Sadly, this won't work if she's a citizen and not a greencard holder. The US is one of the countries that taxes income based on both citizenship AND residency.
Doesn't matter if you are outside of the US, the IRS will ask for it's cut unless you are in a country that has a tax treaty with the US (and you fall within the terms of said treaty). Even then, most of the treaties require proof of payment with respect to the taxes due in the other country or the IRS still takes a cut.
If you are in a country without a tax treaty, then you are out of luck as most countries tax based on residency, therefor you are double taxed by the country where the work is done, and the US.
I really want to expand upon this, because it really is a very good point.
Take the assumption that even if G was able to come out with a way port the new OS to the old phone users (which as we can already see is a slow process, and questions may exist of any hardware dependencies) users would still have to rely on application developers to recode any apps they have already bought. Next assuming the apps are developed, I suspect it will be a bit of a shock to see how much apps cost when re-buying a whole lot of them. Micro-payments have a way of adding and no necessarily getting noticed until you need to repay for stuff you've lost. (Caveat here, hopefully being that G would eat this cost being a good corporate citizen and all that.)
Ironically, this is exactly where Microsoft seems to be going with it's mobile devices. I can't help but wonder if the good that comes from the new UI, will counteract the uncertainties and negatives of the change in the underlying framework, the expandability with the HC-micro-sd cards, the cut and paste loss, and the loss of functionality when the pre-7 apps can't run. While not every application was able to make the migration without problems or relativity minor code changes from WM2002 to WM6.5 a majority of the gems applications migrated so easily that you only really had to re-buy an application if there was a major product enhancement or feature add. With the way 7 is locking down applications I suspect there's going to be a major re-purchasing of applications (if the developers are even willing to recode for 7 or go through the necessary bureaucracy that they didn't have to deal with before...) and I have to wonder if that overhead is going to stop those that are already running a wm type smart-phone that they have customized to the point that they are very satisfied with it.
Probably the same person that had decided that no one uses text messages anymore and supporting non-smartphones is not worth their time and non-smartphones supposedly no longer exist.
As it is I migrated to BrightKite a long time ago because their interface just worked better and I was never really interested in the gaming aspect of Foursquare. To me it's just a social proprioception tool.
My use case in case anyone wants to know. I have a tight knit group of friends and for 90% of my checkins only they get the updates. Conversly, I only get their alerts sent to me. Where this is useful, for me, is if I say go to the mall on Saturday.
*I check-in at the mall cause I need new socks. *Fifteen minutes later friend A checks in at the mall *This check-in generates an alert which gets SMS'd to my phone "A has checked in where you are!" *I sms Friend A : "Hey I'm at the mall too. Why don't we grab lunch at Restaurant X?"
There, with little effort I now have a coincidental meet-up with a friend over lunch; this has significantly made my trip to the mall more enjoyable than just hunting for a good deal on socks. Silly, perhaps, but for all you know it maybe a friend I don't get to see that much offline.
Here I was hoping this is a production ready next step to what the Fingerwork's touchstream should have been in it's next iteration. I can only hope this will come to pass as there has only been backwards movement on that technology since the company was bought out.
I'm not really sure I'd call this exclusive. I've had a program on my phone for years called voice commander.
I say "Call Cindy at work" and it dials her work number I say "Dial five five five one two one two" and it calls 555-1212 I say "Launch TomTom" and it launches TomTom "Play Kimi wa dare wo mamotte iru".... you guessed it starts playing the full song that I sampled for my ringtone.
I suppose the fact that I can't command TomTom which address to find via voice is different. Granted I either have to hit my voice command/ppt reprogrammable button or the pickup button on my headset, but I think the android works very much the same way.
What, no links to Top Gears news segment on this a few weeks ago?
I can't find the vid from work but.. beautiful shot of a test run of one of their prototype safe Volvos that's supposed to apply the breaks to prevent a crash.... crashing.
I seem to recall a Microsoft Case Study used for NI that proposed a similiar yet more thought out idea, giving an example of services in, at, around a fictional chain ski resorts and their associated villages. This included everything from check-in to rental preperation to a little bing at the ski-lift if you have a message email.
Also I seem to recall a story about Brad Fitzpatrick using one of the Dev android phones back in the day to alert his house to him coming home, opening the garage door, and potentially other subroutines that could be activated.
While the iphone app may not have any of this functionality built in, I have to wonder if the idea isn't just a tad bit obvious... or at least with multiple examples of prior art.
I think there is also a question of difference of levels. Take, for instance the PSP. A device that is semi customizable.
Sony tries to make sure it stays with-in a certain standard but there are ways to run arbitrary code and cook new software and firmware for it. Some of the methods are trivial others are not. Overall, when you look at the entire scope of what can be done to the device, Sony is rather hands off. (Which is a surprise to me as I often lump Sony and Apple into similiar categories.)
With the iPhone, Apple tries to make it a tooth & nail fight for every inch.
I guess to continue the analogy; The wall in Sony's garden is chicken wire, and wall in Apple's garden is 3 meter thick unobtainium. The former is more of a suggestion and people are more easy going with that.
Agreed, the Millienium Cycle probably sold a heck of a lot more than 1 Million E-books. I know far more people reading it on the Sony Reader than the Kindle, so I'm not so sure that even doubling the number is far fetched if all actual ebook sales are reviewed.
Never said it was an easy position. Not one of them likes the situation they are in, but no one has been able to come up with a good solution.
To be fair I think as wide spread, detremental, and unknown as these two problems are it's very unlikely that there are more than a handful of such cases in software out there today and it's only done in the most extreme of situations. At least, that's my sincere hope.
As for it being used right now. To be honest we don't know that it isn't. But generally, it's a widely enough software that I'd expect people there to be press despite the company getting a lot of passes in the press.
So.. since all their touch technology derives from FingerWorks [ http://fingerworks.com/ ]. They revived the iGesturePad from 1999 and added a raiser.
Question 1) Do we get to see any of the 60 or so gestures they used to use a decade ago that Apple declined to reuse?
Question 2) Is there a chance that it means the TouchStream LP is coming back in a form I could potentially get for my windows9x+/*nix9x computer again... without having to pay several hundred on eBay + driver hunts... just several hundred to Apple?
------------- My hope is that they are answered as followed:
... and posted them elsewhere. So here's a quick copy paste and what my thoughts are. ====================== Procedure : Step 1) notify manufacturer of flaw
Step 2) Wait an appropriate time for response. This depends on the product. OS could be as much as months depending on how deep the flaw is. Web-browsers probably 2-3 weeks. Corollary 2a) If manufacturer responds and says its a will-not-fix you have some decisions, see 3a.
Step 3) If no response, make an announcement of doing a proof of concept exhibition with a very vague description. People asking for details say it was probably as vague as possible. The company has already been contacted, so they know the issue or can contact you from the announcement. Schedule it with enough time for the company to release a fix. Corollary 3a) How critical is the flaw. If marked as will-not-fix and its very detrimental you might have to sit on it.
Step 4) Do exhibit. With luck flaw has been fixed and last slide is about how well manufacturer did.
Step 5)...Profit!!!! (While this is the obligatory joke post, Check out E-Eye security to see how it's happened before) =============== WRT to 3a: You'd be surprised how often this is done. There are two long-standing issues against a certain software that, while being uncommon and not often thought of attack vectors, are less than trivial to exploit and gain full access. Manufacturer has, in fact, responded with a "works as designed, will not fix." People in the information securities industry have found the flaws so detrimental that they've imposed a self-embargo about openly discussing it. Without manufacturer buy-in, a fix just can't come in time if that particular information was released and the effect would be significantly widespread. The only thing releasing the information would do is cause a massive Zero Day event that would only harm consumers or leave them without the services of the software for several months. With no evidence that the exploit is being used in the wild, save for handful of anecdotal reports, the issue has become a bi-annual prodding of the manufacturer.
Isn't that what the various religous affiliated schools are for, or has the parochial school system, et al, suddenly dissappeared in the last 16 years since I left it?
... do what Marc Maiffret did and turn your affiliation with Microsoft and penchant for finding and addressing vulnerabilities into a profitable career/company. Frankly, I think the credibility he earned goes a heck of a lot further for making money in the long run than a series bounties would. It also further limits any possible muck-rakers from trying to insinuate conflicts of interest.
Also, I am not sure people realize that Microsoft has made leaps and bounds in terms of how they view security/vulnerabilities since the 90's. Going beyond the chuckles: Do they have problems still? Sure, but it's no longer viewed as a marketing problem; they acknowledge it's an engineering problem and have an actual hope in Hades of fixing it compared to a company that once used to treat everything as branding and marketing.
And that's because that is really just a FAQ and a very limited explanation of the regulations in place. The least amount of leverage is applied to get things done. The regulations never say that the industry can't go above and beyond what regulations say just that they meet the bare minimum. I suspect the FCC knowing how exchanges work wrote this regulation with the suspicion that logistical costs made it such that it was better for the telecoms to make number portability universal, not just local.
All this said, I haven't bought a phone offline since my StarTac...
And I'd say 80% of the people I know bought their last 2-3 phones either online or during travels to foreign destinations (Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong). I suspect the lack of sales had a number of factors, including misfocus of the target market, targetting the wrong (ir insufficient) region, fragmentation and confusion between all the android devices (ans smart phones in general), and finally there are still a number of people on the fence about the OS due to the inconsistent internal rules and interfaces in the systems. Personally, I think the User Experience team really needs to get involved with inputs on the UI and maybe even targeting (as of yet they've been kept away from the project.)
I think it was more targeted at the Carriers than the OEMs persay. Let's remember the History of the G1. It was essentially the 3 year old google dev phone with a slightly 'shinier' case that could handle branding. Carriers weren't initially willing to do the buy in without a sign-off from the software writer (the big G, duh) and they weren't willing to re-test any new phone that HTC or any OEM had come up with.
I think Google use the N1 as a way to convince the carriers to "take a chance" and probably to stop bugging their dev team for signoffs. They were playing it safe with phones that didn't deviate from the original dev spec too much as a way to ensure the system would work. The N1 likely scared carriers into ordering more advanced units that the OEMs just couldn't get out of prototyping do to tooling cost restraints.
Rogers Throttles as much as or more. In fact, not only are they throttling, they made a statement recently about charging $5 for ever GB (rounding up) of transfer over their undisclosed limit set on "unlimited" accounts.
As for third parties. You have Telus, but they are rather limited to the Western half of the country, and Allstream, which is what is left of AT&T after they decided they couldn't compete with Bell and pulled out of the country. Finally, IIRC not only does Bell own the last mile, they also serve as the Tier 2 operator for the Tier 1 ISP's. So even if they didn't screw you up front; they could still potentially screw you in the background.
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Sadly, this won't work if she's a citizen and not a greencard holder. The US is one of the countries that taxes income based on both citizenship AND residency.
Doesn't matter if you are outside of the US, the IRS will ask for it's cut unless you are in a country that has a tax treaty with the US (and you fall within the terms of said treaty). Even then, most of the treaties require proof of payment with respect to the taxes due in the other country or the IRS still takes a cut.
If you are in a country without a tax treaty, then you are out of luck as most countries tax based on residency, therefor you are double taxed by the country where the work is done, and the US.
I really want to expand upon this, because it really is a very good point.
Take the assumption that even if G was able to come out with a way port the new OS to the old phone users (which as we can already see is a slow process, and questions may exist of any hardware dependencies) users would still have to rely on application developers to recode any apps they have already bought. Next assuming the apps are developed, I suspect it will be a bit of a shock to see how much apps cost when re-buying a whole lot of them. Micro-payments have a way of adding and no necessarily getting noticed until you need to repay for stuff you've lost. (Caveat here, hopefully being that G would eat this cost being a good corporate citizen and all that.)
Ironically, this is exactly where Microsoft seems to be going with it's mobile devices. I can't help but wonder if the good that comes from the new UI, will counteract the uncertainties and negatives of the change in the underlying framework, the expandability with the HC-micro-sd cards, the cut and paste loss, and the loss of functionality when the pre-7 apps can't run. While not every application was able to make the migration without problems or relativity minor code changes from WM2002 to WM6.5 a majority of the gems applications migrated so easily that you only really had to re-buy an application if there was a major product enhancement or feature add. With the way 7 is locking down applications I suspect there's going to be a major re-purchasing of applications (if the developers are even willing to recode for 7 or go through the necessary bureaucracy that they didn't have to deal with before...) and I have to wonder if that overhead is going to stop those that are already running a wm type smart-phone that they have customized to the point that they are very satisfied with it.
All of a sudden the Easter Island statues' purpose becomes clear!
Probably the same person that had decided that no one uses text messages anymore and supporting non-smartphones is not worth their time and non-smartphones supposedly no longer exist.
As it is I migrated to BrightKite a long time ago because their interface just worked better and I was never really interested in the gaming aspect of Foursquare. To me it's just a social proprioception tool.
My use case in case anyone wants to know. I have a tight knit group of friends and for 90% of my checkins only they get the updates. Conversly, I only get their alerts sent to me. Where this is useful, for me, is if I say go to the mall on Saturday.
*I check-in at the mall cause I need new socks.
*Fifteen minutes later friend A checks in at the mall
*This check-in generates an alert which gets SMS'd to my phone "A has checked in where you are!"
*I sms Friend A : "Hey I'm at the mall too. Why don't we grab lunch at Restaurant X?"
There, with little effort I now have a coincidental meet-up with a friend over lunch; this has significantly made my trip to the mall more enjoyable than just hunting for a good deal on socks. Silly, perhaps, but for all you know it maybe a friend I don't get to see that much offline.
Here I was hoping this is a production ready next step to what the Fingerwork's touchstream should have been in it's next iteration. I can only hope this will come to pass as there has only been backwards movement on that technology since the company was bought out.
I'm not really sure I'd call this exclusive. I've had a program on my phone for years called voice commander.
I say "Call Cindy at work" and it dials her work number .... you guessed it starts playing the full song that I sampled for my ringtone.
I say "Dial five five five one two one two" and it calls 555-1212
I say "Launch TomTom" and it launches TomTom
"Play Kimi wa dare wo mamotte iru"
I suppose the fact that I can't command TomTom which address to find via voice is different. Granted I either have to hit my voice command/ppt reprogrammable button or the pickup button on my headset, but I think the android works very much the same way.
Program Link: http://www.cyberon.com.tw/pro-solAG1-1.php?NO1=1
... on an episode of MacGuyver?
Except, I think he used drywall dust from the nearest wall (always carry a knife) instead of photo tricks to 'bump up the contrast.'
What, no links to Top Gears news segment on this a few weeks ago?
I can't find the vid from work but .. beautiful shot of a test run of one of their prototype safe Volvos that's supposed to apply the breaks to prevent a crash .... crashing.
This sounds awfully familiar.
I seem to recall a Microsoft Case Study used for NI that proposed a similiar yet more thought out idea, giving an example of services in, at, around a fictional chain ski resorts and their associated villages. This included everything from check-in to rental preperation to a little bing at the ski-lift if you have a message email.
Also I seem to recall a story about Brad Fitzpatrick using one of the Dev android phones back in the day to alert his house to him coming home, opening the garage door, and potentially other subroutines that could be activated.
While the iphone app may not have any of this functionality built in, I have to wonder if the idea isn't just a tad bit obvious ... or at least with multiple examples of prior art.
I think there is also a question of difference of levels. Take, for instance the PSP. A device that is semi customizable.
Sony tries to make sure it stays with-in a certain standard but there are ways to run arbitrary code and cook new software and firmware for it. Some of the methods are trivial others are not. Overall, when you look at the entire scope of what can be done to the device, Sony is rather hands off. (Which is a surprise to me as I often lump Sony and Apple into similiar categories.)
With the iPhone, Apple tries to make it a tooth & nail fight for every inch.
I guess to continue the analogy; The wall in Sony's garden is chicken wire, and wall in Apple's garden is 3 meter thick unobtainium. The former is more of a suggestion and people are more easy going with that.
Agreed, the Millienium Cycle probably sold a heck of a lot more than 1 Million E-books. I know far more people reading it on the Sony Reader than the Kindle, so I'm not so sure that even doubling the number is far fetched if all actual ebook sales are reviewed.
Little johnny ( and his parents ) can look at the percentage and figure it out then.
Ah .. but Little Johnny's Parents only got C's when they were doing percentages in their Mathematics course...
Good point! Unless ... maybe this is the same exact hardware in a shinier packaging? Then maybe they can still claim it's the first?
Or maybe it will be claimed that the FingerWorks systems were never designed to work with Apple, they just happened to?
I didn't even ponder that one. Someone get metatic a cookie!
The iGesturePad was a similiar price point. The Touchstream LP(on the website link) was significantly more ... functional ... and cost a lot more.
Question 2 was more in hopes that the latter product will be delivered as well as the smaller cousin.
What makes you think some of the people that know aren't at CERT...
That said you are correct; Cert should be notified at the same time as the manufactuer IMHO.
Never said it was an easy position. Not one of them likes the situation they are in, but no one has been able to come up with a good solution.
To be fair I think as wide spread, detremental, and unknown as these two problems are it's very unlikely that there are more than a handful of such cases in software out there today and it's only done in the most extreme of situations. At least, that's my sincere hope.
As for it being used right now. To be honest we don't know that it isn't. But generally, it's a widely enough software that I'd expect people there to be press despite the company getting a lot of passes in the press.
So .. since all their touch technology derives from FingerWorks [ http://fingerworks.com/ ]. They revived the iGesturePad from 1999 and added a raiser.
Question 1) Do we get to see any of the 60 or so gestures they used to use a decade ago that Apple declined to reuse?
Question 2) Is there a chance that it means the TouchStream LP is coming back in a form I could potentially get for my windows9x+/*nix9x computer again ... without having to pay several hundred on eBay + driver hunts... just several hundred to Apple?
-------------
My hope is that they are answered as followed:
1) Yes
2) Yes, more than a chance, and soon.
... and posted them elsewhere. So here's a quick copy paste and what my thoughts are.
======================
Procedure :
Step 1) notify manufacturer of flaw
Step 2) Wait an appropriate time for response. This depends on the product. OS could be as much as months depending on how deep the flaw is. Web-browsers probably 2-3 weeks.
Corollary 2a) If manufacturer responds and says its a will-not-fix you have some decisions, see 3a.
Step 3) If no response, make an announcement of doing a proof of concept exhibition with a very vague description. People asking for details say it was probably as vague as possible. The company has already been contacted, so they know the issue or can contact you from the announcement. Schedule it with enough time for the company to release a fix.
Corollary 3a) How critical is the flaw. If marked as will-not-fix and its very detrimental you might have to sit on it.
Step 4) Do exhibit. With luck flaw has been fixed and last slide is about how well manufacturer did.
Step 5) ...Profit!!!! (While this is the obligatory joke post, Check out E-Eye security to see how it's happened before)
===============
WRT to 3a: You'd be surprised how often this is done. There are two long-standing issues against a certain software that, while being uncommon and not often thought of attack vectors, are less than trivial to exploit and gain full access. Manufacturer has, in fact, responded with a "works as designed, will not fix." People in the information securities industry have found the flaws so detrimental that they've imposed a self-embargo about openly discussing it. Without manufacturer buy-in, a fix just can't come in time if that particular information was released and the effect would be significantly widespread. The only thing releasing the information would do is cause a massive Zero Day event that would only harm consumers or leave them without the services of the software for several months. With no evidence that the exploit is being used in the wild, save for handful of anecdotal reports, the issue has become a bi-annual prodding of the manufacturer.
Isn't that what the various religous affiliated schools are for, or has the parochial school system, et al, suddenly dissappeared in the last 16 years since I left it?
... do what Marc Maiffret did and turn your affiliation with Microsoft and penchant for finding and addressing vulnerabilities into a profitable career/company. Frankly, I think the credibility he earned goes a heck of a lot further for making money in the long run than a series bounties would. It also further limits any possible muck-rakers from trying to insinuate conflicts of interest.
Also, I am not sure people realize that Microsoft has made leaps and bounds in terms of how they view security/vulnerabilities since the 90's. Going beyond the chuckles: Do they have problems still? Sure, but it's no longer viewed as a marketing problem; they acknowledge it's an engineering problem and have an actual hope in Hades of fixing it compared to a company that once used to treat everything as branding and marketing.
Yes, Thank you. However, hardly my biggest gramatical blunder in the last few days of sleep-typoing. ^^x;;
And that's because that is really just a FAQ and a very limited explanation of the regulations in place. The least amount of leverage is applied to get things done. The regulations never say that the industry can't go above and beyond what regulations say just that they meet the bare minimum. I suspect the FCC knowing how exchanges work wrote this regulation with the suspicion that logistical costs made it such that it was better for the telecoms to make number portability universal, not just local.
All this said, I haven't bought a phone offline since my StarTac...
And I'd say 80% of the people I know bought their last 2-3 phones either online or during travels to foreign destinations (Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong). I suspect the lack of sales had a number of factors, including misfocus of the target market, targetting the wrong (ir insufficient) region, fragmentation and confusion between all the android devices (ans smart phones in general), and finally there are still a number of people on the fence about the OS due to the inconsistent internal rules and interfaces in the systems. Personally, I think the User Experience team really needs to get involved with inputs on the UI and maybe even targeting (as of yet they've been kept away from the project.)
I think it was more targeted at the Carriers than the OEMs persay. Let's remember the History of the G1. It was essentially the 3 year old google dev phone with a slightly 'shinier' case that could handle branding. Carriers weren't initially willing to do the buy in without a sign-off from the software writer (the big G, duh) and they weren't willing to re-test any new phone that HTC or any OEM had come up with.
I think Google use the N1 as a way to convince the carriers to "take a chance" and probably to stop bugging their dev team for signoffs. They were playing it safe with phones that didn't deviate from the original dev spec too much as a way to ensure the system would work. The N1 likely scared carriers into ordering more advanced units that the OEMs just couldn't get out of prototyping do to tooling cost restraints.
Rogers Throttles as much as or more. In fact, not only are they throttling, they made a statement recently about charging $5 for ever GB (rounding up) of transfer over their undisclosed limit set on "unlimited" accounts.
As for third parties. You have Telus, but they are rather limited to the Western half of the country, and Allstream, which is what is left of AT&T after they decided they couldn't compete with Bell and pulled out of the country. Finally, IIRC not only does Bell own the last mile, they also serve as the Tier 2 operator for the Tier 1 ISP's. So even if they didn't screw you up front; they could still potentially screw you in the background.