Ah, but you'll find that these companies exist in the tax-dodge countries with no more than a post-office box. No-one in their right mind would consider a PO box to be a company HQ.
the real problem is that tax laws are complicated, so these kinds of loopholes are always going to be discovered when they were not intentional.
The current UK government has a new trick: when you change your accounting practices to avoid a tax you have to tell the tax man, and if he decides that the loophole you've just discovered was not intended, they close it before you get to use it. Makes sense really,
or its a failing of the taxation regulation in countries. If the UK said you have to have a presence in the UK in order to do business here, and pay tax on all UK transactions regardless of where your HQ is based, you'll find these companies will return their HQs to London. (which, technically is where they are anyway, they only have a postal box in Luxembourg so they can claim they're based there).
Its no amoral as in News International Amoral, but there is a systematic un-ethical approach to fiddling the rules to get round your responsibilities as a player in our societies.
I think this is important. A long time back I always used to metamod, there was practically a permanent link at the top of the page, and I'd click it, give a bit of feedback and then go on to browse/.
today, apart from the fact that I don't fully understand if I should be metamodding bad mods as + or -, or if its the post I'm +/- on that matches to the mod +/-... the link is never there, so I don't bother.
The metamod was very important to keep the moderators honest. It is more important than the moderation and deserves more attention from the devs because of that.
hell even G+ is forcing crap at us all the time. Larry, remember why Google became great in the first place - it had an unobtrusive search page that was not filled to bursting with flashing banners and adverts.
So why does Google+ homepage insist on sticking a "what's hot" crap across the stream of stuff I've decided I want to see? Why is there a 'best of' G+ banner that you can't turn off?
Tell you what Larry, turn on location services on your phone so we can all see exactly where you are all the time, and open your email so we can see everything you're doing. Even just show us the feed of 'personalisations' that Google is accumulating based on your browsing, email and G+ activities.
I wondered if the 'this is a paid advertisement' notice was legally required for for reason. I don't think they'd put it up if they had a choice - integrity or no, the people who chose to run it wouldn't be giving a fig about the rest of the paper's professionalism.
And if it is a legal requirement not to mislead the readers, why doesn't/. have to follow the same requirements?
plenty of zinc in the world....aren't US pennies made of the stuff?
Anyway, from TFA:
As well as a lack of emissions, the other good news is that the zinc oxide can apparently be reused, meaning the solar reactor is theoretically self sustaining as it only relies on materials and energy that are renewable.
and considering that the majority of apps will be desktop-only for quite some time (IMHO), then the metro UI is pretty much just a full-screen start menu.
And not a very good one at that.
I imagine MS will be deprecating the desktop interface as soon as they can. (sorry, that should read: I think they've deprecated it already, they just haven't told us yet. They'll be removing it as soon as they can).
The charms bar is an always-accessible set of five icons that appear down the right hand edge of the screen. From top to bottom, these icons are Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. Start is the easiest to handle as it simply takes you to the Start screen. Search is used to initiate searches, both of built-in things (files, programs, settings) and applications that register themselves as being searchable. Share allows the content of the current application to be shared in some way with other applications (for example, a Flickr browser might allow URLs to be "shared" with other programs, and a mail client might opt to receive such shared content).
lol, yes, that link has a nice picture of the Mill.
I can imagine the film could be better.....and Gandalf spake unto the assembled Followship, "these are times of the gravest import", upon which Bilbo, hearing these words jumped up and said "An' I soy unto yaouw this is a dale that metters to all of oos"
I can only guess they dropped this for 'Ameriglish' because Elijah Woods couldn't handle any other accent:)
nonsense. The hobbits were from his childhood, where the local fields (around Hall Green) were being slowly built upon. These became Sarumans' mills, and I understand the nasty industrial areas in the black country could easily be Mordor.
There's a reason why its called the Black country... once upon a time, it was described as hell on earth. - Thomas Carlyle described it in 1824 as "A frightful scene..... a dense cloud of pestilential smoke hangs over it forever....... and at night the whole region burns like a volcano spitting fire from a thousand tubes of brick. But oh the wretched thousands of mortals who grind out their destiny there!"
Tolkien was born into the (then) leafy area in Warwickshire, you can take the Tolkien Trail though today there is very little left that he'd recognise.
So yes, ok, Brummie orcs. I didn't think the Americans would know the difference:)
and when they do it the other way round it's even worse!
I mean no-one believed that old Etonian Dominc West wasn't really New-York-Irish!
See him in The Wire, then watch an interview with him. That required some serious dedication and skill with accents. If only Maggie et al could dedicate some of their time to being taught to speak (and act).
once upon a time, there was a TV comedy show called 'Allo 'Allo This was set in occupied France, and to keep things amusing and simple for the viewers, it was decided that each character would speak english, but in a phoney accent of the country they were depicting.
So the French bartender "spook like zees", and the escaping British airmen "spoke jolly good proper English what"! etc.
It got sillier when the foreign characters spoke in english, ie the french resistance fighter woudl speak with "ze french accent" when talking 'french' to the other french characters, and then change to a pseudo-jolly-what accent when she spoke english to the English airmen. Of course, they had to add a English spy character who didn't speak french very well later on (like Peter Seller's Clouseau)
It was silly, and probably no-one except the Germans would get the joke (except it was never shown in Germany due to it being set during the war and thus illegal due to the German characters and symbols being in it). Shame, they'd have really liked it. For fairness, it did take the piss out of every European race.
*I* think its becuase the dwarves are depicted as coming from the north of Middle Earth, where's its mountainous and strange. And in the UK, the 'wild north' is Scotland.
Though, as Tolkien was an anglo-saxon scholar, the dwarves could so easily have been from a northern Scandinavian country instead. Swedish dwarves anyone?
whilst there is a good analogy between the little British people (hobbits) kicking the stuff out of the evil empire of Sauron (Hitler), the entire world is based around anglo-saxon myths, so technically it includes Britain, and the northern Germanic and Scandinavian countries.
Dwarves come from the north part of Middle Earth, so it's natural they got Scottish accents, but they could so easily have been Norwegian instead.
The shire, BTW, is Warwickshire (that's wa-rick-shire), there's still a 'tolkien trail' around Hall Green in what is now a very-built-up Birmingham, not the green fields of Tolkien's youth, but the dark satanic mills of Saruman's industrial progress.
No. But I will note that when the UK director Gerry Anderson produced Thunderbirds, for a UK audience, he gave the puppets US accents.
Jessica Rabbit does:)
The thunderbirds puppets were modelled on the US astronauts, so its not unreasonable that (at the time) futuristic people were American. I guess its the same as today where all the terrorists are middle eastern.
There are a lot of British accents in Hollywood... but they're usually the badguy, with the hero as an apple-pie-eating-all-american guy, like Tom Cruise.
I think its alll about keeping things simple for the US audiences, the bad guy speaks with a British accent, the good guy has an American one, the terrorist is dark and swarthy, the charming rogue is Irish... stereotypes make it easy for the audience to know what to expect from that character.
it wasn't the standards body that "called them out", but the retailers who asked "shouldn't it have...."
The Pi devs thought it didn't need the CE mark because it is an unfinished product, not a consumer device (eg it doesn't come with a case). they thought this because the Beagleboard is a similarly 'unfinished' product and it too doesn't have the CE mark.
The Pi people are going through the CE motions to make sure they're covered, and finding out if they really have to go through the compliance checks on the side.
I guess optional isn't good for protocols. If a device might not support it then you can't rely on it, and if you can't rely on it, you might as well not bother trying to use it.
Of course, if all this happens under the covers of the network stack, then things might be different, but can you really implement push notifications on the server if the client only supports pull.
I particularly worry that MS will introduce another 'optional' component that is available on Window server and Window Phone, and make it a 'de-facto standard' (though, admittedly, they have little chance of that give their share of the web server/internet arena).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but when I first saw it, it was not possible to turn it off. You could minimise it a little, but you still had a bar across your stream
Do a quick google for this problem and you'll see what the issue was back before Google gave in to user disgust.
Take a look at the googleplususers post that describes using adblock or css filters to get rid of it.
Ah, but you'll find that these companies exist in the tax-dodge countries with no more than a post-office box. No-one in their right mind would consider a PO box to be a company HQ.
the real problem is that tax laws are complicated, so these kinds of loopholes are always going to be discovered when they were not intentional.
The current UK government has a new trick: when you change your accounting practices to avoid a tax you have to tell the tax man, and if he decides that the loophole you've just discovered was not intended, they close it before you get to use it. Makes sense really,
or its a failing of the taxation regulation in countries. If the UK said you have to have a presence in the UK in order to do business here, and pay tax on all UK transactions regardless of where your HQ is based, you'll find these companies will return their HQs to London. (which, technically is where they are anyway, they only have a postal box in Luxembourg so they can claim they're based there).
Its no amoral as in News International Amoral, but there is a systematic un-ethical approach to fiddling the rules to get round your responsibilities as a player in our societies.
well now! they listened to everybody. It used to be that these things could not be turned off, just muted or minimised.
I think this is important. A long time back I always used to metamod, there was practically a permanent link at the top of the page, and I'd click it, give a bit of feedback and then go on to browse /.
today, apart from the fact that I don't fully understand if I should be metamodding bad mods as + or -, or if its the post I'm +/- on that matches to the mod +/-... the link is never there, so I don't bother.
The metamod was very important to keep the moderators honest. It is more important than the moderation and deserves more attention from the devs because of that.
hell even G+ is forcing crap at us all the time. Larry, remember why Google became great in the first place - it had an unobtrusive search page that was not filled to bursting with flashing banners and adverts.
So why does Google+ homepage insist on sticking a "what's hot" crap across the stream of stuff I've decided I want to see? Why is there a 'best of' G+ banner that you can't turn off?
Tell you what Larry, turn on location services on your phone so we can all see exactly where you are all the time, and open your email so we can see everything you're doing. Even just show us the feed of 'personalisations' that Google is accumulating based on your browsing, email and G+ activities.
Then we can talk privacy.
I recommend ArsTechnica, it seems a lot of /. posts are coming from them anyway, so you might as well go direct.
Their comments section needs threading though, but if you're after articles rather than discussion, it's way better then here.
I wondered if the 'this is a paid advertisement' notice was legally required for for reason. I don't think they'd put it up if they had a choice - integrity or no, the people who chose to run it wouldn't be giving a fig about the rest of the paper's professionalism.
And if it is a legal requirement not to mislead the readers, why doesn't /. have to follow the same requirements?
plenty of zinc in the world....aren't US pennies made of the stuff?
Anyway, from TFA:
As well as a lack of emissions, the other good news is that the zinc oxide can apparently be reused, meaning the solar reactor is theoretically self sustaining as it only relies on materials and energy that are renewable.
Sticking to desktop-only UI would be suicide for Microsoft. Metro works quite fine if you only look at it from a tablet point of view.
there, FTFY.
amen.
and considering that the majority of apps will be desktop-only for quite some time (IMHO), then the metro UI is pretty much just a full-screen start menu.
And not a very good one at that.
I imagine MS will be deprecating the desktop interface as soon as they can. (sorry, that should read: I think they've deprecated it already, they just haven't told us yet. They'll be removing it as soon as they can).
Charms in Win8: (from an ArsTechnical article)
The charms bar is an always-accessible set of five icons that appear down the right hand edge of the screen. From top to bottom, these icons are Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. Start is the easiest to handle as it simply takes you to the Start screen. Search is used to initiate searches, both of built-in things (files, programs, settings) and applications that register themselves as being searchable. Share allows the content of the current application to be shared in some way with other applications (for example, a Flickr browser might allow URLs to be "shared" with other programs, and a mail client might opt to receive such shared content).
Does anyone really believe MS will bring the two together at this point in development? I really, really doubt it.
does anyone really believe the desktop isn't now considered a legacy component there solely for running backward-compatible apps?
The desktop in Metro is like XPMode in Vista/Win7.
no, lots of people thought this - they complained about privacy and were told to shut up, there's nothing wrong.
well, here you see exactly why you want strong privacy controls on your data.
lol, yes, that link has a nice picture of the Mill.
I can imagine the film could be better.. ...and Gandalf spake unto the assembled Followship, "these are times of the gravest import", upon which Bilbo, hearing these words jumped up and said "An' I soy unto yaouw this is a dale that metters to all of oos"
I can only guess they dropped this for 'Ameriglish' because Elijah Woods couldn't handle any other accent :)
nonsense. The hobbits were from his childhood, where the local fields (around Hall Green) were being slowly built upon. These became Sarumans' mills, and I understand the nasty industrial areas in the black country could easily be Mordor.
There's a reason why its called the Black country... once upon a time, it was described as hell on earth. - Thomas Carlyle described it in 1824 as "A frightful scene ..... a dense cloud of pestilential smoke hangs over it forever ....... and at night the whole region burns like a volcano spitting fire from a thousand tubes of brick. But oh the wretched thousands of mortals who grind out their destiny there!"
Tolkien was born into the (then) leafy area in Warwickshire, you can take the Tolkien Trail though today there is very little left that he'd recognise.
So yes, ok, Brummie orcs. I didn't think the Americans would know the difference :)
Anglo-Saxon europe particularly, including the Normans (ie the norse-men, ie the danes/swedes).
You can see the Norman influence in Gondor, and the Saxon influence to the Rohirrim.
and when they do it the other way round it's even worse!
I mean no-one believed that old Etonian Dominc West wasn't really New-York-Irish!
See him in The Wire, then watch an interview with him. That required some serious dedication and skill with accents. If only Maggie et al could dedicate some of their time to being taught to speak (and act).
oh, but there is...
once upon a time, there was a TV comedy show called 'Allo 'Allo
This was set in occupied France, and to keep things amusing and simple for the viewers, it was decided that each character would speak english, but in a phoney accent of the country they were depicting.
So the French bartender "spook like zees", and the escaping British airmen "spoke jolly good proper English what"! etc.
It got sillier when the foreign characters spoke in english, ie the french resistance fighter woudl speak with "ze french accent" when talking 'french' to the other french characters, and then change to a pseudo-jolly-what accent when she spoke english to the English airmen. Of course, they had to add a English spy character who didn't speak french very well later on (like Peter Seller's Clouseau)
It was silly, and probably no-one except the Germans would get the joke (except it was never shown in Germany due to it being set during the war and thus illegal due to the German characters and symbols being in it). Shame, they'd have really liked it. For fairness, it did take the piss out of every European race.
*I* think its becuase the dwarves are depicted as coming from the north of Middle Earth, where's its mountainous and strange. And in the UK, the 'wild north' is Scotland.
Though, as Tolkien was an anglo-saxon scholar, the dwarves could so easily have been from a northern Scandinavian country instead. Swedish dwarves anyone?
whilst there is a good analogy between the little British people (hobbits) kicking the stuff out of the evil empire of Sauron (Hitler), the entire world is based around anglo-saxon myths, so technically it includes Britain, and the northern Germanic and Scandinavian countries.
Dwarves come from the north part of Middle Earth, so it's natural they got Scottish accents, but they could so easily have been Norwegian instead.
The shire, BTW, is Warwickshire (that's wa-rick-shire), there's still a 'tolkien trail' around Hall Green in what is now a very-built-up Birmingham, not the green fields of Tolkien's youth, but the dark satanic mills of Saruman's industrial progress.
and he was an Anglo-Saxon scholar too, which is why the archetypal fantasy world is pretty much set in anglo-saxon-based myth.
Of course, the Hobbits should technically all be Brummie, and I guess the Elves should all speak with a tree-hugging Somerset accent
Does Bugs Bunny sound sexy to you?
No. But I will note that when the UK director Gerry Anderson produced Thunderbirds, for a UK audience, he gave the puppets US accents.
Jessica Rabbit does :)
The thunderbirds puppets were modelled on the US astronauts, so its not unreasonable that (at the time) futuristic people were American. I guess its the same as today where all the terrorists are middle eastern.
There are a lot of British accents in Hollywood... but they're usually the badguy, with the hero as an apple-pie-eating-all-american guy, like Tom Cruise.
I think its alll about keeping things simple for the US audiences, the bad guy speaks with a British accent, the good guy has an American one, the terrorist is dark and swarthy, the charming rogue is Irish... stereotypes make it easy for the audience to know what to expect from that character.
it wasn't the standards body that "called them out", but the retailers who asked "shouldn't it have...."
The Pi devs thought it didn't need the CE mark because it is an unfinished product, not a consumer device (eg it doesn't come with a case). they thought this because the Beagleboard is a similarly 'unfinished' product and it too doesn't have the CE mark.
The Pi people are going through the CE motions to make sure they're covered, and finding out if they really have to go through the compliance checks on the side.
ArsTechnica does a much better job describing the issue.
I guess optional isn't good for protocols. If a device might not support it then you can't rely on it, and if you can't rely on it, you might as well not bother trying to use it.
Of course, if all this happens under the covers of the network stack, then things might be different, but can you really implement push notifications on the server if the client only supports pull.
I particularly worry that MS will introduce another 'optional' component that is available on Window server and Window Phone, and make it a 'de-facto standard' (though, admittedly, they have little chance of that give their share of the web server/internet arena).