I should have clarified that I think Bitcoin intrinsically lacks qualifications for a currency capable of buying a car.
For instance, a break through in prime factorization (or however bitcoins are created) that is kept secret could mean that someone generates a ton of money out of thin air, which are impossible to identify apart from normal bitcoins (as they would be legitimate bitcoins). Think the counterfeiting problem, except a breakthrough here means an exponentially bigger problem.
If there is a secret breakthrough in prime factorization, we have bigger problems than bitcoin. One problem would be criminals accessing your conventional bank's website and stealing all of your money.
It's highly unlikely.
Further, the problem of the wildly fluctuating prices: why would I want to store money in a currency whose value can wildly fluctuate from $17 ea, to $2, to 4, all in the span of a year? Why would a bank want to give out loans in a currency when they could end up receiving far less than they loaned out? Why would I want to loan from them when my debt could skyrocket in price?
The stability problem is because so few people are using it. If bitcoin had as many people using it as, say, the Euro dollar, it would be more stable than any other currency. One day it might become very stable indeed, it's certainly designed with that goal in mind.
Further, I can think of very few usecases for the anonymous features of Bitcoin. Every scenario I can think of involves activity that is internationally illegal (ie, money laundering). How would you like seeing Big Corp, Inc have $1B in bitcoins from venture funding, then "losing" $500 mil to "unforseen contingencies", and knowing there is no possibility of tracing what happened? Hmmm, doesnt sound so good now does it?
Bitcoin is not designed to be anonymous. It's has security features which involve *everyone* who uses bitcoin helping out to verify the validity of *every* transaction in the world. Do you want your next door neighbour to know how much you get paid each week? No? That's why bitcoin has strong privacy.
Bitcoin needs privacy as a side effect of the way it works, not because it's designed to be anonymous.
And my understanding is that we moved away from a gold standard precisely so that we could regulate the economy to some degree by controlling the flow of money. We gave up the stability of having some real-world backing (gold) so that we could have more flexibility. Bitcoin has the worst of both worlds: its "backing" is a mathematical function, the supply is uncontrollable, and its value is unstable. Wooo, where can I sign up?
Plenty of people around the world think it was a very bad idea to move away from a gold standard.
Regular wallets can not be stolen with a computer program. Stealing money from a bank account is possible for a program, but there are ways to recover it after the fact, unlike with bitcoin.
With the wallet anyone holding a baseball bat can make "an offer I couldn't refuse".
With the bank, I'm forced to trust their (in many ways lax) security policies.
With bitcoin, I can protect it with strong security techniques. Stronger than any bank I've ever dealt with.
Sure, companies are choosing to act the way they are, but the current patent system is incentivizing this behavior. The question should be whether there is a system with better incentives, not whether companies should stop doing what they are doing, because some companies will behave responsibly, but others invariably won't and you have to expect that behavior.
I'm not convinced any companies, even patent trolls, are truly acting irresponsibly. It's impossible to know if a patent is/isn't valid without going to court. And it's impossible to know if a patent is/isn't being infringed without going to court.
This leads to disagreements between patent holders and potential licensors about just how much should be paid in any licensing agreement, or whether any licensing fees should even be paid at all. To make matters worse, the courts are making stupid decisions all the time.
In my mind, this is a clear situation where we need to blame whoever wrote patent law in the first place for failing to predict the mess they created. And blame more recent government(s) for failing to do anything about it.
But how to solve it? That's the trillion dollar question.
Nope. It's a choice. Apple is choosing to strangle the competition while they have the strong hand.
Which is something the patent system is specifically designed to encourage. The idea is to encourage entities just like Apple to spend billions of dollars researching some new technology, in full confidence they will be able to recover those billions of dollars in future by having a high profit margin on their product.
If someone else has the right to bring the same technology to the market with razor slim profit margins, then nobody will spend billions of dollars researching new technology.
Say what you want about Apple, they *do* spend billions researching new technology. And they should be allowed to recover that money.
Personally I'm not convinced the patent system is a net positive. But calling it an "evil monopoly" is a bit much I think.
In contrast, IBM and Google (generally?) don't pursue patent suits unless they're attacked first. (At least, that's the impression that's been put forth by tech journalism.)
I don't know anything about IBM, but Google seems to run around with their head in the sand until someone slaps them in the face with a patent lawsuit. They were told by their lawyers not to create Dalvik without a licensing agreement with Sun, but they ignored the advice. And now their getting their ass handed to them in court, because Sun/Oracle wants compensation for their inventions, and Google isn't making enough money off Dalvik to pay any reasonable sum.
But throw in a few popular third party extensions, and leave FireFox running for a day or two. It will start consuming all your available RAM and a good chunk of virtual memory too (growing more and more the longer you leave it open).
With other browsers, memory consumption is rarely even noticeable. I can leave safari running for *months* and it'll happily sit on around 200MB with my usual 15 or so tabs. And yes, I do have a bunch of third party extensions installed. Pretty much the same ones I had when I was using FireFox every day.
Perhaps you should try Safari. It defaults more modern zoom-everything behaviour, but has a "zoom text only" setting to bring back what you want.
Anyone who hasn't tried safari for a while (especially on windows) really should give it another try as it's improved a lot. There is a list of small features ten miles long I can't live without, that are only in safari.
PS: Be sure to check out the third party extensions as well.
But that doesn't mean Apple has to actively hinder the average user from becoming us.
And what makes you think they're doing that? They still offer all of their developer tools for free, and some of them (automator, dashcode, quartz composer) are very approachable.
I learned to program with things like hypercard, and sure I miss a few things from those days. But we still have learning tools just as good, if not better. They just have different names.
And as for people writing their own programs in HyperCard? I don't care how many people did it, it's a bad idea. Programming should be done by professionals and kids on their way to becoming pro's. It shouldn't be done by your average Jo, they've got better things to do with their time.
Finally, the most compelling characteristic, imho, is definitely the work ethic. It is not uncommon for my colleagues to work 12 hour days (without overtime pay) and still commute 2 hours to and from work.
I wouldn't call that work ethic. I'd just call it sad.
Working a 12 hour day is good work ethic when it's necessary. But it's not healthy. Better to have three employees working 8 hours, than two working 12 hours.
There is no way anyone can think clearly after 10 hours on the job.
When I call up my phone company, I get a computer asking me to tell it what I'm calling about.
There are a handful of issues it can help with over the phone (especially around bill payments), and if your query isn't on the list they pass you on to a call centre.
They are as of iOS 5: your contacts are automatically copied to iCloud, unless you disable iCloud entirely.
Automatically? What are you smoking?
iCloud is off by default, you have to go to all the extra trouble of entering your details and login password and agreeing to additional legal crap and blah blah blah, before you can turn it on. You don't have to pay $100 per year anymore, but it still takes just as much effort as ever to turn it on. Nothing is automatic.
And if you do decide to *manually* turn it on, there are a million tick boxes to customise what is shared, and one of them is "contacts". I wouldn't call that "disabling iCloud entirely".
Then all that's shared with Apple is what apps you use, how long you use them, what calls are made and how long, and where your phone is. The last one being done explicitly for advertising reasons. The first two are for "diagnostic purposes." Read your terms of service, kids!)
They are do not have a list of what apps you use. They only have a list of apps that you buy from their store. Similarly, if you go to the corner store and buy a bottle of milk the guy working there will know that you bought some milk. There are other ways to get apps (without jail breaking) through the developer channel, they aren't very popular but I've got several.
They do not keep track of how long any app is used. Ever. Where did you get that shit from? You say it's in the EULA, why don't you show me where? I haven't read mine but pretty sure I would know about it. You made the claim, now back it up.
They do not keep track of what calls you're made either, or for how long. I'd like to see where you found that info as well. Your carrier does keep track of this, but that's no different than buying milk from the corner store.
And they don't track your location either! Your phone is capable of asking apple what the latitude/longatude/power (range) of a specific phone tower is, and from that they could infer that you are somewhere close to that tower at the time when it asked, but it will never do this without asking you for permission first, and it doesn't ask every time you're within range of the same tower, only if the tower has dropped off the local cache of the tower's location, and the tower lookup is anonymous. See buying milk at the store.
Apple and Microsoft would be worse than Google because Google at least (a) has caught NSLs and (b) published statistics on government data requests.
Government data requests that they usually comply with by the way.
The carrier is an issue when it comes to sharing private info with the government. But I'm more worried about my info being shared with businesses, and for that Android is the worst choice available.
Not true. Google's business model is collecting users and selling some advertising. They do not sell personal information, and there is no way for advertisers to get access to your anonymised profile.
As someone who works for a marketing company that specialises in setting up small/medium businesses with google's data, a have to beg to disagree. Google sells all kinds of information to advertisers and some of it is very personal and *ABSOLUTELY* identifiable.
Google has makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through our clients and believe me, the best thing about it is they give our clients more/better information about users than just about any other advertising network we know of.
Encryption between you and the phone tower doesn't do shit. You want encryption between you *and the other phone*.
Secondly, A5/1 was designed by people who didn't know what they were doing, and has huge flaws.
Thirdly, A5/1 is a very old cipher designed to run efficiently on extremely low power 50 cent CPU's, and doesn't have anywhere near enough entropy to be secure.
Fourthly... most of the good smartphones have VOIP apps available (including Skype although I wouldn't trust them) which actually do offer end-to-end encryption for your voice calls.
For starters you don't have to jailbreak/root the phone to install an app that isn't Google approved.
Apps don't need to be approved by Apple, the encryption system requires that the *developers* are approved. If you're an iOS developer (and it's dirt cheap compared to the cost of, say, a phone data plan) then you can install any app you want if you have the source code. And you don't have to abide by any rules except mass-distributing your binaries, and the built in security measures in the phone.
I'm surprised there isn't bigger open source community around iOS apps. I've written one or two, but haven't seen any others.
And you can do so with just the phone - you do not need something like iTunes.
You don't need iTunes to install apps on an iPhone, you just need a URL to the app. As long as the app is signed by an approved developer, it will install.
Secondly while rooting will supposedly void your warranty there are apps to do so that are right there on the android market.
It doesn't void your warranty. It just means they will not provide you with tech support of any kind, even if you pay for it (this includes checking if a problem is a software bug - possibly in the jail break code, or a hardware fault). All the jail breaks can be uninstalled in a few seconds, and then they will give you tech support.
But what does any of this have to do with privacy? I would argue the tightly locked down iOS system, where apps cannot read each others files or communicate with each other or communicate with the internet unless they've got a good explanation for why, is a near *perfect* situation from a privacy front.
Bottled water can, when combined with other circumstances, hydrate your body. It can also kill you in other circumstances (for example, if you drink lots of it while sweating a lot).
Therefore, it is invalid to claim that it will hydrate you, when in reality it will only hydrate you in some situations.
The claim wasn't "when combined with yada yada water will hydrate you", it was just "water will hydrate you". And therefore, it is misleading.
Just because "common sense" says that water will hydrate you doesn't mean common sense is true.
Asymco, probably one of the best analysts around for Apple, estimates apple's various online stores cost approximately 1.3 billion dollars per year to run. He also estimates they earn a gross income of approximately 1.3 billion dollars.
Exactly how much tax is collected is a perfectly valid topic to discuss. But a successful nation needs to collect some kind of tax, and the tax being collected needs to be fair.
Making a local business charge tax while their competitors on the other side of the country (or planet) don't charge tax is damaging to the local economy.
Not all sales involve a product which needs to be shipped to your door.
The way it works here in Australia is any time a business sells anything to to a customer, they are required to provide an invoice stating how much tax was collected. If they do not provide an invoice, or if they collect the wrong amount of tax, or if they try to pretend they are not a business when they really are, they will be sent off to prison.
I'm not sure if this bill is the answer, but it's about time you guys fixed this issue over on your side of the pond. It's just plain stupid that some businesses collect sales tax, while other businesses don't.
All businesses should be paying the exact same tax, under the same laws. Anything else is extremely unfair.
In this case has management with golden parachutes been paid off to bankrupt Qantas. Whilst there was an industrial dispute, there was no actual industrial action going on
Bullshit. Strikes have cancelled 500 flights, or 88,000 seats, in the last handful of weeks, and there's no sign of the industrial action stopping.
Assuming the _entire_ work force wanted the increase, $68m/30,000/40(hours in a week)/52(weeks in a year)=$1.09 increase per worker per hour
If the increases were going to bankrupt the company, qantas should be looking pretty bankrupt about now.
You're spreading the $68 million over a whole year? That is only one month of losses, and the unions are threatening to continue that action on into the next year.
But worse than the money lost, flights have been cancelled. One of the most premium airlines in the world, praised by business and high income customers, cannot afford to cancel flights regularly.
Either the industrial action needs to end, or quantas needs to shut down entirely, and focus on jetstar.
Light memory usage (1 tab): firefox: 438MB chrome: 134MB conclusion page: "strong" for firefox and "acceptable" for chrome
memory management (after closing 40 tabs):
* firefox: 438MB immediately after, 161MB five minutes later
* chrome: 134MB immediately after, 94MB five minutes later conclusion page: "winner" for firefox, and "strong" for chrome.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have clarified that I think Bitcoin intrinsically lacks qualifications for a currency capable of buying a car.
For instance, a break through in prime factorization (or however bitcoins are created) that is kept secret could mean that someone generates a ton of money out of thin air, which are impossible to identify apart from normal bitcoins (as they would be legitimate bitcoins). Think the counterfeiting problem, except a breakthrough here means an exponentially bigger problem.
If there is a secret breakthrough in prime factorization, we have bigger problems than bitcoin. One problem would be criminals accessing your conventional bank's website and stealing all of your money.
It's highly unlikely.
Further, the problem of the wildly fluctuating prices: why would I want to store money in a currency whose value can wildly fluctuate from $17 ea, to $2, to 4, all in the span of a year? Why would a bank want to give out loans in a currency when they could end up receiving far less than they loaned out? Why would I want to loan from them when my debt could skyrocket in price?
The stability problem is because so few people are using it. If bitcoin had as many people using it as, say, the Euro dollar, it would be more stable than any other currency. One day it might become very stable indeed, it's certainly designed with that goal in mind.
Further, I can think of very few usecases for the anonymous features of Bitcoin. Every scenario I can think of involves activity that is internationally illegal (ie, money laundering). How would you like seeing Big Corp, Inc have $1B in bitcoins from venture funding, then "losing" $500 mil to "unforseen contingencies", and knowing there is no possibility of tracing what happened? Hmmm, doesnt sound so good now does it?
Bitcoin is not designed to be anonymous. It's has security features which involve *everyone* who uses bitcoin helping out to verify the validity of *every* transaction in the world. Do you want your next door neighbour to know how much you get paid each week? No? That's why bitcoin has strong privacy.
Bitcoin needs privacy as a side effect of the way it works, not because it's designed to be anonymous.
And my understanding is that we moved away from a gold standard precisely so that we could regulate the economy to some degree by controlling the flow of money. We gave up the stability of having some real-world backing (gold) so that we could have more flexibility. Bitcoin has the worst of both worlds: its "backing" is a mathematical function, the supply is uncontrollable, and its value is unstable. Wooo, where can I sign up?
Plenty of people around the world think it was a very bad idea to move away from a gold standard.
Regular wallets can not be stolen with a computer program. Stealing money from a bank account is possible for a program, but there are ways to recover it after the fact, unlike with bitcoin.
With the wallet anyone holding a baseball bat can make "an offer I couldn't refuse".
With the bank, I'm forced to trust their (in many ways lax) security policies.
With bitcoin, I can protect it with strong security techniques. Stronger than any bank I've ever dealt with.
Sure, companies are choosing to act the way they are, but the current patent system is incentivizing this behavior. The question should be whether there is a system with better incentives, not whether companies should stop doing what they are doing, because some companies will behave responsibly, but others invariably won't and you have to expect that behavior.
I'm not convinced any companies, even patent trolls, are truly acting irresponsibly. It's impossible to know if a patent is/isn't valid without going to court. And it's impossible to know if a patent is/isn't being infringed without going to court.
This leads to disagreements between patent holders and potential licensors about just how much should be paid in any licensing agreement, or whether any licensing fees should even be paid at all. To make matters worse, the courts are making stupid decisions all the time.
In my mind, this is a clear situation where we need to blame whoever wrote patent law in the first place for failing to predict the mess they created. And blame more recent government(s) for failing to do anything about it.
But how to solve it? That's the trillion dollar question.
Nope. It's a choice. Apple is choosing to strangle the competition while they have the strong hand.
Which is something the patent system is specifically designed to encourage. The idea is to encourage entities just like Apple to spend billions of dollars researching some new technology, in full confidence they will be able to recover those billions of dollars in future by having a high profit margin on their product.
If someone else has the right to bring the same technology to the market with razor slim profit margins, then nobody will spend billions of dollars researching new technology.
Say what you want about Apple, they *do* spend billions researching new technology. And they should be allowed to recover that money.
Personally I'm not convinced the patent system is a net positive. But calling it an "evil monopoly" is a bit much I think.
In contrast, IBM and Google (generally?) don't pursue patent suits unless they're attacked first. (At least, that's the impression that's been put forth by tech journalism.)
I don't know anything about IBM, but Google seems to run around with their head in the sand until someone slaps them in the face with a patent lawsuit. They were told by their lawyers not to create Dalvik without a licensing agreement with Sun, but they ignored the advice. And now their getting their ass handed to them in court, because Sun/Oracle wants compensation for their inventions, and Google isn't making enough money off Dalvik to pay any reasonable sum.
With a stock firefox that's true.
But throw in a few popular third party extensions, and leave FireFox running for a day or two. It will start consuming all your available RAM and a good chunk of virtual memory too (growing more and more the longer you leave it open).
With other browsers, memory consumption is rarely even noticeable. I can leave safari running for *months* and it'll happily sit on around 200MB with my usual 15 or so tabs. And yes, I do have a bunch of third party extensions installed. Pretty much the same ones I had when I was using FireFox every day.
Perhaps you should try Safari. It defaults more modern zoom-everything behaviour, but has a "zoom text only" setting to bring back what you want.
Anyone who hasn't tried safari for a while (especially on windows) really should give it another try as it's improved a lot. There is a list of small features ten miles long I can't live without, that are only in safari.
PS: Be sure to check out the third party extensions as well.
If you look at the graph, chrome 15 has a bit over 24%, while all other versions of chrome are down around 0.1%.
They are not lumping versions of chrome together.
When it asks you if you want to send diagnostics. Say no.
If you were stupid enough to say yes in the past, you can change it in settings -> general -> about -> diagnostics.
But that doesn't mean Apple has to actively hinder the average user from becoming us.
And what makes you think they're doing that? They still offer all of their developer tools for free, and some of them (automator, dashcode, quartz composer) are very approachable.
I learned to program with things like hypercard, and sure I miss a few things from those days. But we still have learning tools just as good, if not better. They just have different names.
And as for people writing their own programs in HyperCard? I don't care how many people did it, it's a bad idea. Programming should be done by professionals and kids on their way to becoming pro's. It shouldn't be done by your average Jo, they've got better things to do with their time.
Finally, the most compelling characteristic, imho, is definitely the work ethic. It is not uncommon for my colleagues to work 12 hour days (without overtime pay) and still commute 2 hours to and from work.
I wouldn't call that work ethic. I'd just call it sad.
Working a 12 hour day is good work ethic when it's necessary. But it's not healthy. Better to have three employees working 8 hours, than two working 12 hours.
There is no way anyone can think clearly after 10 hours on the job.
When I call up my phone company, I get a computer asking me to tell it what I'm calling about.
There are a handful of issues it can help with over the phone (especially around bill payments), and if your query isn't on the list they pass you on to a call centre.
They are as of iOS 5: your contacts are automatically copied to iCloud, unless you disable iCloud entirely.
Automatically? What are you smoking?
iCloud is off by default, you have to go to all the extra trouble of entering your details and login password and agreeing to additional legal crap and blah blah blah, before you can turn it on. You don't have to pay $100 per year anymore, but it still takes just as much effort as ever to turn it on. Nothing is automatic.
And if you do decide to *manually* turn it on, there are a million tick boxes to customise what is shared, and one of them is "contacts". I wouldn't call that "disabling iCloud entirely".
Then all that's shared with Apple is what apps you use, how long you use them, what calls are made and how long, and where your phone is. The last one being done explicitly for advertising reasons. The first two are for "diagnostic purposes." Read your terms of service, kids!)
They are do not have a list of what apps you use. They only have a list of apps that you buy from their store. Similarly, if you go to the corner store and buy a bottle of milk the guy working there will know that you bought some milk. There are other ways to get apps (without jail breaking) through the developer channel, they aren't very popular but I've got several.
They do not keep track of how long any app is used. Ever. Where did you get that shit from? You say it's in the EULA, why don't you show me where? I haven't read mine but pretty sure I would know about it. You made the claim, now back it up.
They do not keep track of what calls you're made either, or for how long. I'd like to see where you found that info as well. Your carrier does keep track of this, but that's no different than buying milk from the corner store.
And they don't track your location either! Your phone is capable of asking apple what the latitude/longatude/power (range) of a specific phone tower is, and from that they could infer that you are somewhere close to that tower at the time when it asked, but it will never do this without asking you for permission first, and it doesn't ask every time you're within range of the same tower, only if the tower has dropped off the local cache of the tower's location, and the tower lookup is anonymous. See buying milk at the store.
Apple and Microsoft would be worse than Google because Google at least (a) has caught NSLs and (b) published statistics on government data requests.
Government data requests that they usually comply with by the way.
The carrier is an issue when it comes to sharing private info with the government. But I'm more worried about my info being shared with businesses, and for that Android is the worst choice available.
Excuse me?
Not true. Google's business model is collecting users and selling some advertising. They do not sell personal information, and there is no way for advertisers to get access to your anonymised profile.
As someone who works for a marketing company that specialises in setting up small/medium businesses with google's data, a have to beg to disagree. Google sells all kinds of information to advertisers and some of it is very personal and *ABSOLUTELY* identifiable.
Google has makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through our clients and believe me, the best thing about it is they give our clients more/better information about users than just about any other advertising network we know of.
Encryption between you and the phone tower doesn't do shit. You want encryption between you *and the other phone*.
Secondly, A5/1 was designed by people who didn't know what they were doing, and has huge flaws.
Thirdly, A5/1 is a very old cipher designed to run efficiently on extremely low power 50 cent CPU's, and doesn't have anywhere near enough entropy to be secure.
Fourthly... most of the good smartphones have VOIP apps available (including Skype although I wouldn't trust them) which actually do offer end-to-end encryption for your voice calls.
For starters you don't have to jailbreak/root the phone to install an app that isn't Google approved.
Apps don't need to be approved by Apple, the encryption system requires that the *developers* are approved. If you're an iOS developer (and it's dirt cheap compared to the cost of, say, a phone data plan) then you can install any app you want if you have the source code. And you don't have to abide by any rules except mass-distributing your binaries, and the built in security measures in the phone.
I'm surprised there isn't bigger open source community around iOS apps. I've written one or two, but haven't seen any others.
And you can do so with just the phone - you do not need something like iTunes.
You don't need iTunes to install apps on an iPhone, you just need a URL to the app. As long as the app is signed by an approved developer, it will install.
Secondly while rooting will supposedly void your warranty there are apps to do so that are right there on the android market.
It doesn't void your warranty. It just means they will not provide you with tech support of any kind, even if you pay for it (this includes checking if a problem is a software bug - possibly in the jail break code, or a hardware fault). All the jail breaks can be uninstalled in a few seconds, and then they will give you tech support.
But what does any of this have to do with privacy? I would argue the tightly locked down iOS system, where apps cannot read each others files or communicate with each other or communicate with the internet unless they've got a good explanation for why, is a near *perfect* situation from a privacy front.
Does water hydrate the body or not?
Bottled water can, when combined with other circumstances, hydrate your body. It can also kill you in other circumstances (for example, if you drink lots of it while sweating a lot).
Therefore, it is invalid to claim that it will hydrate you, when in reality it will only hydrate you in some situations.
The claim wasn't "when combined with yada yada water will hydrate you", it was just "water will hydrate you". And therefore, it is misleading.
Just because "common sense" says that water will hydrate you doesn't mean common sense is true.
I've been working in IT for 10 years and have never met *anyone* who even works in the tech industry and is black.
Chinese, indian, filipino... worked with all of them. But never anyone black.
Perhaps if there were more working in the tech industry, there would be more entrepreneurs.
Say to why they're so rare? I have no idea.
Asymco, probably one of the best analysts around for Apple, estimates apple's various online stores cost approximately 1.3 billion dollars per year to run. He also estimates they earn a gross income of approximately 1.3 billion dollars.
His net income estimate is somewhere around zero.
Exactly how much tax is collected is a perfectly valid topic to discuss. But a successful nation needs to collect some kind of tax, and the tax being collected needs to be fair.
Making a local business charge tax while their competitors on the other side of the country (or planet) don't charge tax is damaging to the local economy.
Not all sales involve a product which needs to be shipped to your door.
The way it works here in Australia is any time a business sells anything to to a customer, they are required to provide an invoice stating how much tax was collected. If they do not provide an invoice, or if they collect the wrong amount of tax, or if they try to pretend they are not a business when they really are, they will be sent off to prison.
It's simple, it works, and it's fair.
I'm not sure if this bill is the answer, but it's about time you guys fixed this issue over on your side of the pond. It's just plain stupid that some businesses collect sales tax, while other businesses don't.
All businesses should be paying the exact same tax, under the same laws. Anything else is extremely unfair.
In this case has management with golden parachutes been paid off to bankrupt Qantas. Whilst there was an industrial dispute, there was no actual industrial action going on
Bullshit. Strikes have cancelled 500 flights, or 88,000 seats, in the last handful of weeks, and there's no sign of the industrial action stopping.
Assuming the _entire_ work force wanted the increase, $68m/30,000/40(hours in a week)/52(weeks in a year)=$1.09 increase per worker per hour
If the increases were going to bankrupt the company, qantas should be looking pretty bankrupt about now.
You're spreading the $68 million over a whole year? That is only one month of losses, and the unions are threatening to continue that action on into the next year.
But worse than the money lost, flights have been cancelled. One of the most premium airlines in the world, praised by business and high income customers, cannot afford to cancel flights regularly.
Either the industrial action needs to end, or quantas needs to shut down entirely, and focus on jetstar.
I'll mention two "wrong" items I spotted:
Light memory usage (1 tab):
firefox: 438MB
chrome: 134MB
conclusion page: "strong" for firefox and "acceptable" for chrome
memory management (after closing 40 tabs):
* firefox: 438MB immediately after, 161MB five minutes later
* chrome: 134MB immediately after, 94MB five minutes later
conclusion page: "winner" for firefox, and "strong" for chrome.
WTF?!