I just struggle to see a situation that wouldn't be better served by a laptop in the field or a workstation back at the studio.
Really? Because it's kind of in the summary:
The Black Betty gets around one issue with the massive data processing and storage needs inherent to high-capacity, high-resolution video cameras by attacking it head-on
This covers the data storage, the camera, and in a pinch or out of necessity you can do the editing on the device itself.
It's likely not going to be your primary place to do processing on the video, but it will cover your storage needs and give you some editing as well.
The lawsuit also claims that Uber is misclassifying its drivers as contractors, rather than employees.
Well, are they contractors? You should now your own employment status.
Depending on what exactly the relationship between the drivers and the company will define a lot. If they're just a dispatcher for people who have signed up to be told they can pick someone up... you may well be a contractor.
I'm fairly sure cab drivers aren't generally considered employees, so unless you've been hired by these people, and they're doing your payroll deductions and the like, why would this be different?
Skimming tips is another issue, and could indicate all kinds of douchy-ness, but whether or not you're a contractor will depend entirely on what kind of relationship you have with them.
Give them some real world activities... filling out TPS reports, doing your timesheets, entering change requests, patching Windows, listening to quarterly calls when the company releases the numbers, trying to scrounge together machines for QA, listening to a client tell you how it's your fault that there's no power on the 3rd floor...
That'll learn 'em.
Oh, did you want to encourage them to get into the field?
There is always another party to that email, so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy and at which point does the receiver take over that right
Sadly, we live in a world where implicit/click-through EULAs have been upheld in court.
Which means there's likely a clause which says "by using this service (which includes sending to our users)..."
This will be true of pretty much any organization... once the email hits their servers, they own that copy of it. Hell, if you sent me email at work, my company owns those servers and you have no expectation of privacy as well -- because like every company, they basically say they retain the right to access emails.
The problem isn't with Google (though I'm not defending them), it's with privacy laws. As long as governments decide that business models are corporate profits trump privacy, and the expectation is people want to monetize you, then there will always be be this kind of thing.
just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed
Except, from a strictly legal perspective, you have, even if you didn't explicitly say so -- once again, that's EULAs.
And, I can guarantee you, Yahoo, Microsoft, and lots of other entities do this.
The only way you are ever going to have 100% privacy in email is if you own and host your own server, and everything is sent encrypted. And even then, if the government themselves wanted to know, they could compel you.
So what needs to happen is improvements to privacy laws. And quite frankly, I don't see a lot of governments giving a damn about that, because they're more worried about surveillance. And if they're exploiting the fact that Google can look at your email to do advertising (which they are), they can also use that to see the contents of your email if they wish.
Seriously, blame your lawmakers -- they are the ones who set this scenario up and passed the laws that allow this to happen (or failed to pass laws that prevent it).
If I text someone, and I have no idea where they are or what they are in the middle of doing... how the hell can I be liable for whatever the recipient did thereafter?
Nothing about me texting you compels you to read the damned thing while you're driving. One of the nice things about text messages is you can ignore it for a little bit because it's not real time -- that the recipient chose to do something stupid is entirely their own problem.
Increasingly, I am convinced that judges in the US don't have the barest grasp of logic.
Can we extend this to say that gun makers/auto makers are liable if they allow a gun/car to come into the hands of someone with a temper or any history of bad judgement? Because this is basically saying you're now responsible for the actions of anybody you could reasonably conclude does stupid things.
At this point I'm actually surprised that there have been no accidental nuclear explosions.
My understanding (very loose, very old, very incomplete) is that it's actually hard to make that kind of reaction happen... and most devices designed by anybody not planning on blowing themselves to pieces would be designed to make that difficult by keeping some of the bits separated or requiring something else to kick it off.
My vague understanding is that you usually use some conventional explosives to force the fissile material into a tighter ball to tip it over a threshold -- and since we'd be talking about military grade explosives, most of those are pretty inert except when you want them not to be (C4 is harmless, apparently, without the right stuff to kick it off, and I'm sure they use something else anyway for that application). And without that extra compression/energy (or whatever), the material isn't just going to go into an uncontrolled reaction -- otherwise it would have done so already.
I *think* you're more likely to get a radiation leak out of one before you actually got an accidental detonation.
Having said that, I'm sure numerous Slashdotters will happily tell me that I'm an idiot -- a few might even tell me I'm wrong.;-) Someone might even offer a better explanation than I can.
But, from what I remember in grade 8 and what I've seen on TV since... you need the conventional explosion to (compress/energize/excite/something like that) to trigger the nuclear reaction.
And I gather for power plants, it's a little different -- put a big pile of it in one place (the technical term;-), and stop absorbing the neutrons, and it'll just happen on its own. The trick is then keeping it under control.
So, you mean if I have a transaction for $576.23 from Bob's Porn emporium, someone can sift through the transactions for $576.23 and figure out that was me?
Well, color me completely un-surprised. I'm not sure I've ever believed it was anonymous -- aren't the signatures of everyone who ever spent it tacked onto it?
So they've disallowed software patents, but allowed more extensive spying. Dammit New Zealand, you need to pick one.
Though, I will say that any company looking to develop software for a domestic market will be happy about this -- you likely can't export because the patents would be in place most everywhere else.
I'm sure right now there's an entire branch of the US government planning regime change, since the US has pinned their hopes to copyright and patents. It is, however, nice to see other countries saying "what's in it for us?"
How does creating an element that lasts all of a few hundred milliseconds at most telling us interesting things from the early universe?
Because, oddly enough, many of the things in the early universe are postulated to have been elements which last a few hundred milliseconds.:-P
My understanding is these are the kinds of things which get created when you have a really high-energy event, and you can likely learn stuff about how matter and the universe works. Mostly we get to see what really happens instead of a theoretical guess.
As far as what this teaches us directly, I'm afraid I'll have to defer to someone a little more qualified. Having said that, this might be a good starting point.
Understanding the world around us? You know, sciency stuff.
Nobody is going to make you a car out of this, but some of these 'exotic' materials they need to create in a lab can tell us some interesting things about the early universe.
Since when do we need a specific reason to do science? You never know what you'll find out once you've done the research.
Next time uninstall Norton first and WildTangent second. Then you'll have enough resources to run the rest of the uninstalls:D
In these cases it was the Toshiba and HP crap with all of those stupid (and useless) 'assistants' that do more to make the machine useless than useful. I had to disable or uninstall so many things it wasn't funny. It's like they wrote a clippy for every feature in Windows that you can access already.
This is why when I buy a machine I splash for the full retail license. Because an OEM install is pretty much garbage and full of crap -- mostly just full of shitty trial ware, ad ware, and things which just need to get removed.
MS knows EXACTLY how to treat its 3rd party developers. Like shit and the 3rd party developers will lap it up hoping that one day they will be bought out.
You know, in an era where more people are buying tablets running a non-MS operating system than they are anything Windows... Microsoft might need to rethink that.
Or, maybe (as usual) Ballmer was full of shit when he was yelling "developers developers developers".
Sooner or later one would assume the developers would say "fuck it, we can do Android", and Microsoft will find themselves wondering what happened. In fact, I would say based on market share alone anybody solely developing for Windows platforms these days is hurting themselves.
If Microsoft can't have apps to make their platform compelling, people aren't going to buy it for Notepad, Solitaire and Office.
Or *shiver* partnered. Which is code for getting it so hard up the ass your tonsils hurt.
Sadly, in my observation, that's true -- I have taken to interpreting 'partner' as "we'll do business with you until we buy/build our own competing product and try to put you out of business".
OEM's have always been installing third party software in an attempt to improve upon Windows and differentiate themselves from each other.
I'm more of the opinion they do it to get paid some distribution money from the third party crap. Much like I don't think Oracle is trying to improve Java or Windows when they try to install that Ask.com shit toolbar.
Nobody is doing it to improve anything but their bottom line, and they're willing to install shitware to do it.
I won't even buy an OEM install because it's got so much crap on it -- my mother in law and my wife's laptops took so much time to disable all of the shit it wasn't funny. What should be on paper a decent machine with nice specs is full of shit that slows it down and makes it unusable, because there's no memory left.
More on topic, if Microsoft isn't going to get this to developers before they get it to the public, they're going to have the same problem they've been having... in addition to nobody actually wanting Windows 8, there won't be any apps for it.
That isn't how I read it. I read it like management said "to make it legit, you have to pick one of the FOSS projects that we are using software from this year. How about, say...CloneZilla?"
It's possible, but their wording made it sounds a little dubious:
A management catch was that it could not appear to be a donation and it had to be for something we had notionally received in the current financial year.... All somebody needed to do was invoice us for something (perhaps 'support' or whatever) and they'd have received $5000.
So, clearly they were making a pretty specific demand on the potential recipients of this thing which is like a donation but not a donation. And 'notionally' screams "it just has to look OK on paper if you don't dig too deep".
At which point you're trying to make a donation, but make it look like it isn't a donation, and have the recipient write up some bogus paperwork to put the money into another category besides donations. As I said, that's bordering on fraud.
So, "my cousin Vito is going to make a charitable donation to you, but he just needs you to sign this paper giving him a controlling interest of your house and we'll get you the check, it's routine don't worry" makes it sound like a full-on scam, or definitely something shady you want to stay the hell away from.
That the company needed this be accounted for as anything but donation says part of the problem was the accounting shell game happening within the company, and then asking someone to play along and fabricate stuff to support that. And it sounds like the potential recipients would have more to lose than the donors in this.
You can either make a donation or not. But if you can't do it as a 'donation', expecting these groups to help put together a false paper trail to support it, and then bitching when they don't... well, someone means well but hasn't got a clue about how accounting works.
Why was it important to management that the money be earmark for a specific invoiceâableâ item?
Likely because of how companies do their accounting.
You've got your capital budget, your operating budget, approved projects, and who knows what else (not an accountant).
The company trying to make the 'donation' needed to keep it within the same bucket and needed the potential recipients to give them an invoice.
In this case, it was "we'd like to 'give' you money, but it needs to look like on your side like you billed us for something". And generally when someone needs you to account for something in a special way, you might need to ask if you can (or should) actually do that without causing yourself problems.
And if I'm a charity and someone says "we'd like to donate, but can you make it look like you sold us a car instead" -- my first impulse is going to be a little wary of that deal. Because, it's no longer a donation, it's money being disguised as something else, and the recipient potentially gets themselves into legal trouble by trying to do that.
So, you try calling the Red Cross and say you'd like to donate $1 million, but they need to make it look like they sold you an island you could get the same problem. They didn't sell you an island, and as much as that $1 million might be shiny, needing to stay strictly within the rules means you might just have to say "if you want to donate $1 million, awesome, but we can't do magic accounting to make it look like something else".
All somebody needed to do was invoice us for something (perhaps 'support' or whatever) and they'd have received $5000
You mean, commit fraud?
Part of the problem sounds like your company needed it to look a certain way for accounting, and if the projects you contacted found themselves "how do we do that and keep it above board", maybe that was your problem.
But if someone giving out free software invoiced you for $5k for something they didn't ever actually sell you, that might put them into a questionable situation.
On the surface, it sounds like your "management catch" might have been worded in such a way as it would require very creative accounting on their end to satisfy your requirements for your gift. And that might have scared them off -- because when someone says "hey, we want to make a donation, but all you need to do it make it look like we bought something" can definitely make people worry if they're not going to get screwed in this deal.
The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex. It's easy to say that they should have just followed the rules, but IRS rules are a serious PITA to satisfy.
So, hire a qualified accountant -- it's not like other entities don't do their taxes properly and on-time to retain their charitable status.
But "they got in trouble after failing to routinely file their taxes on time" implies more than once, and something of their own doing.
So, before we ponder such things as the IRS cracking down on people, the NSA, or a tenuous connection to Aaron Schwartz... did they 'routinely' fail to file their taxes on time? Because if they did, then we don't need to look at alternate reasons other than "failure to follow the rules", and I'm sure that charitable status is worth spending some effort on keeping your taxes up to date.
This sounds more like something self inflicted than any grand conspiracy. If you don't feel like doing the paperwork to keep your status you might lose it. That is a completely unsurprising thing to me.
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That's a pretty high bar you've set
OK, let me clarify... because clearly you feel the need to be pedantic.
What unique combination of technologies to produce something novel and groundbreaking has MS developed over the last 10 years?
They couldn't make their own motion controller work, so they bought one and integrated that with XBox, but they didn't build it. The Zune was a "me too" product which apparently 'squirted' and nobody bought. Their tablets and phones, just more "me too" and the market doesn't seem interested. Tabbed browsing, Firefox had that before MS. I'm told at one point they made decent keyboards and mice -- but not what I'd call innovative.
Other than that, I don't believe Microsoft has 'innovated' much of anything in years. And in a lot of cases, they've done a piss poor job of copying what other people created.
I'm not saying you need to create every single piece of technology from scratch without relying on anything before. I'm saying they haven't strung together existing bits of technology to create anything which is novel or innovative in a very long time.
If Microsoft is reduced to making copies of other products, resting on their laurels and collecting revenue from Office and OS upgrades and not making new and interesting things... then Microsoft despite all of this money on R&D is either pissing it away, or the management are incapable of taking it to the product stage and have anybody buy it.
Sorry, but Microsoft has become everything they used to criticize IBM for being -- too large to adapt, too rigid in their thinking, and missing out on what it is people are looking for in some of these newer technologies.
By rights with their resources and spending on R&D Microsoft should be putting out reams of cool stuff. Instead they've given us tablets and phones nobody wants, Windows 8 and not a whole lot else.
Microsoft may not be in trouble now, but long-term if they're not capable of making anything new and interesting... they could be really screwed, because gone are the days where they could just trot out an OS every few years and an update to Office and make shit tons of money. You only have to look at their market share in tablets and phones to realize that.
At one point, so was Enron and the Roman Empire... that doesn't mean Microsoft hasn't put out some dogs lately, and that they couldn't be making even more money if the division which makes Office wasn't using their strange hold on the company to make sure nothing cuts into their profits.
Are you seriously thinking Windows phone, their tablets, or Windows 8 are hugely successful products?
Microsoft's strategy the last bunch of years has been to prop up unprofitable products until they become successful (XBox) or cancelled (Zune) -- and with the hardware makers pulling back from their tablets and phones to focus on things, it's going to hurt even more.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Because it's kind of in the summary:
This covers the data storage, the camera, and in a pinch or out of necessity you can do the editing on the device itself.
It's likely not going to be your primary place to do processing on the video, but it will cover your storage needs and give you some editing as well.
Well, are they contractors? You should now your own employment status.
Depending on what exactly the relationship between the drivers and the company will define a lot. If they're just a dispatcher for people who have signed up to be told they can pick someone up ... you may well be a contractor.
I'm fairly sure cab drivers aren't generally considered employees, so unless you've been hired by these people, and they're doing your payroll deductions and the like, why would this be different?
Skimming tips is another issue, and could indicate all kinds of douchy-ness, but whether or not you're a contractor will depend entirely on what kind of relationship you have with them.
Give them some real world activities ... filling out TPS reports, doing your timesheets, entering change requests, patching Windows, listening to quarterly calls when the company releases the numbers, trying to scrounge together machines for QA, listening to a client tell you how it's your fault that there's no power on the 3rd floor ...
That'll learn 'em.
Oh, did you want to encourage them to get into the field?
Sadly, we live in a world where implicit/click-through EULAs have been upheld in court.
Which means there's likely a clause which says "by using this service (which includes sending to our users) ..."
This will be true of pretty much any organization ... once the email hits their servers, they own that copy of it. Hell, if you sent me email at work, my company owns those servers and you have no expectation of privacy as well -- because like every company, they basically say they retain the right to access emails.
The problem isn't with Google (though I'm not defending them), it's with privacy laws. As long as governments decide that business models are corporate profits trump privacy, and the expectation is people want to monetize you, then there will always be be this kind of thing.
Except, from a strictly legal perspective, you have, even if you didn't explicitly say so -- once again, that's EULAs.
And, I can guarantee you, Yahoo, Microsoft, and lots of other entities do this.
The only way you are ever going to have 100% privacy in email is if you own and host your own server, and everything is sent encrypted. And even then, if the government themselves wanted to know, they could compel you.
So what needs to happen is improvements to privacy laws. And quite frankly, I don't see a lot of governments giving a damn about that, because they're more worried about surveillance. And if they're exploiting the fact that Google can look at your email to do advertising (which they are), they can also use that to see the contents of your email if they wish.
Seriously, blame your lawmakers -- they are the ones who set this scenario up and passed the laws that allow this to happen (or failed to pass laws that prevent it).
If I text someone, and I have no idea where they are or what they are in the middle of doing ... how the hell can I be liable for whatever the recipient did thereafter?
Nothing about me texting you compels you to read the damned thing while you're driving. One of the nice things about text messages is you can ignore it for a little bit because it's not real time -- that the recipient chose to do something stupid is entirely their own problem.
Increasingly, I am convinced that judges in the US don't have the barest grasp of logic.
Can we extend this to say that gun makers/auto makers are liable if they allow a gun/car to come into the hands of someone with a temper or any history of bad judgement? Because this is basically saying you're now responsible for the actions of anybody you could reasonably conclude does stupid things.
My understanding (very loose, very old, very incomplete) is that it's actually hard to make that kind of reaction happen ... and most devices designed by anybody not planning on blowing themselves to pieces would be designed to make that difficult by keeping some of the bits separated or requiring something else to kick it off.
My vague understanding is that you usually use some conventional explosives to force the fissile material into a tighter ball to tip it over a threshold -- and since we'd be talking about military grade explosives, most of those are pretty inert except when you want them not to be (C4 is harmless, apparently, without the right stuff to kick it off, and I'm sure they use something else anyway for that application). And without that extra compression/energy (or whatever), the material isn't just going to go into an uncontrolled reaction -- otherwise it would have done so already.
I *think* you're more likely to get a radiation leak out of one before you actually got an accidental detonation.
Having said that, I'm sure numerous Slashdotters will happily tell me that I'm an idiot -- a few might even tell me I'm wrong. ;-) Someone might even offer a better explanation than I can.
But, from what I remember in grade 8 and what I've seen on TV since ... you need the conventional explosion to (compress/energize/excite/something like that) to trigger the nuclear reaction.
And I gather for power plants, it's a little different -- put a big pile of it in one place (the technical term ;-), and stop absorbing the neutrons, and it'll just happen on its own. The trick is then keeping it under control.
*phbtbtbbt* Like I'm gonna trust disposeable wallets. ;-)
No, the judge was very clear that I'm not allowed to do that any more.
So, you mean if I have a transaction for $576.23 from Bob's Porn emporium, someone can sift through the transactions for $576.23 and figure out that was me?
Well, color me completely un-surprised. I'm not sure I've ever believed it was anonymous -- aren't the signatures of everyone who ever spent it tacked onto it?
Well, back in the day, the rationale was that with Mutually Assured Destruction, anybody would be, er, mad to set one off.
I'm not sure anybody else believed that at the time, but that was the reason given 30 years ago or so.
Now it seems to be mostly because we've had them so long we need to hang onto them in case someone else develops them.
Oddly enough, no, no it doesn't.
So they've disallowed software patents, but allowed more extensive spying. Dammit New Zealand, you need to pick one.
Though, I will say that any company looking to develop software for a domestic market will be happy about this -- you likely can't export because the patents would be in place most everywhere else.
I'm sure right now there's an entire branch of the US government planning regime change, since the US has pinned their hopes to copyright and patents. It is, however, nice to see other countries saying "what's in it for us?"
Because, oddly enough, many of the things in the early universe are postulated to have been elements which last a few hundred milliseconds. :-P
My understanding is these are the kinds of things which get created when you have a really high-energy event, and you can likely learn stuff about how matter and the universe works. Mostly we get to see what really happens instead of a theoretical guess.
As far as what this teaches us directly, I'm afraid I'll have to defer to someone a little more qualified. Having said that, this might be a good starting point.
So, Chemistry was 25+ years ago for me ... does the "un-un" part actually mean anything here, or is it just some joke like "un-obtanium"?
Understanding the world around us? You know, sciency stuff.
Nobody is going to make you a car out of this, but some of these 'exotic' materials they need to create in a lab can tell us some interesting things about the early universe.
Since when do we need a specific reason to do science? You never know what you'll find out once you've done the research.
Really? Thanks for that.
It's been several years since I bought a new machine and went through this process, which means I'm starting to think about replacing it.
In these cases it was the Toshiba and HP crap with all of those stupid (and useless) 'assistants' that do more to make the machine useless than useful. I had to disable or uninstall so many things it wasn't funny. It's like they wrote a clippy for every feature in Windows that you can access already.
This is why when I buy a machine I splash for the full retail license. Because an OEM install is pretty much garbage and full of crap -- mostly just full of shitty trial ware, ad ware, and things which just need to get removed.
You know, in an era where more people are buying tablets running a non-MS operating system than they are anything Windows ... Microsoft might need to rethink that.
Or, maybe (as usual) Ballmer was full of shit when he was yelling "developers developers developers".
Sooner or later one would assume the developers would say "fuck it, we can do Android", and Microsoft will find themselves wondering what happened. In fact, I would say based on market share alone anybody solely developing for Windows platforms these days is hurting themselves.
If Microsoft can't have apps to make their platform compelling, people aren't going to buy it for Notepad, Solitaire and Office.
Sadly, in my observation, that's true -- I have taken to interpreting 'partner' as "we'll do business with you until we buy/build our own competing product and try to put you out of business".
I'm more of the opinion they do it to get paid some distribution money from the third party crap. Much like I don't think Oracle is trying to improve Java or Windows when they try to install that Ask.com shit toolbar.
Nobody is doing it to improve anything but their bottom line, and they're willing to install shitware to do it.
I won't even buy an OEM install because it's got so much crap on it -- my mother in law and my wife's laptops took so much time to disable all of the shit it wasn't funny. What should be on paper a decent machine with nice specs is full of shit that slows it down and makes it unusable, because there's no memory left.
More on topic, if Microsoft isn't going to get this to developers before they get it to the public, they're going to have the same problem they've been having ... in addition to nobody actually wanting Windows 8, there won't be any apps for it.
It's possible, but their wording made it sounds a little dubious:
So, clearly they were making a pretty specific demand on the potential recipients of this thing which is like a donation but not a donation. And 'notionally' screams "it just has to look OK on paper if you don't dig too deep".
At which point you're trying to make a donation, but make it look like it isn't a donation, and have the recipient write up some bogus paperwork to put the money into another category besides donations. As I said, that's bordering on fraud.
So, "my cousin Vito is going to make a charitable donation to you, but he just needs you to sign this paper giving him a controlling interest of your house and we'll get you the check, it's routine don't worry" makes it sound like a full-on scam, or definitely something shady you want to stay the hell away from.
That the company needed this be accounted for as anything but donation says part of the problem was the accounting shell game happening within the company, and then asking someone to play along and fabricate stuff to support that. And it sounds like the potential recipients would have more to lose than the donors in this.
You can either make a donation or not. But if you can't do it as a 'donation', expecting these groups to help put together a false paper trail to support it, and then bitching when they don't ... well, someone means well but hasn't got a clue about how accounting works.
Likely because of how companies do their accounting.
You've got your capital budget, your operating budget, approved projects, and who knows what else (not an accountant).
The company trying to make the 'donation' needed to keep it within the same bucket and needed the potential recipients to give them an invoice.
In this case, it was "we'd like to 'give' you money, but it needs to look like on your side like you billed us for something". And generally when someone needs you to account for something in a special way, you might need to ask if you can (or should) actually do that without causing yourself problems.
And if I'm a charity and someone says "we'd like to donate, but can you make it look like you sold us a car instead" -- my first impulse is going to be a little wary of that deal. Because, it's no longer a donation, it's money being disguised as something else, and the recipient potentially gets themselves into legal trouble by trying to do that.
So, you try calling the Red Cross and say you'd like to donate $1 million, but they need to make it look like they sold you an island you could get the same problem. They didn't sell you an island, and as much as that $1 million might be shiny, needing to stay strictly within the rules means you might just have to say "if you want to donate $1 million, awesome, but we can't do magic accounting to make it look like something else".
You mean, commit fraud?
Part of the problem sounds like your company needed it to look a certain way for accounting, and if the projects you contacted found themselves "how do we do that and keep it above board", maybe that was your problem.
But if someone giving out free software invoiced you for $5k for something they didn't ever actually sell you, that might put them into a questionable situation.
On the surface, it sounds like your "management catch" might have been worded in such a way as it would require very creative accounting on their end to satisfy your requirements for your gift. And that might have scared them off -- because when someone says "hey, we want to make a donation, but all you need to do it make it look like we bought something" can definitely make people worry if they're not going to get screwed in this deal.
So, hire a qualified accountant -- it's not like other entities don't do their taxes properly and on-time to retain their charitable status.
But "they got in trouble after failing to routinely file their taxes on time" implies more than once, and something of their own doing.
So, before we ponder such things as the IRS cracking down on people, the NSA, or a tenuous connection to Aaron Schwartz ... did they 'routinely' fail to file their taxes on time? Because if they did, then we don't need to look at alternate reasons other than "failure to follow the rules", and I'm sure that charitable status is worth spending some effort on keeping your taxes up to date.
This sounds more like something self inflicted than any grand conspiracy. If you don't feel like doing the paperwork to keep your status you might lose it. That is a completely unsurprising thing to me.
OK, let me clarify ... because clearly you feel the need to be pedantic.
What unique combination of technologies to produce something novel and groundbreaking has MS developed over the last 10 years?
They couldn't make their own motion controller work, so they bought one and integrated that with XBox, but they didn't build it. The Zune was a "me too" product which apparently 'squirted' and nobody bought. Their tablets and phones, just more "me too" and the market doesn't seem interested. Tabbed browsing, Firefox had that before MS. I'm told at one point they made decent keyboards and mice -- but not what I'd call innovative.
Other than that, I don't believe Microsoft has 'innovated' much of anything in years. And in a lot of cases, they've done a piss poor job of copying what other people created.
I'm not saying you need to create every single piece of technology from scratch without relying on anything before. I'm saying they haven't strung together existing bits of technology to create anything which is novel or innovative in a very long time.
If Microsoft is reduced to making copies of other products, resting on their laurels and collecting revenue from Office and OS upgrades and not making new and interesting things ... then Microsoft despite all of this money on R&D is either pissing it away, or the management are incapable of taking it to the product stage and have anybody buy it.
Sorry, but Microsoft has become everything they used to criticize IBM for being -- too large to adapt, too rigid in their thinking, and missing out on what it is people are looking for in some of these newer technologies.
By rights with their resources and spending on R&D Microsoft should be putting out reams of cool stuff. Instead they've given us tablets and phones nobody wants, Windows 8 and not a whole lot else.
Microsoft may not be in trouble now, but long-term if they're not capable of making anything new and interesting ... they could be really screwed, because gone are the days where they could just trot out an OS every few years and an update to Office and make shit tons of money. You only have to look at their market share in tablets and phones to realize that.
At one point, so was Enron and the Roman Empire ... that doesn't mean Microsoft hasn't put out some dogs lately, and that they couldn't be making even more money if the division which makes Office wasn't using their strange hold on the company to make sure nothing cuts into their profits.
Are you seriously thinking Windows phone, their tablets, or Windows 8 are hugely successful products?
Microsoft's strategy the last bunch of years has been to prop up unprofitable products until they become successful (XBox) or cancelled (Zune) -- and with the hardware makers pulling back from their tablets and phones to focus on things, it's going to hurt even more.