When real property is sold, consideration needs to be given as to whether or not the sale will be subject to GST. A sale of residential premises is input taxed to the extent that it is to be used predominantly for residential accommodation; s40-65(1) A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999 (the GST Act) however sales of new residential premises by a GST-registered vendor constitute a taxable supply (although may be subject to the application of the margin scheme discussed below); s40-65(2)(b) of the GST Act. New residential premises are defined in s40-75 of the GST Act, however uncertainties surrounding its interpretation have necessitated reliance by taxpayers on Tax Office rulings, principally, GSTR 2003/3: Goods and Services Tax: When is a Sale of Real Property a sale of new residential premises? This article considers the Tax Office view of when residential premises will be new residential premises for GST purposes as well as the Governmentâ(TM)s proposed legislative amendment following the recent decision of Commissioner of Taxation v Gloxinia Investments Ltd as trustee for Gloxinia Unit Trust [2010] FCAFC 46.
No I pay the other service providers and don't claim the partial refund that DIY super funds are entitled to because it is not worth the time and effort involved.
> What's hard about it? You keep your tax invoices and enter their total into a web site quarterly. There is no "this applies, this doesn't." If you are GST registered, and you paid GST on ANY ITEM, you can claim that GST as an input.
Two things (among many) you left out.
1. I have to divide all costs into rebatable and non-rebatable costs. In the case of my self-managed super fund not all costs are rebatable (eg capital costs, and certain other costs).
2. The rebateable costs are then rebateable at different rates depending on the category. Again I need to divide the costs into these categories.
Don't get me started on rental properties and property developments. Here is a tiny snippet of the verbiage you have to navigate
"First limb of the Statutory Definition Premises that have not been previously sold as residential premises and have not been the subject of a long term lease (defined in s195-1 GST Act as a lease of at least 50 years or a period reasonably expected to be at least 50 years) except if for the period of at least five years since the premises first became residential premises, the premises have only been used for making input taxed supplies of residential rent"
I then need to do a return on a quarterly basis and a final return annually.
> Nearly every company in Australia registers for GST, so the government made it extremely simple.
As someone who has had to comply with GST I can tell you this is not he case. My accountant told me that it would be cheaper and easier to just pay the gross GST and forget about claiming GST on inputs, because that would mean I no longer had to file GST returns.
GST has turned into a nightmare of complexity. If you doubt this, read the GST updates published by the Taxpayers' Association.
2. Can you offer any suggestions as to how a retail investor might deal with the presence of HFTs and not get taken to the cleaners? Eg in the light of things like this "Evaluation of the 'Adaptive-Aggressive' Trading-Agent Strategy Against Human Traders in CDA: AA Wins" at http://lscits.cs.bris.ac.uk/docs/AAMAS_CAMERA_READY.pdf
> Why the rage? Just spell out very clearly (and in writing) exactly what will happen if component X fails, and the cost to implement redundancy now. When component X fails and the company loses Y dollars of revenue and the CEO comes to you, just pull out the email and say "I tried to design redundancy but he wouldn't spend the money".
This happened to a friend of mine. The internal "customer" raged about the waste and cost of the proposed redundant network infrastructure. He insisted on having it removed. My friend agreed but insisted on the "customer" signing off on the risks involved and acknowledging it was he who made the decision.
In due course the network failed and due to lack of redundancy it was out for about 1/2 a day. The "customer" then came for my friend's head, demanding that the person responsible for this disaster be fired.
My friend produced the documentation and asked the "customer" if he wanted this forwarded to his boss so he could be fired. The issue suddenly went very quiet. Without this documentation my friend would have been fired.
You are absolutely right. And on the other hand, there are no financial interests at all among the oil, coal, auto and gas companies in keeping the current emissions regime going as long as possible.
> Our legal system is based on the concept of choice; when you commit a crime, you are assumed to be making a conscious choice, and the fact of your doing it proves the choice that you made, and thus your guilt. The laws themselves read this way: part of the definition of a crime in California is that you must INTENTIONALLY perform the illegal act, but this is almost meaningless since it's assumed that you mean to do what you do.
> However, it's my belief that ultimately, there is no real choice.
Nietzsche pointed this out in the nineteenth century (Human All Too Human). He also pointed out that we may have to pretend there is free will so as to maintain order, at least temporarily.
You're right. They all got paid big money to come up with these bogus ratings. They got paid the same money and came up with the same ratings. "Programming error" is the new "cat ate my homework". The fact that the ratings business is a cosy oligopoly doesn't help either.
> This is not unusual. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, James Watt's patents on a key aspect of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by several decades.
This is not unusual. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, James Watts patents on a key aspect of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by several decades.
Interesting side-note: An article in Scientific American a while back showed that all the programs Ms Ada Lovelace wrote were buggy and did not work corretcly.
> if (and I concede it's a fairly big assumption) the effects of drugs render the drug addict just as unemployable in a society which allows them as one which condemns them, I wouldn't expect the level of petty crime to change much.
Yes that's what it is - an assumption - and it's a false assumption. There are lots of tobacco and even alcohol addicts who are productive members of society (I know quite a few of them). The inherent harm from heroin is far less than alcohol.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that shootouts in the street are the only harm from the policies of prohibition. My view is that the huge sums of money that go to criminals and the resulting corruption are the biggest costs. Corruption is something that people try to hide, so it is not "in your face".
I agree that a lot of people are reluctant to consider alternatives to prohibition. It takes a bit of lateral thinking, and a willingness to get past the initial emotional reactions, to realize that the biggest problem is not the drugs themselves but the fact that they are illegal.
Here are some of the costs of illegality:
- Crime (burglaries, muggings) and associated trauma and injuries due to the need to pay high costs for drugs. - Higher insurance premiums. - Cost of detection, policing and of running prisons (about 40% of people in prison in the US are there for drug related offenses). - Cost of being in prison. - Inability of people to use illegal drugs for legitimate purposes (eg medical uses of marijuana). - Balance of payments problems contributed to by lareg drug imports. - Corruption of police, customs officials and politicians. - Large sums of money put in the hands of criminals, gangsters, corrupt officials and terrorists. - Resources wasted smuggling drugs into the country. - Poor quality, adulteration and variable potencies of drugs leading to overdoses and toxicity. - Transmission of serious illnesses such as hepatitis and AIDS due to lack of access to sterile needles. - Instability and failure of states as seen in several Latin American countries. - Massive financial incentives for drug pushers to enlist new users into the use of drugs.
The common view that drug addicts are morally flawed people who just need to abstain is wrong in my view, in many or most cases. A lot of drug users are self-mediating for various defects in their brain chemistry. For example heroin addicts and also alcoholics tend to have problems with endorphin production or receptors. Cocaine addicts and amphetamine users often have problems with the dopamine systems. Trying to solve a medical problem using a punitive legal approach is an approach that *has* failed.
> We manufacture our own enemies, no need to blame any boogeymen for funding.
There is a lot of truth in this. You only have to look at who supported Osama bin Laden when he was a "freedom fighter" against the Russians. That was before he turned against the US and became a "terrorist". I put the terms in quotes because ObL has not changed at all, just the US view of him.
Similarly have a look at who put Saddam Hussein into power in a coup. I will give you a clue - the color of their flag is red white and blue and it has stars and stripes on it. Who put the Shah of Iran in power in a coup, setting the stage for the subsequent takeover by the mulllahs?
This does not take away from the fact that $1,000,000,000,000 dollars per year are going into the hands of various types of criminals as a result of the policies of prohibition.
The fact that you do not want to hear the truth about what your spending on drugs does does not make it any less true. I lived in a country town in Australia where a local politician was murdered by the drug cartels. This was a wake-up call for many people about what that money was doing.
As found as I got older that it is very useful to try and separate "what is true" from "what I want to be true" and from "what I am going to do about it".
> I've lived with a drug addict (OK, it was crack rather than heroin) and I can tell you you missed a few side effects out.
I was specifically talking about heroin, as you acknowledged. But two out of the three items you mentioned are a result of illegality and the expensive supply. In contrast to crack, alcohol is harmful in many ways but it is cheap enough that you do not need to embark on a life of crime to support alcohol consumption. Alcohol sales are also not funding gangs and organized crime and terrorism, because alcohol is legal.
Organnzed crime got its hold on the US during prohibition, when alcohol was banned.
Even for drugs that are seriously harmful, I would argue that a harm minimization approach is more likely to be effective, and will have far fewer effects on society, than prohibition.
It is easier for under-age children to buy illegal drugs than alcohol. Since when is that a good thing?
> Constipation and bad junk [resulting in overdoses] are the worst hazards of Heroin abuse you can think of?
Well, that is what you will find if you go and look it up in a pharmaceutical reference book.
Clearly opiates are addictive but that is only a problem if safe, inexpensive, legal supplies are not available. What destroys lives is the fact that the drug is illegal and therefore expensive. This means that criminal activities are needed to support the habit.
AIDS transmission in this case is a result of reusing dirty needles. Have you every wondered why diabetics who inject insulin don't get AIDS? The reason is that they have access to cheap legal supplies of needles. Countries that have instituted needle exchange programs for addicts have more effectively limited the spread of AIDS than those that have not.
There used to be a way to change the threshold on a discussion so you only see comments with a score > X. After 1/2 an hour I still cannot find this. Is there any way to do this? If so, please make it possible for people to find it!
I have been looking at the evidence over the years and it seems that terrorists are more likely to get funding from making and selling illegal drugs than from marginal activities like copying software.
The total spend on illegal drugs in the US alone is over $1 trillion!. This money goes to organized crime, gangsters, crooked police and politicians, and to terrorists.
Have a look at Afghanistan, which is currently supplying a large percentage of the world's heroin trade. The funds are then used to fight the US, NATO and other allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Just another cost of the "war on drugs". Current US drug policies, which are also forced on the rest of the world, are widely recognized to be counter-productive. And why? The side-effects of heroin are constipation and the risk of overdose. Overdose is a problem caused by erratic potencies, which is a result of illegality.
However certain people make a lot of money from the war on drugs. Thus the policy does not change.
> The shreds of ships in Pearl Harbor were pretty good evidence that we needed to confront Japan.
Don't be so naive.
1. The US had been blockading Japan's access to raw materials for some time. From the Japanese point of view they had little choice but to attack, and to start a fight they knew they would almost certainly lose. The US hierarchy knew this.
2. The US had broken the Japanese ciphers and knew from them that Japan was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor. This information was not passed on to Hawaii. The previous commander of the Hawaii base had been replaced by a person who was known to be a dolt.
3. The US needed a pretext to enter the war. A major Japanese attack would be a good pretext and would inflame public opinion as required.
The US has a long track record of such behavior. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is one example.
One thing I do is I say "Just a moment". Then I leave the phone off the hook for about ten minutes. This wastes their time quite effectively. I even had one of them get quite angry at me, which was good.
A number of banks have implemented two-factor authentication using mobile phones. When a transaction is initiated, the bank send a number by text to your nominated mobile phone. You then enter the number in the screen. No need for expensive HHAD devices. And it really seems to work very well. In theory you can defeat it via man-in-the-middle attacks but these are a lot harder to implement than normal phishing.
> Other governments are not going to be willing to buy a system with a NSA backdoor.
If something has *already* happened, then it is possible that it *could* happen. After WWII, the US sold copies of the german crypto machines to governments all over the world and proceeded to read the "encrypted" traffic. This machine, the enigma machine, had of course been broken.
Never underestimate stupidity, especially of governments.
Maybe secPM is not as much of an expert as he claims to be. Or maybe he is trying to mislead us.
I remember when I saw the Skype acquisition thinking "this makes no sense". It seemed quite obvious that Skype would have a lot of trouble making money out of this.
What could the explanation be?
The Skype acquisition by eBay brings Skype under control of a US corporation. This, one would assume, would make it a lot easier for Skype phone calls to be monitored by the US authorities. If that were the motive, you would expect at some point a "surprising" gift of some kind by the US government or interests associated with it to eBAY. Or perhaps the gift is removal of a negative. J Edgar Hoover used to keep dirt files on politicians to ensure no-one could touch him. Perhaps someone has something on someone high up in eBAY.
One would imagine that the ability to monitor world-wide phone conversations more easily would be very valuable, given the amount of money being spent on Homeland Security.
Of course, it is quite possible that it was just a stuff-up by eBAY.
One really big stressor with meetings is related to the number of people present. Because everyone has to commment on everything and everyone has to comment on everyone's comment, the result is the infamous "inverse square law of meeting progress". The useful work done in a meeting is in inverse proportion to the number of people present.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is some more about this "simple" GST
When real property is sold, consideration needs to be given as to whether or not the sale will be subject to GST.
A sale of residential premises is input taxed to the extent that it is to be used predominantly for residential
accommodation; s40-65(1) A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999 (the GST Act) however sales of
new residential premises by a GST-registered vendor constitute a taxable supply (although may be subject to
the application of the margin scheme discussed below); s40-65(2)(b) of the GST Act. New residential premises
are defined in s40-75 of the GST Act, however uncertainties surrounding its interpretation have necessitated
reliance by taxpayers on Tax Office rulings, principally, GSTR 2003/3: Goods and Services Tax: When is a Sale of
Real Property a sale of new residential premises? This article considers the Tax Office view of when residential
premises will be new residential premises for GST purposes as well as the Governmentâ(TM)s proposed legislative
amendment following the recent decision of Commissioner of Taxation v Gloxinia Investments Ltd as trustee for
Gloxinia Unit Trust [2010] FCAFC 46.
No I pay the other service providers and don't claim the partial refund that DIY super funds are entitled to because it is not worth the time and effort involved.
> What's hard about it? You keep your tax invoices and enter their total into a web site quarterly. There is no "this applies, this doesn't." If you are GST registered, and you paid GST on ANY ITEM, you can claim that GST as an input.
Two things (among many) you left out.
1. I have to divide all costs into rebatable and non-rebatable costs. In the case of my self-managed super fund not all costs are rebatable (eg capital costs, and certain other costs).
2. The rebateable costs are then rebateable at different rates depending on the category. Again I need to divide the costs into these categories.
Don't get me started on rental properties and property developments. Here is a tiny snippet of the verbiage you have to navigate
"First limb of the Statutory Definition
Premises that have not been previously sold as
residential premises and have not been the subject of
a long term lease (defined in s195-1 GST Act as a lease
of at least 50 years or a period reasonably expected to
be at least 50 years) except if for the period of at least
five years since the premises first became residential
premises, the premises have only been used for making
input taxed supplies of residential rent"
I then need to do a return on a quarterly basis and a final return annually.
> Nearly every company in Australia registers for GST, so the government made it extremely simple.
As someone who has had to comply with GST I can tell you this is not he case. My accountant told me that it would be cheaper and easier to just pay the gross GST and forget about claiming GST on inputs, because that would mean I no longer had to file GST returns.
GST has turned into a nightmare of complexity. If you doubt this, read the GST updates published by the Taxpayers' Association.
1. Can you offer any insights into what happens with these meltdowns? If that actually HFT related and what goes wrong? Is it amateurs in action of is there a more fundamental issue with market structure? Eg http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-hft-quote-stuffing-caused-market-crash-may-6-and-threatens-destroy-entire-market-any-mom
2. Can you offer any suggestions as to how a retail investor might deal with the presence of HFTs and not get taken to the cleaners? Eg in the light of things like this "Evaluation of the 'Adaptive-Aggressive' Trading-Agent Strategy Against Human Traders in CDA: AA Wins" at http://lscits.cs.bris.ac.uk/docs/AAMAS_CAMERA_READY.pdf
> Why the rage? Just spell out very clearly (and in writing) exactly what will happen if component X fails, and the cost to implement redundancy now. When component X fails and the company loses Y dollars of revenue and the CEO comes to you, just pull out the email and say "I tried to design redundancy but he wouldn't spend the money".
This happened to a friend of mine. The internal "customer" raged about the waste and cost of the proposed redundant network infrastructure. He insisted on having it removed. My friend agreed but insisted on the "customer" signing off on the risks involved and acknowledging it was he who made the decision.
In due course the network failed and due to lack of redundancy it was out for about 1/2 a day. The "customer" then came for my friend's head, demanding that the person responsible for this disaster be fired.
My friend produced the documentation and asked the "customer" if he wanted this forwarded to his boss so he could be fired. The issue suddenly went very quiet. Without this documentation my friend would have been fired.
You are absolutely right. And on the other hand, there are no financial interests at all among the oil, coal, auto and gas companies in keeping the current emissions regime going as long as possible.
> Our legal system is based on the concept of choice; when you commit a crime, you are assumed to be making a conscious choice, and the fact of your doing it proves the choice that you made, and thus your guilt. The laws themselves read this way: part of the definition of a crime in California is that you must INTENTIONALLY perform the illegal act, but this is almost meaningless since it's assumed that you mean to do what you do.
> However, it's my belief that ultimately, there is no real choice.
Nietzsche pointed this out in the nineteenth century (Human All Too Human). He also pointed out that we may have to pretend there is free will so as to maintain order, at least temporarily.
You're right. They all got paid big money to come up with these bogus ratings. They got paid the same money and came up with the same ratings. "Programming error" is the new "cat ate my homework". The fact that the ratings business is a cosy oligopoly doesn't help either.
> This is not unusual. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, James Watt's patents on a key aspect of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by several decades.
Left out an apostrophe. A thousand pardons.
This is not unusual. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, James Watts patents on a key aspect of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by several decades.
Interesting side-note: An article in Scientific American a while back showed that all the programs Ms Ada Lovelace wrote were buggy and did not work corretcly.
> if (and I concede it's a fairly big assumption) the effects of drugs render the drug addict just as unemployable in a society which allows them as one which condemns them, I wouldn't expect the level of petty crime to change much.
Yes that's what it is - an assumption - and it's a false assumption. There are lots of tobacco and even alcohol addicts who are productive members of society (I know quite a few of them). The inherent harm from heroin is far less than alcohol.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that shootouts in the street are the only harm from the policies of prohibition. My view is that the huge sums of money that go to criminals and the resulting corruption are the biggest costs. Corruption is something that people try to hide, so it is not "in your face".
I agree that a lot of people are reluctant to consider alternatives to prohibition. It takes a bit of lateral thinking, and a willingness to get past the initial emotional reactions, to realize that the biggest problem is not the drugs themselves but the fact that they are illegal.
Here are some of the costs of illegality:
- Crime (burglaries, muggings) and associated trauma and injuries due to the need to pay high costs for drugs.
- Higher insurance premiums.
- Cost of detection, policing and of running prisons (about 40% of people in prison in the US are there for drug related offenses).
- Cost of being in prison.
- Inability of people to use illegal drugs for legitimate purposes (eg medical uses of marijuana).
- Balance of payments problems contributed to by lareg drug imports.
- Corruption of police, customs officials and politicians.
- Large sums of money put in the hands of criminals, gangsters, corrupt officials and terrorists.
- Resources wasted smuggling drugs into the country.
- Poor quality, adulteration and variable potencies of drugs leading to overdoses and toxicity.
- Transmission of serious illnesses such as hepatitis and AIDS due to lack of access to sterile needles.
- Instability and failure of states as seen in several Latin American countries.
- Massive financial incentives for drug pushers to enlist new users into the use of drugs.
The common view that drug addicts are morally flawed people who just need to abstain is wrong in my view, in many or most cases. A lot of drug users are self-mediating for various defects in their brain chemistry. For example heroin addicts and also alcoholics tend to have problems with endorphin production or receptors. Cocaine addicts and amphetamine users often have problems with the dopamine systems. Trying to solve a medical problem using a punitive legal approach is an approach that *has* failed.
> We manufacture our own enemies, no need to blame any boogeymen for funding.
There is a lot of truth in this. You only have to look at who supported Osama bin Laden when he was a "freedom fighter" against the Russians. That was before he turned against the US and became a "terrorist". I put the terms in quotes because ObL has not changed at all, just the US view of him.
Similarly have a look at who put Saddam Hussein into power in a coup. I will give you a clue - the color of their flag is red white and blue and it has stars and stripes on it. Who put the Shah of Iran in power in a coup, setting the stage for the subsequent takeover by the mulllahs?
This does not take away from the fact that $1,000,000,000,000 dollars per year are going into the hands of various types of criminals as a result of the policies of prohibition.
The fact that you do not want to hear the truth about what your spending on drugs does does not make it any less true. I lived in a country town in Australia where a local politician was murdered by the drug cartels. This was a wake-up call for many people about what that money was doing.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/07/1070732070321.html?from=storyrhs
As found as I got older that it is very useful to try and separate "what is true" from "what I want to be true" and from "what I am going to do about it".
Tim
> I've lived with a drug addict (OK, it was crack rather than heroin) and I can tell you you missed a few side effects out.
I was specifically talking about heroin, as you acknowledged. But two out of the three items you mentioned are a result of illegality and the expensive supply. In contrast to crack, alcohol is harmful in many ways but it is cheap enough that you do not need to embark on a life of crime to support alcohol consumption. Alcohol sales are also not funding gangs and organized crime and terrorism, because alcohol is legal.
Organnzed crime got its hold on the US during prohibition, when alcohol was banned.
Even for drugs that are seriously harmful, I would argue that a harm minimization approach is more likely to be effective, and will have far fewer effects on society, than prohibition.
It is easier for under-age children to buy illegal drugs than alcohol. Since when is that a good thing?
Tim
> Constipation and bad junk [resulting in overdoses] are the worst hazards of Heroin abuse you can think of?
Well, that is what you will find if you go and look it up in a pharmaceutical reference book.
Clearly opiates are addictive but that is only a problem if safe, inexpensive, legal supplies are not available. What destroys lives is the fact that the drug is illegal and therefore expensive. This means that criminal activities are needed to support the habit.
AIDS transmission in this case is a result of reusing dirty needles. Have you every wondered why diabetics who inject insulin don't get AIDS? The reason is that they have access to cheap legal supplies of needles. Countries that have instituted needle exchange programs for addicts have more effectively limited the spread of AIDS than those that have not.
Tim
There used to be a way to change the threshold on a discussion so you only see comments with a score > X. After 1/2 an hour I still cannot find this. Is there any way to do this? If so, please make it possible for people to find it!
This is a show stopper for using slashdot for me.
I have been looking at the evidence over the years and it seems that terrorists are more likely to get funding from making and selling illegal drugs than from marginal activities like copying software.
The total spend on illegal drugs in the US alone is over $1 trillion!. This money goes to organized crime, gangsters, crooked police and politicians, and to terrorists.
Have a look at Afghanistan, which is currently supplying a large percentage of the world's heroin trade. The funds are then used to fight the US, NATO and other allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Just another cost of the "war on drugs". Current US drug policies, which are also forced on the rest of the world, are widely recognized to be counter-productive. And why? The side-effects of heroin are constipation and the risk of overdose. Overdose is a problem caused by erratic potencies, which is a result of illegality.
However certain people make a lot of money from the war on drugs. Thus the policy does not change.
> The shreds of ships in Pearl Harbor were pretty good evidence that we needed to confront Japan.
Don't be so naive.
1. The US had been blockading Japan's access to raw materials for some time. From the Japanese point of view they had little choice but to attack, and to start a fight they knew they would almost certainly lose. The US hierarchy knew this.
2. The US had broken the Japanese ciphers and knew from them that Japan was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor. This information was not passed on to Hawaii. The previous commander of the Hawaii base had been replaced by a person who was known to be a dolt.
3. The US needed a pretext to enter the war. A major Japanese attack would be a good pretext and would inflame public opinion as required.
The US has a long track record of such behavior. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is one example.
Anyone wanting to inform themselves about he huge costs of IP laws would do worse than to read this book. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
The story about how the patents on parts of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by 30 years is one that needs to be told - often.
Tim Josling
One thing I do is I say "Just a moment". Then I leave the phone off the hook for about ten minutes. This wastes their time quite effectively. I even had one of them get quite angry at me, which was good.
A number of banks have implemented two-factor authentication using mobile phones. When a transaction is initiated, the bank send a number by text to your nominated mobile phone. You then enter the number in the screen. No need for expensive HHAD devices. And it really seems to work very well. In theory you can defeat it via man-in-the-middle attacks but these are a lot harder to implement than normal phishing.
See for example http://nab.com.au/Personal_Finance/0,,84176,00.html
Tim
> Other governments are not going to be willing to buy a system with a NSA backdoor.
If something has *already* happened, then it is possible that it *could* happen. After WWII, the US sold copies of the german crypto machines to governments all over the world and proceeded to read the "encrypted" traffic. This machine, the enigma machine, had of course been broken.
Never underestimate stupidity, especially of governments.
Maybe secPM is not as much of an expert as he claims to be. Or maybe he is trying to mislead us.
I remember when I saw the Skype acquisition thinking "this makes no sense". It seemed quite obvious that Skype would have a lot of trouble making money out of this.
What could the explanation be?
The Skype acquisition by eBay brings Skype under control of a US corporation. This, one would assume, would make it a lot easier for Skype phone calls to be monitored by the US authorities. If that were the motive, you would expect at some point a "surprising" gift of some kind by the US government or interests associated with it to eBAY. Or perhaps the gift is removal of a negative. J Edgar Hoover used to keep dirt files on politicians to ensure no-one could touch him. Perhaps someone has something on someone high up in eBAY.
One would imagine that the ability to monitor world-wide phone conversations more easily would be very valuable, given the amount of money being spent on Homeland Security.
Of course, it is quite possible that it was just a stuff-up by eBAY.
One really big stressor with meetings is related to the number of people present. Because everyone has to commment on everything and everyone has to comment on everyone's comment, the result is the infamous "inverse square law of meeting progress". The useful work done in a meeting is in inverse proportion to the number of people present.