Otherwise, multi-nationals could just play a shell game with all their data and never have to comply with any nation's court orders ever while single-nation corporations could never enjoy the same freedom.
You do realize they already do this with taxes right? Microsoft in Ireland is a distinct legal entity, and it not the same corporation as the one in Redmond. Otherwise Microsoft would pay taxes on its global income to the American government, as well as all of the localities in which they operate.
The entity in Ireland is subject to Ireland's laws, and is located there because taxation is favorable.
That does not in any way mean that Microsoft US owning Microsoft in Ireland means that Microsoft in Ireland is exempt from the laws of Ireland, nor can Microsoft USA compel the Irish entity to break the laws of Ireland.
If what you're saying were true, the EU could fine Microsoft a fraction of it's global revenues and say "it's all the same company, right"?
This is purely a case of America deciding their laws extend beyond their borders.
If the data only lives on a server in Ireland, it is most certainly NOT subject to the laws of the US.
It's water resistant which usually means everything except prolonged submersion
'Water Resistant' is one of those marketing terms that you need to look at more closely to know what it's actually saying.
Sometimes, water resistant means you can wash your hands, but the rating is for ~1 bar in a static chamber. Basically standard atmospheric pressure.
Sometimes water resistant means you can actively be doing stuff under water for a prolonged period of time up to a certain depth.
A lot of cheap watches that say water resistant are more like the 1 bar/static rating. But you sure as heck wouldn't go swimming with one on.
At 20 bar, you can safely assume the watch can be submerged for extended periods of time while moving around. And, at that rating, if you ever find yourself anywhere near what it's theoretically rated for... your watch will be a secondary concern to making sure you're wearing breathing gear.:-P
This is kind of like saying 3D TV companies were in a war with each other. While that may have been true, consumers didn't notice because the tech just wasn't that interesting to them.
Totally off-topic... but I've started seeing commercials for curved ultra-HDTV displays.
My frickin' cable company doesn't give me full 1080p now. No way they're gonna give me uncompressed 4K video.
I just looked at the commercial and figured some rich guys would soon be parted with their money, and the rest of us won't care.
We all learned our lesson with the moving target which was HD initially, that left early adopters with TVs which were no longer allowed to display HD due to HDCP/HDMI.
I'm sure people will buy these watches. And I'm also sure it will be a relatively small amount of people, and the rest of the us will ignore them entirely.
I was also thinking a stopwatch, one ore more alarms, the ability to set for a different time zone or account for DST. Maybe even keep track of the date and day of the week.
Those would be sweet.
And, then, I'm afraid I'm firmly in the camp of "don't give a crap about smart watches"
Microsoft USA has acces to mail relevant ot the case. It have been moved to storage owned by a different Microsoft entity in Ireland. Since Microsoft USA has access to it it should be reasonable for a US court-order that correctly follows due process to require that Microsoft USA provide the mail to the court.
So, your argument is that if Microsoft operates in North Korea, Iran, or any other country.. that those countries should also be able to force Microsoft to hand over any and all records on Americans if they see fit? Without showing probable cause in the the US or worrying about American laws?
Or are you saying that only America gets to have extra-territorial laws because you're special?
Which is it? Every court on the planet should be able to subpoena any record from a multinational because they want it? Or you're just so damned unique and awesome that it's only you?
There's not really much middle ground here. Either it is a legal principle which would apply to any country... or it isn't.
And if it isn't, your argument is probably crap and reeks of exceptionalism.
The bottom line is that according to information theory, environments favorable to life are unlikely to be unusual.
Except in a universe with billions and billions of galaxies, each containing billions and billions of stars... some of us assume that, statistically, the 'unusual' happens all the time.
In the last 30 years our understanding of how many stars have planets has changed entirely. We used to think there would be a small amount with planets and that we were really unique. Now, not so much.
These conditions may well be unusual. But there's a lot of unusual to go around, to the point that it almost seems like it would be happening over and over again.
Because Microsoft will become persona non grata in Europe if they are required to hand over data to the US against local law.
This has always been something people have warned about... the PATRIOT act basically says "we can force any company to hand over your data from anywhere in the world, and we don't give a damn about your laws and it stays secret".
So Microsoft is in the position of complying with the US government, and losing business elsewhere... or telling the US government to shove it.
When the US has decided their secret laws trump the laws of every other country, this was inevitable -- and people have been warning about this for years.
I know many governments already basically say "you can't store government data in a US cloud service or on a US server" for exactly this reason.
Basically, the US passed a law which put companies between a rock and a hard place. And now they have to choose between long term profits, or America's zeal for security.
Quite frankly, the US needs to get slapped back down and told by the rest of the world not our fucking problem.
Believe it or not, some of us still wear watches every day.
At any given time, I might have to track down where in the house my phone is. I also know I can go swimming in any of my watches and they'll be just fine.
So, I want neither the smart watch, nor to be tethered to my phone all the time.
I had lunch with a former co-worker a month or so ago... and the first thing I noticed was he was wearing a Samsung smart watch. He seemed to think it was great and that he could be quite far from his phone. I couldn't see the point.
Some of us geezers will still continue to wear watches which don't do anything related to our phones.
But, hey, buy whatever toy floats your boat, it's not a one size fits all thing.
Me, when I'm actually wearing a shirt and tie, I'll stick with one of my old fashioned automatic skeleton watches or a spiffy chronograph.
Maybe one of these days I'll learn to tie a bow tie and get one of them fancy tweed driving caps.;-)
But, which presumably wouldn't have happened without adding the bike lanes, and therefore was a happy side effect which made cyclists safer AND cars go faster.
I'm not saying ancient is bad. I'm saying ancient is ancient.
The language itself is... I believe purposefully verbose is a nice way to say it. I also know the language has had extensions over the years (don't ask me what they are, I haven't kept track). But I'm betting there's no "COBOL on RAILS" (or if there is, that's hilarious).
But, really, when I was in university 20+ years ago, I had profs who had used COBOL 20+ years before. Which means there's software out there which is old enough to be grandparents.;-)
The wheel is ancient, but not bad.
Except for places where it's entrenched... do you really think people are choosing it for new work? There's a lot of open source projects using COBOL nobody is aware of, are there? If it's largely legacy systems using it, it's outdated.
However, I've also know people who have been using the same old farm tractor to power something for several decades, and they work just fine.
But, if you were starting from scratch, you might use something else.
(Though, admittedly, I'm not sure you can do better than some of those old farm tractors which have been running machinery for decades.)
More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them
You know, I see stuff like this, and I think this is a terribly bad thing waiting to happen.
Great, your artificial heart has wi-fi. The firmware will become obsolete, or have security holes, or any number of ways in which this will be problematic.
It just seems like people build these things, when they have no real concept or experience with building a piece of technology which is expected to run for decades without problem.
It sounds cool, but the devil is in the details. And one definitely worries if enough details have been sorted out.
Sadly, not all systems can be replaced by one guy over a 7 year period.
Now take a mainframe system, which has a database which feeds dozens of other applications, all of which are integral to the business of the company, and which implement the business process and logic for many aspects of the business -- either you fully solve the integration across ALL of those at once, or the system is essentially useless.
I'm certainly not saying all pieces of legacy software can't be replaced, but some of the scarier/huger ones don't always lend themselves to it.
I once worked on a project where 4 of us were working full time to replace a system like that for four years... at which time, we'd barely scratched the surface, and were learning the more we knew the more everything they'd told us about the system at the beginning was such an oversimplification as to have been an outright lie.
And, then the usual cancelling of the project and acrimony follows.
There are certain kinds of legacy migrations I do not want to get anywhere near. There's also been a couple which are relatively straight forward and made perfect sense.
Because, there is no one size fits all solution for all problems.
It's not so much that it was a mistake, as it was actual reality of the situation the company found themselves in.
We're talking about systems with 40-50 years of data, for highly complex machines with incredibly long service lives that generate billions in revenue, which are tightly integrated into everything in the company, and which would likely cost 10's of millions of dollars (if not 100's) and several years to replace -- with the risk that you'd spend the money and still not end up with a viable replacement.
The reality is, in long-established businesses in highly regulated industries with systems which are literally decades old and not easily replaced... many many organizations find that it would be impossible to replace/retire these systems, and that it's cheaper to keep paying the people who have familiarity with these systems. And if they die, you find someone else with a lot of years on a similar system.
Saying "oh, just replace it with something new" is something which I hear from naive, inexperienced people who have never encountered these kinds of systems. Sure, it sounds great, but it doesn't match up with actual reality.
I've encountered several of these systems, and been on projects to try to replace a couple -- and almost universally when you try to do it, you realize that the scope of the problem, and the way in which it will break everything else you have, corporations decide it's not possible or cost effective.
Say what you will about the old school mainframe applications, but they did exactly what they were supposed to, for very long periods of time, with thousands of pieces of institutional and business process embedded in them... and they do it without crashing, breaking, or otherwise being unavailable. EVER!
Systems which have been running robustly since decades before Microsoft was even founded are about as non-trivial to replace as you can possibly imagine.
Precisely because they are so big, so important, so complex, and so tightly integrated into every one of your business processes.
So, you'll excuse me if I question if you've actually encountered any of these systems, or been part of trying to replace one.
Because anybody who has usually looks at the project and says "no way am I getting dragged into that".
Slashdot Mirror
LOL ... did you read the link in the GP? I'm sticking with pudometer.
You do realize they already do this with taxes right? Microsoft in Ireland is a distinct legal entity, and it not the same corporation as the one in Redmond. Otherwise Microsoft would pay taxes on its global income to the American government, as well as all of the localities in which they operate.
The entity in Ireland is subject to Ireland's laws, and is located there because taxation is favorable.
That does not in any way mean that Microsoft US owning Microsoft in Ireland means that Microsoft in Ireland is exempt from the laws of Ireland, nor can Microsoft USA compel the Irish entity to break the laws of Ireland.
If what you're saying were true, the EU could fine Microsoft a fraction of it's global revenues and say "it's all the same company, right"?
This is purely a case of America deciding their laws extend beyond their borders.
If the data only lives on a server in Ireland, it is most certainly NOT subject to the laws of the US.
Sounds pretty unlikely to me. ;-)
'Water Resistant' is one of those marketing terms that you need to look at more closely to know what it's actually saying.
Sometimes, water resistant means you can wash your hands, but the rating is for ~1 bar in a static chamber. Basically standard atmospheric pressure.
Sometimes water resistant means you can actively be doing stuff under water for a prolonged period of time up to a certain depth.
A lot of cheap watches that say water resistant are more like the 1 bar/static rating. But you sure as heck wouldn't go swimming with one on.
At 20 bar, you can safely assume the watch can be submerged for extended periods of time while moving around. And, at that rating, if you ever find yourself anywhere near what it's theoretically rated for ... your watch will be a secondary concern to making sure you're wearing breathing gear. :-P
Dude, it's an accelerometer ... I'm pretty sure they can also measure something oscillating continuously for a duration.
Your honor, if my client's hand was shaking like that while holding a gun, there's simply no way he'd have been able to shoot the victim. ;-)
Of course, as with all things ... I'm sure people would be posting fap-graphs on the interwebs trying to out do one another.
Sounds like a pudometer to me. ;-)
Dude, I'll sell you a pack of Sharpies for a couple thousand dollars.
Every week, you can sketch on your choice of cool symbol. I'll even give you several colors of Sharpie, so you can adorn it as you require.
You won't be limited to just one cool logo, and you won't even have to only have it on your wrist. You could put it in the middle of your forehead.
Come on, you know what want it. ;-)
Totally off-topic ... but I've started seeing commercials for curved ultra-HDTV displays.
My frickin' cable company doesn't give me full 1080p now. No way they're gonna give me uncompressed 4K video.
I just looked at the commercial and figured some rich guys would soon be parted with their money, and the rest of us won't care.
We all learned our lesson with the moving target which was HD initially, that left early adopters with TVs which were no longer allowed to display HD due to HDCP/HDMI.
I'm sure people will buy these watches. And I'm also sure it will be a relatively small amount of people, and the rest of the us will ignore them entirely.
I know, right?
I was also thinking a stopwatch, one ore more alarms, the ability to set for a different time zone or account for DST. Maybe even keep track of the date and day of the week.
Those would be sweet.
And, then, I'm afraid I'm firmly in the camp of "don't give a crap about smart watches"
Sorry, but when your courts violate the law of the country in question ... it comes down to a measure of sovereignty.
Are you suggesting that Microsoft is exempt from the laws of Ireland because a US court says so? Or that it's Microsoft's problem?
Microsoft is saying "this isn't us, this is you, and can you really do this?".
Srroy, but when abroad, you are subject to local laws. And a US court should not be able to compel someone to break the law in another country.
What if an Irish court demanded that US laws be broken? Would you be outraged, or would you say that's how it's supposed to work?
But, hey, I'm sure you believe America is different than everybody else, and therefore can do whatever they choose here.
The rest of the world doesn't agree.
So, your argument is that if Microsoft operates in North Korea, Iran, or any other country .. that those countries should also be able to force Microsoft to hand over any and all records on Americans if they see fit? Without showing probable cause in the the US or worrying about American laws?
Or are you saying that only America gets to have extra-territorial laws because you're special?
Which is it? Every court on the planet should be able to subpoena any record from a multinational because they want it? Or you're just so damned unique and awesome that it's only you?
There's not really much middle ground here. Either it is a legal principle which would apply to any country ... or it isn't.
And if it isn't, your argument is probably crap and reeks of exceptionalism.
So, we'd be junk food?
Great, that makes me feel much better. :-P
Oh, shit ... yes, I'm a moron ... I got the opposite out of that.
So, information theory tells us life should be common.
Except in a universe with billions and billions of galaxies, each containing billions and billions of stars ... some of us assume that, statistically, the 'unusual' happens all the time.
In the last 30 years our understanding of how many stars have planets has changed entirely. We used to think there would be a small amount with planets and that we were really unique. Now, not so much.
These conditions may well be unusual. But there's a lot of unusual to go around, to the point that it almost seems like it would be happening over and over again.
Because Microsoft will become persona non grata in Europe if they are required to hand over data to the US against local law.
This has always been something people have warned about ... the PATRIOT act basically says "we can force any company to hand over your data from anywhere in the world, and we don't give a damn about your laws and it stays secret".
So Microsoft is in the position of complying with the US government, and losing business elsewhere ... or telling the US government to shove it.
When the US has decided their secret laws trump the laws of every other country, this was inevitable -- and people have been warning about this for years.
I know many governments already basically say "you can't store government data in a US cloud service or on a US server" for exactly this reason.
Basically, the US passed a law which put companies between a rock and a hard place. And now they have to choose between long term profits, or America's zeal for security.
Quite frankly, the US needs to get slapped back down and told by the rest of the world not our fucking problem.
Meh. It's a watch, they use watch terminology (because that's what it's called on a watch).
That's far from an RDF, that's just marketing douchiness.
Believe it or not, some of us still wear watches every day.
At any given time, I might have to track down where in the house my phone is. I also know I can go swimming in any of my watches and they'll be just fine.
So, I want neither the smart watch, nor to be tethered to my phone all the time.
I had lunch with a former co-worker a month or so ago ... and the first thing I noticed was he was wearing a Samsung smart watch. He seemed to think it was great and that he could be quite far from his phone. I couldn't see the point.
Some of us geezers will still continue to wear watches which don't do anything related to our phones.
But, hey, buy whatever toy floats your boat, it's not a one size fits all thing.
Me, when I'm actually wearing a shirt and tie, I'll stick with one of my old fashioned automatic skeleton watches or a spiffy chronograph.
Maybe one of these days I'll learn to tie a bow tie and get one of them fancy tweed driving caps. ;-)
Well, presumably they cared about not having cyclists die.
If it achieves that and improves overall traffic flow, it takes away a lot of the reasons for people bitching against bike lanes in the first place.
It's freakin' New York City, from what I understand traffic congestion has been a problem for decades, and so has cyclists getting killed.
I call this a win-win.
LOL ... suddenly I'm nostalgic for old fashioned green on black monitors.
They even implemented screen burn in, that's awesome!!!
Cheers, and thanks for the good laugh. The guy who did that site is a genius.
But, which presumably wouldn't have happened without adding the bike lanes, and therefore was a happy side effect which made cyclists safer AND cars go faster.
Everybody wins.
I'm not saying ancient is bad. I'm saying ancient is ancient.
The language itself is ... I believe purposefully verbose is a nice way to say it. I also know the language has had extensions over the years (don't ask me what they are, I haven't kept track). But I'm betting there's no "COBOL on RAILS" (or if there is, that's hilarious).
But, really, when I was in university 20+ years ago, I had profs who had used COBOL 20+ years before. Which means there's software out there which is old enough to be grandparents. ;-)
The wheel is ancient, but not bad.
Except for places where it's entrenched ... do you really think people are choosing it for new work? There's a lot of open source projects using COBOL nobody is aware of, are there? If it's largely legacy systems using it, it's outdated.
However, I've also know people who have been using the same old farm tractor to power something for several decades, and they work just fine.
But, if you were starting from scratch, you might use something else.
(Though, admittedly, I'm not sure you can do better than some of those old farm tractors which have been running machinery for decades.)
I wouldn't preclude being old and right.
Years of cynicism and distrust has been vindicated for many of us, because sooner or later, much of the stuff we fear could happen does.
And, if nothing else, from an engineering perspective, you at least plan for the worst from the start.
Sure, my worst case scenario might not happen. But if you at least acknowledge it's a real possibility, you might mitigate a lot of other things.
You know, I see stuff like this, and I think this is a terribly bad thing waiting to happen.
Great, your artificial heart has wi-fi. The firmware will become obsolete, or have security holes, or any number of ways in which this will be problematic.
It just seems like people build these things, when they have no real concept or experience with building a piece of technology which is expected to run for decades without problem.
It sounds cool, but the devil is in the details. And one definitely worries if enough details have been sorted out.
Sadly, not all systems can be replaced by one guy over a 7 year period.
Now take a mainframe system, which has a database which feeds dozens of other applications, all of which are integral to the business of the company, and which implement the business process and logic for many aspects of the business -- either you fully solve the integration across ALL of those at once, or the system is essentially useless.
I'm certainly not saying all pieces of legacy software can't be replaced, but some of the scarier/huger ones don't always lend themselves to it.
I once worked on a project where 4 of us were working full time to replace a system like that for four years ... at which time, we'd barely scratched the surface, and were learning the more we knew the more everything they'd told us about the system at the beginning was such an oversimplification as to have been an outright lie.
And, then the usual cancelling of the project and acrimony follows.
There are certain kinds of legacy migrations I do not want to get anywhere near. There's also been a couple which are relatively straight forward and made perfect sense.
Because, there is no one size fits all solution for all problems.
It's not so much that it was a mistake, as it was actual reality of the situation the company found themselves in.
We're talking about systems with 40-50 years of data, for highly complex machines with incredibly long service lives that generate billions in revenue, which are tightly integrated into everything in the company, and which would likely cost 10's of millions of dollars (if not 100's) and several years to replace -- with the risk that you'd spend the money and still not end up with a viable replacement.
The reality is, in long-established businesses in highly regulated industries with systems which are literally decades old and not easily replaced ... many many organizations find that it would be impossible to replace/retire these systems, and that it's cheaper to keep paying the people who have familiarity with these systems. And if they die, you find someone else with a lot of years on a similar system.
Saying "oh, just replace it with something new" is something which I hear from naive, inexperienced people who have never encountered these kinds of systems. Sure, it sounds great, but it doesn't match up with actual reality.
I've encountered several of these systems, and been on projects to try to replace a couple -- and almost universally when you try to do it, you realize that the scope of the problem, and the way in which it will break everything else you have, corporations decide it's not possible or cost effective.
Say what you will about the old school mainframe applications, but they did exactly what they were supposed to, for very long periods of time, with thousands of pieces of institutional and business process embedded in them ... and they do it without crashing, breaking, or otherwise being unavailable. EVER!
Systems which have been running robustly since decades before Microsoft was even founded are about as non-trivial to replace as you can possibly imagine.
Precisely because they are so big, so important, so complex, and so tightly integrated into every one of your business processes.
So, you'll excuse me if I question if you've actually encountered any of these systems, or been part of trying to replace one.
Because anybody who has usually looks at the project and says "no way am I getting dragged into that".