Apple calls these sorts of things "firmware updates" (yes that is a generic name). Things like this are included, as are things like updates for ethernet chipsets, firewire routers (there are 3 on the MacPro), and even rarely firmware for the GPU. Additionally there are sometimes "SMC" updates for the part of the computer that manages power and sleep behavior.
It is not "double dipping". A simplified view is that the U.S. requires that a company pay the higher of U.S. taxes or foreign taxes on foreign earnings, where the foreign country gets first crack. So only in cases where the company would pay less in foreign taxes than in U.S. taxes do the companies have to pay the U.S. the DIFFERENCE in what would have been owed. There are lots of details that wind up complicating this, but almost always in the direction of lowering what the U.S. gets. So a company is not double taxed, it is only taxed at a single rate, but that pool of money goes to two tax entities (countries). But U.S. law currently only makes those taxed due when the money is "repatriated", or brought to the U.S..
Second point: U.S. companies doing business abroad benefit hugely from being a U.S. company. In the case in point, Apple can only be profitable in China because of all the work the U.S. State department does to persuade China to respect the intellectual property that Apple has claimed in the U.S..
Third point: much of the overseas profit that we are talking about is in the form of licensing fees. In the case in point Apple has taken many of the patents that were invented and filed in the U.S. and moved their licensing functions to a holding company in the Netherlands. Apple then has its other arms pay this Dutch holding company for the rights to use those inventions in its products (so one hand of Apple is paying the other). It is hard to argue that this licensing money should ever go to the Netherlands... all of the work for it was done in the U.S., and it is only an accounting method that makes it otherwise.
Your comment has a basic factual problem: the tax code is about 2600 pages long. Lots of people have been getting this wrong, and reporting the length of the document that tax lawyers use to interpret the law ("CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter"). That document includes lots of case law, history, and legal reasoning, but can not really be called the "tax code".
The wife pledged allegiance moments before entering the building to start shooting, and the "acceptance" of that was much after her death. Of couch ISIL accepted it: it fed their ego. Much more important and to the point: so far there is no evidence that ISIL had any awareness that this was going to happen, let alone did anything material to make ti happen.
So this pair were not members of any organized group in any way that mattered. They went off the rails themselves.
While there are certainly some countries that have guaranteed maternity leave, and are struggling, there does not seem to be any correlation between the two:
- Germany has 14 weeks at 100%, and 156 weeks at 67% to be shared between the parents, a 4.5% unemployment rate, and is considered to be doing far better economically that the USA.
- Norway has more than 35 weeks at at least 80%, a 4.1% unemployment rate, and is doing ok.
- Even dipping into less-well-off countries it is hard to find what you are talking about: Brazil has an unemployment rate of 7.9% and 17 weeks at 100%.
Germany was a ringer, but I chose the other two at random, looking for countries that could be having problems here. But given that the U.S. is nearly alone in the developed world for countries that do not have guaranteed maternity benefits, it is hard to find meaningful evidence for your point.
I hate it when people try to use their ideology as a substitute for facts.
That question is nearly un-answerable. TIFF isn't a concrete format like PNG or JPEG, rather it is a more meta-format that can contain tiled chunks of other formats. Even that isn't quite a good description as is over-generalizes. But it does capture the basic essence. TIFF is frighteningly complex, with lots of corner cases, and in most cases is only appropriate for very large images (for the tiling), or special cases such as scientific/biological data where the raw data is embedded in the "image".
Since the majority (by a good lead) of homicides in the U.S. are by gun it is a good figure. Additionally it is a much fairer comparison because the argument immediately after that is that if a gun is not available then they will use something else.
So rather than leave us to "work out the flaws in that argument", I invite you to find any.
The U.S. military tends to be very deliberate about their policies, and often data-driven. This is why there are strict rules about how many hours a pilot is allowed to fly before needing "bunk time", rules that are generally more strictly enforced in wartime. They found that having sleepy pilots meant they lost them, and it was a net negative, so they changed that. They also have similar rules for doctors: again it was found that having a sleepy doctor was a bigger net negative than having a doctor for more hours.
The rules about only MP's generally having a weapon on-base are probably because they found that fewer solders died that way. Given the drinking culture that I have occasionally seen in enlisted groups, that makes a lot of sense to me.
You are going to have to provide some evidence that "the left" has moved farther to the left. Most of the policies currently being advocated by the mainstream Democratic candidates are similar to ones advocated by President Regan: - first act on being Governor of California was to raise taxes to cover a budget shortfall, mostly on businesses and the wealthiest - raised the federal top-level taxes eleven times while in office... to about where current Democrats want them - increased the absolute size of government (Clinton then shrank this to about what we have now), size relative to population has been falling for a long time.
So there is good evidence that "the right" has moved much further right, and some evidence that so has the left. There is little evidence that either has moved to the left. Even the Affordable Care Act was a much more right-leaning approach to healthcare reform than what the Clintons were trying to achieve current the Bill Clinton presidency.
While you are correct that not all employees get healthcare benefits (what is usually referred to as "benefits"), all employees get some benefits, which contractors do not. For example: social security contributions (which raise your rate in retirement), workers-comp insurance, and unemployment insurance. All of these things cost employers money, but the law assumes contractors will pay for themselves.
This is what Uber has been fighting so hard to avoid paying.
Google recruiting is just that disorganized. I too got to the in-person interview stage, but did not make it though for that position. Then about a week later, ironically while I was sitting in a conference session next to several of the Google employees who interviewed me, I got an email from a Google recruiter who was trying to recruit me for that exact same position.
Note that this was an internal Google recruiter, not a "bounty hunter". They really are that disorganized.
And if her interviews went anything like mine, the in-person has MUCH higher standards than the phone screen, and does not necessarily have much bearing on the job I was being interviewed for (three interviewers asked me repeated questions about how hard links are implemented in on-disk filesystem structures for a Mac Sysadmin position).
If you are right, then why can't/won't Uber compete legally with medalioned taxi companies? Why do they have to pretend that the rules don't apply to them to undercut existing taxies? I completely agree that the taxi market was slow to adapt to apps, and that created a market open for a system like Uber, but the way they have "disrupted" the market by ignoring the existing laws rather than trying to work inside them is simply disgraceful.
How is that more or less complicated from children produced form extra-marital affairs? The courts have long histories of deciding this class of problem.
An Islamic country where others are free to practice their religions, that is easy: Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco immediately come to mind, as well as Malaysia. Really most Islamic nations have large, well-established, minority religions who have been practicing freely within their boarders.
And you will have to prove that Islam has "destroyed civilizations it has infiltrated", since all of those places have had functioning societies for the last 1600 years. If you mean that invaders have taken political control and influenced the culture, well then I think you are a little confused about what "invading" means. If that is the case then you will have to look at what the U.S. has done to places like Japan (we decided they would be a democracy... then put the people we wanted in power).
And Islam is no more or less violent or peaceful than Christianity. After all, the Christian Bible has the example of God commanding the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites, then punished them when they failed to kill all of the women, children, and babies. You really can't get more violent than that.
It is not actually necessary to have/believe in a creator in order to have a concept of right and wrong. There are many places without a concept of a judgement at death that have well developed (and followed) moral systems.
And oddly for your point you seem to be the one that is making the "might makes right" argument in the idea that there needs to be an enforcer for most people to do right.
The problem is that it is really easy to move "profit" from one place to another. A common ploy is to have one part of a company that is in a low-tax area to charge other parts of the company "licensing fees". In some cases this "licensing fee" means that the other parts of the company now make no profits.
If you try to tax revenues rather than profits, then you wind up really hurting (true) low-margin companies, and wind up under-charging (relatively) high-margin ones.
The best proposal I have seen yet is to tax companies on a percentage of the global profits based on the percentage of revenue earned in that tax district. However this would be really difficult to enforce in a reasonable way because 1) How do you audit all of the books in all of the countries to make sure they are not just hiding things? 2) It is still difficult to define profits, especially when you have multiple countries laws to deal with. 3) There is a major possible loophole in just moving all of the profits from one company to another using the same "licensing fee" trick, and having the licensing company have a presence only in a tax haven country.
I would say that the defense spending one is a bit misleading, since a lot of basic science winds up under the Defense Department part of it. Friends of mine were researchers working on a particular parasite that primarily lived in snails. Because some of the neurological pathways involved in what the parasite did to the snails were congruent to those in humans they managed to get funding under the Defense Department banner. I am not sure that any weapon would ever be able come out if this (unless there was a snail invasion), but it was in that category anyways.
And you are really wrong about almost everything in this post. You would not like trying to run iOS apps and trying to mimic their gestures on MacOS with a mouse. And there are very few people who are holding onto old hardware because of older data. You are very much in the minority, and Apple's quarterly statements prove you wrong.
[1] Linking up with legacy hardware is far more common and difficult in my experience. I have seen old hardware from vendors that have gone out of business that is no longer supportable on modern hardware (Windows and MacOS). For researchers trying to re-do older experiments this can be very annoying.
Do you have a source for that? The only things I can find in this area:
1) In 1995 they "re-centered" the test because scores were starting to slip. 2) In 2005 the Math section was made marginally harder to reduce the number of perfect scores. They also changed the verbal section to remove analogies. 3) In 2016 they will remove the more obscure vocabulary words to focus on more commonly used words. 4) MENSA will no longer take scores from the SAT after January of 1994 as criteria for admission.
None of this speaks to a steadily rising difficulty. And with one exception seems to indicate a little bit of the opposite.
As others have already said, the original question is really vague since there is little information about what corner of IT work will be done. But since it is at a college, there is a good chance that it will fall under the area that SIGUCCS conference tries to cover.
I went and presented 5 or 6 years ago and found it to be an OK conference. I did not get a lot out of it from the technical presentations, but it is a really good place to get an idea of what your peers are doing, and the "hallway track" is really good.
My read of this is that they applied as a charity, but the IRS's definition of a charity requires that you be serving a distinct, disadvantaged group of people. A quick look at the software that Yorba produces (http://yorba.org), does not lead me to believe that their software would particularly benefit any specific disadvantaged groups more than other people.
So by the rules that the IRS is working on, it does appear that they do not qualify as a charity. And to be honest, this is a correct definition, they are not running a charity. Now there is a valid question about whether there should be a method for them to run a non-profit without being taxes, but they are not a charity.
If you are wiling to go refub, then Apple has just the thing for you, last year's 13inch MacBookAir starting at $779, or this year's starting at $20 more:
The “within a few seconds of each other” shows that you have not really paid attention here. The problem is that if you are trying to place a single composite order on multiple markets. Unless you time your partial orders to arrive at their respective markets within 10 milliseconds or so, you will find that someone has magicallly swooped in to the markets that got your orders 20 miliseconds later than the others and bought what you were trying to buy and is now offering them for marginally more.
The way that they are doing this is by watching for your orders and predicting that you will go to other markets as well, and then having faster network routes than you can have to all of the markets. While this might not be illegal, it is copletely unfair. And more imporantly this means that people are making money from the markets (sucking money out) without providing anything like a benifit to the market as a whole.
1) There is the nearly-stated assertion that teen pregnecy is on the rise. That is completly wrong, and tenn pregency in the US has been dropping for more than 20 years: http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/images/teenbirthsgraph2011.png
I don’t know of anywhere where teen pregnency has been glorified. So since you are wrong on the basic fact I am going to have to call your second assertion there false as well.
2) “Pro-Life is not about the life of hte baby”. You are correct that a fertilized cell is alive and the DNA is human, but the same can be said about the while blood cells in the vial of blood that gets drawn for testing. So that can’t possibly be the test to meet. The real argument here is at what point from fetalized cell to birth does that become worthy of the protections of being a “person”. And there is no clear test for that. The "ends a beating heart” type slogans sound great, but don’t have much actual content in them.
Thank you for being clear about your belifs and views. I happen to disagree with you about a feterilized egg being deserving of the protections of a full person, but this is a clear disagreement rather than the messy one that most abortion debates fall into because both sides can’t recognize the true differences of opinion.
But I do have one quibble: it is not ‘life’ that is at debate here, it is personhood. After all, a tomato has ‘life’ but we don’t usually call the creation or eating of a BLT ‘murder’.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple calls these sorts of things "firmware updates" (yes that is a generic name). Things like this are included, as are things like updates for ethernet chipsets, firewire routers (there are 3 on the MacPro), and even rarely firmware for the GPU. Additionally there are sometimes "SMC" updates for the part of the computer that manages power and sleep behavior.
It is not "double dipping". A simplified view is that the U.S. requires that a company pay the higher of U.S. taxes or foreign taxes on foreign earnings, where the foreign country gets first crack. So only in cases where the company would pay less in foreign taxes than in U.S. taxes do the companies have to pay the U.S. the DIFFERENCE in what would have been owed. There are lots of details that wind up complicating this, but almost always in the direction of lowering what the U.S. gets. So a company is not double taxed, it is only taxed at a single rate, but that pool of money goes to two tax entities (countries). But U.S. law currently only makes those taxed due when the money is "repatriated", or brought to the U.S..
Second point: U.S. companies doing business abroad benefit hugely from being a U.S. company. In the case in point, Apple can only be profitable in China because of all the work the U.S. State department does to persuade China to respect the intellectual property that Apple has claimed in the U.S..
Third point: much of the overseas profit that we are talking about is in the form of licensing fees. In the case in point Apple has taken many of the patents that were invented and filed in the U.S. and moved their licensing functions to a holding company in the Netherlands. Apple then has its other arms pay this Dutch holding company for the rights to use those inventions in its products (so one hand of Apple is paying the other). It is hard to argue that this licensing money should ever go to the Netherlands... all of the work for it was done in the U.S., and it is only an accounting method that makes it otherwise.
Your comment has a basic factual problem: the tax code is about 2600 pages long. Lots of people have been getting this wrong, and reporting the length of the document that tax lawyers use to interpret the law ("CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter"). That document includes lots of case law, history, and legal reasoning, but can not really be called the "tax code".
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/04/how_long_is_the_tax_code_it_is_far_shorter_than_70_000_pages.html
The wife pledged allegiance moments before entering the building to start shooting, and the "acceptance" of that was much after her death. Of couch ISIL accepted it: it fed their ego. Much more important and to the point: so far there is no evidence that ISIL had any awareness that this was going to happen, let alone did anything material to make ti happen.
So this pair were not members of any organized group in any way that mattered. They went off the rails themselves.
While there are certainly some countries that have guaranteed maternity leave, and are struggling, there does not seem to be any correlation between the two:
- Germany has 14 weeks at 100%, and 156 weeks at 67% to be shared between the parents, a 4.5% unemployment rate, and is considered to be doing far better economically that the USA.
- Norway has more than 35 weeks at at least 80%, a 4.1% unemployment rate, and is doing ok.
- Even dipping into less-well-off countries it is hard to find what you are talking about: Brazil has an unemployment rate of 7.9% and 17 weeks at 100%.
Germany was a ringer, but I chose the other two at random, looking for countries that could be having problems here. But given that the U.S. is nearly alone in the developed world for countries that do not have guaranteed maternity benefits, it is hard to find meaningful evidence for your point.
I hate it when people try to use their ideology as a substitute for facts.
That question is nearly un-answerable. TIFF isn't a concrete format like PNG or JPEG, rather it is a more meta-format that can contain tiled chunks of other formats. Even that isn't quite a good description as is over-generalizes. But it does capture the basic essence. TIFF is frighteningly complex, with lots of corner cases, and in most cases is only appropriate for very large images (for the tiling), or special cases such as scientific/biological data where the raw data is embedded in the "image".
Since the majority (by a good lead) of homicides in the U.S. are by gun it is a good figure. Additionally it is a much fairer comparison because the argument immediately after that is that if a gun is not available then they will use something else.
So rather than leave us to "work out the flaws in that argument", I invite you to find any.
The U.S. military tends to be very deliberate about their policies, and often data-driven. This is why there are strict rules about how many hours a pilot is allowed to fly before needing "bunk time", rules that are generally more strictly enforced in wartime. They found that having sleepy pilots meant they lost them, and it was a net negative, so they changed that. They also have similar rules for doctors: again it was found that having a sleepy doctor was a bigger net negative than having a doctor for more hours.
The rules about only MP's generally having a weapon on-base are probably because they found that fewer solders died that way. Given the drinking culture that I have occasionally seen in enlisted groups, that makes a lot of sense to me.
You are going to have to provide some evidence that "the left" has moved farther to the left. Most of the policies currently being advocated by the mainstream Democratic candidates are similar to ones advocated by President Regan:
- first act on being Governor of California was to raise taxes to cover a budget shortfall, mostly on businesses and the wealthiest
- raised the federal top-level taxes eleven times while in office... to about where current Democrats want them
- increased the absolute size of government (Clinton then shrank this to about what we have now), size relative to population has been falling for a long time.
So there is good evidence that "the right" has moved much further right, and some evidence that so has the left. There is little evidence that either has moved to the left. Even the Affordable Care Act was a much more right-leaning approach to healthcare reform than what the Clintons were trying to achieve current the Bill Clinton presidency.
While you are correct that not all employees get healthcare benefits (what is usually referred to as "benefits"), all employees get some benefits, which contractors do not. For example: social security contributions (which raise your rate in retirement), workers-comp insurance, and unemployment insurance. All of these things cost employers money, but the law assumes contractors will pay for themselves.
This is what Uber has been fighting so hard to avoid paying.
Google recruiting is just that disorganized. I too got to the in-person interview stage, but did not make it though for that position. Then about a week later, ironically while I was sitting in a conference session next to several of the Google employees who interviewed me, I got an email from a Google recruiter who was trying to recruit me for that exact same position.
Note that this was an internal Google recruiter, not a "bounty hunter". They really are that disorganized.
And if her interviews went anything like mine, the in-person has MUCH higher standards than the phone screen, and does not necessarily have much bearing on the job I was being interviewed for (three interviewers asked me repeated questions about how hard links are implemented in on-disk filesystem structures for a Mac Sysadmin position).
If you are right, then why can't/won't Uber compete legally with medalioned taxi companies? Why do they have to pretend that the rules don't apply to them to undercut existing taxies? I completely agree that the taxi market was slow to adapt to apps, and that created a market open for a system like Uber, but the way they have "disrupted" the market by ignoring the existing laws rather than trying to work inside them is simply disgraceful.
How is that more or less complicated from children produced form extra-marital affairs? The courts have long histories of deciding this class of problem.
An Islamic country where others are free to practice their religions, that is easy: Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco immediately come to mind, as well as Malaysia. Really most Islamic nations have large, well-established, minority religions who have been practicing freely within their boarders.
And you will have to prove that Islam has "destroyed civilizations it has infiltrated", since all of those places have had functioning societies for the last 1600 years. If you mean that invaders have taken political control and influenced the culture, well then I think you are a little confused about what "invading" means. If that is the case then you will have to look at what the U.S. has done to places like Japan (we decided they would be a democracy... then put the people we wanted in power).
And Islam is no more or less violent or peaceful than Christianity. After all, the Christian Bible has the example of God commanding the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites, then punished them when they failed to kill all of the women, children, and babies. You really can't get more violent than that.
It is not actually necessary to have/believe in a creator in order to have a concept of right and wrong. There are many places without a concept of a judgement at death that have well developed (and followed) moral systems.
And oddly for your point you seem to be the one that is making the "might makes right" argument in the idea that there needs to be an enforcer for most people to do right.
The problem is that it is really easy to move "profit" from one place to another. A common ploy is to have one part of a company that is in a low-tax area to charge other parts of the company "licensing fees". In some cases this "licensing fee" means that the other parts of the company now make no profits.
If you try to tax revenues rather than profits, then you wind up really hurting (true) low-margin companies, and wind up under-charging (relatively) high-margin ones.
The best proposal I have seen yet is to tax companies on a percentage of the global profits based on the percentage of revenue earned in that tax district. However this would be really difficult to enforce in a reasonable way because 1) How do you audit all of the books in all of the countries to make sure they are not just hiding things? 2) It is still difficult to define profits, especially when you have multiple countries laws to deal with. 3) There is a major possible loophole in just moving all of the profits from one company to another using the same "licensing fee" trick, and having the licensing company have a presence only in a tax haven country.
I would say that the defense spending one is a bit misleading, since a lot of basic science winds up under the Defense Department part of it. Friends of mine were researchers working on a particular parasite that primarily lived in snails. Because some of the neurological pathways involved in what the parasite did to the snails were congruent to those in humans they managed to get funding under the Defense Department banner. I am not sure that any weapon would ever be able come out if this (unless there was a snail invasion), but it was in that category anyways.
If you really need that legay support for software [1], then there are some solutions out there already, like Chubby Bunny:
http://www.macwindows.com/Emulator-for-Mac-OS-9-in-OS-X-updated-for-Mountain-Lion.html
And you are really wrong about almost everything in this post. You would not like trying to run iOS apps and trying to mimic their gestures on MacOS with a mouse. And there are very few people who are holding onto old hardware because of older data. You are very much in the minority, and Apple's quarterly statements prove you wrong.
[1] Linking up with legacy hardware is far more common and difficult in my experience. I have seen old hardware from vendors that have gone out of business that is no longer supportable on modern hardware (Windows and MacOS). For researchers trying to re-do older experiments this can be very annoying.
Do you have a source for that? The only things I can find in this area:
1) In 1995 they "re-centered" the test because scores were starting to slip.
2) In 2005 the Math section was made marginally harder to reduce the number of perfect scores. They also changed the verbal section to remove analogies.
3) In 2016 they will remove the more obscure vocabulary words to focus on more commonly used words.
4) MENSA will no longer take scores from the SAT after January of 1994 as criteria for admission.
None of this speaks to a steadily rising difficulty. And with one exception seems to indicate a little bit of the opposite.
As others have already said, the original question is really vague since there is little information about what corner of IT work will be done. But since it is at a college, there is a good chance that it will fall under the area that SIGUCCS conference tries to cover.
http://www.siguccs.org/Conference/2014/about.shtml
I went and presented 5 or 6 years ago and found it to be an OK conference. I did not get a lot out of it from the technical presentations, but it is a really good place to get an idea of what your peers are doing, and the "hallway track" is really good.
My read of this is that they applied as a charity, but the IRS's definition of a charity requires that you be serving a distinct, disadvantaged group of people. A quick look at the software that Yorba produces (http://yorba.org), does not lead me to believe that their software would particularly benefit any specific disadvantaged groups more than other people.
So by the rules that the IRS is working on, it does appear that they do not qualify as a charity. And to be honest, this is a correct definition, they are not running a charity. Now there is a valid question about whether there should be a method for them to run a non-profit without being taxes, but they are not a charity.
If you are wiling to go refub, then Apple has just the thing for you, last year's 13inch MacBookAir starting at $779, or this year's starting at $20 more:
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_air/13
The “within a few seconds of each other” shows that you have not really paid attention here. The problem is that if you are trying to place a single composite order on multiple markets. Unless you time your partial orders to arrive at their respective markets within 10 milliseconds or so, you will find that someone has magicallly swooped in to the markets that got your orders 20 miliseconds later than the others and bought what you were trying to buy and is now offering them for marginally more.
The way that they are doing this is by watching for your orders and predicting that you will go to other markets as well, and then having faster network routes than you can have to all of the markets. While this might not be illegal, it is copletely unfair. And more imporantly this means that people are making money from the markets (sucking money out) without providing anything like a benifit to the market as a whole.
1) There is the nearly-stated assertion that teen pregnecy is on the rise. That is completly wrong, and tenn pregency in the US has been dropping for more than 20 years: http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/images/teenbirthsgraph2011.png
I don’t know of anywhere where teen pregnency has been glorified. So since you are wrong on the basic fact I am going to have to call your second assertion there false as well.
2) “Pro-Life is not about the life of hte baby”. You are correct that a fertilized cell is alive and the DNA is human, but the same can be said about the while blood cells in the vial of blood that gets drawn for testing. So that can’t possibly be the test to meet. The real argument here is at what point from fetalized cell to birth does that become worthy of the protections of being a “person”. And there is no clear test for that. The "ends a beating heart” type slogans sound great, but don’t have much actual content in them.
Thank you for being clear about your belifs and views. I happen to disagree with you about a feterilized egg being deserving of the protections of a full person, but this is a clear disagreement rather than the messy one that most abortion debates fall into because both sides can’t recognize the true differences of opinion.
But I do have one quibble: it is not ‘life’ that is at debate here, it is personhood. After all, a tomato has ‘life’ but we don’t usually call the creation or eating of a BLT ‘murder’.