Oh yes, lots of them; there's a large number of big companies willing to provide these sorts of things. But it isn't exactly like you can see any difference between them.
I'd be more likely to recommend getting a smaller firm to provide these sorts of projects, as they're more likely to focus on delivering at least the minimum required. After all, they'll want to be paid on time and will be far more subject to the state's legal system if things go wrong.
Potentially Unwanted Programs are not quite malware, though in many cases I'd argue are worse. PUPs are generally stuff like 'WOMG Awesome Toolbar', 'Internet Coupon Printer 3000', "Free smilies wacky mouse pointers' and Java.
What, like Windows 8 which came with all those Metro apps (which I've never seen a user actually want)?
The trouble is; they're able to hide behind the EULA, and if they are aggressive --- they can sue and win against anyone calling their software malware, since the behavior is "disclosed" as expected operation of the software.
They might be able to claim that, but it doesn't mean that courts would necessarily agree. Consumers typically have greater legal protections than companies precisely because they are usually so much less skilled in contract law. This applies in many areas of commerce; for someone to say that computer software should be exempt from this principle is entirely unrealistic.
Why not blacklist all calls from that country if its third world?
Most calls will show up as domestic, wherever the person handling them is based. The ones where they don't bother are the trivial ones to block.
On the other hand, I also remember that my time is more valuable than theirs; I just ignore unexpected calls from unknown numbers. The phone stays on silent anyway, so the amount of disturbance is minimal. (No, I don't need it for work, and I never told work my cell number.)
Process excellence means you deliver the quality your customer us prepared to pay for, consistently.
Except that almost every MBA-driven management make a mess of that, asking the question how can we make something as cheaply as possible that people will pay more for, instead of asking how to make something so good that it is really desirable and people become willing to pay extra. MBAs take their lessons from Walmart, not from Apple.
Suggestions that "<codeunit>*" mean any number of repeats of make as much sense as suggesting that "the*" means the user wants any number of repeats of "the" (rather than the 'e') because "the" is an English word.
Do you mean bytes or characters? While you think these are the same thing, you'll continue to be very confused.
Uhm, the entire point of GPL is that you can restrict others right to copy it and distribute it.
Technically true, but the only restriction is that those others cannot in turn add further restrictions.
Practically, the way people actually tend to view GPL is as "you can't build your own custom commercial software on top of it". Whether this is true in fact doesn't matter; it's what they think. The BSD license really just says that you can't claim you wrote what you didn't, and you can't change the license; it definitely permits building proprietary things on top. (You could just take the software itself and sell it, but since others could provide the same thing for nothing, there'd be no value-add in doing so; successful products need a USP.)
What if on the main page of your site it says "We have not been served any secret warrants".
Can they force you to leave that on your site?
In a word: yes. Assuming that the threat of getting jail time for going explicitly against a court order (whether that is a secret court or otherwise) can force you to do anything. Tipping people off when you've been explicitly told that you must not do so will carry serious consequences, and this has been the case for a long time; it's well-established in law (provided it's a proper court order). Whether those consequences are worth bearing so that you can maintain a particular moral position isn't a question I can answer for you.
But the big problem is the use of secret courts and a security apparat that at least appears to be trying to make itself not answerable to anyone at all. Technology is not the way to fix such things. (Massively reducing the budget for spying is much more clearly part of a proper resolution, as it forces the spooks to focus on doing just the minimum necessary instead of watching everyone "just in case".)
They'll just increase prices, so you pay more and the extra money is sent to the government. Or they'll cut wages, so you earn less and the extra money is sent to the government.
Except there may be legislated minimums on pay rates, and increasing prices may result in a lower level of sales. Or it might not; some goods become more desirable as they become more expensive (typically because the real reason they're bought is to show that the purchaser can afford them; this is stupid, but definitely happens with some goods). But for all that, corporations have been acting like they believe it is their right to pay as little tax as they can get away with, doing tricks like setting the licensing charges for something to exactly match the profits that would otherwise have taxes paid on them. (That's a trick that always smelt very wrong to me, and it appears to be pretty common.) It sounds like the Italian tax authorities are going to try to clamp down on this.
It is hard to decide if they are merely incompetent or malicious.
"Or"? I think you'll find that "and" works just as well in this case, and it becomes not hard to decide at all. (Though with a boolean "or" as opposed to the customary english usage, it's also easy to decide: "true").
1. Native widgets (especially important under OS X).
Ironically this is the reason we moved our cross-platform OSS app away from wxWidgets to Qt. The native widgets just didn't work properly and it was a pain to fix. We made the move some 4 years ago or so, and I can't say we've noticed we're missing something...
Some users really want the perfect look of native widgets, though totally looking correct does require more than that, as different platforms have different layout norms too (and then there's the "feel", which is harder still unless you go completely native). Other users don't care nearly so much.
It's like that in the whole Latin America, by the way... just with different "targets".
Not just Latin America. It's a favoured tactic of politicians the world over. Why do something about a real problem (that's expensive and might not work!) when you can stir up fuss and bother about foreigners?
Everyone would be fine with finding other ways to make money -- and in fact Google's non-ad revenues are consistently growing much faster than it's ad revenues.
Of course that's going to be true; you've got such a large proportion of online advertising that growing the size of the pie is going to be really hard. It's a measure of success, really. (The rate of change isn't the only interesting metric.)
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour.
Round us, they use variable speed limits so that they can be set lower during rush hour and increased when traffic densities are lower. My experience with them is that during the rush, everyone does almost exactly the same speed; it's like the traffic is flowing like a liquid instead of as a gas.
Great opportunity for a B2B tech startup! Mr. Merchant, we'll figure out the tax for you and take care of the paperwork in return for a surcharge of 0.5 percent.
They already exist. They're expensive, very expensive.
The problem isn't feeding the details into a spreadsheet and getting a value out, the problem is partially maintaining that spreadsheet (well, really a bit more complex than that) and partially that tax collection laws are very divergent in the details.
So... if I want to sell you something and you're located in the US, you say I should pay US sales tax, even though my locality (Hong Kong) doesn't have a sales tax at all?
Doesn't sound exactly fair to me. And then I'm not even contemplating the nightmare of having to charge customers taxes, based on where they are located, and then manage to pay it to the relevant overseas governments.
What actually tends to happen (based on experience with countries that do have national sales tax systems like VAT) is that as a foreign customer you don't pay the sales tax, but you instead have to pay any local import duties. Now, they might be zero in your country/area, but that's not the exporter's problem.
The other way that technically works is that you have to pay the sales taxes and you're free to take your business elsewhere. That's what happens if you buy the goods/services in person. (Again, you might be allowed to reclaim the taxes on exit from the country, particularly in the case that they were levied on goods that are leaving with you, and again you may well be liable for import duties. I wouldn't expect to be able to reclaim tax on services, as they're not exportable in the same sense.) This has been demonstrated to work without excessive bureaucracy.
What sucks is where you've got thousands of overlapping taxing jurisdictions, each with their own rules as to what is taxable and at what rate. It'd be an absolute nightmare to code up such a mess, and to keep it up to date. Which is why Amazon would be very happy to see a national sales tax system: almost any amount of complexity in the rules there would be less onerous on them than what they're putting up with (and "minimising") now.
It's only used on some very small percentage of pages
When you can't count on support for it being there, of course you're not going to write pages using it! What people actually use is a (La)TeX fragment to image converter, which sucks but at least is known to deliver readable output. Even if it isn't computer-readable.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I forgetting anyone?
Oh yes, lots of them; there's a large number of big companies willing to provide these sorts of things. But it isn't exactly like you can see any difference between them.
I'd be more likely to recommend getting a smaller firm to provide these sorts of projects, as they're more likely to focus on delivering at least the minimum required. After all, they'll want to be paid on time and will be far more subject to the state's legal system if things go wrong.
Potentially Unwanted Programs are not quite malware, though in many cases I'd argue are worse. PUPs are generally stuff like 'WOMG Awesome Toolbar', 'Internet Coupon Printer 3000', "Free smilies wacky mouse pointers' and Java.
What, like Windows 8 which came with all those Metro apps (which I've never seen a user actually want)?
The trouble is; they're able to hide behind the EULA, and if they are aggressive --- they can sue and win against anyone calling their software malware, since the behavior is "disclosed" as expected operation of the software.
They might be able to claim that, but it doesn't mean that courts would necessarily agree. Consumers typically have greater legal protections than companies precisely because they are usually so much less skilled in contract law. This applies in many areas of commerce; for someone to say that computer software should be exempt from this principle is entirely unrealistic.
Why not blacklist all calls from that country if its third world?
Most calls will show up as domestic, wherever the person handling them is based. The ones where they don't bother are the trivial ones to block.
On the other hand, I also remember that my time is more valuable than theirs; I just ignore unexpected calls from unknown numbers. The phone stays on silent anyway, so the amount of disturbance is minimal. (No, I don't need it for work, and I never told work my cell number.)
...ubiquitous, in-demand, and guaranteed to cause brain damage to any aspiring programmer who learns it first.
It's not quite that bad. Now, imagine if it had been Perl 4 that had been widely adopted instead of one of the offspring of Smalltalk...
<shudders>
It's watchmen all the way down.
Or rather Ceiling Cats all the way up.
The clowns in Congress can't even keep the streets paved.
I'm not too worried about the clowns; they're just a bit scary and funny. It's the politicians in Congress that are really the problem.
Where do you think the question 'Cat got your tongue" came from?
Our cats prefer liver, but nobody ever said "cat got your liver?".
The same can be said about engineers.
Engineering is a fast path to management??? Umm... no...
Process excellence means you deliver the quality your customer us prepared to pay for, consistently.
Except that almost every MBA-driven management make a mess of that, asking the question how can we make something as cheaply as possible that people will pay more for, instead of asking how to make something so good that it is really desirable and people become willing to pay extra. MBAs take their lessons from Walmart, not from Apple.
I might as well be playing Cookie Clicker.
PoE got me off the CC addiction....
Suggestions that "<codeunit>*" mean any number of repeats of make as much sense as suggesting that "the*" means the user wants any number of repeats of "the" (rather than the 'e') because "the" is an English word.
Do you mean bytes or characters? While you think these are the same thing, you'll continue to be very confused.
Uhm, the entire point of GPL is that you can restrict others right to copy it and distribute it.
Technically true, but the only restriction is that those others cannot in turn add further restrictions.
Practically, the way people actually tend to view GPL is as "you can't build your own custom commercial software on top of it". Whether this is true in fact doesn't matter; it's what they think. The BSD license really just says that you can't claim you wrote what you didn't, and you can't change the license; it definitely permits building proprietary things on top. (You could just take the software itself and sell it, but since others could provide the same thing for nothing, there'd be no value-add in doing so; successful products need a USP.)
What if on the main page of your site it says "We have not been served any secret warrants".
Can they force you to leave that on your site?
In a word: yes. Assuming that the threat of getting jail time for going explicitly against a court order (whether that is a secret court or otherwise) can force you to do anything. Tipping people off when you've been explicitly told that you must not do so will carry serious consequences, and this has been the case for a long time; it's well-established in law (provided it's a proper court order). Whether those consequences are worth bearing so that you can maintain a particular moral position isn't a question I can answer for you.
But the big problem is the use of secret courts and a security apparat that at least appears to be trying to make itself not answerable to anyone at all. Technology is not the way to fix such things. (Massively reducing the budget for spying is much more clearly part of a proper resolution, as it forces the spooks to focus on doing just the minimum necessary instead of watching everyone "just in case".)
Real Programmers(TM) use Fortran
What about Integer Programmers? (Hey, I declared it so I can do that, yes?)
They'll just increase prices, so you pay more and the extra money is sent to the government. Or they'll cut wages, so you earn less and the extra money is sent to the government.
Except there may be legislated minimums on pay rates, and increasing prices may result in a lower level of sales. Or it might not; some goods become more desirable as they become more expensive (typically because the real reason they're bought is to show that the purchaser can afford them; this is stupid, but definitely happens with some goods). But for all that, corporations have been acting like they believe it is their right to pay as little tax as they can get away with, doing tricks like setting the licensing charges for something to exactly match the profits that would otherwise have taxes paid on them. (That's a trick that always smelt very wrong to me, and it appears to be pretty common.) It sounds like the Italian tax authorities are going to try to clamp down on this.
It is hard to decide if they are merely incompetent or malicious.
"Or"? I think you'll find that "and" works just as well in this case, and it becomes not hard to decide at all. (Though with a boolean "or" as opposed to the customary english usage, it's also easy to decide: "true").
I don't need to beware the ads, since I don't bother to RTFA! Or the summary all that much.
1. Native widgets (especially important under OS X).
Ironically this is the reason we moved our cross-platform OSS app away from wxWidgets to Qt. The native widgets just didn't work properly and it was a pain to fix. We made the move some 4 years ago or so, and I can't say we've noticed we're missing something...
Some users really want the perfect look of native widgets, though totally looking correct does require more than that, as different platforms have different layout norms too (and then there's the "feel", which is harder still unless you go completely native). Other users don't care nearly so much.
It's like that in the whole Latin America, by the way... just with different "targets".
Not just Latin America. It's a favoured tactic of politicians the world over. Why do something about a real problem (that's expensive and might not work!) when you can stir up fuss and bother about foreigners?
Everyone would be fine with finding other ways to make money -- and in fact Google's non-ad revenues are consistently growing much faster than it's ad revenues.
Of course that's going to be true; you've got such a large proportion of online advertising that growing the size of the pie is going to be really hard. It's a measure of success, really. (The rate of change isn't the only interesting metric.)
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour.
Round us, they use variable speed limits so that they can be set lower during rush hour and increased when traffic densities are lower. My experience with them is that during the rush, everyone does almost exactly the same speed; it's like the traffic is flowing like a liquid instead of as a gas.
Great opportunity for a B2B tech startup! Mr. Merchant, we'll figure out the tax for you and take care of the paperwork in return for a surcharge of 0.5 percent.
They already exist. They're expensive, very expensive.
The problem isn't feeding the details into a spreadsheet and getting a value out, the problem is partially maintaining that spreadsheet (well, really a bit more complex than that) and partially that tax collection laws are very divergent in the details.
So... if I want to sell you something and you're located in the US, you say I should pay US sales tax, even though my locality (Hong Kong) doesn't have a sales tax at all?
Doesn't sound exactly fair to me. And then I'm not even contemplating the nightmare of having to charge customers taxes, based on where they are located, and then manage to pay it to the relevant overseas governments.
What actually tends to happen (based on experience with countries that do have national sales tax systems like VAT) is that as a foreign customer you don't pay the sales tax, but you instead have to pay any local import duties. Now, they might be zero in your country/area, but that's not the exporter's problem.
The other way that technically works is that you have to pay the sales taxes and you're free to take your business elsewhere. That's what happens if you buy the goods/services in person. (Again, you might be allowed to reclaim the taxes on exit from the country, particularly in the case that they were levied on goods that are leaving with you, and again you may well be liable for import duties. I wouldn't expect to be able to reclaim tax on services, as they're not exportable in the same sense.) This has been demonstrated to work without excessive bureaucracy.
What sucks is where you've got thousands of overlapping taxing jurisdictions, each with their own rules as to what is taxable and at what rate. It'd be an absolute nightmare to code up such a mess, and to keep it up to date. Which is why Amazon would be very happy to see a national sales tax system: almost any amount of complexity in the rules there would be less onerous on them than what they're putting up with (and "minimising") now.
It's only used on some very small percentage of pages
When you can't count on support for it being there, of course you're not going to write pages using it! What people actually use is a (La)TeX fragment to image converter, which sucks but at least is known to deliver readable output. Even if it isn't computer-readable.