Salary amplification in... states with no income tax:
- Alaska - Florida - Nevada - South Dakota - Texas - Washington - Wyoming
If you have no dividend or interest income, add:
- Tennessee - New Hampshire
What actually matters here is not where you want to live to work, but where you want to live eventually/retire to, and how long you are willing to work before you can safely retire, which is how much money you are effectively able to sock away each year.
Austin is still something of a deal, since compared to California, you get about 25% of your salary back through not paying income taxes, but the other places in the article are less of a deal, regardless of the cost of living, because what matters is not the cost of where you are, but the cost of where you end up when you and your money eventually move there. And that includes differential real estate pricing.
Washington is not so much of a deal, unless you live near the Oregon border; Washington makes up for its lack of income tax through sales tax, and Oregon makes up for its lack of sales tax with an income tax, so if you can get salaries in Washington, and buy your consumables, furniture, cars, and other items in Oregon, you can get a pretty good deal. A lot of Microsofties take this option, and have no problem with job transfers, which are more of a problem in Austin than Silicon Valley, but less of a problem than if you took a job at some data center in Iowa.
The problem is that by paying for the cop, they tell the city "there'd better be a cop right here".
I expect the conversation went more like this:
FB: "We are building new housing in a ghetto area and we plan to have 10% of it go to our employees, and 90% of it to be rented at below market rates do that people can have better housing; all of this will be worthless, however, if no one wants to live there due to the high crime rate in the area. We'd like to see periodic patrols by a police officer in the area"
MP: "Sorry, we don't have enough officers to guarantee periodic patrols in the area that you're requesting"
FB: "Have another officer, on us, then, so that you can periodically patrol the area"
"The 2010 United States Census[9] reported that Menlo Park had a population of 32,026."... "The racial makeup of Menlo Park was 22,494 (70.2%) White, 1,551 (4.8%) African American, 156 (0.5%) Native American, 3,157 (9.9%) Asian, 454 (1.4%) Pacific Islander, 2,776 (8.7%) from other races, and 1,438 (4.5%) from two or more races."
You don't have to be a particular race to live in a slum, you just have to have bad neighbors who make things miserable for everyone else.
They earmarked the funds for a cop, instead of just giving the city money to spend on whatever stupid, politically motivated bullshit worth maybe $25,000 some city councilman's brother in law could get away with selling the city for that same $200,000.
I rather approve of earmarks like this.
If I could earmark donated funds for specific uses, like solar powered LED street lights that pretty much never need service for 20+ years, I'd probably buy several for my neighborhood, as they are ~$500 each, and labor to put them up couldn't be more than ~$200 each (and if it was, I'd hire the private contractors to do the work instead of city employees). I'd happily pay $3,500 out of pocket for 5 lights to get safer streets in my immediate neighborhood.
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
Except such a thing is irrelevant to all but a microscopic minority of nerds.
I totally disagree.
It's also really important to regulatory agencies like the FCC in the U.S., the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Ministere de l'Econonie des Finances et des L'Industrie in France, the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway in Germany, the European Radiocommunication Office in all of Europe, the Commission for Communications Regulation, and other government agencies.
Because they will damn well not let a software defined radio with source code be legally imported into their jurisdiction, and they all require that the firmware load on SDRs be cryptographically protected from being replaced by the end user, and they certify radio units as bundles of software + hardware, and any attempt to sever the relationship between the two renders the equipment illegal to use.
I just assumed that they were lumping corporate losses and corporate store profits to make the overall loss look smaller.
This is also assuming that their corporate stores are actually profitable if examined separately from the company as a whole. I don't know if that's actually true or not.
Read their Edgar 10-Q filings: it's not true; the stores are unprofitable when examined on their own, but it is the operational costs of the store vs. the operational profits which counts as ROI on the investment, whether it be operating capitol, inventory, relative cost of flooring, opportunity cost relative to putting the capital to use elsewhere, channel aging, which makes closing them desirable to corporate.
My argument is that if there is a difference between the stores being closed and those being kept open, then it's a correctable difference for the stores being closed, or they might as well just follow Blockbuster into closure of all their corporate stores.
They do not appear to have anything in mind, other than a short term write-off on the closure costs vs. their taxes, and a reduction in operating expenses, and whatever they get from sale of the real estate under the stores being closed. In other words, this is a short term pump for the stock prior to a dump before it goes in the crapper over the long term. Blockbuster did this a couple of times as a leadup to the closure of the rest of their corporate stores.
Ironically, it's pretty clear that Radio Shack is salvageable, just as Blockbuster was, at one point, salvageable.
The other company currently in this crapper is Staples, and I could see some fundamental process model changes that might save them as well, but I'd be a hell of a lot less confident of my own ability to do the necessary work than either the Blockbuster or Radio Shack cases. Staples is probably a long shot, even if they get someone competent at business process engineering in charge, and give her or him carte blanche to try and fix things.
Of course there is. Just to do a completely extreme example: If gas was taxed so it got priced at $1000/gallon, people would hardly drive at all.
I think it would probably be cheaper, economically, to assassinate the people taxing it up to $1000/gallon than it would be to not drive. Just saying, when a gallon of gas can hire a relatively competent hitman, and all subsequent gallons of gas would be cheaper as a result, someone's going to pull out their siphon hose and get themselves a cheap hitman.
I work in a job where I do systems programming in C and Ruby (and sometimes Python) and rarely am in a situation where I am just "beating a framework".
Just a guess, but this means that corporate is not getting enough in franchise fees to actually support their operations. The locations remain profitable, while the costs are passed on and charged as a loss to corporate and its stores.
This is a non-sequitur. If their trade name and trade dress are that valuable for business, then the corporate owned stores, which pay only "funny money" as an accounting proxy for these things, would be more profitable than the franchisees, all other things being equal.
If nothing else, it'd be possible to spin the stores out as separate franchisees incorporations, in turn owned by a holding company, in turn owned either outright by corporate, or as apportioned shares in a spun out stock division. Either way, for that 25% to be profitable, it's have to start doing what the other franchisees do, rather than playing by the corporate playbook.
This is a willful decision to not learn from people better at running an individual store than corporate was.
Advertising on column inches. A story about Apple gets more views than a story about some other company.
It's the same reason we keep hearing about "Google busses" being stopped, even though one of them actually belonged to Intuit; reporting it as a Google bus sold more ads per column inch than reporting it as an "Intuit bus" would have.
ASLR is not security through obscurity. If that were true, regular encryption would be security through obscurity. Security through obscurity is an idiom, and it doesn't literally mean that nothing can be secure which depends on a secret.
ASLR is "secrecy through implementation to provide security"; that, according to Wikipedia, is the very definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
And ASLR has other benefits beyond raising the bar for bug exploitation. When ASLR was enabled by default in OpenBSD many years ago, it uncovered a plethora of bugs, particularly in the ports collection. Not because those developers were depending on some particular pattern of allocation, but because bugs were exercised more frequently when the relative location of blocks became randomized. So ASLR ultimately resulted in OpenBSD and a ton of other free software becoming much more robust.
Sure; but like compiling for the DEC Alpha uncovered alignment issues that resulted in improved performance due to alignment exceptions and fixups for unaligned data accesses, it would not be necessary to leave the option on once the bugs were fixed; and indeed, the alignment check bit is not set in CR0 for Intel processors on Intel versions of OpenBSD, even though doing so would result in OpenBSD and a ton of other free software ending up with much better performance. So ASLR might have been handy to turn on temporarily for the purposes of finding bugs, but arguably alignment issues are also bugs, yet unaligned accesses are not resulting in faults, log messages, and software changes to fix those bugs.
Fackebook prohibits all weapons sales. They always have. I don't see why illegal weapons sales are a big deal here, given that "illegal" is a subset of "all".
Way back when, I brought up to the OpenBSD mailing list that position-independent executables (PIE) on x86 would incur a negligible performance penalty while increasing the effectiveness of certain security measures--the randomization of stack, library, and heap base--significantly.
Theo immediately pulled the discussion off-list to tell me that the optimization is "very expensive" (i.e. incurs a huge performance hit). He bolstered his argument by repeating, across 14 e-mails, "We invented this stuff, I know what I'm talking about" and "I don't even know who you are, everyone knows who I am".
Linux had oprofile.
I ran some measurements. The performance hit without relying on -fomit-stack-pointer was some 0.6%, and with -fomit-stack-pointer you got a 5.2% boost unrealized. We could call the raw performance hit 5.8%. -fPIE code is 5.8% slower.
Was this profiling done on Linux or OpenBSD?
The reason I ask is that the Linux model for 32 bit is to have a 4G/4G address space, where the user and kernel address space are completely disjoint, while the OpenBSD model was to have (initially) a 2G/2G split, later followed by a 3G/1G split.
With a disjoint address space, you aren't going to see tremendous performance degradation by going to PIE, even though you lose a register over it in 32 bit executables, since you are already paying the TLB flush overhead for the overlapping address spaces, and you are already paying the CR3 reload overhead for the mapping of copy buffers for the copyin/copyout operations. Assuming you do lazy mapping for the copy regions, you'll mask a pretty big chunk of the overhead, if the only activity you have on your system is your benchmarking process, as opposed to paying to move the copy window mappings around if you are doing a lot of context switching between processes that have even modest copyin/out requirements.
The overall overhead of this, according to Ingo Molnar, amounts to some 38% performance increase if you do not use a disjoint address space and copy windows.
This is practically the same performance you get from moving the kernel high (i.e. effectively, a negative offset) in a 64 bit system.
In addition, as long as you work around the Intel architecture TLB flush bug for the large vs. small page mappings covering the same physical memory region (i.e. the TLB flush would leave one of the TLB unflushed, and this is what caused issues with large page support to cover the kernel address space to get the TLB regions non-intersecting), you can get another up to 11% performance improvement by supporting all large pages in kernel space and all small pages in user space.
I suspect that the suggestion didn't get traction for 2 reasons:
(1) The above performance considerations, which were architecturally a performance win that OpenBSD could have and Linux couldn't, in the default case, for the default kernel and user address space mapping made the hit considerably more than the Linux-observed 5.8% on OpenBSD.
(2) ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), which is the primary reason for supporting PIE, is a means of security through obscurity, which relies on hiding the locations from the attack vectors, rather than actually having the code be secure, which is somewhat antithetical to normal security philosophy, which disdains obscurity as a protection mechanism (i.e. You can work around it using a relative return, unless you set the NX bit on all your DS/SS pages, which you should probably be doing anyway -- rendering the technique unnecessary in the first place).
I admit that PIE can be handy when you override shared libraries on the command line with environment variables passed to the run time linker, particularly for testing, but as a default mechanism, it's something of a dead end, particularly now that many architectures are taking the ARM 9 approach of a modified Harvard architecture. You can do a similar thing on recent Intel processors, although the recovery from a fault is you h
Blockbuster called, and they want their stupid back.
If you don't include the 900 franchise stores, you're about to close almost 25% of your corporate stores because you're too tied to your existing process playbook for running a store to be able to see where it's hurting you.
Clearly your 900 franchise stores are able to profitably stay in business.
This is *exactly* what Blockbuster did when they closed their corporately owned stores, even though they had the undeniable evidence of the franchise stores proof by existence that it was possible for a video rental store to remain profitable, despite the online movie services and cable and satellite company's "on demand" offerings.
It was almost enough to make me want to go into the video store business (and I am not kidding!).
I know this is a really radical idea, but have you considered *asking your franchisees* what practices they are engaging in, and what processes they have in place, such that they are able to remain profitable, while your 1,100 stores aren't?
And then, you know, throwing out your own, unprofitable practices in favor of their profitable ones?
Do you guys really just never hire systems engineers, or do you not view your retail operations as systems?
It sounds like the micropayment problem. Which no one but the telephone companies have been able to solve, at a flat rate additional cost to all transactions. Only lacking the network access requirement of telephone services, which are the means by which these transactions are recorded.
This is a pretty stupid goal, since if you could solve this problem, the magazine and newspaper industry would be beating down your door already, assuming you could get an audience stupid enough to not want predictable flat rate pricing. Good thing you have a monopoly where you can effectively force participation in an otherwise untenable micropayment system.
Seriously, though...
Just do a historical analysis of the wear rate of non-software access controlled items, assume that's going to be a lab cost, potentially using regression analysis to account for things which get worn at different rates, depending on correlation between class offerings (i.e. if none of the labs for the classes this quarter/semester require a centrifuge, you are probably not going to see wear on your centrifuge), and then roll that costing into the lab fee that everyone pays equally.
Yeah, you're going to get the occasional Calamity Jane/Wrong Way Corrigan who's going to be harder on the equipment than average, but given that you'll have accounted for this by historical records already in your possession, the costs will work out. This is exactly how real businesses deal with wear on capitol equipment.
Bluetooth keyboard or type on the screen, but the BT keyboard from Apple is a keyboard in a laser cut aluminum case, so it's not nearly as bendy as the surface keyboard.
San Francisco isn't part of a "targeted employment area" (or TEA) so it doesn't get the half off. The green card would have to put in at least $1 million in theory. Similarly, Florida only has one such TEA.
The easiest way to deal with this would be to buy the property in one of the TEAs (and yes, SF has large swaths of them). That's pretty trivial; here are the California TEAs: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/ez/en... and here is the map of TEAs (Enterprise zones) that qualify under the EB-5 program in San Francisco: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/ez/pd...
[...]So yes, this sort of activity could be driving the market or conversely, this sort of activity could be attracted to unusually high volume, high price markets because that is more efficient.
Well, there are 10,000 EB-5 program slots available per year, and if we apportion EB-5 activity proportionally to percentage of foreign property purchases, then that's 1,700 home purchases a year (this is being very generous).
Assuming we ignore the $500,000 end run around the problem by investing in a real estate holding company in a TEA, rather than directly in real estate, and those purchases are all in the $1,000,000+ range, then there is a huge incentive to push equity values above the $1,000,000 mark - just barely - when they would be closer to the $800,000 mark. This both guarantees you a winning bid (the +25% I mentioned earlier), and it pushes up the median prices by a like amount.
Unfortunately, this is a cascade effect - as anyone who listens to the radio in the Bay Area can tell you, there are huge numbers of companies trying to sell you "How to flip property in the Bay Area" seminars, books, software, kits, and so on. As the median price goes up for a reason other than an actual increase in value, the available real estate is additionally squeezed by this "band wagon" effect.
But then we get to your recommended solution. Why would it be a good idea to ban foreign ownership of US real estate? That remains a non sequitur. Even if we are truly seeing yet another immigration policy gimmick pumping up the price of real estate in San Francisco, the solution would be to fix or eliminate the policy not screw with ownership of property.
This would be perhaps a good way to deal with the immigration policy "gimmick", but unfortunately that gimmick is there as a matter of economic and immigration policy (a policy I'd probably agree with you is bigoted, due to it's emergent properties, assuming they're intentional). The purpose of the policy is to stem a tide of immigration by making a carrot available, and putting the carrot mostly out of reach of the average person in the countries people would like to leave in order to come to the U.S.. It's there so that we can point at it and say "look, if you don't want to wait, you can always buy yourself to the head of the line instead".
So in answer, I have about as much hope of that particular loophole being closed as I do seeing government switch from giving tax breaks to giving grants so that they have to account for the money changing hands through political cronyism, instead of hiding it in some obscure part of the tax code.
As Minnesota has demonstrated with their agricultural land purchase policies, it's within the boundaries of states rights to prevent foreign purchase of real estate, without running afoul of the Constitution's Article I Section 8 Commerce Clause, and so it's addressable at a state level. Obviously, if you have a huge project that's not going to get funded without someone like an Adnan Khashoggi footing the bill, you can either take that up at a legislative level to grant an exception.
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
Bigotry is so interesting. Here, we go from a bunch of people wanting cheap rent to foreigners bad without any logical connection between the two.
You reordered the sentence to put the conclusion before the supporting evidence, so of course it sounds bigoted; that was pretty clearly your intent, when you went out of your way to edit the markup language so you could take those sentences out of order.
Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Was the property at that 25% premium still a good investment? If so, then perhaps you should bid more next time or snipe those auctions just like the pros did. If not, then a foreign investor just donated to the US economy. Send him a thank you letter.
Was it worth another 25%, and the extra effort to make an all-cash offer? It depends... there are three dfferent ways of looking at the word "investment" in this context:
(1) As a place to live... definitely "no"; the house was priced about market value to begin with, and all the bids were coming in close to that by 1-2%; certainly nothing close to a 25% premium, until the last minute.
(2) As a property intended to be held for ~5 years to appreciate, and then flipped as an actual investment property? It's very iffy. It depends on whether you believe that the current speculation bubble in San Francisco is the result of an actual depressed valuation, or whether you believe it's being driven by external influences (as I do). Certainly, we are not seeing an upswing in actual owner occupied homes, which means that it is in fact an investment bubble. If you believe the bubble will last that long, then yes.
(3) As a foreign investor using a purchase in excess of $500,000 to qualify under the EB-5 Immigrant Investor program as a fast track means of getting a green card? Clearly, it's a great investment. It's half the cost of the in excess of $1,000,000 that they'd have to invest otherwise. See http://www.uscis.gov/i-526 "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services form I-526, Immigrant Petition by Alien Entrepreneur".
As the CNN article says, four states accounted for 58% of all foreign sales: 23% Florida, 17% California, 9% Arizona, 9% Texas. See the CNN article here: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/0... It's interesting that these are also the states with currently accelerating "recovery" in the real estate market.
So assuming the ruling stands, is it likely the dad now owes his lawyers the $60k in fees they were awarded as part of the settlement?
Obviously, the papers have not been published by the court, and Snay's lawyers have not been identified. However, it's typical of this type of case for the fees to have been paid on contingency.
Also, regardless of the $80,000, it's unlikely that the $10,000 in back pay and $60,000 in fees were contingent on non-breach of confidentiality; the $80K was specifically to keep them from doing exactly what they are doing now, and publicizing both the facts of the case and the terms of the settlement. My expectation is that the fees and the back pay would have been subject to the same terms os the dismissal with prejudice,
To put it another way, the $80K was likely "hush money" to keep other similar cases from coming forward on the precedent (not a case law precedent) of the case having been won. Given that, it's likely that there are likely more than 2 but less than 4 cases where the same situation that applied Snay may pertain. If that's the case, with the cat being already out of the bag, then the costs of payout in those cases would be less than the $80K on settlement, and without confidentiality, those cases, if they existed, would likely not hurt the school any more than it's already hurt.
IMO, This is likely a case of sour grapes, since the Facebook post didn't result in news stories until after it was put in context by the school being offended by it and taking them back to court for breach of the confidentiality agreement, which, I think, is what actually made it news. In other words, "Streisand Effect". Most likely someone at the school had "buyers remorse" on the settlement.
Can they still do that? After all, they were the ones who broke the deal.
It depends on the specific details of the confidentiality agreement; for it to be a legally binding contract there must be agreement and consideration (U.S. Law prevails in this case, as it took place in Miami, FL).
The normal mechanism here is that there is an exchange of "$1 and other valuable considerations", and that the settlement is considered and "additional consideration", and if the agreement is a negotiated agreement, which is typically the case, then the jude dismisses the original case with prejudice, which means it can not be legally re-raised, as (A) the separate consideration keeps the contract valid, and so (B) the dismissal with prejudice remains valid, even if the disclosure voided part of the contract, due to implied severability of contract terms.
Typically, a good lawyer on your side would prevent this type of estoppel, and you'd be able to reopen the case, but if the father in the case was very happy with the settlement amount, it might have been signed with that type of clause present, and the case could not be reasserted. A good lawyer on their side might "sweeten the pot" on the settlement to get the clause into place over your lawyers objections, if they could get you to fall for it.
So to answer your implied statement, it's likely that there is still a settlement, but it's probably $1, and it's probably already been paid, so there is no basis for reasserting the original case claims. Otherwise, this would likely not have hit the news.
How about google supports paying more local taxes so that the local transit district can provide the services for free, and forever.
Local taxes would go to Mountain View, where the main Google campus is located, not San Francisco, unless they were willing to merge their transit district with that of the rest of the peninsula, which they've historically gone bat shit crazy every time it's been suggested in the last 30 years.
Also, California prohibits city, county, and municipal income taxes, so it's not like in New York, where the city would be allowed to come yank the money out of your pocket, assuming your job was in San Francisco instead of Mountain View in the first place. Instead San Francisco collects service charges, property taxes, receives money from the state general fund, which together accounted for about 2/3rd of their $6B in revenue in the last year for which they were willing to publish numbers. Other local taxes and federal funds account for another ~$1B.
As a side note, less than 5% of the income San Francisco collects goes to fund aid/assistance programs; 50% of it goes for personnel, with almost a third of that going to pension obligations for retired city employees. About half of one percent goes for facilities maintenance (parking garages, schools, parks, and so on).
Other states where a city, county, and municipal income taxes is also prohibited include Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, and West Virginia. You'd probably know this, if you actually lived in California, instead of being someone from out of state trying to tell San Francisco how it should run things with Google or the other companies running busses.
Slashdot Mirror
Salary amplification in... states with no income tax:
- Alaska
- Florida
- Nevada
- South Dakota
- Texas
- Washington
- Wyoming
If you have no dividend or interest income, add:
- Tennessee
- New Hampshire
What actually matters here is not where you want to live to work, but where you want to live eventually/retire to, and how long you are willing to work before you can safely retire, which is how much money you are effectively able to sock away each year.
Austin is still something of a deal, since compared to California, you get about 25% of your salary back through not paying income taxes, but the other places in the article are less of a deal, regardless of the cost of living, because what matters is not the cost of where you are, but the cost of where you end up when you and your money eventually move there. And that includes differential real estate pricing.
Washington is not so much of a deal, unless you live near the Oregon border; Washington makes up for its lack of income tax through sales tax, and Oregon makes up for its lack of sales tax with an income tax, so if you can get salaries in Washington, and buy your consumables, furniture, cars, and other items in Oregon, you can get a pretty good deal. A lot of Microsofties take this option, and have no problem with job transfers, which are more of a problem in Austin than Silicon Valley, but less of a problem than if you took a job at some data center in Iowa.
The problem is that by paying for the cop, they tell the city "there'd better be a cop right here".
I expect the conversation went more like this:
FB: "We are building new housing in a ghetto area and we plan to have 10% of it go to our employees, and 90% of it to be rented at below market rates do that people can have better housing; all of this will be worthless, however, if no one wants to live there due to the high crime rate in the area. We'd like to see periodic patrols by a police officer in the area"
MP: "Sorry, we don't have enough officers to guarantee periodic patrols in the area that you're requesting"
FB: "Have another officer, on us, then, so that you can periodically patrol the area"
MP: "Thanks!"
They're black, you mean. Scary black people.
You wish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"The 2010 United States Census[9] reported that Menlo Park had a population of 32,026." ... "The racial makeup of Menlo Park was 22,494 (70.2%) White, 1,551 (4.8%) African American, 156 (0.5%) Native American, 3,157 (9.9%) Asian, 454 (1.4%) Pacific Islander, 2,776 (8.7%) from other races, and 1,438 (4.5%) from two or more races."
You don't have to be a particular race to live in a slum, you just have to have bad neighbors who make things miserable for everyone else.
"If the service isn't good, fix it for everybody"
They did.
They earmarked the funds for a cop, instead of just giving the city money to spend on whatever stupid, politically motivated bullshit worth maybe $25,000 some city councilman's brother in law could get away with selling the city for that same $200,000.
I rather approve of earmarks like this.
If I could earmark donated funds for specific uses, like solar powered LED street lights that pretty much never need service for 20+ years, I'd probably buy several for my neighborhood, as they are ~$500 each, and labor to put them up couldn't be more than ~$200 each (and if it was, I'd hire the private contractors to do the work instead of city employees). I'd happily pay $3,500 out of pocket for 5 lights to get safer streets in my immediate neighborhood.
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
Except such a thing is irrelevant to all but a microscopic minority of nerds.
I totally disagree.
It's also really important to regulatory agencies like the FCC in the U.S., the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Ministere de l'Econonie des Finances et des L'Industrie in France, the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway in Germany, the European Radiocommunication Office in all of Europe, the Commission for Communications Regulation, and other government agencies.
Because they will damn well not let a software defined radio with source code be legally imported into their jurisdiction, and they all require that the firmware load on SDRs be cryptographically protected from being replaced by the end user, and they certify radio units as bundles of software + hardware, and any attempt to sever the relationship between the two renders the equipment illegal to use.
It's a nice pipe dream, though.
It's no secret that innovation in the low-end of the market is high on the priority of manufacturers.
Because everyone wants to compete in the booming low-margin Blackberry/Nokia feature phone market?
I just assumed that they were lumping corporate losses and corporate store profits to make the overall loss look smaller.
This is also assuming that their corporate stores are actually profitable if examined separately from the company as a whole. I don't know if that's actually true or not.
Read their Edgar 10-Q filings: it's not true; the stores are unprofitable when examined on their own, but it is the operational costs of the store vs. the operational profits which counts as ROI on the investment, whether it be operating capitol, inventory, relative cost of flooring, opportunity cost relative to putting the capital to use elsewhere, channel aging, which makes closing them desirable to corporate.
My argument is that if there is a difference between the stores being closed and those being kept open, then it's a correctable difference for the stores being closed, or they might as well just follow Blockbuster into closure of all their corporate stores.
They do not appear to have anything in mind, other than a short term write-off on the closure costs vs. their taxes, and a reduction in operating expenses, and whatever they get from sale of the real estate under the stores being closed. In other words, this is a short term pump for the stock prior to a dump before it goes in the crapper over the long term. Blockbuster did this a couple of times as a leadup to the closure of the rest of their corporate stores.
Ironically, it's pretty clear that Radio Shack is salvageable, just as Blockbuster was, at one point, salvageable.
The other company currently in this crapper is Staples, and I could see some fundamental process model changes that might save them as well, but I'd be a hell of a lot less confident of my own ability to do the necessary work than either the Blockbuster or Radio Shack cases. Staples is probably a long shot, even if they get someone competent at business process engineering in charge, and give her or him carte blanche to try and fix things.
Of course there is. Just to do a completely extreme example: If gas was taxed so it got priced at $1000/gallon, people would hardly drive at all.
I think it would probably be cheaper, economically, to assassinate the people taxing it up to $1000/gallon than it would be to not drive. Just saying, when a gallon of gas can hire a relatively competent hitman, and all subsequent gallons of gas would be cheaper as a result, someone's going to pull out their siphon hose and get themselves a cheap hitman.
I work in a job where I do systems programming in C and Ruby (and sometimes Python) and rarely am in a situation where I am just "beating a framework".
How the heck do you do this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
In an interpreted language like Ruby or Python?
Just a guess, but this means that corporate is not getting enough in franchise fees to actually support their operations. The locations remain profitable, while the costs are passed on and charged as a loss to corporate and its stores.
This is a non-sequitur. If their trade name and trade dress are that valuable for business, then the corporate owned stores, which pay only "funny money" as an accounting proxy for these things, would be more profitable than the franchisees, all other things being equal.
If nothing else, it'd be possible to spin the stores out as separate franchisees incorporations, in turn owned by a holding company, in turn owned either outright by corporate, or as apportioned shares in a spun out stock division. Either way, for that 25% to be profitable, it's have to start doing what the other franchisees do, rather than playing by the corporate playbook.
This is a willful decision to not learn from people better at running an individual store than corporate was.
...Apple tends to get singled out for some reason
Advertising on column inches. A story about Apple gets more views than a story about some other company.
It's the same reason we keep hearing about "Google busses" being stopped, even though one of them actually belonged to Intuit; reporting it as a Google bus sold more ads per column inch than reporting it as an "Intuit bus" would have.
ASLR is not security through obscurity. If that were true, regular encryption would be security through obscurity. Security through obscurity is an idiom, and it doesn't literally mean that nothing can be secure which depends on a secret.
ASLR is "secrecy through implementation to provide security"; that, according to Wikipedia, is the very definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
And ASLR has other benefits beyond raising the bar for bug exploitation. When ASLR was enabled by default in OpenBSD many years ago, it uncovered a plethora of bugs, particularly in the ports collection. Not because those developers were depending on some particular pattern of allocation, but because bugs were exercised more frequently when the relative location of blocks became randomized. So ASLR ultimately resulted in OpenBSD and a ton of other free software becoming much more robust.
Sure; but like compiling for the DEC Alpha uncovered alignment issues that resulted in improved performance due to alignment exceptions and fixups for unaligned data accesses, it would not be necessary to leave the option on once the bugs were fixed; and indeed, the alignment check bit is not set in CR0 for Intel processors on Intel versions of OpenBSD, even though doing so would result in OpenBSD and a ton of other free software ending up with much better performance. So ASLR might have been handy to turn on temporarily for the purposes of finding bugs, but arguably alignment issues are also bugs, yet unaligned accesses are not resulting in faults, log messages, and software changes to fix those bugs.
I think you are confused; just because a couple of pages are dual mapped doesn't make the virtual address spaces *not* disjoint.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2003/7/1...
Fackebook prohibits all weapons sales. They always have. I don't see why illegal weapons sales are a big deal here, given that "illegal" is a subset of "all".
This is not news, because it's not new.
"Slashdot ... tools for analyzing .NET and Java"
I am partial to "rm"; I have a couple of friends who prefer "unlink", and one friend who prefers "cp /dev/null ".
Seriously, why do you think *anyone* other than "security consultants" analyzes binary libraries? Why do you think FXCop hasn't been updated?
Way back when, I brought up to the OpenBSD mailing list that position-independent executables (PIE) on x86 would incur a negligible performance penalty while increasing the effectiveness of certain security measures--the randomization of stack, library, and heap base--significantly.
Theo immediately pulled the discussion off-list to tell me that the optimization is "very expensive" (i.e. incurs a huge performance hit). He bolstered his argument by repeating, across 14 e-mails, "We invented this stuff, I know what I'm talking about" and "I don't even know who you are, everyone knows who I am".
Linux had oprofile.
I ran some measurements. The performance hit without relying on -fomit-stack-pointer was some 0.6%, and with -fomit-stack-pointer you got a 5.2% boost unrealized. We could call the raw performance hit 5.8%. -fPIE code is 5.8% slower.
Was this profiling done on Linux or OpenBSD?
The reason I ask is that the Linux model for 32 bit is to have a 4G/4G address space, where the user and kernel address space are completely disjoint, while the OpenBSD model was to have (initially) a 2G/2G split, later followed by a 3G/1G split.
With a disjoint address space, you aren't going to see tremendous performance degradation by going to PIE, even though you lose a register over it in 32 bit executables, since you are already paying the TLB flush overhead for the overlapping address spaces, and you are already paying the CR3 reload overhead for the mapping of copy buffers for the copyin/copyout operations. Assuming you do lazy mapping for the copy regions, you'll mask a pretty big chunk of the overhead, if the only activity you have on your system is your benchmarking process, as opposed to paying to move the copy window mappings around if you are doing a lot of context switching between processes that have even modest copyin/out requirements.
The overall overhead of this, according to Ingo Molnar, amounts to some 38% performance increase if you do not use a disjoint address space and copy windows.
This is practically the same performance you get from moving the kernel high (i.e. effectively, a negative offset) in a 64 bit system.
In addition, as long as you work around the Intel architecture TLB flush bug for the large vs. small page mappings covering the same physical memory region (i.e. the TLB flush would leave one of the TLB unflushed, and this is what caused issues with large page support to cover the kernel address space to get the TLB regions non-intersecting), you can get another up to 11% performance improvement by supporting all large pages in kernel space and all small pages in user space.
I suspect that the suggestion didn't get traction for 2 reasons:
(1) The above performance considerations, which were architecturally a performance win that OpenBSD could have and Linux couldn't, in the default case, for the default kernel and user address space mapping made the hit considerably more than the Linux-observed 5.8% on OpenBSD.
(2) ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), which is the primary reason for supporting PIE, is a means of security through obscurity, which relies on hiding the locations from the attack vectors, rather than actually having the code be secure, which is somewhat antithetical to normal security philosophy, which disdains obscurity as a protection mechanism (i.e. You can work around it using a relative return, unless you set the NX bit on all your DS/SS pages, which you should probably be doing anyway -- rendering the technique unnecessary in the first place).
I admit that PIE can be handy when you override shared libraries on the command line with environment variables passed to the run time linker, particularly for testing, but as a default mechanism, it's something of a dead end, particularly now that many architectures are taking the ARM 9 approach of a modified Harvard architecture. You can do a similar thing on recent Intel processors, although the recovery from a fault is you h
"...that can lift 50kg with each hand..."
Big deal. In "Kal e forn e yah" we had a governor which could do that.
My post on the CNN article...
---
Hi, Radio Shack.
Blockbuster called, and they want their stupid back.
If you don't include the 900 franchise stores, you're about to close almost 25% of your corporate stores because you're too tied to your existing process playbook for running a store to be able to see where it's hurting you.
Clearly your 900 franchise stores are able to profitably stay in business.
This is *exactly* what Blockbuster did when they closed their corporately owned stores, even though they had the undeniable evidence of the franchise stores proof by existence that it was possible for a video rental store to remain profitable, despite the online movie services and cable and satellite company's "on demand" offerings.
It was almost enough to make me want to go into the video store business (and I am not kidding!).
I know this is a really radical idea, but have you considered *asking your franchisees* what practices they are engaging in, and what processes they have in place, such that they are able to remain profitable, while your 1,100 stores aren't?
And then, you know, throwing out your own, unprofitable practices in favor of their profitable ones?
Do you guys really just never hire systems engineers, or do you not view your retail operations as systems?
It sounds like the micropayment problem. Which no one but the telephone companies have been able to solve, at a flat rate additional cost to all transactions. Only lacking the network access requirement of telephone services, which are the means by which these transactions are recorded.
This is a pretty stupid goal, since if you could solve this problem, the magazine and newspaper industry would be beating down your door already, assuming you could get an audience stupid enough to not want predictable flat rate pricing. Good thing you have a monopoly where you can effectively force participation in an otherwise untenable micropayment system.
Seriously, though...
Just do a historical analysis of the wear rate of non-software access controlled items, assume that's going to be a lab cost, potentially using regression analysis to account for things which get worn at different rates, depending on correlation between class offerings (i.e. if none of the labs for the classes this quarter/semester require a centrifuge, you are probably not going to see wear on your centrifuge), and then roll that costing into the lab fee that everyone pays equally.
Yeah, you're going to get the occasional Calamity Jane/Wrong Way Corrigan who's going to be harder on the equipment than average, but given that you'll have accounted for this by historical records already in your possession, the costs will work out. This is exactly how real businesses deal with wear on capitol equipment.
How do you type on an ipad in bed?
Bluetooth keyboard or type on the screen, but the BT keyboard from Apple is a keyboard in a laser cut aluminum case, so it's not nearly as bendy as the surface keyboard.
San Francisco isn't part of a "targeted employment area" (or TEA) so it doesn't get the half off. The green card would have to put in at least $1 million in theory. Similarly, Florida only has one such TEA.
The easiest way to deal with this would be to buy the property in one of the TEAs (and yes, SF has large swaths of them). That's pretty trivial; here are the California TEAs: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/ez/en... and here is the map of TEAs (Enterprise zones) that qualify under the EB-5 program in San Francisco: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/ez/pd...
[...]So yes, this sort of activity could be driving the market or conversely, this sort of activity could be attracted to unusually high volume, high price markets because that is more efficient.
Well, there are 10,000 EB-5 program slots available per year, and if we apportion EB-5 activity proportionally to percentage of foreign property purchases, then that's 1,700 home purchases a year (this is being very generous).
Assuming we ignore the $500,000 end run around the problem by investing in a real estate holding company in a TEA, rather than directly in real estate, and those purchases are all in the $1,000,000+ range, then there is a huge incentive to push equity values above the $1,000,000 mark - just barely - when they would be closer to the $800,000 mark. This both guarantees you a winning bid (the +25% I mentioned earlier), and it pushes up the median prices by a like amount.
Unfortunately, this is a cascade effect - as anyone who listens to the radio in the Bay Area can tell you, there are huge numbers of companies trying to sell you "How to flip property in the Bay Area" seminars, books, software, kits, and so on. As the median price goes up for a reason other than an actual increase in value, the available real estate is additionally squeezed by this "band wagon" effect.
But then we get to your recommended solution. Why would it be a good idea to ban foreign ownership of US real estate? That remains a non sequitur. Even if we are truly seeing yet another immigration policy gimmick pumping up the price of real estate in San Francisco, the solution would be to fix or eliminate the policy not screw with ownership of property.
This would be perhaps a good way to deal with the immigration policy "gimmick", but unfortunately that gimmick is there as a matter of economic and immigration policy (a policy I'd probably agree with you is bigoted, due to it's emergent properties, assuming they're intentional). The purpose of the policy is to stem a tide of immigration by making a carrot available, and putting the carrot mostly out of reach of the average person in the countries people would like to leave in order to come to the U.S.. It's there so that we can point at it and say "look, if you don't want to wait, you can always buy yourself to the head of the line instead".
So in answer, I have about as much hope of that particular loophole being closed as I do seeing government switch from giving tax breaks to giving grants so that they have to account for the money changing hands through political cronyism, instead of hiding it in some obscure part of the tax code.
As Minnesota has demonstrated with their agricultural land purchase policies, it's within the boundaries of states rights to prevent foreign purchase of real estate, without running afoul of the Constitution's Article I Section 8 Commerce Clause, and so it's addressable at a state level. Obviously, if you have a huge project that's not going to get funded without someone like an Adnan Khashoggi footing the bill, you can either take that up at a legislative level to grant an exception.
But more likely, what will happen i
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
Bigotry is so interesting. Here, we go from a bunch of people wanting cheap rent to foreigners bad without any logical connection between the two.
You reordered the sentence to put the conclusion before the supporting evidence, so of course it sounds bigoted; that was pretty clearly your intent, when you went out of your way to edit the markup language so you could take those sentences out of order.
Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Was the property at that 25% premium still a good investment? If so, then perhaps you should bid more next time or snipe those auctions just like the pros did. If not, then a foreign investor just donated to the US economy. Send him a thank you letter.
Was it worth another 25%, and the extra effort to make an all-cash offer? It depends... there are three dfferent ways of looking at the word "investment" in this context:
(1) As a place to live... definitely "no"; the house was priced about market value to begin with, and all the bids were coming in close to that by 1-2%; certainly nothing close to a 25% premium, until the last minute.
(2) As a property intended to be held for ~5 years to appreciate, and then flipped as an actual investment property? It's very iffy. It depends on whether you believe that the current speculation bubble in San Francisco is the result of an actual depressed valuation, or whether you believe it's being driven by external influences (as I do). Certainly, we are not seeing an upswing in actual owner occupied homes, which means that it is in fact an investment bubble. If you believe the bubble will last that long, then yes.
(3) As a foreign investor using a purchase in excess of $500,000 to qualify under the EB-5 Immigrant Investor program as a fast track means of getting a green card? Clearly, it's a great investment. It's half the cost of the in excess of $1,000,000 that they'd have to invest otherwise. See http://www.uscis.gov/i-526 "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services form I-526, Immigrant Petition by Alien Entrepreneur".
As the CNN article says, four states accounted for 58% of all foreign sales: 23% Florida, 17% California, 9% Arizona, 9% Texas. See the CNN article here: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/0... It's interesting that these are also the states with currently accelerating "recovery" in the real estate market.
So assuming the ruling stands, is it likely the dad now owes his lawyers the $60k in fees they were awarded as part of the settlement?
Obviously, the papers have not been published by the court, and Snay's lawyers have not been identified. However, it's typical of this type of case for the fees to have been paid on contingency.
Also, regardless of the $80,000, it's unlikely that the $10,000 in back pay and $60,000 in fees were contingent on non-breach of confidentiality; the $80K was specifically to keep them from doing exactly what they are doing now, and publicizing both the facts of the case and the terms of the settlement. My expectation is that the fees and the back pay would have been subject to the same terms os the dismissal with prejudice,
To put it another way, the $80K was likely "hush money" to keep other similar cases from coming forward on the precedent (not a case law precedent) of the case having been won. Given that, it's likely that there are likely more than 2 but less than 4 cases where the same situation that applied Snay may pertain. If that's the case, with the cat being already out of the bag, then the costs of payout in those cases would be less than the $80K on settlement, and without confidentiality, those cases, if they existed, would likely not hurt the school any more than it's already hurt.
IMO, This is likely a case of sour grapes, since the Facebook post didn't result in news stories until after it was put in context by the school being offended by it and taking them back to court for breach of the confidentiality agreement, which, I think, is what actually made it news. In other words, "Streisand Effect". Most likely someone at the school had "buyers remorse" on the settlement.
Can they still do that? After all, they were the ones who broke the deal.
It depends on the specific details of the confidentiality agreement; for it to be a legally binding contract there must be agreement and consideration (U.S. Law prevails in this case, as it took place in Miami, FL).
The normal mechanism here is that there is an exchange of "$1 and other valuable considerations", and that the settlement is considered and "additional consideration", and if the agreement is a negotiated agreement, which is typically the case, then the jude dismisses the original case with prejudice, which means it can not be legally re-raised, as (A) the separate consideration keeps the contract valid, and so (B) the dismissal with prejudice remains valid, even if the disclosure voided part of the contract, due to implied severability of contract terms.
Typically, a good lawyer on your side would prevent this type of estoppel, and you'd be able to reopen the case, but if the father in the case was very happy with the settlement amount, it might have been signed with that type of clause present, and the case could not be reasserted. A good lawyer on their side might "sweeten the pot" on the settlement to get the clause into place over your lawyers objections, if they could get you to fall for it.
So to answer your implied statement, it's likely that there is still a settlement, but it's probably $1, and it's probably already been paid, so there is no basis for reasserting the original case claims. Otherwise, this would likely not have hit the news.
How about google supports paying more local taxes so that the local transit district can provide the services for free, and forever.
Local taxes would go to Mountain View, where the main Google campus is located, not San Francisco, unless they were willing to merge their transit district with that of the rest of the peninsula, which they've historically gone bat shit crazy every time it's been suggested in the last 30 years.
Also, California prohibits city, county, and municipal income taxes, so it's not like in New York, where the city would be allowed to come yank the money out of your pocket, assuming your job was in San Francisco instead of Mountain View in the first place. Instead San Francisco collects service charges, property taxes, receives money from the state general fund, which together accounted for about 2/3rd of their $6B in revenue in the last year for which they were willing to publish numbers. Other local taxes and federal funds account for another ~$1B.
As a side note, less than 5% of the income San Francisco collects goes to fund aid/assistance programs; 50% of it goes for personnel, with almost a third of that going to pension obligations for retired city employees. About half of one percent goes for facilities maintenance (parking garages, schools, parks, and so on).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Other states where a city, county, and municipal income taxes is also prohibited include Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, and West Virginia. You'd probably know this, if you actually lived in California, instead of being someone from out of state trying to tell San Francisco how it should run things with Google or the other companies running busses.