Yes, you missed the whole post. You seem to be claiming that the massive advantage I was referring to was simply the fact you got less abuse, when in reality it was the fact that you got given more free shit, got invited to groups more often, and got better spots in raiding parties more frequently. The game was much easier when teenage boys made the incorrect assumption that female character = female player.
Again, try reading the whole post next time rather than cherry picking the bits you feel like arguing over despite the fact said argument then makes absolutely no sense because it's based on half a point and not the whole point.
Agreed but as I understand it it's possible that the agreement stands regardless of the validity of the patents, so if their agreement with Microsoft is such that they're paying for these patents regardless of validity then there's no point them focussing on invalidating the patents, hence why I suspect they've instead decided to try and invalidate their agreement by arguing that Microsoft is now a smartphone manufacturer where it wasn't before- just as Microsoft managed to argue that payments should be made regardless of patent validity, Samsung probably managed to argue the agreement was only valid whilst Microsoft is not acting as a smartphone vendor itself.
Have Google ever sued anyone that hasn't sued them first on patent issues? I don't think Google has, which would still make it purely defensive and not an aggressive patent troll like MS is.
Samsung isn't being told by the EU it faces a fine for using patents offensively and not defensively, it's being fined because it's being told it can't use those specific patents at all in court action because they're too fundamental to be allowed to do anything with them as compared to say, swipe to unlock. As such Samsung's potential fine still says nothing whatsoever about the defensiveness or lack of of their patent litigation.
I don't think the GP was saying Google/Samsung haven't sued, I think he was just saying that they've only ever counter-sued in response to being sued on these particular issues, which may still be wrong, but I can't think off the top of my head of any examples of Google/Samsung suing first in the smartphone race rather than simply as a response to being sued by someone else - i.e. neither of them sued Microsoft/Apple or whoever until Microsoft/Apple had already sued them.
Problem is, look what happened to Estonia, they were victims of a Russian state sponsored cyber attack which was quite problematic because they had built their state around heavy internet focus for provision of services and so forth.
It's a good idea, if you're a nation that has enough control of it's borders to prevent physical access to important internet infrastructure from Russian agents, and if you can withstand Russian cyber attack both focussed hacks and dumb DDOS attacks, but I don't think Ukraine is there right now, and it would probably just result in a quick and easy way for Putin to dig his claws back into the country.
I like their idea, most definitely, but I don't think the Ukraine is ready for it just yet, it doesn't have the independent strength of security to protect itself from Russian cyber-attack and meddling - they're having a hard enough time protecting themselves physically from Russian soldiers invading their territory, let alone protecting their digital infrastructure which will likely require decent physical security in the first place.
"This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want."
To be fair, that's actually in part Google's fault. On my Android phone now Chrome has completely merged the Google search box with the URL bar, they are now one and the same, there is no longer an explicit distinction there between entering a URL and searching on Google.
The problem Google has it's that it's not just acting as someone's bank, it's profiting from the content via ads, and that opens up a fair argument of complicity.
I'm not about to judge as to whether that means it deserves to bear all responsibility for content- certainly I think it's unrealistic that it should have to scour all it's servers and make a judgement on whether every bit of content is or isn't there legally, but I don't think it's unreasonable that if someone points it to a specific bit of infringing content, that given that it both hosts the content, and profits from the content, that it should have to take it down, else I don't really see how Google can argue against the suggestion that it's knowingly profiting from illegal content at that point - if it's hosting the content, providing access to the content, and the content is known to be illegal, and it continues to host and provide access to it, then surely it's pretty clear cut that it's intentionally profiting from illegally provided content?
But I think that's the key thing here, it has to be knowingly doing so. That puts the onus on the alleged victim to put the effort it and make it clear to Google that the content is not being legally distributed - and even there Google should have recourse to get the courts to rule if it's not certain and should be protected until the courts have decided, but it most definitely should not put the onus on Google to try and figure out what content is illegal.
Your analogy would be better phrased as someone having stolen money from you, stored it in a bank and the bank is profiting off that cash by investing it, and continues to do so and refuses to hand it over even when it's been made clear to the bank that that money has been obtained illegally. In that case yes, I think the bank absolutely can no longer pay the innocent party - once it's been informed of alleged or proven illegality then it has a responsibility to investigate and act.
As for the demands of $100m? well, that's a different issue - that's just the US' stupid sue everyone for everything culture.
So as for this particular case, if they've given Google specific URLs and Google hasn't acted then apart from their stupid financial demands then I don't think they're really much in the wrong. If they've just blanket told Google to scour every inch of their server and make arbitrary judgements on legality then these folks should be told to go screw themselves or to come back when they have something more concrete.
So all in all, I think this sounds like it's probably a stupid case, but that doesn't mean Google should necessarily be given a get out of jail free card from knowingly profiting from illegally hosted content- there has to be at least some degree of responsibility held by them to act if genuinely and reasonably informed.
No one was prosecuted for doing this even when it was completely illegal, now it's legal if you're not circumventing DRM, but still no one is going to be prosecuted are they? The police have better things to do and it's too cost prohibitive and largely impossible for the industry to do it themselves.
So whatever the change it's completely meaningless all the same.
What I'm intrigued about though is the talk of not being able to share with your family, how does this apply within a household if family or friends live together? I can buy a music CD and can't lend it to my partner to play elsewhere in the same house?
What if we go to the shop and put a fiver each towards a £10 CD, who owns it? If the shop has allowed us to make a joint transaction then how is the owner defined - statutory consumer rights on what the shop sold us would normally overrule civil issues of non-commercial copyright infringement? Presumably if it was jointly owned however what's to stop someone putting up a website that allows 1000 people to contribute 1p to the price of a CD? is it jointly owned by all 1000? I'm intrigued to know how this works legally.
As I say it all seems academic regardless and no one's getting prosecuted over this stuff anyway, but I'm intrigued to know what the limits are.
"I'd say that you'd find an amazing amount of hatred for each of those categories."
On the contrary, when I played Dark Age of Camelot playing a female char was a massive advantage as all the desperate teenage boys assumed you were actually female, sucked up to you, gave you a load of free gear, and regularly invited you into groups. On large raids they were always given the best spots, and allowed first dibs on good items.
Females were always at a massive advantage in that game at least and any abuse they took wasn't even close to the amount that males took from other males.
It's just an anecdote of course, but it's certainly not universally the case that minority groups (minority in game that is) always inherently get treated worse than others in games, not at all.
We keep both cars in the garage though, so corrosion isn't really much of an issue. I can see that if we have a bad winter with lots of salt being spread corrosion certainly becomes more of a problem, but on a 7 year old car, doing 3000 miles a year, being kept in a garage, there's not really much that can go wrong.
I don't mind green taxes either as long as they're used to fund green things, but they never are. All money from supposed green taxes should go straight into funding installation of solar panels, and provision of electric car charging points and such.
The issue I have with mileage based taxation is that you have to figure out what problem you're trying to solve, I think you have to ask the question, who should be penalised more heavily, the 100 school mums who drive a gas inefficient 4x4 a mile to a single school and a mile back each resulting in 200 miles of utter laziness emission production and creates massive congestion, or the country vet or doctor that has to travel 50 miles a day for his job otherwise we wouldn't get our meat and dairy produce that we depend on?
Mileage based taxation, especially in rural areas, hits those areas hard, when the majority of pollution is actually being produced by inner city areas by people that could easily walk, cycle, or catch a train but are too lazy to do so. If you look at the places the government is failing to hit it's emission targets in it's entirely inside the cities, so emissions in the countryside where mileage is necessarily higher isn't really a problem, yet that's what mileage based taxation harms - of course, it also harms the necessary haulage industry too, and whilst I agree that in some ways that's not a bad thing if it means more stuff gets shifted overnight by rail for example, there's still a risk of damaging the lifeblood of the economy.
And I suspect that's exactly why successive governments have stuck with VED- they don't want to harm essential drivers when it's really lazy school mums and so forth that are the bulk of the problem. In an ideal world you'd really want to tax based on the level of necessity of a journey so that necessary journeys (say, ambulances for example) aren't taxed at all, whilst people doing short journeys where they have no time constraints because they're too lazy to walk should be hit the hardest. This would have the dual benefit of also increasing exercise and hence reduce the NHS bill too, but how you'd ever determine it I don't know, and I think that's why we're stuck with VED- the Chelsea tractor mothers continue to pay it to drive their 4x4s around, but necessary drivers just buy more fuel efficient vehicles - it's far from perfect, but I can see why they've stuck with it.
I've still had tax disc reminders this year, and my partner only just got hers even though she's in this first October tranche of no paper disc folks so even with the change to paperless taxation they're still sending out the reminders thankfully.
I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online, as you say you get no reminder and then you're at the whims of the fucking garages as they determine when you must give up your car to them. It's so stupidly inconvenient, especially as we only do about 3000 miles a year on one of our cars- the fact it has to be MOT'd as much as the car we do about 25,000 miles a year on is just plain fucking stupid as it's the mileage wear and tear that makes a difference - the 25,000 mile a year car frankly never passes it's MOT so probably isn't really technically roadworthy for a short while before it's MOT given that it's being driven around with those failures prior to the test, whilst the 3,000 mile a year one hasn't failed an MOT for about 5 years now and never needs anything doing to it so it shows what a farce the MOT system really is - it's highly inconvenient and doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve, low mileage cars are getting penalised for the sake of it, and high mileage cars are driving around unsafe regardless.
The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it as the fact he'd called them to explain was evidence enough in their eyes that it was nothing more than an honest mistake and I know my father forgot to display his new disc once, got pulled, but they took no action after checking he had renewed online (and this was back in 2004, so the ability to check online by the police has been in place at least a decade).
But most people don't know that, and even those that do generally want to avoid the hassle of being pulled over even if it would've meant no action would be taken against you so make the effort to avoid driving around without a valid tax disc anyway.
FWIW you most certainly can renew earlier than 2 weeks from expiration, that used to be the case when you could only renew from the 15th of the month, but you've been able to renew from the 5th for quite a while now just fine (at least 5 years), so you get the best part of a month to renew.
I suspect that normally people renew a week or two or three in advance because they need the paper disc to come through in time so they can display it before expiration at the end of the month and hence the load is spread across a few weeks.
Now however, people probably just figured "Hey, I don't need the disc anymore, I'll do it last minute", hence why it was the last day of the month that it fell over- because everyone now figures they can wait until last minute to do it.
I suspect even that would be better served by simply factoring in locale/language settings though rather than say something that can be used a bit more nefariously though like IP and/or some IP geolocation result, as you get different cultures within individual geolocation areas quite frequently.
Again, this isn't to say I necessarily trust Microsoft in this respect of course regardless, I'm just saying it's possible to gather this data in a fairly mundane manner with no ill effects if your intentions are genuinely innocent. The problem is that Microsoft's rarely are, so I'd still personally avoid this service by not installing the OS or turning it off if that was an option. It's not something I'd trust to have running on my system from Microsoft, or even any of the large tech vendors in all honesty.
I'm not naive, I thought I was pretty blunt in stating that I'm not convinced that Microsoft can stick to simply collecting only purely anonymous data, my post was made merely to point out that it's most definitely not impossible to collect anonymous usage data that is useful which is what you originally implied (but now seem to agree is incorrect).
"How does one obscure data to the point where you can't identify the user, but still have meaningful data? Haven't we heard this all before?"
Easily, if all you want is to figure out things like "How long does it take a user to find the application they want in the Start Menu" then all you're doing is timing from the moment they click start, to the time they click a start menu option. You don't need to know who the user is, or even what IP the data was submitted from and when you have a lot of this data it's trivial to tell if the mean time users take to find an application has increased or decreased after you made a change in an update, or after they changed a configuration setting.
If all you're doing is getting metrics on millions of users as to how they use things like this then it's trivial to keep it anonymised and non-identifying. I don't care how long it takes John Smith from Outer Mongolia specifically to find Microsoft Word in his Start Menu - I don't need to take information about who he is, where he lives or any such thing, I just want to know how long on average it takes a sample of users to do so for example.
Though of course, this isn't to say that I trust Microsoft to do just this, I don't for one moment imagine they'll be able to resist the urge to keep the data anonymous and/or only collect data that is non-identifying, but that doesn't change the fact that it's trivial to come up with useful metrics they may choose to gather without it being identifiable - what they're claiming is certainly possible, realistic, and even helpful to them (and arguably users too if they get a better product out of it) but whether they'll stick to what they're claiming or not? that's what's troubling here.
Yep, they'd never follow through with the bluff anyway. If the UK government called say, Amazon's bluff, and said we're forcing you to pay this tax so go ahead, leave the country if you want and Amazon left then that'd create a massive void in which a competitor for Amazon could start up in the UK and use it as a launchpad to challenge Amazon elsewhere in the world.
It is genuinely a ridiculous argument that they'd leave if they had to pay intended corporation tax, especially in a country like the UK - no major company is going to forfeit a market like that over a 21% corporation tax rate, it's just still way too profitable to ignore and way too risky to leave open to a competitor that would gladly fill the void and gain a foothold.
It's even more ridiculous in the context of companies like Starbucks who face heavy competition in the UK from companies like Costa and Cafe Nero - these guys could take over Starbucks' premises and hire all their staff within no time so you wouldn't even really see anything more than a very very short term hit in terms of job losses in many cases. As we've seen during the recession as a result of bankruptcies, you can take over another companies stores post-Administration and rebrand them and get their staff working for you in their old premises within a matter of only as little as a week or two in many cases.
Companies aren't simply going to turn away and say "We can only make £100 million in profit if we pay corporation tax, instead of £120 million, it's just not worth it" if they were given an ultimatum between paying corporation tax and leaving the UK market altogether. They might well sulk, but millions in profit is millions in profit and you don't say no to that- especially when all your competitors are at the exact same disadvantage.
They're funded by the tax payer, corporate lobbying is not part of their mandate. Thus, the only capacity in which they should be doing this is a personal capacity, and not whilst making any use of the City of London Police name, facilities, or anything else.
But what's particularly offensive about the City of London police's anti-piracy efforts is that they spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources outside their square mile chasing it in other parts of the UK which are not their jurisdiction. This is even more concerning when you recognise that there are countless criminals undealt with in their square mile who have had far more damaging impacts on the global economy from libor riggers, to illegal use of investment funds, through to high class pickpockets raiding the bags of the rich in the area's restaurants and bars.
None of which would be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that when I asked if my local police force could priorities these City of London criminals who have done far more economic damage and send some of their officers to the City of London to deal with it just as the City of London sends their officers up here for economic crimes, I was eventually, after 3 months, told that the City of London police would prioritise these issues themselves and would not support our officers in doing so in their jurisdiction.
The real question should be why is anyone letting the City of London police operate outside their area of jurisdiction when they wont let anyone deal with the far bigger, far more damaging criminals in theirs.
You're blaming everyone else for your country's woes, but it ignores the fact there are other countries, including some of your neighbours that have turned things around. You seem set on the idea that everything that's been told to you by your media/government is correct and that everyone else is at fault and Argentina is just one of the world's victims- why is Argentina one of the world's victims? Chile turned itself around after Pinochet incredibly well, Brazil is now one of the top 10 global economies. You have success on both sides of you, and yes you have nations less successful next to you too, but you and they might want to consider how others have succeeded whilst your countries have failed.
Worse, Argentina was actually on the up until Kirchner decided to resort to the most vile form of politics there is - nationalism. She started roaring off about the Malvinas again, started nationalising foreign firms, and started refusing to service debts and you tell yourself this is okay because the other guys were just as corrupt, but it's not - it's the sign of a politician who is out of ideas, out of her depth, and desperate.
Your country can and will change, just like your successful neighbours have, the question of when is entirely down to when you decide to start finding decent political leadership.
As an aside you asked the question, what is the point in higher bonds if you can be ordered to pay them anyway? - I can answer this, you're being ordered to pay them by a judge, but you don't have to, the alternative is default, and if there's a chance you'll default then the bonds have to be higher to cover that risk. If Argentina declares itself default and bankrupt then it can opt not to pay, but then the price of bonds will increase even more - it's the choice your country has to make, either give up borrowing from elsewhere and default, or continue to want to participate in the world bond market and pay what you legally owe no matter how high and unfair that might be. Risk comes with a cost, and if you're a risk you must accept that cost or patiently work hard to stop being a risk.
I'm not mixing anything up, on one hand your saying you don't have control over your government including currency controls and on the other you're asking people to send money in. You don't seem to realise that the former creates much greater risk for those doing the latter.
I'm not blaming you for the actions of your government and I do sympathize with how it effects people like you but my point stands that it's not the fault of others that they won't take the risk your asking them too either - it's wholly on your government.
You say they only borrowed 80 million, but here's the thing, why did they borrow it in the first place with such ludicrous terms? However your government may wish to spin it you simply cannot take money under some terms and then suggest you should have the right to renege later on without there being consequences.
As for stealing foreign assets in taking about things like nationalisation of Spanish oil forms without proper compensation - if you do this stealing billions of assets off people then why are you surprised that a judge wold take a hard line in holding you to your agreements elsewhere? You can't run a country by taking money and assets and not living up to your on obligations. If you do then you'll be seen as a risk and people like you won't be able to get startup funding from investors that they're asking for.
No unlike you I understand economics. It doesn't matter who is or isn't responsible for your country's situation, the fact remains that you have no control over it and your government is not improving the situation. Whether you like it or not that makes lending to your country an extremely risky proposition and if professional investors with the wealth of information they have available feel that your nations credit worthiness is junk then individuals with less knowledge of the risk should be protected from that too. If you want start up funding then move to a country with financial stability where it's safe for investors to invest, don't bitch at others for not setting up in a place where it's far too risky to do so.
This is a fact of living somewhere with poor financial management, that's defaulting on debt repeatedly, and has been stealing foreign assets. I know it's not your fault, but it's not Kikckstarters either so you can't blame them for not being willing to face the risks your country has created for itself. You may have a good idea, you may have good financial management, but whilst your government could tank your investors money over night it's not fair to ask them to take such a massive risk.
I guess it depends whose doing the calling. Sure a child minded simpleton who believes the whole world is black and white might call it hypocrisy, but most intelligent minded people with an understanding of how the world actually works call it what it is more reasonably defined as- pragmatism.
Again, you're free to try and offer counterexamples, but you won't find any because whether it's Stallman having to use a computer with a proprietary BIOS to push his FOSS philosophy because he's sometimes had little other choice or Ayn Rand accepting social security when it was her only option to survive. Sometimes reality leaves you a choice - compromise, or give up. Anyone who gets anywhere in life with their goals selects for compromise, no one has achieved anything by giving up.
Even Ghandi's principle of non violent opposition had to take a back seat once Hitler's tanks started rolling and the Japanese got ever closer.
I had some sympathy for your point until I saw your homepage is an Argentinian domain name.
Do you really think it's smart for Kickstarter to setup in a country that's defaulting on a national level and whose currency is so volatile as a result?
This story is about Kickstarter trying to reduce the chance of financial loss to backers, if ever there was a way to do the opposite and instead further increase the chance of loss then setting up in a country with the financial instability of Argentina would be it.
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Yes, you missed the whole post. You seem to be claiming that the massive advantage I was referring to was simply the fact you got less abuse, when in reality it was the fact that you got given more free shit, got invited to groups more often, and got better spots in raiding parties more frequently. The game was much easier when teenage boys made the incorrect assumption that female character = female player.
Again, try reading the whole post next time rather than cherry picking the bits you feel like arguing over despite the fact said argument then makes absolutely no sense because it's based on half a point and not the whole point.
Agreed but as I understand it it's possible that the agreement stands regardless of the validity of the patents, so if their agreement with Microsoft is such that they're paying for these patents regardless of validity then there's no point them focussing on invalidating the patents, hence why I suspect they've instead decided to try and invalidate their agreement by arguing that Microsoft is now a smartphone manufacturer where it wasn't before- just as Microsoft managed to argue that payments should be made regardless of patent validity, Samsung probably managed to argue the agreement was only valid whilst Microsoft is not acting as a smartphone vendor itself.
Have Google ever sued anyone that hasn't sued them first on patent issues? I don't think Google has, which would still make it purely defensive and not an aggressive patent troll like MS is.
Samsung isn't being told by the EU it faces a fine for using patents offensively and not defensively, it's being fined because it's being told it can't use those specific patents at all in court action because they're too fundamental to be allowed to do anything with them as compared to say, swipe to unlock. As such Samsung's potential fine still says nothing whatsoever about the defensiveness or lack of of their patent litigation.
I don't think the GP was saying Google/Samsung haven't sued, I think he was just saying that they've only ever counter-sued in response to being sued on these particular issues, which may still be wrong, but I can't think off the top of my head of any examples of Google/Samsung suing first in the smartphone race rather than simply as a response to being sued by someone else - i.e. neither of them sued Microsoft/Apple or whoever until Microsoft/Apple had already sued them.
Problem is, look what happened to Estonia, they were victims of a Russian state sponsored cyber attack which was quite problematic because they had built their state around heavy internet focus for provision of services and so forth.
It's a good idea, if you're a nation that has enough control of it's borders to prevent physical access to important internet infrastructure from Russian agents, and if you can withstand Russian cyber attack both focussed hacks and dumb DDOS attacks, but I don't think Ukraine is there right now, and it would probably just result in a quick and easy way for Putin to dig his claws back into the country.
I like their idea, most definitely, but I don't think the Ukraine is ready for it just yet, it doesn't have the independent strength of security to protect itself from Russian cyber-attack and meddling - they're having a hard enough time protecting themselves physically from Russian soldiers invading their territory, let alone protecting their digital infrastructure which will likely require decent physical security in the first place.
Um, try reading the rest of the post and you might make a bit more sense.
"This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want."
To be fair, that's actually in part Google's fault. On my Android phone now Chrome has completely merged the Google search box with the URL bar, they are now one and the same, there is no longer an explicit distinction there between entering a URL and searching on Google.
The problem Google has it's that it's not just acting as someone's bank, it's profiting from the content via ads, and that opens up a fair argument of complicity.
I'm not about to judge as to whether that means it deserves to bear all responsibility for content- certainly I think it's unrealistic that it should have to scour all it's servers and make a judgement on whether every bit of content is or isn't there legally, but I don't think it's unreasonable that if someone points it to a specific bit of infringing content, that given that it both hosts the content, and profits from the content, that it should have to take it down, else I don't really see how Google can argue against the suggestion that it's knowingly profiting from illegal content at that point - if it's hosting the content, providing access to the content, and the content is known to be illegal, and it continues to host and provide access to it, then surely it's pretty clear cut that it's intentionally profiting from illegally provided content?
But I think that's the key thing here, it has to be knowingly doing so. That puts the onus on the alleged victim to put the effort it and make it clear to Google that the content is not being legally distributed - and even there Google should have recourse to get the courts to rule if it's not certain and should be protected until the courts have decided, but it most definitely should not put the onus on Google to try and figure out what content is illegal.
Your analogy would be better phrased as someone having stolen money from you, stored it in a bank and the bank is profiting off that cash by investing it, and continues to do so and refuses to hand it over even when it's been made clear to the bank that that money has been obtained illegally. In that case yes, I think the bank absolutely can no longer pay the innocent party - once it's been informed of alleged or proven illegality then it has a responsibility to investigate and act.
As for the demands of $100m? well, that's a different issue - that's just the US' stupid sue everyone for everything culture.
So as for this particular case, if they've given Google specific URLs and Google hasn't acted then apart from their stupid financial demands then I don't think they're really much in the wrong. If they've just blanket told Google to scour every inch of their server and make arbitrary judgements on legality then these folks should be told to go screw themselves or to come back when they have something more concrete.
So all in all, I think this sounds like it's probably a stupid case, but that doesn't mean Google should necessarily be given a get out of jail free card from knowingly profiting from illegally hosted content- there has to be at least some degree of responsibility held by them to act if genuinely and reasonably informed.
But what exactly is the point?
No one was prosecuted for doing this even when it was completely illegal, now it's legal if you're not circumventing DRM, but still no one is going to be prosecuted are they? The police have better things to do and it's too cost prohibitive and largely impossible for the industry to do it themselves.
So whatever the change it's completely meaningless all the same.
What I'm intrigued about though is the talk of not being able to share with your family, how does this apply within a household if family or friends live together? I can buy a music CD and can't lend it to my partner to play elsewhere in the same house?
What if we go to the shop and put a fiver each towards a £10 CD, who owns it? If the shop has allowed us to make a joint transaction then how is the owner defined - statutory consumer rights on what the shop sold us would normally overrule civil issues of non-commercial copyright infringement? Presumably if it was jointly owned however what's to stop someone putting up a website that allows 1000 people to contribute 1p to the price of a CD? is it jointly owned by all 1000? I'm intrigued to know how this works legally.
As I say it all seems academic regardless and no one's getting prosecuted over this stuff anyway, but I'm intrigued to know what the limits are.
"I'd say that you'd find an amazing amount of hatred for each of those categories."
On the contrary, when I played Dark Age of Camelot playing a female char was a massive advantage as all the desperate teenage boys assumed you were actually female, sucked up to you, gave you a load of free gear, and regularly invited you into groups. On large raids they were always given the best spots, and allowed first dibs on good items.
Females were always at a massive advantage in that game at least and any abuse they took wasn't even close to the amount that males took from other males.
It's just an anecdote of course, but it's certainly not universally the case that minority groups (minority in game that is) always inherently get treated worse than others in games, not at all.
We keep both cars in the garage though, so corrosion isn't really much of an issue. I can see that if we have a bad winter with lots of salt being spread corrosion certainly becomes more of a problem, but on a 7 year old car, doing 3000 miles a year, being kept in a garage, there's not really much that can go wrong.
I don't mind green taxes either as long as they're used to fund green things, but they never are. All money from supposed green taxes should go straight into funding installation of solar panels, and provision of electric car charging points and such.
The issue I have with mileage based taxation is that you have to figure out what problem you're trying to solve, I think you have to ask the question, who should be penalised more heavily, the 100 school mums who drive a gas inefficient 4x4 a mile to a single school and a mile back each resulting in 200 miles of utter laziness emission production and creates massive congestion, or the country vet or doctor that has to travel 50 miles a day for his job otherwise we wouldn't get our meat and dairy produce that we depend on?
Mileage based taxation, especially in rural areas, hits those areas hard, when the majority of pollution is actually being produced by inner city areas by people that could easily walk, cycle, or catch a train but are too lazy to do so. If you look at the places the government is failing to hit it's emission targets in it's entirely inside the cities, so emissions in the countryside where mileage is necessarily higher isn't really a problem, yet that's what mileage based taxation harms - of course, it also harms the necessary haulage industry too, and whilst I agree that in some ways that's not a bad thing if it means more stuff gets shifted overnight by rail for example, there's still a risk of damaging the lifeblood of the economy.
And I suspect that's exactly why successive governments have stuck with VED- they don't want to harm essential drivers when it's really lazy school mums and so forth that are the bulk of the problem. In an ideal world you'd really want to tax based on the level of necessity of a journey so that necessary journeys (say, ambulances for example) aren't taxed at all, whilst people doing short journeys where they have no time constraints because they're too lazy to walk should be hit the hardest. This would have the dual benefit of also increasing exercise and hence reduce the NHS bill too, but how you'd ever determine it I don't know, and I think that's why we're stuck with VED- the Chelsea tractor mothers continue to pay it to drive their 4x4s around, but necessary drivers just buy more fuel efficient vehicles - it's far from perfect, but I can see why they've stuck with it.
I've still had tax disc reminders this year, and my partner only just got hers even though she's in this first October tranche of no paper disc folks so even with the change to paperless taxation they're still sending out the reminders thankfully.
I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online, as you say you get no reminder and then you're at the whims of the fucking garages as they determine when you must give up your car to them. It's so stupidly inconvenient, especially as we only do about 3000 miles a year on one of our cars- the fact it has to be MOT'd as much as the car we do about 25,000 miles a year on is just plain fucking stupid as it's the mileage wear and tear that makes a difference - the 25,000 mile a year car frankly never passes it's MOT so probably isn't really technically roadworthy for a short while before it's MOT given that it's being driven around with those failures prior to the test, whilst the 3,000 mile a year one hasn't failed an MOT for about 5 years now and never needs anything doing to it so it shows what a farce the MOT system really is - it's highly inconvenient and doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve, low mileage cars are getting penalised for the sake of it, and high mileage cars are driving around unsafe regardless.
The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it as the fact he'd called them to explain was evidence enough in their eyes that it was nothing more than an honest mistake and I know my father forgot to display his new disc once, got pulled, but they took no action after checking he had renewed online (and this was back in 2004, so the ability to check online by the police has been in place at least a decade).
But most people don't know that, and even those that do generally want to avoid the hassle of being pulled over even if it would've meant no action would be taken against you so make the effort to avoid driving around without a valid tax disc anyway.
FWIW you most certainly can renew earlier than 2 weeks from expiration, that used to be the case when you could only renew from the 15th of the month, but you've been able to renew from the 5th for quite a while now just fine (at least 5 years), so you get the best part of a month to renew.
I suspect that normally people renew a week or two or three in advance because they need the paper disc to come through in time so they can display it before expiration at the end of the month and hence the load is spread across a few weeks.
Now however, people probably just figured "Hey, I don't need the disc anymore, I'll do it last minute", hence why it was the last day of the month that it fell over- because everyone now figures they can wait until last minute to do it.
I suspect even that would be better served by simply factoring in locale/language settings though rather than say something that can be used a bit more nefariously though like IP and/or some IP geolocation result, as you get different cultures within individual geolocation areas quite frequently.
Again, this isn't to say I necessarily trust Microsoft in this respect of course regardless, I'm just saying it's possible to gather this data in a fairly mundane manner with no ill effects if your intentions are genuinely innocent. The problem is that Microsoft's rarely are, so I'd still personally avoid this service by not installing the OS or turning it off if that was an option. It's not something I'd trust to have running on my system from Microsoft, or even any of the large tech vendors in all honesty.
I'm not naive, I thought I was pretty blunt in stating that I'm not convinced that Microsoft can stick to simply collecting only purely anonymous data, my post was made merely to point out that it's most definitely not impossible to collect anonymous usage data that is useful which is what you originally implied (but now seem to agree is incorrect).
"How does one obscure data to the point where you can't identify the user, but still have meaningful data? Haven't we heard this all before?"
Easily, if all you want is to figure out things like "How long does it take a user to find the application they want in the Start Menu" then all you're doing is timing from the moment they click start, to the time they click a start menu option. You don't need to know who the user is, or even what IP the data was submitted from and when you have a lot of this data it's trivial to tell if the mean time users take to find an application has increased or decreased after you made a change in an update, or after they changed a configuration setting.
If all you're doing is getting metrics on millions of users as to how they use things like this then it's trivial to keep it anonymised and non-identifying. I don't care how long it takes John Smith from Outer Mongolia specifically to find Microsoft Word in his Start Menu - I don't need to take information about who he is, where he lives or any such thing, I just want to know how long on average it takes a sample of users to do so for example.
Though of course, this isn't to say that I trust Microsoft to do just this, I don't for one moment imagine they'll be able to resist the urge to keep the data anonymous and/or only collect data that is non-identifying, but that doesn't change the fact that it's trivial to come up with useful metrics they may choose to gather without it being identifiable - what they're claiming is certainly possible, realistic, and even helpful to them (and arguably users too if they get a better product out of it) but whether they'll stick to what they're claiming or not? that's what's troubling here.
Yep, they'd never follow through with the bluff anyway. If the UK government called say, Amazon's bluff, and said we're forcing you to pay this tax so go ahead, leave the country if you want and Amazon left then that'd create a massive void in which a competitor for Amazon could start up in the UK and use it as a launchpad to challenge Amazon elsewhere in the world.
It is genuinely a ridiculous argument that they'd leave if they had to pay intended corporation tax, especially in a country like the UK - no major company is going to forfeit a market like that over a 21% corporation tax rate, it's just still way too profitable to ignore and way too risky to leave open to a competitor that would gladly fill the void and gain a foothold.
It's even more ridiculous in the context of companies like Starbucks who face heavy competition in the UK from companies like Costa and Cafe Nero - these guys could take over Starbucks' premises and hire all their staff within no time so you wouldn't even really see anything more than a very very short term hit in terms of job losses in many cases. As we've seen during the recession as a result of bankruptcies, you can take over another companies stores post-Administration and rebrand them and get their staff working for you in their old premises within a matter of only as little as a week or two in many cases.
Companies aren't simply going to turn away and say "We can only make £100 million in profit if we pay corporation tax, instead of £120 million, it's just not worth it" if they were given an ultimatum between paying corporation tax and leaving the UK market altogether. They might well sulk, but millions in profit is millions in profit and you don't say no to that- especially when all your competitors are at the exact same disadvantage.
Just Google Maps City of London then zoom out a little for perspective and you'll see how ridiculously small it actually is.
They're funded by the tax payer, corporate lobbying is not part of their mandate. Thus, the only capacity in which they should be doing this is a personal capacity, and not whilst making any use of the City of London Police name, facilities, or anything else.
But what's particularly offensive about the City of London police's anti-piracy efforts is that they spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources outside their square mile chasing it in other parts of the UK which are not their jurisdiction. This is even more concerning when you recognise that there are countless criminals undealt with in their square mile who have had far more damaging impacts on the global economy from libor riggers, to illegal use of investment funds, through to high class pickpockets raiding the bags of the rich in the area's restaurants and bars.
None of which would be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that when I asked if my local police force could priorities these City of London criminals who have done far more economic damage and send some of their officers to the City of London to deal with it just as the City of London sends their officers up here for economic crimes, I was eventually, after 3 months, told that the City of London police would prioritise these issues themselves and would not support our officers in doing so in their jurisdiction.
The real question should be why is anyone letting the City of London police operate outside their area of jurisdiction when they wont let anyone deal with the far bigger, far more damaging criminals in theirs.
You're blaming everyone else for your country's woes, but it ignores the fact there are other countries, including some of your neighbours that have turned things around. You seem set on the idea that everything that's been told to you by your media/government is correct and that everyone else is at fault and Argentina is just one of the world's victims- why is Argentina one of the world's victims? Chile turned itself around after Pinochet incredibly well, Brazil is now one of the top 10 global economies. You have success on both sides of you, and yes you have nations less successful next to you too, but you and they might want to consider how others have succeeded whilst your countries have failed.
Worse, Argentina was actually on the up until Kirchner decided to resort to the most vile form of politics there is - nationalism. She started roaring off about the Malvinas again, started nationalising foreign firms, and started refusing to service debts and you tell yourself this is okay because the other guys were just as corrupt, but it's not - it's the sign of a politician who is out of ideas, out of her depth, and desperate.
Your country can and will change, just like your successful neighbours have, the question of when is entirely down to when you decide to start finding decent political leadership.
As an aside you asked the question, what is the point in higher bonds if you can be ordered to pay them anyway? - I can answer this, you're being ordered to pay them by a judge, but you don't have to, the alternative is default, and if there's a chance you'll default then the bonds have to be higher to cover that risk. If Argentina declares itself default and bankrupt then it can opt not to pay, but then the price of bonds will increase even more - it's the choice your country has to make, either give up borrowing from elsewhere and default, or continue to want to participate in the world bond market and pay what you legally owe no matter how high and unfair that might be. Risk comes with a cost, and if you're a risk you must accept that cost or patiently work hard to stop being a risk.
I'm not mixing anything up, on one hand your saying you don't have control over your government including currency controls and on the other you're asking people to send money in. You don't seem to realise that the former creates much greater risk for those doing the latter.
I'm not blaming you for the actions of your government and I do sympathize with how it effects people like you but my point stands that it's not the fault of others that they won't take the risk your asking them too either - it's wholly on your government.
You say they only borrowed 80 million, but here's the thing, why did they borrow it in the first place with such ludicrous terms? However your government may wish to spin it you simply cannot take money under some terms and then suggest you should have the right to renege later on without there being consequences.
As for stealing foreign assets in taking about things like nationalisation of Spanish oil forms without proper compensation - if you do this stealing billions of assets off people then why are you surprised that a judge wold take a hard line in holding you to your agreements elsewhere? You can't run a country by taking money and assets and not living up to your on obligations. If you do then you'll be seen as a risk and people like you won't be able to get startup funding from investors that they're asking for.
No unlike you I understand economics. It doesn't matter who is or isn't responsible for your country's situation, the fact remains that you have no control over it and your government is not improving the situation. Whether you like it or not that makes lending to your country an extremely risky proposition and if professional investors with the wealth of information they have available feel that your nations credit worthiness is junk then individuals with less knowledge of the risk should be protected from that too. If you want start up funding then move to a country with financial stability where it's safe for investors to invest, don't bitch at others for not setting up in a place where it's far too risky to do so.
This is a fact of living somewhere with poor financial management, that's defaulting on debt repeatedly, and has been stealing foreign assets. I know it's not your fault, but it's not Kikckstarters either so you can't blame them for not being willing to face the risks your country has created for itself. You may have a good idea, you may have good financial management, but whilst your government could tank your investors money over night it's not fair to ask them to take such a massive risk.
I guess it depends whose doing the calling. Sure a child minded simpleton who believes the whole world is black and white might call it hypocrisy, but most intelligent minded people with an understanding of how the world actually works call it what it is more reasonably defined as- pragmatism.
Again, you're free to try and offer counterexamples, but you won't find any because whether it's Stallman having to use a computer with a proprietary BIOS to push his FOSS philosophy because he's sometimes had little other choice or Ayn Rand accepting social security when it was her only option to survive. Sometimes reality leaves you a choice - compromise, or give up. Anyone who gets anywhere in life with their goals selects for compromise, no one has achieved anything by giving up.
Even Ghandi's principle of non violent opposition had to take a back seat once Hitler's tanks started rolling and the Japanese got ever closer.
I backtrack, it turns out you really are just far too child-like to understand the discussion at hand.
I had some sympathy for your point until I saw your homepage is an Argentinian domain name.
Do you really think it's smart for Kickstarter to setup in a country that's defaulting on a national level and whose currency is so volatile as a result?
This story is about Kickstarter trying to reduce the chance of financial loss to backers, if ever there was a way to do the opposite and instead further increase the chance of loss then setting up in a country with the financial instability of Argentina would be it.