Real didn't remove the Apple DRM, though, they added it. That's not DRM circumvention. Real had the rights to distribute the music. If there was some legal issue with creating the FairPlay (gotta love them names) compatible files, Apple would have sued Real rather than just adding code to reject their files.
First, it makes the tax structure for companies a lot simpler. The amount of paperwork for tracking all of your expenses is silly (I _hate_ saving and tracking receipts) and you don't know how much your tax will be until you know how much your profit is. If it's a percentage of revenues you can just figure it in to your costs and be done.
Second, the tax on income penalized businesses saving. So, if you need to make a big investment that you can't finance out of revenues in a single tax year it makes more sense to borrow for it than it does to save profits for a few years. When times are good, borrowing is fairly easy. However, as soon as a recession hits, banks start to trim credit lines and refuse to make new loans. This decreases investment and makes the recession worse. If more businesses were financing themselves out saved profits the business cycle would probably not be as much of a boom/bust as it.
The difference is that for a corporation almost everything is a business expense whereas for an individual you can't deduct things like food, clothing and other things not directly related to the business.
Hmmm...here in Tokyo a lot of the power is coming in through overhead lines. Our building gets fed off a pole and we haven't had an outage in years. That includes during the multiple typhoons that come through every year. They tend to insulate the wires and wrap them with steel cable here, though, so maybe that's a big difference.
Most of the answers to your questions are "it depends" I don't understand what you mean by a "software shop" - is this a consulting company, a company that produces a large scale product, a company that produces a small product, an online service or what?
Your ratio of junior to senior developers depends on the kind of product you're producing. If you have an application that has a big, overarching architecture and then lots of relatively simple modules for specific cases, you want many junior developers to pound out those simple modules (e.g. different types of data entry screens).
Coding standards and standardization are always good. For a small shop you're best off looking around for one that you like and adopting it rather than trying to make your own from scratch because it is not a revenue producer and you can burn endless hours in meetings arguing about spacing, comment style, etc. Make an executive decision and move forward.
Tools and languages, again, it depends. Use the right tool for the job.
Since you don't know any of these things or how to make the tradeoffs, what you need is to hire a director of engineering who does because if you try to hire some developers and apply the vast depth of wisdom that you've acquired from this thread on Slashdot you're probably going to fail miserably.
There's a lot of value in having humans along. Currently, launch costs are so high that the costs of bringing along the life support for humans is prohibitive, but if it got cheaper many things would work better.
Consider Philae - if it had landed a few meters in another direction it would still be working. If it had been a manned expedition, that wouldn't have been an issue.
Or look at the Mars rovers. Great stuff, but there's little ability to improvise. Think up a different experiment you want done? Well, it'll have to wait for the next rover because that one can't do it.
That's such bullshit. We didn't understand the atom until a little over a century ago. Quantum mechanics even later. Just because it's been thousands of years and we haven't figured something out doesn't mean that it's unknowable.
Because nobody is making that many batteries yet and they're quite expensive? The whole Tesla "gigafactory" is so they can produce 500,000 cars per year. That's a drop in the bucket for supplying homes with batteries.
Yeah, Angela Merkel was upset the NSA was spying on her (and she's actually a legitimate target as a head of state and has her own security forces who are supposed to be securing her communications) but wants to return the favor to the rest of the world. They're all the same.
There's one barrier in front of space exploration - high launch costs. Everything else is surmountable or ignorable.
We've been sending people to Antarctica for a while. Many of the early explorers died. Tourists have died in Antarctica. Some space explorers will die because of shoddy equipment. We may even send people places with equipment known to be substandard. I wouldn't go but there seem to be plenty who would.
And personal tax is a myth for the same reason because I just ask for a higher salary to offset my tax burden. By that logic you can't tax ANYTHING because the cost will get shifted somewhere else.
What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.
Well, as a normal US citizen (I'm an ex-pat so I have to deal with this crap) the US wants to tax you on your worldwide income. The only legal way to avoid that is to give up your US citizenship. Currently, I think the US is the only country that tries to tax you on your worldwide income so pretty much if you shift your citizenship to any other country you can then go reside in whatever low tax locale you can and only pay the local taxes. The US has come up with an "exit tax" though, so if you have a substantial amount of assets and want to give up your US citizenship they want you to pay for the privilege of leaving.
If it was only shielding non-US profits from US tax collection I'd be inclined to agree, but I think they're evading taxes in every country they're doing business in.
Luxembourg can afford to offer low tax rates because there's no cost to them. Amazon is using the infrastructure in other countries (e.g. roads, airports, etc.) to make money without paying for it. If they actually based their entire business in Luxembourg and then shipped worldwide I'd say it made sense. This is not competition on tax rates, this is just a scam.
I don't think it will work without a pretty wide-open connection to Amazon. All of those queries that we saw were not being satisfied by the local box. The shopping list was internet connected. That thing is not going in my house.
Essentially what Luxembourg is doing here is offering tax collection as a service. Luxembourg collects a small percentage but much more than they would get otherwise, since Amazon et al. don't do much business in Luxembourg and offers these large corporations a legal shield against other countries' taxes.
This would appear to be a bug in the international tax system.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you think /dev/null is implemented?
Real didn't remove the Apple DRM, though, they added it. That's not DRM circumvention. Real had the rights to distribute the music. If there was some legal issue with creating the FairPlay (gotta love them names) compatible files, Apple would have sued Real rather than just adding code to reject their files.
I think there may be some merit to this.
First, it makes the tax structure for companies a lot simpler. The amount of paperwork for tracking all of your expenses is silly (I _hate_ saving and tracking receipts) and you don't know how much your tax will be until you know how much your profit is. If it's a percentage of revenues you can just figure it in to your costs and be done.
Second, the tax on income penalized businesses saving. So, if you need to make a big investment that you can't finance out of revenues in a single tax year it makes more sense to borrow for it than it does to save profits for a few years. When times are good, borrowing is fairly easy. However, as soon as a recession hits, banks start to trim credit lines and refuse to make new loans. This decreases investment and makes the recession worse. If more businesses were financing themselves out saved profits the business cycle would probably not be as much of a boom/bust as it.
The difference is that for a corporation almost everything is a business expense whereas for an individual you can't deduct things like food, clothing and other things not directly related to the business.
I remember hearing that back in the mid-80's. May I introduce you to bubble memory?
Hmmm...here in Tokyo a lot of the power is coming in through overhead lines. Our building gets fed off a pole and we haven't had an outage in years. That includes during the multiple typhoons that come through every year. They tend to insulate the wires and wrap them with steel cable here, though, so maybe that's a big difference.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly
Most of the answers to your questions are "it depends" I don't understand what you mean by a "software shop" - is this a consulting company, a company that produces a large scale product, a company that produces a small product, an online service or what?
Your ratio of junior to senior developers depends on the kind of product you're producing. If you have an application that has a big, overarching architecture and then lots of relatively simple modules for specific cases, you want many junior developers to pound out those simple modules (e.g. different types of data entry screens).
Coding standards and standardization are always good. For a small shop you're best off looking around for one that you like and adopting it rather than trying to make your own from scratch because it is not a revenue producer and you can burn endless hours in meetings arguing about spacing, comment style, etc. Make an executive decision and move forward.
Tools and languages, again, it depends. Use the right tool for the job.
Since you don't know any of these things or how to make the tradeoffs, what you need is to hire a director of engineering who does because if you try to hire some developers and apply the vast depth of wisdom that you've acquired from this thread on Slashdot you're probably going to fail miserably.
And there's nothing in North America except trees and savages. What a short-sighted view you have.
There's a lot of value in having humans along. Currently, launch costs are so high that the costs of bringing along the life support for humans is prohibitive, but if it got cheaper many things would work better.
Consider Philae - if it had landed a few meters in another direction it would still be working. If it had been a manned expedition, that wouldn't have been an issue.
Or look at the Mars rovers. Great stuff, but there's little ability to improvise. Think up a different experiment you want done? Well, it'll have to wait for the next rover because that one can't do it.
That's such bullshit. We didn't understand the atom until a little over a century ago. Quantum mechanics even later. Just because it's been thousands of years and we haven't figured something out doesn't mean that it's unknowable.
The difference being that you could have coded it from scratch - and you don't learn how to do that just by copy/pasting code.
Because nobody is making that many batteries yet and they're quite expensive? The whole Tesla "gigafactory" is so they can produce 500,000 cars per year. That's a drop in the bucket for supplying homes with batteries.
Yeah, Angela Merkel was upset the NSA was spying on her (and she's actually a legitimate target as a head of state and has her own security forces who are supposed to be securing her communications) but wants to return the favor to the rest of the world. They're all the same.
There's one barrier in front of space exploration - high launch costs. Everything else is surmountable or ignorable.
We've been sending people to Antarctica for a while. Many of the early explorers died. Tourists have died in Antarctica. Some space explorers will die because of shoddy equipment. We may even send people places with equipment known to be substandard. I wouldn't go but there seem to be plenty who would.
Nope - I haven't given up on my US citizenship yet.
And personal tax is a myth for the same reason because I just ask for a higher salary to offset my tax burden. By that logic you can't tax ANYTHING because the cost will get shifted somewhere else.
What makes you think that companies don't want and lobby for this complex tax code that is full of loopholes they can explot?
Don't like it? Move.
What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.
Well, considering that you're NOT paying taxes in a tax haven, tax "heaven" seems reasonable.
Actually, it doesn't matter how long you reside outside of the US they still want their bite.
Well, as a normal US citizen (I'm an ex-pat so I have to deal with this crap) the US wants to tax you on your worldwide income. The only legal way to avoid that is to give up your US citizenship. Currently, I think the US is the only country that tries to tax you on your worldwide income so pretty much if you shift your citizenship to any other country you can then go reside in whatever low tax locale you can and only pay the local taxes. The US has come up with an "exit tax" though, so if you have a substantial amount of assets and want to give up your US citizenship they want you to pay for the privilege of leaving.
If it was only shielding non-US profits from US tax collection I'd be inclined to agree, but I think they're evading taxes in every country they're doing business in.
Luxembourg can afford to offer low tax rates because there's no cost to them. Amazon is using the infrastructure in other countries (e.g. roads, airports, etc.) to make money without paying for it. If they actually based their entire business in Luxembourg and then shipped worldwide I'd say it made sense. This is not competition on tax rates, this is just a scam.
I don't think it will work without a pretty wide-open connection to Amazon. All of those queries that we saw were not being satisfied by the local box. The shopping list was internet connected. That thing is not going in my house.
Essentially what Luxembourg is doing here is offering tax collection as a service. Luxembourg collects a small percentage but much more than they would get otherwise, since Amazon et al. don't do much business in Luxembourg and offers these large corporations a legal shield against other countries' taxes.
This would appear to be a bug in the international tax system.