I bashed Apple before idevices even had a name. I still remember when slashdot used to praise how great Apple computers were compared to Windows systems, how open Apple is, etc. I remember even then saying then that if Apple was in Microsoft's position, they'd also own the hardware which allows them to lock things down so tight you'd long for the old Microsoft days.
Apparently no one running a retail payment terminal cares.
Virtually every walmart, walgreens, CVS, and mcdonalds I've seen has one.
This is a long time coming IMO, but I can still see the tinfoil hat crowd rejecting it. Too much FUD goes around about RFID (like those little credit card faraday cages that some infomercials sell) to make it seem somehow dangerous (I remember when the internet itself was considered dangerous by these types...anybody remember the Sandra Bullock movie "The Net"?)
In reality though, RFID payment, at least in the Android implementation I've seen, is by far more secure than magnetic strips as it isn't susceptible to skimming or any other type of replay attack.
I'm not telling you how to run your career, I'm just telling you that there's more to life than New York. If you want to live paycheck to paycheck needlessly, be my guest.
But know this: You have no right to name your own price for anybody else's resources any more than they have a right to name their price for yours. Labor, too, is a resource.
No matter what the outcome, the Jury will always be out on America. Unlike all of the previous mentioned, the US doesn't seem to be aiming for annexation, so it's kind of hard to argue that they "failed" when they leave, because they never at any point intended to stay.
No, you don't. I don't care what your career is; there are plenty of other places to do it. For example, "artísts" of the type you describe do extremely well in Las Vegas, which is a MUCH cheaper place to live.
Second, we (us voters) have a sense of ownership.
What you describe isn't a sense of ownership. Not at all. It's a sense of entitlement.
How would you feel if somebody who was richer than you decided he wanted your house, and kicked you out under eminent domain?
You never owned it to begin with.
Essentially what all of this comes down to is that because of some combination of your job and who you are, you feel you're somehow special and deserve that kind of living more than somebody else who may want to live there. What you're feeling isn't much different from a king who believes they have a "divine right" to rule with an iron fist; only you put it in different terms.
All I want to respond with is this: Get over yourself dude.
One of our biggest problems in New York City is that housing is too expensive.
While a lot of your other complaints are legitimate, this one is not. When you live in a place like New York, you are making a conscious choice to live in what is perhaps the most expensive place in the US to live. It's a simple supply vs demand parable. The higher the demand, the more you pay. New York is a very high demand place to live.
That said, you can't just decide to live in one of the most in demand places to live, mingle with the global elite, and then expect to not have to make any sacrifices in doing so. If no sacrifices had to be made, then you'd literally be forced to squeeze about 10 people in every single one of those apartments you speak of. Seriously, there's not enough room, and something somewhere has to give, and it's either going to be your quality of life or your wallet.
That also said, this is just a case of "yeah, it's expensive; deal with it." If you don't like how much it costs, you can always buy a beach front mansion in Texas or Florida (at some NICE beaches too) for the same price as a mid-sized condo in New York. I'm not joking.
A difference in this case is that Microsoft didn't already need to build a web browser solely for its own internal purposes anyways. In the case of storage services, notice how all three of these companies ALREADY have massive storage arrays for their own internal purposes, in addition to using them for other products (tell me, how long do you think gmail would remain inexpensive if Google just went on borrowing its storage resources?)
Once you already have that infrastructure in place and it already is a profit center for another portion of your business, then offering that same service to external customers doesn't have much of a cost involved. That savings is then passed to the customer.
In the case of dropbox, they weren't already using the storage for another business function.
Besides, mega.co.nz already offers vastly higher amounts of storage than dropbox for free, in addition to offering full end-to-end encryption...and like dropbox, they too are ONLY in the storage business...yet I haven't heard any complaints out of them. And in light of mega.co.nz, don't you think it's possible that dropbox could just be lamenting the fact that their services aren't more profitable than they already are?
No, it's not. This goes by many names, e.g. the freebie model, the razor and blade model, etc. It is actually infinitely sustainable. It's also very much not anti-competitive.
Google (and I'm wagering Microsoft and Amazon are similar) makes their money on advertising. They get that by attracting more users. They get and keep these users by building a complete ecosystem, and make their products work more efficiently with one another. Google's current cash cows (AFAIK) are search, email, and android. By making these products work more seamless with one another, they complement one another.
In the case of storage: If Google offers a ton of storage, that might be something that attracts them to their Office suite (which they also make money on, just not as much as the other three.)
Why would a user, for example, stick with Google Docs if it offered basically no storage (or the storage was expensive) when Office 365 offers 15GB (or whatever the amount is) for free? Amazon I imagine wants to attract people to its service so that they might buy AWS, EC2, or shop at Amazon. Either way, it works out in the end where you get stuff for cheap.
Also note that ALL of these companies are in the storage business for their own internal purposes. It likewise makes sense that they would lease out their own internal service to external customers at a cheap rate to help offset a cost that they ALREADY have to bear anyways.
And finally, I wish the hippies would make up their damn mind: They complain about how evil corporations are when something is too expensive, and then they make the same complaint when it is too inexpensive.
What's wrong with prostitution? Ugly person A wants sex. Hot person B wants money and will tolerate and/or even enjoy a willy inside them. Person A pays person B for sex. Both get what they want. Damn those evil people, how dare they offend God! Why...sex is ok, but only if somebody doesn't get paid damnit! (Except the god described in the old testament. He's cool with it so long as you burn incense and sacrifice a lamb or two in his name.)
And I don't see anything wrong with selling your own organs either so long as it is done with the same stipulations that are already in place for donation. This is actually what Iran does and...surprise surprise...they're the only country where very few people die while waiting on organ transplants...Oh and people get paid to save lives in the process. What a backwards civilization those Iranians are, amirite? AMIRITE BRO?
As for the slavery part; in some respects people already do that.
Consent cannot be given if one of the parties is mentally impaired and under duress due to the well-documented effects of drug addiction. It would be one thing if Silk Road had been only a marketplace for non-addictive substances like cannabis or hallucinogens, but in fact trade in heroin, cocaine and addictive painkillers was a major part of the site.
I think it would be a stronger argument that somebody isn't responsible for their own behavior while intoxicated. In fact, you'd have to pretty well establish that notion before you could even get to what you just said.
To add to that: generally, personal income is not double taxed either in this respect. Anything one hears to the contrary is usually political FUD.
That's very much incorrect. It's treated as a deduction, which means you still pay the US tax anyways, in addition to the foreign tax.
Say you live in Australia and made $200,000USD one year. Australia would tax roughly $68,500USD off of it. That leaves $131,500 to you. The US then taxes you on that amount. How much of that you pay in US taxes depends on the source of the income, and how you're employed. If you're self employed, your tax liability for that amount is 28% base plus 16% to make up for US payroll taxes (your typical US worker sees about 8% payroll taxes and the employer pays the other half, but since you have no employer you have to pay the whole thing.) If this is earned income (i.e. not dividends, not capital gains, not income made from charging rent) then you're liable for about $36,500 of it, otherwise you're liable for the whole thing.
So yeah even though you're potentially taxed less, you're still very much taxed twice, possibly even completely double taxed depending on how you make your money.
This is why some people who make a lot of money overseas and have jack diddly to do with the US will go out of their way to renounce their citizenship. The US really is the only country that actually sends you a bill just for being a national, regardless of whether or not you make use of its utilities.
You can deduct it from your income, just the same as if it were a business expense, but they still tax you on that money anyways. If you had made that money inside of the US instead of somewhere else, you'd be taxed quite a bit less.
Or to put it another way, that's just sugar coating the fact that you're still really being taxed twice just for the privilege of having a US citizenship, even if you've never had anything to do with the US (which is why the US is pretty much the only country whose citizenship people will renounce for tax purposes.)
If you leave them in the dryer, just turn it on for about 5 minutes and those wrinkles are gone.
Though for me I just hang-dry them, and then the dryer softens them for about 10 minutes. More energy efficient that way, plus your clothes might last slightly longer.
In the age of the internet, if you have to pay someone to sit you in a room and teach you like a trained monkey you have serious problems that go way beyond education.
I'll actually say that's quite wrong. At least it is for me anyways. I actually learned networking from the Cisco Network Academy at my local community college. The teachers there combined their literally decades of field experience with Cisco's curriculum, and I can honestly say just from that alone I probably know more than some of the people I've worked with in the past who themselves have been in their jobs for decades, and are where they are from learning it the way you describe...in fact some of the things I've seen some people do wrong are just downright scary from a security perspective.
Now if you want to make that argument about typical schools with high tuition rates, there's a ring of truth to it. I don't know why, but I often find that the more people spend on their education, the worse it is. There are outliers of course, but it tends to be the rule that if you paid a lot for your education, then you paid too much.
I work for a big corp, and we don't treat our customers like crap.
I think what you're looking at is companies like Comcast who have government guaranteed monopoly in the areas they serve. Smaller outfits or community broadband outfits are either forbidden from competing or are forced to pay exorbitant easement fees. Not by the federal government, but by the local governments. For companies in Comcast's position, there's no need to be concerned how you treat the customer, mainly because the local governments tell them not to worry about it.
As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse. I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job.
But the same term is often used by others to mean a market free of regulation, which is often the opposite.
Not quite. Regulations currently forbid a free market in this case. What they're proposing is regulation to remove regulation, which is a good thing in my opinion (and yes, I'm one of those evil free market libertarians.)
In my opinion, regulation is perhaps the biggest barrier to faster internet connectivity. Not regulation by the federal government, but regulation by the smaller governments. To include but not limited to regulation that forbids community broadband, regulation that says they have to pay absurdly high lease rates to run cabling through conduit, etc.
Don't ever allow the Republicans to say they are opposed to regulation. Quite the opposite; they love regulation.
While I know the situation has improved markedly since the cold war, I highly doubt China has any serious checks and balances to prevent government corruption. I mean fuck, they have the world's largest firewall which is specifically intended to halt free speech. If you think the NSA is secretive, you know little. Unlike the NSA, the Chinese government not only has the authority to spy on your thoughts, but it also has the authority to bend them to its own will.
Slashdot Mirror
I bashed Apple before idevices even had a name. I still remember when slashdot used to praise how great Apple computers were compared to Windows systems, how open Apple is, etc. I remember even then saying then that if Apple was in Microsoft's position, they'd also own the hardware which allows them to lock things down so tight you'd long for the old Microsoft days.
Hate to say I told you so, but...
Apparently no one running a retail payment terminal cares.
Virtually every walmart, walgreens, CVS, and mcdonalds I've seen has one.
This is a long time coming IMO, but I can still see the tinfoil hat crowd rejecting it. Too much FUD goes around about RFID (like those little credit card faraday cages that some infomercials sell) to make it seem somehow dangerous (I remember when the internet itself was considered dangerous by these types...anybody remember the Sandra Bullock movie "The Net"?)
In reality though, RFID payment, at least in the Android implementation I've seen, is by far more secure than magnetic strips as it isn't susceptible to skimming or any other type of replay attack.
I'm not telling you how to run your career, I'm just telling you that there's more to life than New York. If you want to live paycheck to paycheck needlessly, be my guest.
But know this: You have no right to name your own price for anybody else's resources any more than they have a right to name their price for yours. Labor, too, is a resource.
There are plenty of places; Vegas is merely one of them.
Nah, Raid Over Moscow for sure.
No, I think the most terrifying moment in history is when Hillary Clinton was born.
No matter what the outcome, the Jury will always be out on America. Unlike all of the previous mentioned, the US doesn't seem to be aiming for annexation, so it's kind of hard to argue that they "failed" when they leave, because they never at any point intended to stay.
First, I have to live in New York City.
No, you don't. I don't care what your career is; there are plenty of other places to do it. For example, "artísts" of the type you describe do extremely well in Las Vegas, which is a MUCH cheaper place to live.
Second, we (us voters) have a sense of ownership.
What you describe isn't a sense of ownership. Not at all. It's a sense of entitlement.
How would you feel if somebody who was richer than you decided he wanted your house, and kicked you out under eminent domain?
You never owned it to begin with.
Essentially what all of this comes down to is that because of some combination of your job and who you are, you feel you're somehow special and deserve that kind of living more than somebody else who may want to live there. What you're feeling isn't much different from a king who believes they have a "divine right" to rule with an iron fist; only you put it in different terms.
All I want to respond with is this: Get over yourself dude.
One of our biggest problems in New York City is that housing is too expensive.
While a lot of your other complaints are legitimate, this one is not. When you live in a place like New York, you are making a conscious choice to live in what is perhaps the most expensive place in the US to live. It's a simple supply vs demand parable. The higher the demand, the more you pay. New York is a very high demand place to live.
That said, you can't just decide to live in one of the most in demand places to live, mingle with the global elite, and then expect to not have to make any sacrifices in doing so. If no sacrifices had to be made, then you'd literally be forced to squeeze about 10 people in every single one of those apartments you speak of. Seriously, there's not enough room, and something somewhere has to give, and it's either going to be your quality of life or your wallet.
That also said, this is just a case of "yeah, it's expensive; deal with it." If you don't like how much it costs, you can always buy a beach front mansion in Texas or Florida (at some NICE beaches too) for the same price as a mid-sized condo in New York. I'm not joking.
A difference in this case is that Microsoft didn't already need to build a web browser solely for its own internal purposes anyways. In the case of storage services, notice how all three of these companies ALREADY have massive storage arrays for their own internal purposes, in addition to using them for other products (tell me, how long do you think gmail would remain inexpensive if Google just went on borrowing its storage resources?)
Once you already have that infrastructure in place and it already is a profit center for another portion of your business, then offering that same service to external customers doesn't have much of a cost involved. That savings is then passed to the customer.
In the case of dropbox, they weren't already using the storage for another business function.
Besides, mega.co.nz already offers vastly higher amounts of storage than dropbox for free, in addition to offering full end-to-end encryption...and like dropbox, they too are ONLY in the storage business...yet I haven't heard any complaints out of them. And in light of mega.co.nz, don't you think it's possible that dropbox could just be lamenting the fact that their services aren't more profitable than they already are?
It's basically just politicians who are kowtowing to an industry that doesn't want more competition than it already has.
No, it's not. This goes by many names, e.g. the freebie model, the razor and blade model, etc. It is actually infinitely sustainable. It's also very much not anti-competitive.
Google (and I'm wagering Microsoft and Amazon are similar) makes their money on advertising. They get that by attracting more users. They get and keep these users by building a complete ecosystem, and make their products work more efficiently with one another. Google's current cash cows (AFAIK) are search, email, and android. By making these products work more seamless with one another, they complement one another.
In the case of storage: If Google offers a ton of storage, that might be something that attracts them to their Office suite (which they also make money on, just not as much as the other three.)
Why would a user, for example, stick with Google Docs if it offered basically no storage (or the storage was expensive) when Office 365 offers 15GB (or whatever the amount is) for free? Amazon I imagine wants to attract people to its service so that they might buy AWS, EC2, or shop at Amazon. Either way, it works out in the end where you get stuff for cheap.
Also note that ALL of these companies are in the storage business for their own internal purposes. It likewise makes sense that they would lease out their own internal service to external customers at a cheap rate to help offset a cost that they ALREADY have to bear anyways.
And finally, I wish the hippies would make up their damn mind: They complain about how evil corporations are when something is too expensive, and then they make the same complaint when it is too inexpensive.
What's wrong with prostitution? Ugly person A wants sex. Hot person B wants money and will tolerate and/or even enjoy a willy inside them. Person A pays person B for sex. Both get what they want. Damn those evil people, how dare they offend God! Why...sex is ok, but only if somebody doesn't get paid damnit! (Except the god described in the old testament. He's cool with it so long as you burn incense and sacrifice a lamb or two in his name.)
And I don't see anything wrong with selling your own organs either so long as it is done with the same stipulations that are already in place for donation. This is actually what Iran does and...surprise surprise...they're the only country where very few people die while waiting on organ transplants...Oh and people get paid to save lives in the process. What a backwards civilization those Iranians are, amirite? AMIRITE BRO?
As for the slavery part; in some respects people already do that.
No withdraws.
So you didn't stop after all?
Consent cannot be given if one of the parties is mentally impaired and under duress due to the well-documented effects of drug addiction. It would be one thing if Silk Road had been only a marketplace for non-addictive substances like cannabis or hallucinogens, but in fact trade in heroin, cocaine and addictive painkillers was a major part of the site.
I think it would be a stronger argument that somebody isn't responsible for their own behavior while intoxicated. In fact, you'd have to pretty well establish that notion before you could even get to what you just said.
To add to that: generally, personal income is not double taxed either in this respect. Anything one hears to the contrary is usually political FUD.
That's very much incorrect. It's treated as a deduction, which means you still pay the US tax anyways, in addition to the foreign tax.
Say you live in Australia and made $200,000USD one year. Australia would tax roughly $68,500USD off of it. That leaves $131,500 to you. The US then taxes you on that amount. How much of that you pay in US taxes depends on the source of the income, and how you're employed. If you're self employed, your tax liability for that amount is 28% base plus 16% to make up for US payroll taxes (your typical US worker sees about 8% payroll taxes and the employer pays the other half, but since you have no employer you have to pay the whole thing.) If this is earned income (i.e. not dividends, not capital gains, not income made from charging rent) then you're liable for about $36,500 of it, otherwise you're liable for the whole thing.
So yeah even though you're potentially taxed less, you're still very much taxed twice, possibly even completely double taxed depending on how you make your money.
This is why some people who make a lot of money overseas and have jack diddly to do with the US will go out of their way to renounce their citizenship. The US really is the only country that actually sends you a bill just for being a national, regardless of whether or not you make use of its utilities.
You can deduct it from your income, just the same as if it were a business expense, but they still tax you on that money anyways. If you had made that money inside of the US instead of somewhere else, you'd be taxed quite a bit less.
Or to put it another way, that's just sugar coating the fact that you're still really being taxed twice just for the privilege of having a US citizenship, even if you've never had anything to do with the US (which is why the US is pretty much the only country whose citizenship people will renounce for tax purposes.)
If you leave them in the dryer, just turn it on for about 5 minutes and those wrinkles are gone.
Though for me I just hang-dry them, and then the dryer softens them for about 10 minutes. More energy efficient that way, plus your clothes might last slightly longer.
In the age of the internet, if you have to pay someone to sit you in a room and teach you like a trained monkey you have serious problems that go way beyond education.
I'll actually say that's quite wrong. At least it is for me anyways. I actually learned networking from the Cisco Network Academy at my local community college. The teachers there combined their literally decades of field experience with Cisco's curriculum, and I can honestly say just from that alone I probably know more than some of the people I've worked with in the past who themselves have been in their jobs for decades, and are where they are from learning it the way you describe...in fact some of the things I've seen some people do wrong are just downright scary from a security perspective.
Now if you want to make that argument about typical schools with high tuition rates, there's a ring of truth to it. I don't know why, but I often find that the more people spend on their education, the worse it is. There are outliers of course, but it tends to be the rule that if you paid a lot for your education, then you paid too much.
So only conservatives are supposed to have freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and the like?
I work for a big corp, and we don't treat our customers like crap.
I think what you're looking at is companies like Comcast who have government guaranteed monopoly in the areas they serve. Smaller outfits or community broadband outfits are either forbidden from competing or are forced to pay exorbitant easement fees. Not by the federal government, but by the local governments. For companies in Comcast's position, there's no need to be concerned how you treat the customer, mainly because the local governments tell them not to worry about it.
As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse. I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job.
But the same term is often used by others to mean a market free of regulation, which is often the opposite.
Not quite. Regulations currently forbid a free market in this case. What they're proposing is regulation to remove regulation, which is a good thing in my opinion (and yes, I'm one of those evil free market libertarians.)
In my opinion, regulation is perhaps the biggest barrier to faster internet connectivity. Not regulation by the federal government, but regulation by the smaller governments. To include but not limited to regulation that forbids community broadband, regulation that says they have to pay absurdly high lease rates to run cabling through conduit, etc.
Don't ever allow the Republicans to say they are opposed to regulation. Quite the opposite; they love regulation.
It can suppress, and the Chinese government can do that quite well. But it knows well enough that if it suppresses too much, there would rebellion.
What counts as too much then? Because this doesn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I mean seriously are you sympathetic of the Chinese government or something? You'd very well have to be to believe what you just said.
While I know the situation has improved markedly since the cold war, I highly doubt China has any serious checks and balances to prevent government corruption. I mean fuck, they have the world's largest firewall which is specifically intended to halt free speech. If you think the NSA is secretive, you know little. Unlike the NSA, the Chinese government not only has the authority to spy on your thoughts, but it also has the authority to bend them to its own will.