it, for a relatively poor country. It's completely unrealistic most other places. You'd never have enough land for that to work in say India or china, and corn ethanol is horribly inefficient compared to cane.
Also, research is new, novel and doesn't always work as well as you'd hope. It's not engineering where they know what the outcome will be. On the scale of things 20 billion dollars for one research project is basically nothing. To build one nuclear power plant (not reactor, but power plant) will probably cost more than that. If it works there will be hundreds of 'fusion plants' worth building eventually.
Er... no. This is 'unintended consequences'. I don't want you to drive drunk, so what I'm going to do is ban cars from parking within 8Km of an establishment that serves alcohol would be an example of 'unintended consequences'.
I can't really judge the spillover effect in detail, not being an indian economist, but it seems unlikely to accomplish any of its goals, and is just bad law. This wouldn't be the first bad idea for a law ever proposed after all.
actually... as per the article, heavy cash use on average equates to heavy corruption (which is itself a form of tax evasion). That might mean that one minister of state is collecting 10 million dollars in cash and responsible for 99% of the corruption or it might mean that 10 million people each get $1 in corruption, or somewhere in between. It's not a personal accusation. It's just an objective look at the data, and I'm sure quite a lot of economists go to quite a lot of effort to study in detail how cash use correlates to graft. I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say in Japan heavy cash use is probably not much different than electronic money use, because japan is a generally honest well ordered society, in Europe that isn't as much the case. In fact a google scholar search for "cash use correlation to corruption" produces as one of the first hits a study on just this effect in sweden, from 2007, which conveiently places it just before the effect the TFA is discussing. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1022024
Also, "they can catch tax cheats with good old fashioned detective work" is completely false. They have always failed miserably at it. How many federal agents do you want patting you down at the airport to make sure you're paying the right import duties? That's why they've had all of these horribly bad tax systems in the past, the government by virtue of its control of access points at ports (and airports) could put import and export taxes on everything and monitor everything going through. That is exactly what they do, is a massive pervasive documentation of where all of those good were going to or from. The problem of course is that really messes up trade, and income tax provides a much more regular income stream and can be tuned to be less horribly biased in who it effects. So then your employer is obliged to provide the government with records of how much they paid you, your bank is required to give them records of monies you collected etc.etc. etc. The business you pay cash to are obliged to provide records of all their pay, business expenses etc. The tracking may not specifically personally track you, but they are doing exactly what you said they should do, which is good old fashioned detective work, and electronic transactions give them very good tools for that, so they can actually catch people everywhere.
Also, even if you aren't trying to use cash for graft, the person you're paying may be taking it as an opportunity. That tip you gave a delivery guy, well if it was in cash he can just pocket some of it and his boss and the government are none the wiser right? One of my friends just bought a car with cash (as in roll of money cash), he gets paid a lot in cash for hourly one off contract work, so 50 bucks here, 200 bucks there, over 2 years it can add up. That's almost impossible for the sales guy to try and dodge tax with. The car sale itself goes through layers of paperwork, and as the guy buying the car you need official paperwork for warranty and insurance purposes. Even if you sell hundreds of cars it's pretty hard to hide from the layers of management that you bought 500 cars this year, 50 are on the lot, 3 were stolen and 446 were sold, well.. wheres the other one? But how about getting your bathroom done? Or your lawn mowed. Ever call a plumber, electrician or gone to a mom and pop automotive shop?
Right, so presuming a heavy use of cash is somehow illegal or fraudulent can be very very believable, I can even provide you more studies that look at that in more detail if you're not capable of entering basic terms in google scholar before you speak again. If you were in india, and with a name like Vijay that's not a huge stretch, I would say with about 99% certainty you were using cash to dodge tax. If you were in japan I'd be about 1% certain. Greece, Italy... somewhere in between. US.. not quite japan, and not quite Greece or Italy either. The US (and up until recently germany) also have legalized, institutionalized corruption,
It's not. I use cash whenever I can.
As per the article: so do the greeks and italians (and outside the euro zone, indians, arabs, bangladeshi's, pakistani's etc).
Cash sounds like a wonderful privacy tool. It's so wonderful that you can use it to dodge tax. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/goa-education-minister-detained-with-10-mn/770712/ For example.
That's kind of the thrust of the article, cash based societies are more corrupt than electronic ones, because with electronic ones you can actually track where the money is going to and from.
From TFA:
"If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities," says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.
In Italy — where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman — Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under euro1,000 ($1,300), down from euro2,500 before.
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Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden's first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
"One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time," he says."
So fair enough, you think your privacy is being invaded by using electronic payments. But the government thinks you're using cash to dodge legally required taxes. And if you're both right who wins? The only way this is going to play out is asking for privacy rules surrounding the record keeping on transactions, because it's not fair to anyone when people dodge taxes, and if there's a way to track that, governments will (as they should).
why would it matter? All of the components are coming from the same places likely, whether 1% of the cost of the device in final assembly and packaging is done in one location or another doesn't really change that the CPU is probably made in one of a handful of foundaries in the world, same with the mobo, hard drive etc.
You're thinking like a poor person. When you're rich, you buy at whatever price, but you buy enough to drive the price up even more, usually with someone else's money first, and then you sell.
In the case of Apple and their 100 billion dollar cash on hand, they're pretty much right in principle on this though. 100 billion dollars cash on hand isn't giving enough ROI, and people can make better use of that money themselves than Apple can, if apple could use 100 billion dollars for something it wouldn't have it lying around collecting interest on overnight bonds and crap like that.
The stock buyback is pretty normal, use some of the corporate cash to drive up the paper value of the company, thereby enriching shareholders without them having to pay tax. Paying a dividend of 1.7% of the value of the stock seems like they're trying to ease into this.