Well, the point is that you fill an application and get the permit to raise funds. All kinds of non-profit organizations get them all the time. If wikipedia had done that the Finnish police would be quite happy. The problem is that Wikimedia is registered in California and they obviously do not care about Finnish law and I have no idea of how the police think they can force a US organization to comply with the rules if all the servers and staff are outside Finland.
"Forcing" may be a problem, but generally the principle is that a possibly illegal action "happens" where it takes effect, so if people in Finland read the donation requests, then the Finnish police has the right and duty to act on it.
So worst case, the Finnish police could ask Finnish ISPs to prevent access to a website that breaks the law in Finland.
The problem with blaming the registrar is that the registrar has no power to stop the infringement. The registrar does not control the server that distributes the infringing material. All the registrar can do is deactivate the domain name, but people who want access to the infringing material can still link directly to the IP address of the server.
That's if there is a fixed IP address. And most people don't know the IP address. And anyway, it would be the domain registrar's job to do their bit. Next you can go to the ISP and ask for the account to be closed down, and the IP address is gone.
I used to handled DMCA requests for an ISP. They are awful. There is no real way to verify the person complaining is who they say they are, much less that they own the content. What if the complaint came from Robin Thicke himself? Does he own his own songs? Or does his record company? Micheal Jackson owned the Beatles albums... and how do you know this is really him? All you got was an email...
You don't have to verify any of these. You verify that all the required information is there (otherwise you throw the request away), remove the content, and pass all the info you've got on to the person whose content was removed. If the information is false, that's perjury. To be precise, if the person making the DMCA request doesn't hold the copyright or acts for the copyright holder of the content that they claim is there, that's perjury. It's up to the person whose content was removed to investigate this.
- Some troublemaker files a false complaint to my registrar who, afraid of liability, immediately kills my domain and takes down not just web but email too.
- Some troublemaker files a false complain to whoever sold microsoft.com and their complaint is forwarded to the trashcan.
If you are damaged by a false complaint, you sue the troublemaker for damages. And the judgment we are talking about was about a case where there was "clear and obvious" infringement. I suppose it means that if the registrar had bothered to visit the website, they would have seen clear and obvious infringement with their own eyes.
Don't know who well it works, but there was a demo by Apple's iOS developers where they combine GPS and WiFi. In towns with large buildings and awful GPS reception you will usually have tons of WiFi signals around, so at least in principle it should be possible to improve navigation using both.
There was a discussion a while ago, where Phil Schiller was attacked because he said that of the companies making PCs when the Macintosh project was started, none were selling PCs anymore except Apple. Sony was given as a counter-example (although Sony only sold to the Japanese market at the relevant time, and stopped selling PCs for a while in the 90's), but now they are exiting anyway.
News flash, it's expensive to die, no matter the reason. Smokers aren't adding to that bill any more than you are. Not a smoker.
I can tell you most definitely that dying is a very cheap affair. Digging a grave and putting you inside a coffin costs a lot less than keeping you in hospital for a week.
Take out the carbs, and life is much better. Less sugar means your insulin doesn't kick in and store everything to your tissues. This takes place in London, Bath, Stokes, Leicester, Wales, wherever. It's how we're put together. Depression causes people to carb-load. That's a personal problem, not a regional one. Carb loading to increase serotinine is a well-honoured pass-time.
For the last thirty years, people have been hammered with messages to avoid fat. Coke is full of sugar and fat free. Companies put sugar into food when they remove fat, because removing fat without replacing it with sugar makes things taste bad and people don't buy them. So for the last thirty years people have been stuffing themselves with carbohydrates, making them fat and diabetic. And the more you try to avoid fat, the worse it gets.
And then they start dieting. Those with plenty of will power are the unlucky ones: They actually lose lots of weight. The body thinks it's starving. And all the weight comes back, with some more, because all the will power in the world cannot overcome a starving body in the long run.
The best advice: Ignore all the advice that tells you to avoid fat. _Do_ avoid sugar and other carbohydrates. Do _not_ try to lose weight. Ignore your weight, because being obsessed with your weight will make you unhappy which bad in itself, but will make you eat more as well.
And, if someone calls you "fatty", hit them in the face as hard as you can, knock them out, and kick the shit out of them when they are on the ground.
That's the part that's always bugged me. The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees (that's not even counting more costs if you sell through a brick and mortar store). If you double sales, all of the overhead doubles. Ebooks have almost negligible costs to do all that - which gets even closer to zero if you share resources (e.g sell through Amazon).
You have been modded as "insightful" while being totally wrong. Printing and distributing books is dead cheap compared to the actual worked involved in creating the content, marketing, and so on.
The point is Amazon can delete books you purchased from devices you own, for whatever reason, without your consent. That you think the deletion in this case was justified does not make people more trusting of this Orwellian ability to make publications disappear.
Apple can do the same thing. In a similar situation they didn't delete any books from users' devices but paid a fine of over $100,000 to the copyright owners. (Some poster here used that in an FSF vs. Apple thread to make claims how evil Apple is, by allowing itself being tricked by criminals, and then facing the cost instead of making the customers pay).
I'd expect them to delete software from my device if they reasonably know that the software will hurt _me_.
This isn't about expats living/earning wages overseas, it's about Americans using overseas bank accounts to hide income that they earned in the US, in order to avoid paying taxes on that.
It's causing a lot of upset here in Canada, too, because of our privacy laws, and because the Americans are refusing to give us a reciprocal agreement for Canadians in the US. (on the grounds that they don't enforce foreign laws).
In one country where I know how the tax office does it, if they can't get the numbers from you then they estimate. If they can't get the numbers from you in the next year, then obviously the estimate was too low so they estimate a lot higher. On the other hand, they don't tax foreign income. They only add it into the equation for calculating the tax rate for your local income.
If you want to renounce the obligations of citizenship, you must also renounce the benefits of citizenship and officially naturalize as a citizen of another country. Seems fair to me.
Most countries distinguish clearly between being a citizen and a resident. And usually the only thing you can't do as a non-citizen resident is voting or standing in general elections, or sometimes things like joining the army or police force. Everything else, there should be little difference.
It seems that the USA has this weird interpretation that US citizens should have all the legal obligations that US residents should have, even if they are not US residents anymore, including obligations that US residents that are not citizens.
He's been hired as a fall-guy. The respected developer realized his project was failing and bought himself a sap, a contractor that he can now blame for his screw-up.
That could be. On the other hand, contractors are usually paid more per hour, so that's just part of the job. Rumour is that a very big and expensive department job in London employs a guy whose sole job is to be fired. Every time a customer spending lots of money gets annoyed and wants to see someone fired, he will be publicly berated, fired, leaves his desk, and comes back when that customer has left the store.
There are some head hunting agencies that are positively predatory. One that I recall insisted that job seekers sign a contract that stated that the employer will pay the agency 1/3 of the new employee's first year of pay, and that if the employer fails to pay this money, then the employee is on the hook for it! I had visions of this being turned into a little scam. Get hired by an employer in cahoots with the agency and who never intended to keep you but instead plans to come up with an excuse to fire you in 91 days. Earn 3 months of pay, owe 4 months of pay. Profit!
Interestingly, that is according to Apple's reports one of the things they are quite successfully fighting in China, with the results that employees have been paid back several million dollars in agency fees. Maybe they should do that in the USA as well?
Didn't Apple Computer, Inc only start making PCs in 2006? Before that they were making PowerPC based computers and prior to 1995 Motorola based computers.
And how were these PowerPC and 680x0 based computers not PCs?
There is really some desperation going on here. Imagine Apple made a list of "serious competitors" when the Mac was released. And they made one now. Well, you would really hope they made such a list; not doing it would have been irresponsible. Acer wouldn't have been on the list, a company that later changed it's name to Acer might have been. Dell wouldn't have been on the list. HP built computers, but the HP 150 was an overpriced toy compared to the Macintosh, and HP 3000 etc. were not "desktop computers" but "desk computers". Compaq was swallowed up by HP. "Sony produced computers (MSX home computers and NEWS workstations) during the 1980s, exclusively for sale in the Japanese market. The company withdrew from the computer business around 1990." So yes, Sony wasn't "around" where the Mac was introduced.
So if we count companies that from 1984 to 2014 consistently sold desktop and laptop computers (not workstations) under the same recognisable name and possibly ignore companies which promised they were leaving the market (HP, I'm looking at you), and were important enough both in 1984 and 2014 to be recognised as a player in the market, then Apple may very well be the only one. (The last because it is quite possible there is some mom-and-pop shop open somewhere that has been selling home-made PCs for 30 years).
The XBOX 350 had sold about 80m units worldwide last year, compared to about 13m for the Apple TV. The only reason the Apple TV is now selling more is because the 360 has reached saturation point.
Your writing is misleading - Xbox 360 sold maybe 80 million units up to and including last year, not last year. Big difference. And of course Apple TV is just at the beginning. But right now they are selling more than Xbox 360 every quarter, and have done for two years, and still increasing.
Show me Apple's profits in personal computers please. Prior ot the iPod and later iPhone the company was on death's door because they could not stay afloat selling Mac's.
The latest estimate that I found, before Dell's profits dropped, was that Apple makes about 45% of all profits in the PC hardware market, Dell makes about 13%, and I think Lenovo came next with about 7%. That's purely PC hardware, not counting tablets, and not counting operating systems.
Yeah, they didn't make a success of the Apple TV, so its not like everything they touch magically becomes popular. They had their failures in the past.
Apple TV outsells for example Xbox 360 for the last two years, Wii U, and probably a lot of other devices that you think are very successful.
Absolutly wrong. Most of people will manage to go through their lives without touching a command prompt. But most first world people would save a lot of hours just with minimal programing abilities (shell level).
Most of these people would manage to create a major support case once they learn about the "sudo" command. Problem with shell programming is that you reach the level where you are dangerous before you reach the level where you can do useful things.
...but back in the day they spent a lot of time designing the Mac to be 'hacker proof' with an un-openable case and arcane tools to program it.
The case was easily openable if you had a five inch torx screwdriver and knew where the fifth screw was hidden. The reason why it was designed so that dad wouldn't have the right tool in his toolbox had nothing to do with "hacker-proofing". It had to do with a CRT tube inside that case, which held an extremly nasty voltage for days after the Mac was unplugged.
This is getting common enough that some companies are starting to complain, though. If a few people do it occasionally it's no big deal, but if 500 employees are each receiving multiple packages a week, it starts becoming a significant added burden on the corporate mailroom.
The relationship between company and employees, at first approximation, is that employees come to work, and the company pays them money. In a better approximation, employees do useful work to advance the purposes of the company, while the company does things to keep employees happy. Adding a person to the mailroom is a cheap way to make 500 employees a lot happier, so they will work for you instead of someone else if everything else is equal.
Ok, let's assume in this wondrous future, you are being driven (can't exactly call it driving if you're not in control) on some country roads and you encounter a very large bull standing in the middle of the road. Your car recognizes that there is an obstruction, stops and waits patiently for the road to clear. The bull waits patiently for the car to go away. Unless they've come up with automated cattle in the future you've got a problem. Since the car has no horn, you (the passenger) have to figure out a way to get the bull to clear the road. You try waving your arms. The bull ignores you. You yell at it, fueled by you annoyance. It calmly looks at the source of the noise and goes nowhere. The car finally figures out the obstruction is permanent, executes a perfect u-turn and runs out of gas because it didn't include having to backtrack when it calculated your course.
You honk. Bull gets annoyed and tries who is stronger. Fortunately the manufacturer foresaw the possibility that your car needs to revers faster than a bull can run:-)
I've never driven on a road where my standalone GPS couldn't get a signal -- even within cities and driving in forested areas. I've had it take a while to get a lock in cities, but once the GPS gets a lock, it's always been able to maintain it.
Come to London. TomTom in some areas in Central London is an absolute pain.
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Well, the point is that you fill an application and get the permit to raise funds. All kinds of non-profit organizations get them all the time. If wikipedia had done that the Finnish police would be quite happy. The problem is that Wikimedia is registered in California and they obviously do not care about Finnish law and I have no idea of how the police think they can force a US organization to comply with the rules if all the servers and staff are outside Finland.
"Forcing" may be a problem, but generally the principle is that a possibly illegal action "happens" where it takes effect, so if people in Finland read the donation requests, then the Finnish police has the right and duty to act on it.
So worst case, the Finnish police could ask Finnish ISPs to prevent access to a website that breaks the law in Finland.
The problem with blaming the registrar is that the registrar has no power to stop the infringement. The registrar does not control the server that distributes the infringing material. All the registrar can do is deactivate the domain name, but people who want access to the infringing material can still link directly to the IP address of the server.
That's if there is a fixed IP address. And most people don't know the IP address. And anyway, it would be the domain registrar's job to do their bit. Next you can go to the ISP and ask for the account to be closed down, and the IP address is gone.
I used to handled DMCA requests for an ISP. They are awful. There is no real way to verify the person complaining is who they say they are, much less that they own the content. What if the complaint came from Robin Thicke himself? Does he own his own songs? Or does his record company? Micheal Jackson owned the Beatles albums... and how do you know this is really him? All you got was an email...
You don't have to verify any of these. You verify that all the required information is there (otherwise you throw the request away), remove the content, and pass all the info you've got on to the person whose content was removed. If the information is false, that's perjury. To be precise, if the person making the DMCA request doesn't hold the copyright or acts for the copyright holder of the content that they claim is there, that's perjury. It's up to the person whose content was removed to investigate this.
- Some troublemaker files a false complaint to my registrar who, afraid of liability, immediately kills my domain and takes down not just web but email too.
- Some troublemaker files a false complain to whoever sold microsoft.com and their complaint is forwarded to the trashcan.
If you are damaged by a false complaint, you sue the troublemaker for damages. And the judgment we are talking about was about a case where there was "clear and obvious" infringement. I suppose it means that if the registrar had bothered to visit the website, they would have seen clear and obvious infringement with their own eyes.
Don't know who well it works, but there was a demo by Apple's iOS developers where they combine GPS and WiFi. In towns with large buildings and awful GPS reception you will usually have tons of WiFi signals around, so at least in principle it should be possible to improve navigation using both.
NBC paid $4.38 billion.
There are 2,850 athletes.
That's about $1.5 million for every single athlete competing.
This is really totally stupid. So they are wasting 10,000 kilowatt of electrical power on some artificial "currency".
There was a discussion a while ago, where Phil Schiller was attacked because he said that of the companies making PCs when the Macintosh project was started, none were selling PCs anymore except Apple. Sony was given as a counter-example (although Sony only sold to the Japanese market at the relevant time, and stopped selling PCs for a while in the 90's), but now they are exiting anyway.
News flash, it's expensive to die, no matter the reason. Smokers aren't adding to that bill any more than you are. Not a smoker.
I can tell you most definitely that dying is a very cheap affair. Digging a grave and putting you inside a coffin costs a lot less than keeping you in hospital for a week.
Take out the carbs, and life is much better. Less sugar means your insulin doesn't kick in and store everything to your tissues. This takes place in London, Bath, Stokes, Leicester, Wales, wherever. It's how we're put together. Depression causes people to carb-load. That's a personal problem, not a regional one. Carb loading to increase serotinine is a well-honoured pass-time.
For the last thirty years, people have been hammered with messages to avoid fat. Coke is full of sugar and fat free. Companies put sugar into food when they remove fat, because removing fat without replacing it with sugar makes things taste bad and people don't buy them. So for the last thirty years people have been stuffing themselves with carbohydrates, making them fat and diabetic. And the more you try to avoid fat, the worse it gets.
And then they start dieting. Those with plenty of will power are the unlucky ones: They actually lose lots of weight. The body thinks it's starving. And all the weight comes back, with some more, because all the will power in the world cannot overcome a starving body in the long run.
The best advice: Ignore all the advice that tells you to avoid fat. _Do_ avoid sugar and other carbohydrates. Do _not_ try to lose weight. Ignore your weight, because being obsessed with your weight will make you unhappy which bad in itself, but will make you eat more as well.
And, if someone calls you "fatty", hit them in the face as hard as you can, knock them out, and kick the shit out of them when they are on the ground.
That's the part that's always bugged me. The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees (that's not even counting more costs if you sell through a brick and mortar store). If you double sales, all of the overhead doubles. Ebooks have almost negligible costs to do all that - which gets even closer to zero if you share resources (e.g sell through Amazon).
You have been modded as "insightful" while being totally wrong. Printing and distributing books is dead cheap compared to the actual worked involved in creating the content, marketing, and so on.
The point is Amazon can delete books you purchased from devices you own, for whatever reason, without your consent. That you think the deletion in this case was justified does not make people more trusting of this Orwellian ability to make publications disappear.
Apple can do the same thing. In a similar situation they didn't delete any books from users' devices but paid a fine of over $100,000 to the copyright owners. (Some poster here used that in an FSF vs. Apple thread to make claims how evil Apple is, by allowing itself being tricked by criminals, and then facing the cost instead of making the customers pay).
I'd expect them to delete software from my device if they reasonably know that the software will hurt _me_.
This isn't about expats living/earning wages overseas, it's about Americans using overseas bank accounts to hide income that they earned in the US, in order to avoid paying taxes on that.
It's causing a lot of upset here in Canada, too, because of our privacy laws, and because the Americans are refusing to give us a reciprocal agreement for Canadians in the US. (on the grounds that they don't enforce foreign laws).
In one country where I know how the tax office does it, if they can't get the numbers from you then they estimate. If they can't get the numbers from you in the next year, then obviously the estimate was too low so they estimate a lot higher. On the other hand, they don't tax foreign income. They only add it into the equation for calculating the tax rate for your local income.
If you want to renounce the obligations of citizenship, you must also renounce the benefits of citizenship and officially naturalize as a citizen of another country. Seems fair to me.
Most countries distinguish clearly between being a citizen and a resident. And usually the only thing you can't do as a non-citizen resident is voting or standing in general elections, or sometimes things like joining the army or police force. Everything else, there should be little difference.
It seems that the USA has this weird interpretation that US citizens should have all the legal obligations that US residents should have, even if they are not US residents anymore, including obligations that US residents that are not citizens.
He's been hired as a fall-guy. The respected developer realized his project was failing and bought himself a sap, a contractor that he can now blame for his screw-up.
That could be. On the other hand, contractors are usually paid more per hour, so that's just part of the job. Rumour is that a very big and expensive department job in London employs a guy whose sole job is to be fired. Every time a customer spending lots of money gets annoyed and wants to see someone fired, he will be publicly berated, fired, leaves his desk, and comes back when that customer has left the store.
There are some head hunting agencies that are positively predatory. One that I recall insisted that job seekers sign a contract that stated that the employer will pay the agency 1/3 of the new employee's first year of pay, and that if the employer fails to pay this money, then the employee is on the hook for it! I had visions of this being turned into a little scam. Get hired by an employer in cahoots with the agency and who never intended to keep you but instead plans to come up with an excuse to fire you in 91 days. Earn 3 months of pay, owe 4 months of pay. Profit!
Interestingly, that is according to Apple's reports one of the things they are quite successfully fighting in China, with the results that employees have been paid back several million dollars in agency fees. Maybe they should do that in the USA as well?
Didn't Apple Computer, Inc only start making PCs in 2006? Before that they were making PowerPC based computers and prior to 1995 Motorola based computers.
And how were these PowerPC and 680x0 based computers not PCs?
There is really some desperation going on here. Imagine Apple made a list of "serious competitors" when the Mac was released. And they made one now. Well, you would really hope they made such a list; not doing it would have been irresponsible. Acer wouldn't have been on the list, a company that later changed it's name to Acer might have been. Dell wouldn't have been on the list. HP built computers, but the HP 150 was an overpriced toy compared to the Macintosh, and HP 3000 etc. were not "desktop computers" but "desk computers". Compaq was swallowed up by HP. "Sony produced computers (MSX home computers and NEWS workstations) during the 1980s, exclusively for sale in the Japanese market. The company withdrew from the computer business around 1990." So yes, Sony wasn't "around" where the Mac was introduced.
So if we count companies that from 1984 to 2014 consistently sold desktop and laptop computers (not workstations) under the same recognisable name and possibly ignore companies which promised they were leaving the market (HP, I'm looking at you), and were important enough both in 1984 and 2014 to be recognised as a player in the market, then Apple may very well be the only one. (The last because it is quite possible there is some mom-and-pop shop open somewhere that has been selling home-made PCs for 30 years).
The XBOX 350 had sold about 80m units worldwide last year, compared to about 13m for the Apple TV. The only reason the Apple TV is now selling more is because the 360 has reached saturation point.
Your writing is misleading - Xbox 360 sold maybe 80 million units up to and including last year, not last year. Big difference. And of course Apple TV is just at the beginning. But right now they are selling more than Xbox 360 every quarter, and have done for two years, and still increasing.
Show me Apple's profits in personal computers please. Prior ot the iPod and later iPhone the company was on death's door because they could not stay afloat selling Mac's.
The latest estimate that I found, before Dell's profits dropped, was that Apple makes about 45% of all profits in the PC hardware market, Dell makes about 13%, and I think Lenovo came next with about 7%. That's purely PC hardware, not counting tablets, and not counting operating systems.
Yeah, they didn't make a success of the Apple TV, so its not like everything they touch magically becomes popular. They had their failures in the past.
Apple TV outsells for example Xbox 360 for the last two years, Wii U, and probably a lot of other devices that you think are very successful.
Absolutly wrong. Most of people will manage to go through their lives without touching a command prompt. But most first world people would save a lot of hours just with minimal programing abilities (shell level).
Most of these people would manage to create a major support case once they learn about the "sudo" command. Problem with shell programming is that you reach the level where you are dangerous before you reach the level where you can do useful things.
...but back in the day they spent a lot of time designing the Mac to be 'hacker proof' with an un-openable case and arcane tools to program it.
The case was easily openable if you had a five inch torx screwdriver and knew where the fifth screw was hidden. The reason why it was designed so that dad wouldn't have the right tool in his toolbox had nothing to do with "hacker-proofing". It had to do with a CRT tube inside that case, which held an extremly nasty voltage for days after the Mac was unplugged.
This is getting common enough that some companies are starting to complain, though. If a few people do it occasionally it's no big deal, but if 500 employees are each receiving multiple packages a week, it starts becoming a significant added burden on the corporate mailroom.
The relationship between company and employees, at first approximation, is that employees come to work, and the company pays them money. In a better approximation, employees do useful work to advance the purposes of the company, while the company does things to keep employees happy. Adding a person to the mailroom is a cheap way to make 500 employees a lot happier, so they will work for you instead of someone else if everything else is equal.
Ok, let's assume in this wondrous future, you are being driven (can't exactly call it driving if you're not in control) on some country roads and you encounter a very large bull standing in the middle of the road. Your car recognizes that there is an obstruction, stops and waits patiently for the road to clear. The bull waits patiently for the car to go away. Unless they've come up with automated cattle in the future you've got a problem. Since the car has no horn, you (the passenger) have to figure out a way to get the bull to clear the road. You try waving your arms. The bull ignores you. You yell at it, fueled by you annoyance. It calmly looks at the source of the noise and goes nowhere. The car finally figures out the obstruction is permanent, executes a perfect u-turn and runs out of gas because it didn't include having to backtrack when it calculated your course.
You honk. Bull gets annoyed and tries who is stronger. Fortunately the manufacturer foresaw the possibility that your car needs to revers faster than a bull can run :-)
I've never driven on a road where my standalone GPS couldn't get a signal -- even within cities and driving in forested areas. I've had it take a while to get a lock in cities, but once the GPS gets a lock, it's always been able to maintain it.
Come to London. TomTom in some areas in Central London is an absolute pain.