Ah yes, the now-legendary "cab companies and government" conspiracy theory.
The people are voting their will with their wallets. The taxi companies are upset and whining, threatening no political contributions to the politicians. The politicians are not upset about medallions market value because the number of medallions is capped. Why aren't the politicians voting with the people, if that's who they actually represent?
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just the way politics has pretty much always worked since we quit requiring television and radio stations to operate "in the public interest", and quit requiring "equal time laws", and "local content" became irrelevant because of Dish, Comcast Cable, and the Internet. The only remedy would be individual contribution capped public funding of election campaigns, and disallowing companies being considered as "members of the public", or from paying for non-approved ads.
That's not going to happen, because no sane politician who is an incumbant will ever vote themselves out of office by establishing those rules.
Some posted how the code worked on Voat a few days ago, word seemed to spread from there. Mentioned it was an old hack developed by the CIA, something about creating off-screen i-frames.
Those dastardly devils at the Culinary Institute of America are so cunning, with their JavaScript kung-fu!
One restaurant I know, they use groupon to get people in their restaurant. They don't make a profit on groupon users, and groupon users don't come back. However the more people are in their restaurant, the more people want to come into the restaurant when they walk by and look how busy it is.
It's not worth sleeping with GroupOn to get that.
You can get the same effect pretty simply. All that's necessary is that you partition the restaurant, and open the partitions, as people need more space.
If GroupOn was willing to let you implement pool retention algorithms (reservation required for all GroupOn customers! Walk-Ins do *NOT* get to use the GroupOn coupon!), then you might have an argument for deep visibility interiours on restaurants. But the other alternative for that is: don't permit deep visibility; instead, lay out the restaurant correctly.
They don't own the cars. They don't employ the drivers (the one woman in California who professionally pursues lawsuits like this notwithstanding). The customer can choose the contractor, if there are multiple equivalent ones. They broker the transaction, for a fee. They are a peer to peer service broker; they're like the guy who stands outside the Flea Market and charges admission.
Getting "Ubered" means that the old stupid company you work for has been made obsolete by a young forward looking company that is the epitome of the future of the global technology industry.
We used to call that "obsoleted".
The dubious benefits of using "Ubered" instead of "obsoleted" are:
(1) You will sound cool and tech savvy, since you are associating yourself with something cool and tech savvy (namely: Uber) (2) You will have formed an "in crowd" vs. "out crowd" discriminator so you can laugh at those who look at you "Like WTH, dude?" when you say it (3) You will have save 2 of 4 syllables
If #3 seems that valuable to you, may I suggest you use the MMORPG term everyone uses for when your treasure is stolen out from under your nose after you put in all the work to make it available, but haven't yet picked it up? You'll get more understanding, although you will be less "leet" (exclusionist) if you use the term "Ganked". Plus, if pronounced correctly (ked = t), you can save an additional syllable.
"Dude! Your market was ganked!"
They will also understand anticompetitive behaviour better with this type of terminology:
"Dude! Those taxi company asshats are camping on the new business respawn point!"
See how naturally that works, compared to "Ubered" (and, I guess, for the other side of the coin, "Taxied"...)?
The problem of traditional IT departments in large corporation is not getting "Ubered"; it's just a matter of having a large organization with all the bureaucracy that comes with it. Even Google struggles with that, as Sergei Brin lamented the other day.
Uber is making money because they ignore the law and regulations in the industry it is entering in.
Can you quote the precise statues regarding the ride sharing industry that they are violating, please?
Or are you insisting on claiming they are taxis without medallions, and given the illegality of gypsy cabs, and gypsy cab with a passenger in it is subject to $100 fines in San Francisco, and San Francisco is notorious for fining the heck out of everyone... I guess that money is just rolling in, right? Wait... police don't stop Uber, because they've been told they are not to stop ride sharing services, only gypsy cabs?!? But wouldn't that meant... they're not a taxi service?!?! OMG!!! That's *exactly* what the city of San Francisco is saying by not stopping each and every Uber car with passengers in it!!!
So let's give up on this whole trying to classify them as a taxi to make them illegal crap, M'Kay?
Not to mention that Uber is a piece of crap that would have died out on launch if it didn't have millions in capital to pay off/fend off municipalities that don't want them.
They have those millions because people hate cab companies, and Uber offers a better alternative. So it must not be a piece of crap, if people are voting that heavily for it with their $$$.
Hint: It's not the *people* of the municipalities that don't want Uber, it's the *cab companies* and the *politicians owned by the cab companies* who don't want them.
Google is in full compliance with the U.S. law, and the laws of other countries.
CNIL disagrees
What does CNIL have to do with income tax? I think you are posting in the wrong subthread, since the topic of this subthread was "what happens to Google's income taxes, if the cut France off (and considering that Google *owns* several of the transatlantic and other international fiber links, if it escalates, that could be *quite* a cut off!).
Unless you are suggesting that the CNIL investigation is a blackmail tactic because the CE is still pissed about the perfectly legal execution of contracts in Ireland with French entities. In which case I might agree with you, but point out: France willing joined the EU.
Restaurant prices have kept up with inflation... so a 15% tip on the restaurant bill has also kept up with inflation.
Right, but food runs hot and cold... well, no, that's water. But the point is, there's good and bad times and sometimes they have to live on sub-minimum-wage so help 'em out eh? Unless they're better dressed than you, then ok, 15%
The "rule" in San Francisco is 2X sales tax: you don't pay tip on the tax, and it works out to exactly the right percentage to be a "relatively good tipper" on the pre-tax bill.
If I understood the GP correctly, you may be missing his point. If Google had to return it's operations to the U.S., it would also have to start paying taxes on it's operations that are much higher in the U.S. Not that it has broken laws, but that additional revenues would suddenly be additional tax dollars for the IRS.
Or, maybe I just read too much into it.
You've read too much into it.
They wouldn't be booking revenue from France any more -- and they would not *care*; it's not like revenue would suddenly be accruing to the U.S., it would simply be *gone*.
Google would only have to pay U.S. taxes on the money they have already earned, and the future money they earned in countries *other than France* if they were to do something incredibly stupid, like bringing the money into the U.S. in order to create jobs for U.S. workers. Google would just use the money, which is currently sitting in Bermuda, and spend it *outside the U.S.*.
Maybe they'd build a giant floating island nation, or maybe they'd build a space elevator near the Galapagos Islands on a huge floating platform that could be moved to avoid the worst of the hurricanes, and then *really* have access to space. The point is, that money is not going to come back to the U.S. if it's subject to the full tax burden, 20% of which is double taxation on the taxes already paid to Ireland.
BTW, pretty much every large multinational in the world uses this "Double Dutch Sandwich" mechanism to pay as little corporate income tax as they possibly can, and they're not going to bring any of that money into the U.S. to hire U.S. workers, or start U.S. projects, unless they don't have to pay full U.S. income tax on that money twice.
Ironically, most of these companies would probably *love* to bring some of that money back into the U.S....*IF* it were taxed at 19% (they've paid 20% on it already, and the top corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 39%. 39% - 20% = 19%); tax them at a *fair rate*, and the money comes back. Tax them an additional 20% tax on already taxed money: go jump in a lake. The money will happily work at nothing but keeping its tan up in Bermuda.
Now if we talk about the Moon then gotta start building something now. Now this rover is a small mission but at least puts some focus on the nearest celestial body.
Be sure to wave "Hi" to the Chinese Yutu Rover that's been there since December 2013's Chang'e 3 lunar landing mission by China.
They might even be willing to sell you fuel to keep your lame ass unmanned rover roving, by 2020.
The "free detection" app quoted in the summary is an off-appstore build that must be trusted by the user explicitly. Given this is a "jailbreak team" it's unlikely they'll be bothered to do an in-channel release.
Given that it depends on crossing filesystem protection zones that are disabled for privileged apps which can only run on jailbroken phones, it's unlikely they would be *able* to do an in-channel release, since the thing simply wouldn't work.
To calculate a 20% tip, move the total's decimal point one place to the left then multiply by two. Everyone should be capable of that. Calculating a 15% tip is slightly harder (requires dividing by two, then adding the original and divided value), and an 18% tip is reasonable to use a calculator for.
Also, who decided that 20% is now the "standard" tip amount? It's supposed to be 15%!
To calculate an 18% tip, move the decimal place again, and subtract that value from the 20% value you calculated.
Unless, you know, dividing by two combined with addition is easier than multiplying by two and subtraction?
P.S.: Yes, I know: New Math rather than rote memorization of up to two digit by two digit operations so that you can instantly spit out answers it takes more than a few seconds for a 20 year old to process through is "better", right?;^)
Not being denied insurance for a preexisting condition would be like a one paragraph law, at best.
After you got ill, you were willing to pay for insurance, correct?
Perhaps the subsidy would be nice, but it's handled as a tax credit, so someone with zero money to cover it doesn't get it and can't buy their own health insurance anyway, which means medicare.
Large IT companies seem to make most of it's money by taking on customers that nobody in their right mind would take on, basically due to the fines and punishments that come with abject stuff-ups for mission critical system from three-letter agencies and large companies. Yet somehow they make a profit and completely hash it up while protecting themselves legally - ready to find another victim.
The common strategy for getting away with this is to meet the precise terms of the contract. This is IBM Global Services bread and butter, and I would be incredibly surprised if it was not HPE's strategy as well.
Specifically, you give the customer precisely what the customer requests you give them, and you then go through the CLIN's and check each one of them off. CLIN's are "Contract Line Item Numbers", and constitute "acceptance criteria". Meeting acceptance criteria means you have fulfilled the contract. CLIN's are also the mechanisms by which variances are requested contractor, and then accepted or denied.
The hole here is that you avoid asking for variances unless they are required for you to meet the other acceptance criteria (for example, when you are in the middle of the job, and realize that you have two mutually exclusive CLIN's, where one of them precludes you satisfying the other). These variance requests are relatively rare, so they are usually granted.
In other words: you give them what they *asked for*, rather than giving them what they *needed*. This way they come back to you for modifications to an existing system later, for which they may additionally be billed. Customers tend to tolerate this, since it avoids pushing them over budget or over scheduled completion date, which makes them look good to their constituents.
Likewise, the customer can come back, and ask for modifications to the contract. The contractor may deny this, and usually will, as long as it doesn't upset the customer into denying variance requests later. Customer modifications to the contract are a primary source of cost overruns, and customers are generally less enthusiastic to request changes to existing CLIN's or addition or subtraction of CLIN's, since the contractor will generally be willing to do it for a hefty fee.
In other words: for new features they discover they need, or want, they end up getting additionally billed. IT's a separate contract, and therefore not an over-schedule or over-budget on an existing contract. There may be hefty costs associate with the new project, and these are generally "wants" rather than "needs" anyway, so everyone is happy.
So overall, you are mistaken... they usually go repeatedly to the *same* victim, rather than finding a new victim, since the victim doesn't consider themselves a victim, and the contractor has faithfully fulfilled the previous contracts, and can therefore be trusted to do the same on the new one.
As previously implied by myself and others, I'm just going to flat out state that the bird probably hit the sliding glass door on this one when EDS started shopping themselves out for acquisition, slightly prior to HP acquiring EDS, for the same reason that brides and grooms tend to diet for a month to fit into their wedding clothes.
I've never dealt with a mainframe, so I'll take your word that they are very hard to get off of. What that tells me is to, "just say no" to any mainframe salesman. Stay on commodity hardware and Linux to preserve my autonomy.
Mainframes are hard to get out of because they provide a lot of services that you end up having to reimplement yourself, and there's not a lot of standardization in providing those services over clustered commodity hardware. What people do instead, is spin up VM's in a distributed systems environment. That's a totally different programming paradigm than a single monolithic system, and there's a lot of work that has to go into conversion between the programming paradigms.
The closest you have to a standard at this point is either the half dozen or so HPC substrates, or going to a cloud-based system, like Open Stack. Going cloud-based is another paradigm conversion on top of the distributed computing conversion.
Think along the lines of the programs being written as really big serial computations in a single program (probably with finite state automata), and then having to break those apart so that, rather than all the sessions going in through the same entry point, breaking up the program into lots of pieces that can run on lots of machines at (semi-)arbitrary sequence points where it looks like it might be logical, throwing those pieces into different processes running on different VMs on other computers, so you can handle the same amount of load, and then at the same time, converting each of the finite state automata keyed by session objects into per session threads.
Then you access those sessions over a stateless protocol (HTTP) where you might resend the same GET request multiple times, or the same put request multiple times (where you need to maintain a persistent transaction ID when the connection goes down so the state isn't lost.
At the same time, you need to checkpoint all your data, and it probably has to be done in an ACID way, rather than a NoSQL way, because if a given VM has to be restarted, you have to recover the session from the in progress state so that an operation that takes multiple forms submissions and content checks and "some required fields missing" retries on a given form, in case you have to spin the VM up on another machine that just died so that you can spin the processes back up, and then spin the sessions back up in the processes (basically: session level checkpoint restart).
Conversion is *complicated*.
The first words out of my mouth in spec'ing the job would probably have been "are you sure you don't want to just buy another mainframe, and have us just glue a front end on it using a terminal emulation to screen scrape the forms submissions?". I assume they can't, because a new mainframe won't run the code ("aging mainframe" is code for "discontinued mainframe").
This is probably the sort of topic you should add your usual disclaimer about being a Google employee on.
Former Google employee. Also former Apple employee, and former IBM employee, etc..
It's not really relevant, since I'm not saying anything near my NDA, and just expressing an opinion as a private person with a somewhat deeper than normal interest in the workings of cases involving former employers.
> (1) They haven't judicially defined what constitutes public interest -- because they can't because it's subjective, and making such a decision would piss everyone off and demonstrate the absurdity of the law. So there's no legal test for yes/no.
It's decided by a court, so yes there is a legal test. The court will weigh up the possible harm to the person whose personal data is being published against the benefits to society at large.
Sorry, no. The original court decision upholding the validity of the law only said "an overriding public interest". It did not define what constitutes "an overriding public interest", and that was left ambiguous. Just as it became Google's "responsibility" to block the content, it also became Google's "responsibility" to decide what they though a court in each country where the law applies (all of the EU) would likely decide on a particular "forget request".
Note that the criteria thresholds in the U.K. are based on "public persons", and are derived from English Common Law, which is where the UK gets their ideas of what they believe constitutes "libel" and "slander". In France, there are slight differences, since their legal system is largely based on the Napoleonic code. While both of them can historically be traced (eventually) to the Code of Hammurabi, and thus have common roots, the criteria of what is involved in "an overriding public interest" differs between the two nations.
Thus the whole thing is ambiguous in interpretation, and left to a third party, because it's a political third rail between the nations which make up the EU.
So for some random guy with no media exposure who committed fraud 40 years ago, and has been saving puppies, painting rainbows and generally giving up his entire life to make the world a better place ever since, there's no genuine public benefit in publishing that past conviction - it's long expired under law, it's no longer declarable, and there's not the slightest shred of evidence to suggest it's even remotely representative of him today.
Clearly then, he has redeemed himself in the eyes of society, so bringing it up in polite conversation, since people will recognize that themselves, without the need for a law to enforce that It Is Never To Be Mentioned Again. At worst, the person mentioning it will be considered rude and boorish, right?
[...]Google's apparent need to hold irrelevant and out of date personal data falls under, because I can't see one.
Remove it from the original place of publication, or protect it with a robots.txt, and the data will be removed from the next iteration of the index. Good luck with Internet Archive...
> (3) They know that they can't win, so they're dragging their feet. It makes the politicians look like they are doing something, without actually having to really do something.
What do you mean they know they can't win?
I mean that they are trying to argue with a technology that was engineered and implemented to be resilient to disruption. In the Second Gulf War, the U.S. bombed the crap out of communications infrastructure used for Iraqi command and control systems. And their command and control systems stayed up, despite more than half that infrastructure being bombed to oblivion. Because *that's what it's supposed to do*; that's what it was *designed* to do.
Some nation's law requiring information destruction is going to be about as effective at removing the information as the
The guy you are replying to is an actual Google employee. He usually states as much but not today apparently.
Nope. I know tlambert personally (from college). I am a Google employee, and he is not.
Sean is correct. I am a *former* Google employee. When I make statements that come anywhere near my NDA, I *specifically* go out of the way to disclaim *current* employment with Google, and specifically state *former* employment with Google as a head's up. I also generally make sure that I state when I can not go further because I believe it would violate the spirit of the NDA.
In general, under California law, there's not a lot Google could do to me, but I would be committing career suicide if I were to violate an NDA, and (even more important to me) it would show me as dishonorable in my own eyes. I gone to work for companies after I've agreed to work for them, but subsequently received a MUCH better offer, *because we had an agreement that I would do so*.
I personally wouldn't hire a person who had knowingly violated an NDA, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to either.
That said, I didn't not identify my past relationship in any of those postings because I didn't come anywhere close to the edges of the NDS, so it didn't matter.
If my stating my former relationship -- or if someone was under the impression that the relationship was current because of a posting *while* it was current, please let this stand as a correction.
I'm pretty sure Sean can verify that I *was* in fact a Google employee at one point in time, without violating *his* NDA.:)
Yup, and you are the driver. You extrapolated from a clear, narrow ruling that demonstrates an understanding of how the internet works and what is required to comply with the law, into your own crazy fantasy.
--The Story so far --
Insane policy: "Right to be forgotten" is technologically feasible Google response: Block default Google property from displaying "forgotten" content for users from France French users workaround: Go to a Google property in another country French government response: *All* Google properties must not display "forgotten" content for users from France [... ] -- Obvious escalation path --
Naive idiot suggestion: Use same IPGIS system as a content blocking signal as is used for web site redirect to country specific site Proposed *bad* Google response: Implements same system as a content blocking signal Technical details: Signal is implemented via additional HTTP header (same as the current IPGIS redirect Google does) Repressive government response: Transparent proxy performs same header injection Bonus points: Transparent proxy required government cert to use Bonus bonus points: All encrypted HTTPS traffic is now monitored as cleartext by the repressive government via MITM Chinese government reaction: Cool! Now we can use less equipment and manpower to implement the great firewall of China! Turkish government reaction: Cool! Now we can block all external use of Twitter anytime anyone disses Tayyip Erdogan! Islamist militants in Bangladesh reaction: Cool! Now it will be even easier to find bloggers like Niloy Neel and hack them to death with machetes, too! [...]
IETF Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents? IANA Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents? IEEE Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents? W3C Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents? WHATWG Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents? W3C Reaction: Are you idiots still here?!? WHATWG Reaction: Shut up! We're still relevant! W3C Reaction: No you're not. WHATWG Reaction: Am too! W3C Reaction: Are not. WHATWG Reaction: Am too! W3C Reaction: Are not. WHATWG Reaction: Am too! Times infinity! Neener neener! [...]
Naive idiot reaction: BWAH HA HA HA! I was a sock puppet for a repressive government all along!
Slashdot Mirror
"in continuous development, in-house, for >10 years"
A little late for the rodeo, aren't you?
Now is not the time to think of this sort of thing; that time was 10 years ago.
Ah yes, the now-legendary "cab companies and government" conspiracy theory.
The people are voting their will with their wallets.
The taxi companies are upset and whining, threatening no political contributions to the politicians.
The politicians are not upset about medallions market value because the number of medallions is capped.
Why aren't the politicians voting with the people, if that's who they actually represent?
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just the way politics has pretty much always worked since we quit requiring television and radio stations to operate "in the public interest", and quit requiring "equal time laws", and "local content" became irrelevant because of Dish, Comcast Cable, and the Internet. The only remedy would be individual contribution capped public funding of election campaigns, and disallowing companies being considered as "members of the public", or from paying for non-approved ads.
That's not going to happen, because no sane politician who is an incumbant will ever vote themselves out of office by establishing those rules.
Some posted how the code worked on Voat a few days ago, word seemed to spread from there. Mentioned it was an old hack developed by the CIA, something about creating off-screen i-frames.
Those dastardly devils at the Culinary Institute of America are so cunning, with their JavaScript kung-fu!
One restaurant I know, they use groupon to get people in their restaurant. They don't make a profit on groupon users, and groupon users don't come back. However the more people are in their restaurant, the more people want to come into the restaurant when they walk by and look how busy it is.
It's not worth sleeping with GroupOn to get that.
You can get the same effect pretty simply. All that's necessary is that you partition the restaurant, and open the partitions, as people need more space.
If GroupOn was willing to let you implement pool retention algorithms (reservation required for all GroupOn customers! Walk-Ins do *NOT* get to use the GroupOn coupon!), then you might have an argument for deep visibility interiours on restaurants. But the other alternative for that is: don't permit deep visibility; instead, lay out the restaurant correctly.
SPAM has a conversion rate of 0.21%
Search placement has a conversion rate of 0.22%
Search advertising has a conversion rate of 0.04%
GroupOn has a conversion rate down around that of search advertising; you're better off sending SPAM, hideous as that thought is...
How is Uber not a taxi service?
They don't own the cars.
They don't employ the drivers (the one woman in California who professionally pursues lawsuits like this notwithstanding).
The customer can choose the contractor, if there are multiple equivalent ones.
They broker the transaction, for a fee.
They are a peer to peer service broker; they're like the guy who stands outside the Flea Market and charges admission.
Getting "Ubered" means that the old stupid company you work for has been made obsolete by a young forward looking company that is the epitome of the future of the global technology industry.
We used to call that "obsoleted".
The dubious benefits of using "Ubered" instead of "obsoleted" are:
(1) You will sound cool and tech savvy, since you are associating yourself with something cool and tech savvy (namely: Uber)
(2) You will have formed an "in crowd" vs. "out crowd" discriminator so you can laugh at those who look at you "Like WTH, dude?" when you say it
(3) You will have save 2 of 4 syllables
If #3 seems that valuable to you, may I suggest you use the MMORPG term everyone uses for when your treasure is stolen out from under your nose after you put in all the work to make it available, but haven't yet picked it up? You'll get more understanding, although you will be less "leet" (exclusionist) if you use the term "Ganked". Plus, if pronounced correctly (ked = t), you can save an additional syllable.
"Dude! Your market was ganked!"
They will also understand anticompetitive behaviour better with this type of terminology:
"Dude! Those taxi company asshats are camping on the new business respawn point!"
See how naturally that works, compared to "Ubered" (and, I guess, for the other side of the coin, "Taxied"...)?
The problem of traditional IT departments in large corporation is not getting "Ubered"; it's just a matter of having a large organization with all the bureaucracy that comes with it. Even Google struggles with that, as Sergei Brin lamented the other day.
I propose: "All Grue, and no Minions..."
Uber is making money because they ignore the law and regulations in the industry it is entering in.
Can you quote the precise statues regarding the ride sharing industry that they are violating, please?
Or are you insisting on claiming they are taxis without medallions, and given the illegality of gypsy cabs, and gypsy cab with a passenger in it is subject to $100 fines in San Francisco, and San Francisco is notorious for fining the heck out of everyone ... I guess that money is just rolling in, right? Wait ... police don't stop Uber, because they've been told they are not to stop ride sharing services, only gypsy cabs?!? But wouldn't that meant ... they're not a taxi service?!?! OMG!!! That's *exactly* what the city of San Francisco is saying by not stopping each and every Uber car with passengers in it!!!
So let's give up on this whole trying to classify them as a taxi to make them illegal crap, M'Kay?
Not to mention that Uber is a piece of crap that would have died out on launch if it didn't have millions in capital to pay off/fend off municipalities that don't want them.
They have those millions because people hate cab companies, and Uber offers a better alternative. So it must not be a piece of crap, if people are voting that heavily for it with their $$$.
Hint: It's not the *people* of the municipalities that don't want Uber, it's the *cab companies* and the *politicians owned by the cab companies* who don't want them.
Google is in full compliance with the U.S. law, and the laws of other countries.
CNIL disagrees
What does CNIL have to do with income tax? I think you are posting in the wrong subthread, since the topic of this subthread was "what happens to Google's income taxes, if the cut France off (and considering that Google *owns* several of the transatlantic and other international fiber links, if it escalates, that could be *quite* a cut off!).
Unless you are suggesting that the CNIL investigation is a blackmail tactic because the CE is still pissed about the perfectly legal execution of contracts in Ireland with French entities. In which case I might agree with you, but point out: France willing joined the EU.
Restaurant prices have kept up with inflation... so a 15% tip on the restaurant bill has also kept up with inflation.
Right, but food runs hot and cold... well, no, that's water. But the point is, there's good and bad times and sometimes they have to live on sub-minimum-wage so help 'em out eh? Unless they're better dressed than you, then ok, 15%
The "rule" in San Francisco is 2X sales tax: you don't pay tip on the tax, and it works out to exactly the right percentage to be a "relatively good tipper" on the pre-tax bill.
If I understood the GP correctly, you may be missing his point. If Google had to return it's operations to the U.S., it would also have to start paying taxes on it's operations that are much higher in the U.S. Not that it has broken laws, but that additional revenues would suddenly be additional tax dollars for the IRS.
Or, maybe I just read too much into it.
You've read too much into it.
They wouldn't be booking revenue from France any more -- and they would not *care*; it's not like revenue would suddenly be accruing to the U.S., it would simply be *gone*.
Google would only have to pay U.S. taxes on the money they have already earned, and the future money they earned in countries *other than France* if they were to do something incredibly stupid, like bringing the money into the U.S. in order to create jobs for U.S. workers. Google would just use the money, which is currently sitting in Bermuda, and spend it *outside the U.S.*.
Maybe they'd build a giant floating island nation, or maybe they'd build a space elevator near the Galapagos Islands on a huge floating platform that could be moved to avoid the worst of the hurricanes, and then *really* have access to space. The point is, that money is not going to come back to the U.S. if it's subject to the full tax burden, 20% of which is double taxation on the taxes already paid to Ireland.
BTW, pretty much every large multinational in the world uses this "Double Dutch Sandwich" mechanism to pay as little corporate income tax as they possibly can, and they're not going to bring any of that money into the U.S. to hire U.S. workers, or start U.S. projects, unless they don't have to pay full U.S. income tax on that money twice.
Ironically, most of these companies would probably *love* to bring some of that money back into the U.S. ...*IF* it were taxed at 19% (they've paid 20% on it already, and the top corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 39%. 39% - 20% = 19%); tax them at a *fair rate*, and the money comes back. Tax them an additional 20% tax on already taxed money: go jump in a lake. The money will happily work at nothing but keeping its tan up in Bermuda.
Get it?
Now if we talk about the Moon then gotta start building something now. Now this rover is a small mission but at least puts some focus on the nearest celestial body.
Be sure to wave "Hi" to the Chinese Yutu Rover that's been there since December 2013's Chang'e 3 lunar landing mission by China.
They might even be willing to sell you fuel to keep your lame ass unmanned rover roving, by 2020.
Guess we've had the rights since 1969 then.
Rights are ephemeral. They only last as long as you are there, sitting on the front porch with your shotgun, yelling at them to "get off your lawn".
If you're not on the porch, you've abandoned it, and it's "finders, keepers".
The "free detection" app quoted in the summary is an off-appstore build that must be trusted by the user explicitly. Given this is a "jailbreak team" it's unlikely they'll be bothered to do an in-channel release.
Given that it depends on crossing filesystem protection zones that are disabled for privileged apps which can only run on jailbroken phones, it's unlikely they would be *able* to do an in-channel release, since the thing simply wouldn't work.
Also, who decided that 20% is now the "standard" tip amount? It's supposed to be 15%!
The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in over twenty years. Be a sport.
Restaurant prices have kept up with inflation... so a 15% tip on the restaurant bill has also kept up with inflation.
To calculate a 20% tip, move the total's decimal point one place to the left then multiply by two. Everyone should be capable of that. Calculating a 15% tip is slightly harder (requires dividing by two, then adding the original and divided value), and an 18% tip is reasonable to use a calculator for.
Also, who decided that 20% is now the "standard" tip amount? It's supposed to be 15%!
To calculate an 18% tip, move the decimal place again, and subtract that value from the 20% value you calculated.
Unless, you know, dividing by two combined with addition is easier than multiplying by two and subtraction?
P.S.: Yes, I know: New Math rather than rote memorization of up to two digit by two digit operations so that you can instantly spit out answers it takes more than a few seconds for a 20 year old to process through is "better", right? ;^)
P.S. Death from illness sucks more
Not being denied insurance for a preexisting condition would be like a one paragraph law, at best.
After you got ill, you were willing to pay for insurance, correct?
Perhaps the subsidy would be nice, but it's handled as a tax credit, so someone with zero money to cover it doesn't get it and can't buy their own health insurance anyway, which means medicare.
Large IT companies seem to make most of it's money by taking on customers that nobody in their right mind would take on, basically due to the fines and punishments that come with abject stuff-ups for mission critical system from three-letter agencies and large companies.
Yet somehow they make a profit and completely hash it up while protecting themselves legally - ready to find another victim.
The common strategy for getting away with this is to meet the precise terms of the contract. This is IBM Global Services bread and butter, and I would be incredibly surprised if it was not HPE's strategy as well.
Specifically, you give the customer precisely what the customer requests you give them, and you then go through the CLIN's and check each one of them off. CLIN's are "Contract Line Item Numbers", and constitute "acceptance criteria". Meeting acceptance criteria means you have fulfilled the contract. CLIN's are also the mechanisms by which variances are requested contractor, and then accepted or denied.
The hole here is that you avoid asking for variances unless they are required for you to meet the other acceptance criteria (for example, when you are in the middle of the job, and realize that you have two mutually exclusive CLIN's, where one of them precludes you satisfying the other). These variance requests are relatively rare, so they are usually granted.
In other words: you give them what they *asked for*, rather than giving them what they *needed*. This way they come back to you for modifications to an existing system later, for which they may additionally be billed. Customers tend to tolerate this, since it avoids pushing them over budget or over scheduled completion date, which makes them look good to their constituents.
Likewise, the customer can come back, and ask for modifications to the contract. The contractor may deny this, and usually will, as long as it doesn't upset the customer into denying variance requests later. Customer modifications to the contract are a primary source of cost overruns, and customers are generally less enthusiastic to request changes to existing CLIN's or addition or subtraction of CLIN's, since the contractor will generally be willing to do it for a hefty fee.
In other words: for new features they discover they need, or want, they end up getting additionally billed. IT's a separate contract, and therefore not an over-schedule or over-budget on an existing contract. There may be hefty costs associate with the new project, and these are generally "wants" rather than "needs" anyway, so everyone is happy.
So overall, you are mistaken... they usually go repeatedly to the *same* victim, rather than finding a new victim, since the victim doesn't consider themselves a victim, and the contractor has faithfully fulfilled the previous contracts, and can therefore be trusted to do the same on the new one.
As previously implied by myself and others, I'm just going to flat out state that the bird probably hit the sliding glass door on this one when EDS started shopping themselves out for acquisition, slightly prior to HP acquiring EDS, for the same reason that brides and grooms tend to diet for a month to fit into their wedding clothes.
I've never dealt with a mainframe, so I'll take your word that they are very hard to get off of. What that tells me is to, "just say no" to any mainframe salesman. Stay on commodity hardware and Linux to preserve my autonomy.
Mainframes are hard to get out of because they provide a lot of services that you end up having to reimplement yourself, and there's not a lot of standardization in providing those services over clustered commodity hardware. What people do instead, is spin up VM's in a distributed systems environment. That's a totally different programming paradigm than a single monolithic system, and there's a lot of work that has to go into conversion between the programming paradigms.
The closest you have to a standard at this point is either the half dozen or so HPC substrates, or going to a cloud-based system, like Open Stack. Going cloud-based is another paradigm conversion on top of the distributed computing conversion.
Think along the lines of the programs being written as really big serial computations in a single program (probably with finite state automata), and then having to break those apart so that, rather than all the sessions going in through the same entry point, breaking up the program into lots of pieces that can run on lots of machines at (semi-)arbitrary sequence points where it looks like it might be logical, throwing those pieces into different processes running on different VMs on other computers, so you can handle the same amount of load, and then at the same time, converting each of the finite state automata keyed by session objects into per session threads.
Then you access those sessions over a stateless protocol (HTTP) where you might resend the same GET request multiple times, or the same put request multiple times (where you need to maintain a persistent transaction ID when the connection goes down so the state isn't lost.
At the same time, you need to checkpoint all your data, and it probably has to be done in an ACID way, rather than a NoSQL way, because if a given VM has to be restarted, you have to recover the session from the in progress state so that an operation that takes multiple forms submissions and content checks and "some required fields missing" retries on a given form, in case you have to spin the VM up on another machine that just died so that you can spin the processes back up, and then spin the sessions back up in the processes (basically: session level checkpoint restart).
Conversion is *complicated*.
The first words out of my mouth in spec'ing the job would probably have been "are you sure you don't want to just buy another mainframe, and have us just glue a front end on it using a terminal emulation to screen scrape the forms submissions?". I assume they can't, because a new mainframe won't run the code ("aging mainframe" is code for "discontinued mainframe").
Hey look it's our actual Google shill at it again!
Hey dumbass! I left Google in 2013!
This is probably the sort of topic you should add your usual disclaimer about being a Google employee on.
Former Google employee. Also former Apple employee, and former IBM employee, etc..
It's not really relevant, since I'm not saying anything near my NDA, and just expressing an opinion as a private person with a somewhat deeper than normal interest in the workings of cases involving former employers.
> (1) They haven't judicially defined what constitutes public interest -- because they can't because it's subjective, and making such a decision would piss everyone off and demonstrate the absurdity of the law. So there's no legal test for yes/no.
It's decided by a court, so yes there is a legal test. The court will weigh up the possible harm to the person whose personal data is being published against the benefits to society at large.
Sorry, no. The original court decision upholding the validity of the law only said "an overriding public interest". It did not define what constitutes "an overriding public interest", and that was left ambiguous. Just as it became Google's "responsibility" to block the content, it also became Google's "responsibility" to decide what they though a court in each country where the law applies (all of the EU) would likely decide on a particular "forget request".
Note that the criteria thresholds in the U.K. are based on "public persons", and are derived from English Common Law, which is where the UK gets their ideas of what they believe constitutes "libel" and "slander". In France, there are slight differences, since their legal system is largely based on the Napoleonic code. While both of them can historically be traced (eventually) to the Code of Hammurabi, and thus have common roots, the criteria of what is involved in "an overriding public interest" differs between the two nations.
Thus the whole thing is ambiguous in interpretation, and left to a third party, because it's a political third rail between the nations which make up the EU.
So for some random guy with no media exposure who committed fraud 40 years ago, and has been saving puppies, painting rainbows and generally giving up his entire life to make the world a better place ever since, there's no genuine public benefit in publishing that past conviction - it's long expired under law, it's no longer declarable, and there's not the slightest shred of evidence to suggest it's even remotely representative of him today.
Clearly then, he has redeemed himself in the eyes of society, so bringing it up in polite conversation, since people will recognize that themselves, without the need for a law to enforce that It Is Never To Be Mentioned Again. At worst, the person mentioning it will be considered rude and boorish, right?
[...]Google's apparent need to hold irrelevant and out of date personal data falls under, because I can't see one.
Remove it from the original place of publication, or protect it with a robots.txt, and the data will be removed from the next iteration of the index. Good luck with Internet Archive...
> (3) They know that they can't win, so they're dragging their feet. It makes the politicians look like they are doing something, without actually having to really do something.
What do you mean they know they can't win?
I mean that they are trying to argue with a technology that was engineered and implemented to be resilient to disruption. In the Second Gulf War, the U.S. bombed the crap out of communications infrastructure used for Iraqi command and control systems. And their command and control systems stayed up, despite more than half that infrastructure being bombed to oblivion. Because *that's what it's supposed to do*; that's what it was *designed* to do.
Some nation's law requiring information destruction is going to be about as effective at removing the information as the
The guy you are replying to is an actual Google employee. He usually states as much but not today apparently.
Nope. I know tlambert personally (from college). I am a Google employee, and he is not.
Sean is correct. I am a *former* Google employee. When I make statements that come anywhere near my NDA, I *specifically* go out of the way to disclaim *current* employment with Google, and specifically state *former* employment with Google as a head's up. I also generally make sure that I state when I can not go further because I believe it would violate the spirit of the NDA.
In general, under California law, there's not a lot Google could do to me, but I would be committing career suicide if I were to violate an NDA, and (even more important to me) it would show me as dishonorable in my own eyes. I gone to work for companies after I've agreed to work for them, but subsequently received a MUCH better offer, *because we had an agreement that I would do so*.
I personally wouldn't hire a person who had knowingly violated an NDA, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to either.
That said, I didn't not identify my past relationship in any of those postings because I didn't come anywhere close to the edges of the NDS, so it didn't matter.
If my stating my former relationship -- or if someone was under the impression that the relationship was current because of a posting *while* it was current, please let this stand as a correction.
I'm pretty sure Sean can verify that I *was* in fact a Google employee at one point in time, without violating *his* NDA. :)
Yup, and you are the driver. You extrapolated from a clear, narrow ruling that demonstrates an understanding of how the internet works and what is required to comply with the law, into your own crazy fantasy.
--The Story so far --
Insane policy: "Right to be forgotten" is technologically feasible ... ]
Google response: Block default Google property from displaying "forgotten" content for users from France
French users workaround: Go to a Google property in another country
French government response: *All* Google properties must not display "forgotten" content for users from France
[
-- Obvious escalation path --
Naive idiot suggestion: Use same IPGIS system as a content blocking signal as is used for web site redirect to country specific site
Proposed *bad* Google response: Implements same system as a content blocking signal
Technical details: Signal is implemented via additional HTTP header (same as the current IPGIS redirect Google does)
Repressive government response: Transparent proxy performs same header injection
Bonus points: Transparent proxy required government cert to use
Bonus bonus points: All encrypted HTTPS traffic is now monitored as cleartext by the repressive government via MITM
Chinese government reaction: Cool! Now we can use less equipment and manpower to implement the great firewall of China!
Turkish government reaction: Cool! Now we can block all external use of Twitter anytime anyone disses Tayyip Erdogan!
Islamist militants in Bangladesh reaction: Cool! Now it will be even easier to find bloggers like Niloy Neel and hack them to death with machetes, too!
[...]
IETF Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents?
IANA Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents?
IEEE Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents?
W3C Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents?
WHATWG Reaction: WTF?!? Didn't we F'ing *reject* the "trusted proxy" proposal on the grounds that governments will jail or kill dissidents?
W3C Reaction: Are you idiots still here?!?
WHATWG Reaction: Shut up! We're still relevant!
W3C Reaction: No you're not.
WHATWG Reaction: Am too!
W3C Reaction: Are not.
WHATWG Reaction: Am too!
W3C Reaction: Are not.
WHATWG Reaction: Am too! Times infinity! Neener neener!
[...]
Naive idiot reaction: BWAH HA HA HA! I was a sock puppet for a repressive government all along!