In a big, healthy company, it is inevitable that you will get "infected" with a bad manager somewhere, sometime. I see it like a body catching a cold. Instead of "inertia", I like to think of a company as having a "immune system" to combat colds. If the immune system is strong enough, it will be able to get rid of the "cold", the bad manager.
It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
In many cases, it's not that the money is drying up; it's that the money is increasingly 'focused' on projects rather than administration.
There's a popular conception among donors that the best way to keep NGOs from existing for their own sake (and growing fat and complacent) is to cease providing core funding, instead providing money for individual initiatives. As a happy coincidence, this also keeps NGOs on the string, having to justify every single little thing they do, which makes it easier to ensure that NGOs don't do anything that might make the donors uncomfortable, like speak their mind, or have a conscience or tell the truth.
The 'no core funding' argument has some merits, I'll grant (heh) you, as there have been NGOs who got caught up in navel-gazing, who got lazy and spent more time feathering their respective nests than actually, you know, doing good. That is absolutely something to be guarded against. But this move toward project funding has the unfortunate effect of keeping some NGOs on the fringe, struggling to stay alive. This applies particularly to those who challenge the status quo.
And as noted here, it has a knock-on effect on all NGOs, who find they can obtain salaries and meet project expenses, but can't own any fixed assets or even keep a vehicle running. Perversely, this increases their operating costs, which have to be met somehow. And that results in bigger grant applications for project funding.
Obligatory software analogy: This is similar to tech companies who see design, tech support, permanent staffing and even updates as cost centres and therefore areas to starve as much as possible. This can all too easily lead to more friction in the gears, longer ramp-up times, slower release schedules, reduced quality and sales, and yes, higher development costs, once everything's factored in.
I never realized visiting a website required me to "sacrifice my freedom"!
Look, I know it's a lot to ask that you actually pause to reflect before dashing off that Frist Psot and racking up all that precious karma. But why don't you wind down your supercilious, holier-than-thou tone and actually read what Stallmann says about the Javascript trap?
If you did, you'd see that he has a perfectly valid point about how the effect of non-Free licenses, combined with minified (and therefore effectively unreadable) code, especially that which uses dynamically constructed elements, is hard to read, hard to share and hard for the community to improve. The tone of the article is pragmatic, reasoned and doesn't jump up and down crying 'Injustice!' or waving a placard. Much as you might hate this, it's a reasonable technical argument that follows logically from the concept of Free Software itself.
If you want to argue against Free Software on its merits, knock yourself out. I work with both proprietary and Free software all the time, and I see the benefits of both. But when you start pitching a fit and belittling someone else's calm, reasonably stated points without even attempting to address the logic, then you've lost any credibility. Honestly, you can ridicule Stallmann all you like, but you might want to consider what you look like to others as you indulge in this kind of adolescent, pop-collared frat-boy humour.
I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending
In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.
The days of 'Homesteading the Noosphere' (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it's been since the internet became part of our lives.
The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.
And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman's approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar - VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.
The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word 'copyright' now means 'don't copy at all, ever.'
And in the midst of it all, we're grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.
I grieve to say it, but unless there's a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we're going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network's smarts will not exist for our benefit.
I'm pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the '90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It's not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don't brings us a day closer to the day when we can't any longer.
Hell yeah, if only we could impeach that Bush and get someone new (with promise of hope) instead.
Oh, wait...
You know what? Fuck your cynicism. (Not you, your cynicism.)
Speaking as someone who lives in a country with a history of consistently corrupt, dysfunctional governments, without any kind of police presence in the community, with disgustingly poor health and education services, this litany of complaint and hopelessness sounds to me like nothing more than childish whining.
It wasn't always this way, and frankly, I don't care what happened that reduced the Americans in this audience to such a useless bunch of wankers. But merciful god, could you please show at least a modicum of intelligence and - yes, I'll say it - hope?
You people really have no fucking clue what it's like to live in a broken society. But if you don't shut the fuck up, learn a civics lesson or two and start fixing things, you're going to find out. And before you tell me it's too late, I'm here to say that if you think that, you honestly don't have any fucking idea how bad things can get.
There are very definite steps you can take to curtail this kind of intrusion on press freedom, only the first of which is to shout loud and long to your representative not to stand for it. So get off your ass, shut the fuck up with the whining, and get to fucking work.
I'm not quite clear on the above -- do you mean that:
A. it would be more reasonable to wait years for the telecom infrastructure to become available and then go straight to Internet-capable devices (as opposed to offline devices right away)
B. Internet-capable devices are preloaded (e.g. with Wikipedia), so it's better to get them now as it will eventually be possible to fully utilize their abilities, as opposed to spending on a wave of offline devices followed by online ones
C. Internet-capable devices aren't preloaded, but better to get them for the features they do have as they'll be more useful down the road
I defer to your experience, but was wondering because in cases A & C, it seems to me like any substantial delay would harm the educational & skills development of the kids left waiting, and "A" would result in some kids reaching adulthood without getting their chance.
I like B most, with C as a viable option if B isn't possible.
But emphatically: No, I don't ever advise waiting. What I meant to say is that when someone comes to me with a proposal like this (i.e. to give offline wikipedia devices to students) I suggest that they push harder to get internet into their target schools as well. In my experience, having internet connectivity makes computers many times more attractive to people of all ages in the developing world. Besides, a VSAT dish with generating capacity and a wireless network isn't asking for the moon. It's expensive by local standards, yes, but that's what donor money is for.:-)
The thing that drives me craziest in this job is when people see technology as a kind of either/or thing. You either have exactly the same infrastructure as you would in a downtown office in New York, or you have nothing. This idea is kind of a modulation on that problem, where instead of viewing the world in a binary mode, they've simply misjudged the distance of the steps between.
... In my decidedly less than humble opinion, of course.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret
How long did the Manhattan Project employ thousands of people before anyone figured out what they were making?
Anthony Beevor, in his excellent history of WWII, tells a story about Churchill and Truman trying to figure out how to break the news of the successful Manhattan Project test to Stalin during the Potsdam conference in '45. They decided that Truman would tell him quietly, in a public room, in order to take him aback a little.
Thing is, Stalin already knew all the details. So there they are, Churchill hanging in the doorway watching Stalin like a dog watching a cookie, while Truman sidles up beside him and whispers the details into Stalin's ear. Stalin, of course, didn't bat an eyelash.
Afterwards, Stalin asked Beria (who had bugged the US and UK rooms) how they interpreted his complete non-reaction. According to Beria, Churchill asked Truman, "So? What did he say?" To which Truman replied, "I don't think he understood what I was telling him."
Stalin and Beria had a good laugh, took all of Eastern and Central Europe, but cancelled plans to invade Western Europe because they really did understand just how big that bomb was.
The moral of the story is: Don't ever assume it's a secret. Someone always knows.
Batteries are available anywhere, and there is a single global standard. A rechargable AAA battery is good for 500 cycles at a cost of less than a cent per cycle.
Not true, I'm afraid. Well, not true in the sense that people where I live (about 20% of the population are on the power grid) don't find themselves doing without. Cost is the major factor, though availability is often limited.
I work in IT policy, and one of the biggest things we've had to accomplish in recent years is to convince the government that access to electrical power has to be factored into their ICT policy. It may seem obvious to you and me, but it actually took a bit of work. Curiously, it was the donors who didn't realise it, not government.
People made the same sarcastic, cynical statements about cellphones a decade ago. I guess criticizing others helps them rationalize their own inaction.
To be fair, most people did not actually say these things about mobile phones; they didn't think about them at all. The impact of mobile telephony on poor, rural areas was largely overlooked until it had already begun to make itself felt. Remember that mobile phone banking began in Kenya completely independently of any outside agency. People just began treating phone credit as cash, and passing it between themselves. The donors and banks only got into the mix after the fact. Same with Ushahidi and other cool SMS-based apps.
They did say that about computers and the internet, though, and yes, we're in full agreement that the old 'how can they have computers if they don't have roads' argument is bullshit.
But... I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.
Worth putting right in/etc/profile so anyone who doesn't want it can disable it if they want.
It is an entirely sane default.
I don't think that's required any more - not on Linux or Mac OS X, anyway. I use rsync several times a day and each time it just reads my ~/.ssh/config file for the options, sets up the connection and performs the transfer without any fuss or bother.
I haven't set the RSYNC_RSH env parameter since about 2002.
I would think any french government secrets laws would apply to french citizens no matter where they are.
Not sure about this. While numerous national laws apply to overseas citizens (e.g. child abuse laws in Canada, Aus and the US), French citizenship is a little different. You cannot renounce French citizenship; it's simply not possible. So secrecy laws and various others which can and sometimes do conflict with human rights might be harder to enforce in a court of law.
But hey, the Napoleonic code on which French law is based differs significantly from Common Law, with which I'm more familiar, so I'm nearly certain to be upholding the time-honoured Slashdot tradition of talking through my hat.:-)
Explain to me how hiding your money in offshore accounts so it can't be seen by the govt, for the express purpose of dodging the legally required taxation of that money, is legal?
Well, the way you describe it, there's just no defense against that. But consider the following:
Many companies and individuals legitimately use tax havens as a way of keeping money offshore until they need it. The moment it enters their domestic bank account, of course, it can become capital gains/earnings and therefore subject to tax. But because they do a lot of business overseas, they leave a chunk parked in order to avoid unnecessary fees. So they use this as a floating pot they can dip into to conduct business at lower cost, and then pay the taxes whenever they repatriate some part of it.
That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, which is what you describe.
The problem is that regulatory oversight is slack-to-nonexistent, and that the entire system (like so many other parts of the financial sector) has been gamed so badly that the entire thing is widely (and justifiably) viewed as a sham.
Ironically, 9/11 put an end to some of the worst abuses. The US got so worried about stopping terrorist financing operations that they created a very strict new set of rules, and enforced them by disallowing anyone on their black list from trading in US currency. Smartened up a number of countries in a hurry.
So yeah, those rich schmucks are still hiding their money, but at least it's (slightly) harder for them to buy drugs and guns.... *sigh*
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
That's all well and good, and I agree that access to internet should be taken as a basic service, but did nobody else notice the real evil in this story:
The e-textbooks used in the project, run by the Fairfax County Public Schools, worked only when students were online—and some features required fast connections.
Why the fuck was there not an offline version of this textbook? I don't want to go all Stallmannite, but the problem right here is not lack of bandwidth. The problem here is a fucking textbook that can't be downloaded and used offline.
Americans have no one to blame but themselves and their short sighted insistence that they be paid enough money to keep themselves in food, shelter, transportation and medical care here in America, rather than what it would take to do all of the above in Bangladesh.
I take your point - it's a good one. But the story here seems to be a lack of confidence in the ability to get a return on investment. I'm actually half-inclined to see the core problem here as investors who ask, 'Why should I get a modest rate of return here at home when I can get a higher rate of return elsewhere?'
That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't consider quality, long-term stability, or even pride and brand identity. In other words, I'm not sure that even backing down and selling out completely to the top-hat crowd would change their perspective that the US is a bad investment.
So yeah, shame on us for wanting a living wage and refusing to sacrifice our last modicum of health and well-being at the altar of investment; and shame on them too for not even caring enough about the place they live.
i don't think what nikon is paying for has a whole lot to do with android (omg i can't believe slashdot would be spreading fud!)
I'll reserve judgment until we learn more, but answer me this: why is Nikon, a long established company, only paying now? If they're using Android in their new cameras, then one can reasonably surmise that it might be the reason.
Indeed. I don't have the slightest clue how they dealt with Japan, Korea or even south China in their paper, but prima facie these examples seem to refute their thesis. I could probably come up with a few more examples of economic powerhouses that feature relatively homogeneous populations (genetically speaking), but these are the ones that leap out.
And now that I think about it, the US and Canada are wildly diverse. So it appears that the hypothesis is logically flawed at both extremes.
Slashdot Mirror
In a big, healthy company, it is inevitable that you will get "infected" with a bad manager somewhere, sometime. I see it like a body catching a cold. Instead of "inertia", I like to think of a company as having a "immune system" to combat colds. If the immune system is strong enough, it will be able to get rid of the "cold", the bad manager.
I'm going to guess that he died from analogy....
(Read it aloud. You'll get it....)
It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
Oh yeah? Tell Flanders that.
Why are the grants drying up?
In many cases, it's not that the money is drying up; it's that the money is increasingly 'focused' on projects rather than administration.
There's a popular conception among donors that the best way to keep NGOs from existing for their own sake (and growing fat and complacent) is to cease providing core funding, instead providing money for individual initiatives. As a happy coincidence, this also keeps NGOs on the string, having to justify every single little thing they do, which makes it easier to ensure that NGOs don't do anything that might make the donors uncomfortable, like speak their mind, or have a conscience or tell the truth.
The 'no core funding' argument has some merits, I'll grant (heh) you, as there have been NGOs who got caught up in navel-gazing, who got lazy and spent more time feathering their respective nests than actually, you know, doing good. That is absolutely something to be guarded against. But this move toward project funding has the unfortunate effect of keeping some NGOs on the fringe, struggling to stay alive. This applies particularly to those who challenge the status quo.
And as noted here, it has a knock-on effect on all NGOs, who find they can obtain salaries and meet project expenses, but can't own any fixed assets or even keep a vehicle running. Perversely, this increases their operating costs, which have to be met somehow. And that results in bigger grant applications for project funding.
Obligatory software analogy: This is similar to tech companies who see design, tech support, permanent staffing and even updates as cost centres and therefore areas to starve as much as possible. This can all too easily lead to more friction in the gears, longer ramp-up times, slower release schedules, reduced quality and sales, and yes, higher development costs, once everything's factored in.
I never realized visiting a website required me to "sacrifice my freedom"!
Look, I know it's a lot to ask that you actually pause to reflect before dashing off that Frist Psot and racking up all that precious karma. But why don't you wind down your supercilious, holier-than-thou tone and actually read what Stallmann says about the Javascript trap?
If you did, you'd see that he has a perfectly valid point about how the effect of non-Free licenses, combined with minified (and therefore effectively unreadable) code, especially that which uses dynamically constructed elements, is hard to read, hard to share and hard for the community to improve. The tone of the article is pragmatic, reasoned and doesn't jump up and down crying 'Injustice!' or waving a placard. Much as you might hate this, it's a reasonable technical argument that follows logically from the concept of Free Software itself.
If you want to argue against Free Software on its merits, knock yourself out. I work with both proprietary and Free software all the time, and I see the benefits of both. But when you start pitching a fit and belittling someone else's calm, reasonably stated points without even attempting to address the logic, then you've lost any credibility. Honestly, you can ridicule Stallmann all you like, but you might want to consider what you look like to others as you indulge in this kind of adolescent, pop-collared frat-boy humour.
I'll bet if we could travel back in time and watch these creatures innovate we would have far more respect for their ingenuity in their time.
Travel back in time?!? Feh, it wasn't that long ago. I remember it well.
At least, September 1993 was when I started hurling sharp objects....
I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending
In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.
The days of 'Homesteading the Noosphere' (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it's been since the internet became part of our lives.
The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.
And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman's approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar - VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.
The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word 'copyright' now means 'don't copy at all, ever.'
And in the midst of it all, we're grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.
I grieve to say it, but unless there's a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we're going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network's smarts will not exist for our benefit.
I'm pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the '90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It's not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don't brings us a day closer to the day when we can't any longer.
Hell yeah, if only we could impeach that Bush and get someone new (with promise of hope) instead. Oh, wait...
You know what? Fuck your cynicism. (Not you, your cynicism.)
Speaking as someone who lives in a country with a history of consistently corrupt, dysfunctional governments, without any kind of police presence in the community, with disgustingly poor health and education services, this litany of complaint and hopelessness sounds to me like nothing more than childish whining.
It wasn't always this way, and frankly, I don't care what happened that reduced the Americans in this audience to such a useless bunch of wankers. But merciful god, could you please show at least a modicum of intelligence and - yes, I'll say it - hope?
You people really have no fucking clue what it's like to live in a broken society. But if you don't shut the fuck up, learn a civics lesson or two and start fixing things, you're going to find out. And before you tell me it's too late, I'm here to say that if you think that, you honestly don't have any fucking idea how bad things can get.
There are very definite steps you can take to curtail this kind of intrusion on press freedom, only the first of which is to shout loud and long to your representative not to stand for it. So get off your ass, shut the fuck up with the whining, and get to fucking work.
Hugs, from the developing world.
I'm not quite clear on the above -- do you mean that:
A. it would be more reasonable to wait years for the telecom infrastructure to become available and then go straight to Internet-capable devices (as opposed to offline devices right away)
B. Internet-capable devices are preloaded (e.g. with Wikipedia), so it's better to get them now as it will eventually be possible to fully utilize their abilities, as opposed to spending on a wave of offline devices followed by online ones
C. Internet-capable devices aren't preloaded, but better to get them for the features they do have as they'll be more useful down the road
I defer to your experience, but was wondering because in cases A & C, it seems to me like any substantial delay would harm the educational & skills development of the kids left waiting, and "A" would result in some kids reaching adulthood without getting their chance.
I like B most, with C as a viable option if B isn't possible.
But emphatically: No, I don't ever advise waiting. What I meant to say is that when someone comes to me with a proposal like this (i.e. to give offline wikipedia devices to students) I suggest that they push harder to get internet into their target schools as well. In my experience, having internet connectivity makes computers many times more attractive to people of all ages in the developing world. Besides, a VSAT dish with generating capacity and a wireless network isn't asking for the moon. It's expensive by local standards, yes, but that's what donor money is for. :-)
The thing that drives me craziest in this job is when people see technology as a kind of either/or thing. You either have exactly the same infrastructure as you would in a downtown office in New York, or you have nothing. This idea is kind of a modulation on that problem, where instead of viewing the world in a binary mode, they've simply misjudged the distance of the steps between.
... In my decidedly less than humble opinion, of course.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret
How long did the Manhattan Project employ thousands of people before anyone figured out what they were making?
Anthony Beevor, in his excellent history of WWII, tells a story about Churchill and Truman trying to figure out how to break the news of the successful Manhattan Project test to Stalin during the Potsdam conference in '45. They decided that Truman would tell him quietly, in a public room, in order to take him aback a little.
Thing is, Stalin already knew all the details. So there they are, Churchill hanging in the doorway watching Stalin like a dog watching a cookie, while Truman sidles up beside him and whispers the details into Stalin's ear. Stalin, of course, didn't bat an eyelash.
Afterwards, Stalin asked Beria (who had bugged the US and UK rooms) how they interpreted his complete non-reaction. According to Beria, Churchill asked Truman, "So? What did he say?" To which Truman replied, "I don't think he understood what I was telling him."
Stalin and Beria had a good laugh, took all of Eastern and Central Europe, but cancelled plans to invade Western Europe because they really did understand just how big that bomb was.
The moral of the story is: Don't ever assume it's a secret. Someone always knows.
how it will make them money.
... And then play a single 'Enhance... enhance... enhance... print that!' scene from CSI and say, 'We do that.'
don't have easy access to batteries
Batteries are available anywhere, and there is a single global standard. A rechargable AAA battery is good for 500 cycles at a cost of less than a cent per cycle.
Not true, I'm afraid. Well, not true in the sense that people where I live (about 20% of the population are on the power grid) don't find themselves doing without. Cost is the major factor, though availability is often limited.
I work in IT policy, and one of the biggest things we've had to accomplish in recent years is to convince the government that access to electrical power has to be factored into their ICT policy. It may seem obvious to you and me, but it actually took a bit of work. Curiously, it was the donors who didn't realise it, not government.
People made the same sarcastic, cynical statements about cellphones a decade ago. I guess criticizing others helps them rationalize their own inaction.
To be fair, most people did not actually say these things about mobile phones; they didn't think about them at all. The impact of mobile telephony on poor, rural areas was largely overlooked until it had already begun to make itself felt. Remember that mobile phone banking began in Kenya completely independently of any outside agency. People just began treating phone credit as cash, and passing it between themselves. The donors and banks only got into the mix after the fact. Same with Ushahidi and other cool SMS-based apps.
They did say that about computers and the internet, though, and yes, we're in full agreement that the old 'how can they have computers if they don't have roads' argument is bullshit.
But... I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.
$ env |grep RSYNC
RSYNC_RSH=ssh
Worth putting right in /etc/profile so anyone who doesn't want it can disable it if they want.
It is an entirely sane default.
I don't think that's required any more - not on Linux or Mac OS X, anyway. I use rsync several times a day and each time it just reads my ~/.ssh/config file for the options, sets up the connection and performs the transfer without any fuss or bother.
I haven't set the RSYNC_RSH env parameter since about 2002.
No whey!
Sorry. I couldn't resist.
Well, I hope you feel gouda bout it, because for my part I cheddar at the thought of what's going to become of this thread. Makes me feel bleu....
So... Manhattan, then?
Welcome to the Internet, France. Wiki ain't local. Suck it.
Or as we in KAOS like to put it:
STARKER! ZIS IS DE INTERNET! VE DON'T COUNTRY ON DE INTERNET!!
I would think any french government secrets laws would apply to french citizens no matter where they are.
Not sure about this. While numerous national laws apply to overseas citizens (e.g. child abuse laws in Canada, Aus and the US), French citizenship is a little different. You cannot renounce French citizenship; it's simply not possible. So secrecy laws and various others which can and sometimes do conflict with human rights might be harder to enforce in a court of law.
But hey, the Napoleonic code on which French law is based differs significantly from Common Law, with which I'm more familiar, so I'm nearly certain to be upholding the time-honoured Slashdot tradition of talking through my hat. :-)
Explain to me how hiding your money in offshore accounts so it can't be seen by the govt, for the express purpose of dodging the legally required taxation of that money, is legal?
Well, the way you describe it, there's just no defense against that. But consider the following:
Many companies and individuals legitimately use tax havens as a way of keeping money offshore until they need it. The moment it enters their domestic bank account, of course, it can become capital gains/earnings and therefore subject to tax. But because they do a lot of business overseas, they leave a chunk parked in order to avoid unnecessary fees. So they use this as a floating pot they can dip into to conduct business at lower cost, and then pay the taxes whenever they repatriate some part of it.
That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, which is what you describe.
The problem is that regulatory oversight is slack-to-nonexistent, and that the entire system (like so many other parts of the financial sector) has been gamed so badly that the entire thing is widely (and justifiably) viewed as a sham.
Ironically, 9/11 put an end to some of the worst abuses. The US got so worried about stopping terrorist financing operations that they created a very strict new set of rules, and enforced them by disallowing anyone on their black list from trading in US currency. Smartened up a number of countries in a hurry.
So yeah, those rich schmucks are still hiding their money, but at least it's (slightly) harder for them to buy drugs and guns.... *sigh*
because sony never tried to sensor a negative review.
That must be because they never detected them.
Heh, that just lens itself to humour, doesn't it.
Sorry I'll f-stop. I know what'll happen if iris one more pun. I shutter at the thought.
Has symphony EVER been attractive to youth?
It's all in how it's presented.
Note to all: Not a rickroll. It's a masterpiece of symphonic comedy.
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
That's all well and good, and I agree that access to internet should be taken as a basic service, but did nobody else notice the real evil in this story:
The e-textbooks used in the project, run by the Fairfax County Public Schools, worked only when students were online—and some features required fast connections.
Why the fuck was there not an offline version of this textbook? I don't want to go all Stallmannite, but the problem right here is not lack of bandwidth. The problem here is a fucking textbook that can't be downloaded and used offline.
Americans have no one to blame but themselves and their short sighted insistence that they be paid enough money to keep themselves in food, shelter, transportation and medical care here in America, rather than what it would take to do all of the above in Bangladesh.
I take your point - it's a good one. But the story here seems to be a lack of confidence in the ability to get a return on investment. I'm actually half-inclined to see the core problem here as investors who ask, 'Why should I get a modest rate of return here at home when I can get a higher rate of return elsewhere?'
That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't consider quality, long-term stability, or even pride and brand identity. In other words, I'm not sure that even backing down and selling out completely to the top-hat crowd would change their perspective that the US is a bad investment.
So yeah, shame on us for wanting a living wage and refusing to sacrifice our last modicum of health and well-being at the altar of investment; and shame on them too for not even caring enough about the place they live.
i don't think what nikon is paying for has a whole lot to do with android (omg i can't believe slashdot would be spreading fud!)
I'll reserve judgment until we learn more, but answer me this: why is Nikon, a long established company, only paying now? If they're using Android in their new cameras, then one can reasonably surmise that it might be the reason.
Shyeah. Even a total idiot knows it's 'expirtation'.
Indeed. I don't have the slightest clue how they dealt with Japan, Korea or even south China in their paper, but prima facie these examples seem to refute their thesis. I could probably come up with a few more examples of economic powerhouses that feature relatively homogeneous populations (genetically speaking), but these are the ones that leap out. And now that I think about it, the US and Canada are wildly diverse. So it appears that the hypothesis is logically flawed at both extremes.
It was a typo. They meant to write 'vulnerable'.
I thought it was an autocorrect of 'venerial'.