That'd be great, if the US government actually complied with those protections in a more significant manner than lip service.
Yes, that would be great. However, these kinds of invasions of privacy and espionage are still relatively new for the US, and it remains to be seen how we deal with it. In Europe, they have been the accepted norm for many decades.
Yes. What are you trying to get at? PRISM is relatively new and politically controversial, as opposed to Europe's long running and uncontroversial programs. Furthermore, PRISM still seems to have more legal protections than European spy programs.
However, what the NSA does, is to simply harvest anything they want from anyone. I am not comfortable with that.
Nor am I. But the BND, DGSI, or MI5/GCHQ do the same thing. You can't avoid your data being harvested by someone. The question you should ask yourself which spy agency can cause you more problems when they make a mistake, and that is probably your own domestic spy agency. That's why storing data outside the country is a good idea: it becomes more accessible to foreign spy agencies but less accessible to your own.
That's, of course, also the real reason the EU hates it when Europeans use US servers.
"Due process" applies to legal proceedings, not to espionage or national security. When it comes to espionage and national security, European citizens have fewer protections from their governments than Americans have from the US government. Countries like Germany scan every E-mail, phone call, and text message they can get their hands on for keywords, limited only by technology, and have done so for decades; it's not even a secret, it's just not talked about much in the press.
I assume this ruling helps US cloud providers since even more small companies will be compelled to not host their own servers.
If I have no business presence in the EU, my payments are processed in the US, and my servers are in the US, why would it make any difference to me what the EU wants or what the US rules are?
And given Snowden's revelations, it's purely ridiculous to claim that privacy rights can be respected if foreign data are stored in the US.
If a European stores his data on a US computer, yes, the NSA may snoop on it. If you store it on a European computer, European governments will snoop on it, guaranteed. Who do you think is more likely to cause problems for you, the NSA or your own government? Which government actually has jurisdiction over you?
So google, facebook, twitter, microsoft, cloud computing services, etc... will have to open their wallets and create data centers inside single EU countries.
Yes, protectionism is one reason the EU is pushing so much for this. The other reason is to keep the online data of Europeans in Europe where it is easily accessible to European spy and law enforcement agencies.
Otherwise GTFO.
They may do that. Of course, that doesn't mean Europeans will stop using their services.
Clearly you don't understand London and its taxi system, but don't let that stop you!
You're right: I don't understand London and its taxi system, and I don't care to understand. I have no idea when or where taxis stop with what degree of reliability or availability (I do know it's a lot less than 100%), or what percentage of cabbies commit fraud, or whether they take my form of payment, or what fees they tack on, or how safe the system is. All I want to do is push the same button i push in any other large stinky metropolis like London to get from point A to point B with predictable arrival times and predictable service from a company that I know.
Why? The current rules work fine for everyone except uber. London has an excellent taxi system between black cabs and minicabs
London's taxi system is an overpriced, government created monopoly with stiff barriers to entry. Furthermore, it is a local system, and many business travelers (including myself) don't want to have to deal with the idiosyncracies of every random local little fiefdom, and that's all London is.
surge pricing, loitering drivers, tax avoidance and poor insurance.
Surge pricing is good. As for the rest, it's a delusion that Uber is any worse than other organizations.
1) Ubers maps show fake taxis to lure people into booking. This is similar to Ashley Madison running fake women accounts to lure people to pay for their site. This is fraud.
Really? Has this been proven in a court of law?
2) Uber surge prices, Taxis are regulated prices.
Yes, an obvious problem with regular Taxi service.
3) If Uber is cheap now (largely by the advantage of not complying with laws), once its got the taxi market unregulated, it will take all the profits for itself... marketing 101.
Taxis are currently charging monopoly prices. Uber wants a free market, meaning it would be competing with Lyft and other services.
Uber could offer a proper taxi booking service and comply with local laws, and does in countries where its banned.
They could. Or those countries and local jurisdictions could move into the 21st century, change their laws, and get rid of government-granted monopolies.
Uber is doing a terrific job – but it has to play by the rules
Change the rules.
The hackney carriage trade has been regulated since Oliver Cromwell, and today these black cabs must conform to onerous specifications, including a tight turning circle and wheelchair access. Their drivers must have passed “the Knowledge” – an exacting test about London’s geography.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit that newspapers like The Guardian usually promote: massive government spending on so-called infrastructure. Heck, the local town residents were even willing to vote tax increases for this.
For a "spaceport", The Guardian recognizes the absurdity of it only out of their general hostility to science and engineering. But California high speed rail, sports stadiums, schools, urban renewal, and a lot of other "infrastructure projects" are just the same kind of boondoggle.
That's not something to be proud of and more importantly, I think it's a long-term recipe for failure.
The Linux kernel has been around for a long time, and Linus has been abrasive and rude for all that time. So there is little empirical support for your belief.
Seriously, people, grow the hell up. You likely already have people enforcing some degree of civility on you, because pretty much no organization is going to put up with this shit.
The Linux kernel project seems to be doing just fine, and that's what we are talking about here.
This whole bullshit of women should just suck it up because that's how the world works?
The world doesn't work in any one way. There are all sorts of different companies, communities, and development teams. Women should do the same thing men do: if your workplace or project culture isn't a good match, you leave without making a big fuss. Simple as that.
The U.S. and EU subsidize food production to insure there's sufficient excess margin to prevent starvation if there's a crop failure.
The US and EU subsidize food production because farmers are a powerful special interest group, nothing more. It's crony capitalism, and it should be stopped.
If there are no Roundup-ready crops, the subsidy money for the crops gets distributed to the farmers in the form of the floor price. But if you allow Roundup-ready crops, the mechanics of the subsidy encourage farmers to use Roundup-ready crops to try to grab a larger share of that subsidy
Agricultural subsidies create a lot of perverse incentives. That's why they should be ended.
That is, if you tried to let the market dictate the prices, the farmers wouldn't make enough money to stay in business.
That's the point of more efficient agriculture: fewer farmers can produce the same output.
Given rising costs, people will make do with old cars longer, decreasing new car sales, and will buy cheaper cars, and there's less profit on them. Therefore, if the cost of producing and selling cars goes up, car manufacturer profits go down.
You claimed that "per unit profit" went down. Your argument is now about total profit. You really need to decide what argument you want to make.
To put it another way, if car manufacturers could raise prices to get more profit, why haven't they?
Because car manufacturers are in competition with each other. The effect is that all of them set prices at cost plus a small profit margin (about 3-5%) reflecting the return on investment that owners expect. If the costs are raised for everybody through regulation, their profits increase slightly and demand decreases slightly.
There is a balance here, and the proper way to resolve a balance is political
You're right that there is a balance here. You're wrong that the "proper way" is to resolve this political. A political resolution of these issues is entirely divorced from actual costs and benefits, and dominated by lobbying, rent seeking, and demagoguery.
It can't be through individual contracts, because each polluting industry would have to have a valid contract with each and every landowner in the vicinity in order to proceed. [...] We could institute a landowners' cooperative that would do the negotiation, but factory proprietors would still have to deal with landowners not in the cooperative. If we force people into the cooperative, we've got a government.
People aren't "forced into" anything. They buy their land already encumbered by various easements and rights, and as part of various associations. Furthermore, even though such associations may look like government and use various forms of government-like structures, they are not government. The crucial difference is that all the accounting (costs and benefits) takes place within them; the cost and benefits of making decisions are all born by the people actually affected by the decisions. That's in contrast to government, where the EPA can make decisions to make some lobby groups happy while imposing high costs on others.
When market economics doesn't work (which is frequently), the best way to solve conflicts is political. This is a flawed process, but it's what we've got.
We have never tried market economics for air and water pollution, so you have no basis for such an assertion. In those areas where we have actually tried free markets, they pretty much always work better than government.
The difficulties of GM are that the producer is able to develop a dependancy on the product. This dependency should be illegal. It's why pimps get their girls (and boys) hooked on crack or heroin. It's why big tobacco is evil.
What "dependency"? You can switch from GMO to non-GMO any time you like. Of course, you have to live with the lower yields if you do.
What compounds the issue is that the US patent system is known to be desparately broken. Intellectual property and copyright law are bracketed into the same brokenness.
The US patent system is no more and no less broken than the European patent system. In fact, intellectual property laws were largely created in Europe and imposed on the US. Now that US corporations are successful at using them, Europeans whine and complain, while still having the same or more draconian laws at home.
This isn't about science. Never was. It's about becoming Monsanto's bitch and not being able to do anything about it.
Whether a farmer becomes "Monsanto's bitch" or not is a choice any farmer can make individually, the same way you decide whether to buy an iPhone or an Android phone, run Windows or Ubuntu, etc.
No, what really bugs you is that Europe is highly dependent on US high tech manufacturers and products, and that the European economy and agriculture would collapse if the US stopped supplying Europe with these products.
I can tell you this, after the trouble I get from clients when I have to ask a client what their BILLING ADDRESS is because they didn't put it in and it's not the shipping address, the general public is far too lazy to go through that process.
Yes, and you wouldn't have to ask clients for their "BILLING ADDRESS" anymore; all you would need is to ask them for a single number. They get that number from a display directly on their credit card, on a small card reader, or from their smart phone. In addition to being safer it's also easier than the bullshit you make people go through right now.
Using the "billing address" as a security token, as credit card companies are doing, is stupid, insecure, and an invasion of privacy. You have lousy fraud prevention.
Of course, people like you should really be cut out of the process altogether. When people order online, the browser can talk to a USB credit card reader, request a payment, and the card reader then displays the amount, asks the user to input a pin to confirm, and then transmits the one time payment token.
I work in online/phone based sales and we have probably the best fraud prevention known in the US, but I'd like to see what YOU think that means.
As I was saying: "public key cryptography, one time card numbers, smart cards, pins, and instant notification". It means, among other things, that you don't ever get any credit card numbers or billing addresses. All you get is a one time code for a specific amount of money, valid for a limited amount of time and valid only for you. If anybody steals your customer and order database, they can't do anything with it. It also means that you can instantly verify that the payment is valid without contacting the credit card company.
On the customer side, it means that he needs to talk to his smart card credit card in order to generate that code, and that requires either a pin or even a second physical token. In addition, customers get notified of large charges as soon as they get generated (not when you process them), and optionally verify them via their phone.
1 in every 5 people have had an attempted fraudulent charge stopped by these systems. And credit card fraud isn't the only type of crime these frausters perpetrate. Wire fraud and identity theft are on the rise and are becomming more and more of a problem as the US gets closer to their pin-and-chip deadline.
And the reason this kind of fraud is so frequent is because your industry uses extremely poor security. Fraud detection software should be largely unnecessary if credit card transactions were properly protected using available technology. That means proper use of public key cryptography, one time card numbers, smart cards, pins, and instant notification.
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Yes, that would be great. However, these kinds of invasions of privacy and espionage are still relatively new for the US, and it remains to be seen how we deal with it. In Europe, they have been the accepted norm for many decades.
Yes. What are you trying to get at? PRISM is relatively new and politically controversial, as opposed to Europe's long running and uncontroversial programs. Furthermore, PRISM still seems to have more legal protections than European spy programs.
Nor am I. But the BND, DGSI, or MI5/GCHQ do the same thing. You can't avoid your data being harvested by someone. The question you should ask yourself which spy agency can cause you more problems when they make a mistake, and that is probably your own domestic spy agency. That's why storing data outside the country is a good idea: it becomes more accessible to foreign spy agencies but less accessible to your own.
That's, of course, also the real reason the EU hates it when Europeans use US servers.
"Due process" applies to legal proceedings, not to espionage or national security. When it comes to espionage and national security, European citizens have fewer protections from their governments than Americans have from the US government. Countries like Germany scan every E-mail, phone call, and text message they can get their hands on for keywords, limited only by technology, and have done so for decades; it's not even a secret, it's just not talked about much in the press.
If I have no business presence in the EU, my payments are processed in the US, and my servers are in the US, why would it make any difference to me what the EU wants or what the US rules are?
If a European stores his data on a US computer, yes, the NSA may snoop on it. If you store it on a European computer, European governments will snoop on it, guaranteed. Who do you think is more likely to cause problems for you, the NSA or your own government? Which government actually has jurisdiction over you?
Yes, protectionism is one reason the EU is pushing so much for this. The other reason is to keep the online data of Europeans in Europe where it is easily accessible to European spy and law enforcement agencies.
They may do that. Of course, that doesn't mean Europeans will stop using their services.
You're right: I don't understand London and its taxi system, and I don't care to understand. I have no idea when or where taxis stop with what degree of reliability or availability (I do know it's a lot less than 100%), or what percentage of cabbies commit fraud, or whether they take my form of payment, or what fees they tack on, or how safe the system is. All I want to do is push the same button i push in any other large stinky metropolis like London to get from point A to point B with predictable arrival times and predictable service from a company that I know.
London's taxi system is an overpriced, government created monopoly with stiff barriers to entry. Furthermore, it is a local system, and many business travelers (including myself) don't want to have to deal with the idiosyncracies of every random local little fiefdom, and that's all London is.
Surge pricing is good. As for the rest, it's a delusion that Uber is any worse than other organizations.
Which is what the mayor of London can initiate. Hence my exhortation to him.
You're thinking "mob rule", not "democracy". Furthermore, it's a fantasy that London is a "democracy".
Really? Has this been proven in a court of law?
Yes, an obvious problem with regular Taxi service.
Taxis are currently charging monopoly prices. Uber wants a free market, meaning it would be competing with Lyft and other services.
They could. Or those countries and local jurisdictions could move into the 21st century, change their laws, and get rid of government-granted monopolies.
Change the rules.
Time to change the rules!
Kind of like High Speed Rail in California.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit that newspapers like The Guardian usually promote: massive government spending on so-called infrastructure. Heck, the local town residents were even willing to vote tax increases for this.
For a "spaceport", The Guardian recognizes the absurdity of it only out of their general hostility to science and engineering. But California high speed rail, sports stadiums, schools, urban renewal, and a lot of other "infrastructure projects" are just the same kind of boondoggle.
The Linux kernel has been around for a long time, and Linus has been abrasive and rude for all that time. So there is little empirical support for your belief.
The Linux kernel project seems to be doing just fine, and that's what we are talking about here.
The world doesn't work in any one way. There are all sorts of different companies, communities, and development teams. Women should do the same thing men do: if your workplace or project culture isn't a good match, you leave without making a big fuss. Simple as that.
The US and EU subsidize food production because farmers are a powerful special interest group, nothing more. It's crony capitalism, and it should be stopped.
Agricultural subsidies create a lot of perverse incentives. That's why they should be ended.
That's the point of more efficient agriculture: fewer farmers can produce the same output.
You claimed that "per unit profit" went down. Your argument is now about total profit. You really need to decide what argument you want to make.
Because car manufacturers are in competition with each other. The effect is that all of them set prices at cost plus a small profit margin (about 3-5%) reflecting the return on investment that owners expect. If the costs are raised for everybody through regulation, their profits increase slightly and demand decreases slightly.
You're right that there is a balance here. You're wrong that the "proper way" is to resolve this political. A political resolution of these issues is entirely divorced from actual costs and benefits, and dominated by lobbying, rent seeking, and demagoguery.
People aren't "forced into" anything. They buy their land already encumbered by various easements and rights, and as part of various associations. Furthermore, even though such associations may look like government and use various forms of government-like structures, they are not government. The crucial difference is that all the accounting (costs and benefits) takes place within them; the cost and benefits of making decisions are all born by the people actually affected by the decisions. That's in contrast to government, where the EPA can make decisions to make some lobby groups happy while imposing high costs on others.
We have never tried market economics for air and water pollution, so you have no basis for such an assertion. In those areas where we have actually tried free markets, they pretty much always work better than government.
GM also reduces the amount of labor, water, and pollution needed to produce food and makes food cheaper.
Making food cheaper is a big deal when people spend 15-20% of their income on food, as they do in much of Europe.
What "dependency"? You can switch from GMO to non-GMO any time you like. Of course, you have to live with the lower yields if you do.
The US patent system is no more and no less broken than the European patent system. In fact, intellectual property laws were largely created in Europe and imposed on the US. Now that US corporations are successful at using them, Europeans whine and complain, while still having the same or more draconian laws at home.
Whether a farmer becomes "Monsanto's bitch" or not is a choice any farmer can make individually, the same way you decide whether to buy an iPhone or an Android phone, run Windows or Ubuntu, etc.
No, what really bugs you is that Europe is highly dependent on US high tech manufacturers and products, and that the European economy and agriculture would collapse if the US stopped supplying Europe with these products.
Yes, and you wouldn't have to ask clients for their "BILLING ADDRESS" anymore; all you would need is to ask them for a single number. They get that number from a display directly on their credit card, on a small card reader, or from their smart phone. In addition to being safer it's also easier than the bullshit you make people go through right now.
Using the "billing address" as a security token, as credit card companies are doing, is stupid, insecure, and an invasion of privacy. You have lousy fraud prevention.
Of course, people like you should really be cut out of the process altogether. When people order online, the browser can talk to a USB credit card reader, request a payment, and the card reader then displays the amount, asks the user to input a pin to confirm, and then transmits the one time payment token.
As I was saying: "public key cryptography, one time card numbers, smart cards, pins, and instant notification". It means, among other things, that you don't ever get any credit card numbers or billing addresses. All you get is a one time code for a specific amount of money, valid for a limited amount of time and valid only for you. If anybody steals your customer and order database, they can't do anything with it. It also means that you can instantly verify that the payment is valid without contacting the credit card company.
On the customer side, it means that he needs to talk to his smart card credit card in order to generate that code, and that requires either a pin or even a second physical token. In addition, customers get notified of large charges as soon as they get generated (not when you process them), and optionally verify them via their phone.
Come on, if you're going to go Solaris, at least ship it with SunView or NeWS as the window system!
I have to second these experiences: I found Bank of America and Citibank to be absolutely horrible and incompetent.
And the reason this kind of fraud is so frequent is because your industry uses extremely poor security. Fraud detection software should be largely unnecessary if credit card transactions were properly protected using available technology. That means proper use of public key cryptography, one time card numbers, smart cards, pins, and instant notification.
The quality of the job they are doing is determined by both false positives and false negatives and both are far too high.
US credit card companies aren't doing an "amazing job", they are doing a piss poor job.