Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Apple BIGGER than the U.S. ECONOMY? Or Australia? Or ... Luxembourg?

Re: They can't leave the money overseas forever.

Leaving aside the rights/wrongs and the Apple specifics, but can they leave it overseas for ever?

Firstly they can use the offshore money to build factories, buy raw materials, buy competitors - but this is pointless since they wouldn't pay tax on those anyway.

But they could use them to buy other companies/investments and become essentially a hedge fund.

There would be no US tax to pay if Apple Bermuda bought shares on the US stock market, or bought Heathrow, or the port of Grimsby in the same way that the Dubai National Investment corp, or the Govt of Singapore did. then Apple's share price would rise, since it owned $Tn of profitable investments, and the shareholders would be happy.

Ultimately it could stop bothering to make shiny things at all.

Re: US GDP

> But the ones they make in the US they don't stick in foreign. They cough up the tax just like good little boys.

Then they are idiots who are going to get hit with a minority shareholder lawsuit.

As an Apple shareholder I demand that they stop wasting my money by giving it to Washington and instead sell the rights to the Apple logo to Apple Bermuda for $1 and then have Apple Bermuda charge them $500/item licensing fee.

US GDP

Apple takes US consumer's money and sends a small fraction of it to China to make the thing, an even smaller fraction to Cambridge for an ARM license and sticks the rest of it in Apple's offshore tax haven.

Surely it's only contribution to US GDP is wages paid to those low enough on the totem pole not to have their won "tax efficient" compensation plan.

Eco-loons hack Thirty Meter Telescope website to help the 'natives'

Re: Green scientists

Slight mistake - don't know which bit of US government owned it. I'm just saying that the astronomers aren't cutting down redwoods and stamping on baby seals to build the telescope.

The limits on the number of telescopes, which included shutting down Keck-Interferometer since each little outrigger telescope "counted" - is purely negotiating by local interest groups for money. They protested the Japanese Subaru telescope until each Japanese engineer gained a local assistant to sit around and watch. The same groups who are perfectly happy to have massive tourist hotels.

Yes sure it's their sacred native land - in that case can we get all these Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Norman and other foreign invaders out of mine and return it to the Welsh?

Re: Green scientists

There is no nature there. The summit is bare cinder at 14,500ft, there is no water, except in winter when it is under several m of snow, there is nothing to eat except a few bits of lichen.

The scientists wanted to close the summit above the 9000ft level to the public because tourists drive up there in hire cars and need rescuing when they get altitude sickness or sunstroke (you can get sunburn in minutes at that altitude), local idiots drive up there in 4x4 and cause a lot of damage and need rescuing when they get stuck.

But it's federal land so you can't restrict access. When I worked there all the land below 9000ft was a massive army training ground which made a great nature reserve, now I think it's mainly used for cattle which has destroyed most of the local wildlife.

Re: Direct action

>This particular volcano has not been active for 4000+ years.

To a God, 4000years = Meh

Direct action

The presence of the telescope on top of an active volcano angers the local volcano god....

I don't think defacing the website is the worst that can happen

ESPN sues Verizon: People picking their own TV channels? NOOoo!

Re: Not fine enough.

I don't remember the exact argument but I think buying only the TV programmes you want to watch supports terrorism

So how should we tax these BASTARD COMPANIES, then?

Re: "we want to tax capital incomes at lower rates than labour based incomes"

It even taxes people investing capital differently.

If you are poor and put money into a savings account, you pay income tax on the interest.

If you are rich and buy shares, you pay lower capital gains tax on the profit.

>The only people who benefit from increased productivity are the owners of the company's capital.

Which is us - almost all of every major company is owned by your savings, pension and insurance policies.

The real reason fro taxing capital less than income is that the people that propose it - such as economics columnists - are self employed and can pay themselves in dividends.

Re: Hmmm

That's why it's an economic theory -> not even good on paper + impossible in practice.

Re: Fair Tax?

Then you simply avoid being the final retailer.

Just like the contractor paying yourself in dividends. You simply buy that new TV/Computer/BMW for your side business and don't pay sales tax.

Since your side business is doing Nigel Farage impersonations for children's parties you don't get a lot of work, but you do get to claim a lot of expenses

Hubble hits 25th anniversary IN SPAAACE – time for telescope to come home

Re: A lot can happen...

Except for thermal IR, where you need to be a couple of million km at L2 or x-ray ground based telescopes are now better.

We are building 30m mirrors, compared to hubble's 2.3m or JWST 6.5m, adaptive optics can beat hubble's resolution and you can build new instruments every year. Building on the ground will always be much cheaper, so you get much more data for your money

Re: >> removed one of the scientific instruments and installed the corrective device

>why not go the other direction and keep it going

For how long? Just boosting the orbit would need continuing amounts of fuel, eventually that will run out and you have to deorbit anyway.

Operating it means replacement components, generally gyros but batteries, data recorders and computers all die. It also involves a lot of expensive ground support to schedule time, upload missions, collect and store data and pay for people to work on the data.

It's a much nicer neighbourhood - Hubble has some huge limitations because of the need to put it somewhere that the Shuttle could get to.

Surveillance, broadband, zero hours: Tech policy in a UK hung Parliament

Re: Balanced, detailed election coverage?!

for ( x : [parties] )

Party X claims that they will increase public spending, reduce taxes, make life easier for decent working people, fight terrorism, invest in Britain.....

Re: What about skills?

>We've got 1.9m officially unemployed, 0.9m not in education, employment or training, and about >1.5m disability benefit claimants not in work

And the number of those with physics degrees and 10years software development experience is ...?

So a company in the city needing to expand it's trading system can either:

Take somebody unemployed and totally failed by the education system, educate them to post grad level and teach them software engineering and have staff ready in 10years - unless they leave.

Up the paycheck to persuade somebody to leave an identical job down the road. So if every company simply doubled salaries there would be no unemployment.

Not care about the skin colour or accent and hire from whereever in the world they can.

Licence to chill: Ex-CIA spyboss Petraeus gets probation for leaking US secrets to his mistress

Re: SMH.... His sentence was expected.

That's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it?

I give confidential security briefings.

You leak.

He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.

The huge flaw in Moore’s Law? It's NOT a law after all

Re: Exponential growth has happened before

Actually with 28nm -> 14nm you get 4x as many devices.

And if you have a single point flaw which destroys a single device on a wafer, you now have 4x as many devices per wafer so the cost/defect drops to 25%, you then get another few % win because with smaller devices you can get closer to the edges of a circular wafer so don't waste space.

But with more devices you waste more space to allow for the saw cuts between chips (kerf loss)

Re: Exponential growth has happened before

Moore's law wasn't that there would be exponential growth in computer chip power.

It was that the MOST COST EFFECTIVE feature size would decrease exponentially (or transistor count would increase exp)

So although a new smaller fab process would be more expensive to build and operate all the advantages, more chips/wafer, defects/chip, edge losses, kerff loses, all decrease with the square of the feature size.

With the new 14nm fab it isn't clear that it will ever be cheaper/chip than 22nm and it is even less certain for <10nm. There may be other advantages in power usage and fitting more features into a small phone - but that's not what Moore originally claimed

FBI alert: Get these motherf'king hackers off this motherf'king plane

Re: Either

Boeing's definetly isn't isolated, the FAA statement says that they rely "on firewalls and other software devices". But is typical US/UK government fashion, you don't have them fix it - you just threaten anyone who points out the flaw.

In fact the NTSB are probably terrorists for pointing out why planes crashed - we should arrest them.

But then you would need a separate GPS receiver to feed the moving map display on the seat back. These things could cost $10 - it's much easier and cheaper to just have the map display connect to the aircrafts navigation system

Re: Either

They arrested a drunk guy for trying to open a door inflight - with about 5ton of air pressure on the door that is somewhat impossible.

So presumably if you stick pins in airfix models of a plane you can be charged with terrorist attempts to destroy it with voodoo.

Either

You know they can be compromised - in which case pull their airworthiness certificate now and ground them all. Or they probably can't in which case why arrest the guy for suggesting they can?

Unless of course your intention was to stop people discussing the question - but the FBI would never engage in that sort of behaviour.

Fed-up Colorado man takes 9mm PISTOL to vexing Dell PC

Re: I think that may invalidate his warranty...

Lucky it was a Dell.

If it was an HP the bullets would have $99 each - although the gun would only have cost $39.99

Republicans in sneaky bid to reauthorize Patriot Act spying until 2020

Re: Where are those dictatorships again?

I think this is the obvious solution. If the law is going to lapse in 2015 - you just turn the year back half a century or so.

Something's missing in our universe: Boffins look into the SUPERVOID

A more detailed image shows the text "this space deliberately left blank"

Japan showcases really, really fast … whoa, WTF was that?!

Re: It would be great...

Fortunately in America the government is completely immune to interference from corporate lobbyists and the aircraft/defense industry has no real power

Lawyer: Cops dropped robbery case rather than detail FBI's StingRay phone snoop gizmo

Re: Unwarranted Search

>So if operational details are not the issue, what might the problem be?

The system may allow them to generate fake calls or a fake handset location on the network.

So if the evidence in a totally unrelated case is that your cell phone was recorded at the scene you might get it thrown out if you can show that the police routinely fake cell phone locations using this piece of kit.

Protect pedophiles in the name of fighting terrorists -> treating everyone like a terrorists in the name of fighting pedophiles.

Re: Couldn't happen over here, of course ;-)

We can however allow evidence obtained illegally to be used in court - at the judges discretion.

There is no 'fruit of the poisoned tree' rule as in the USA.

If you are a freedom fighter/terrorist/cultural organisation involved in a civil war against a Nato level military and you don't assume your phone is bugged you are an idiot who deserves everything you get.

If you are a peaceful democratic political party with nearly enough support to get your home rule referendum passed - you should probably also assume the same thing.

ditto for union leaders, journalists, anti-war protestors etc etc

Re: This made me laugh

Plea bargains are very common in the US, it's how public prosecutors manage to get 1000s of convictions without having to waste time in court.

Plead guilty to possessing this small amount of drugs, otherwise we will claim you are a major dealer and we will arrange for a 25year sentence.

There was case in the UK in the 80s when a school girl was kidnapped and the police were appearing on TV appealing for help where they claimed they couldn't track the phone calls because BT's new all digital system-X didn't allow calls to be traced.

This raised a few eyebrows on the computer security sites.

Most people didn't know about it so when offered evidence they were persuaded to plead guilty or the public defender didn't want to bother making a fuss.

It can also be used to get other evidence which you do present in court - so you never have to mention the illegally gathered bit

Ad-blocking is LEGAL: German court says Ja to browser filters

Re: It's my computer

But watching TV without watching the ads is stealing - according to Ted Turner

Remember - "If you put the kettle on between programmes, then the terrorists have won".

Yay, we're all European (Irish) now on Twitter (except Americans)

An Eu based employee can't be ordered to break eu law - but a US employee at head office can be ordered to remote in and copy the data.

>If there's a conflict of demand between the US and a country like Ireland

i think we can rely on Ireland to stand upto the US - even if it means US corporations being forced to move out of Ireland.

So why exactly does almost ALL tech live in Silicon Valley?

Re: A Zombie concept?

I was commenting on the difficulty of solving the remote recruiting reputation problem.

If I have a very simple easily packaged bit of work that I can send out to a remote dev and be able to see if they have done it correctly - then I can probably have it done cheaply by somebody on elancer.

Otherwise unless somebody has an international reputation it is very difficult to pick somebody from the web to risk person-year projects on.

Accountants are not only easier to judge but their differences matter less. A great dev can be 10x more effective than somebody picked at random, and if I was George Soros and needed to hide a few $Bn I would be careful in picking the best. But if I simply need form X submitted by a State Certified Y then I don't. The same with lawyers, if I'm Hans Reiser I need Alan Dershowitz, if I need a stock NDA I don't.

Re: I'm sorry, but some assumptions are wrong

Selling advertising is just as much about technology as building a rocket that can land on a barge.

And it gets harder every day, you are competing with other companies also selling advertising and with people becoming immune to advertising. Elon Musk just has to make a control loop faster, he doesn't have to deal with gravity becoming stronger every month.

I would say SV is one of the areas least guilty of pay disparity between bosses and engineers. You can hire a dozen CFOs on any street corner but I have to pay software devs more than Google will pay (in $ or by promising that their shares will be worth more).

Layers of incompetent middle managers who got where they are by playing golf with the right people (US) or having gone to the right school (UK) are a lot rarer in a startup than they are in almost any other industry.

> a highly specific branch of history.

Worse, it's a highly specific branch of politics or philosophy.

"I think this is a supply side classical recession and we should introduce austerity" - because I'm a right winger who wants to cut taxes / "I think this is a demand led Keynsian recession and we should introduce stimulus spending" - because I'm a bleeding heart liberal who doesn't like to see poor people.

Engineers might argue about the best solution - but they don't normally choose the alloy based on whether their surname was originally Norman or Saxon.

Re: Question:

But all those grew for exactly the same reason and in the same way as silicon valley - or were a government program to replicate SV. They don't prove that you can do distributed innovation. They prove the exact opposite, that if you want a silicon valley you replicate silicon valley.

America was founded on a dislike of taxes, so how did it get the IRS?

"Good" from the point of view of extracting more profit from you.

Re: House prices

There are big versions of Thomas the Tank engine. I know people from York that commute into London and the government wants to spend a gazillion quid on making Birmingham a London suburb

Re: House prices

One of the problems with SF is that there is a desire to keep the place low rise and low density. So high demand and low supply = prices rise (the policy is set by voters = property owners)

In Houston there is 300mi of empty land between Houston and San Antonio which is being filled with suburbs as fast as the concrete can set, prices are low but you have to sit in movie grade traffic jams.

And distances are bigger, you can commute to London from Yorkshire. You can't commute to SF from Detroit. I'm guessing that >50% of the UK population live in comutting distances to London?

Re: re: Here you have condo-fees if you live in a flat or townhouse

Leasehold always used to be pretty cheap though, I paid £100/year ground rent and a few quid for external lighting/etc in the UK.

Here even ordinary flats come with hefty fees and I get the impression that the property developer regards these as the profit margin. If the place has a gym or outside pool then the fees can end up being 50% on top of the rent/mortgage. It's enough that the mortgage companies take it into account when working out how much they will lend you.

Anonymous unleashes online petition against US info-sharing bills

Re: /append to list

But we need C-51 to protect us from the terrorists lapping at our shores.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Tortilla de patatas

Tried it - couldn't get it to stick together enough to flip.

Ended up with basically scrambled egg on chips.

Still ate it though - delicous.

Food can be divided into 2 groups - stuff that should have garlic in it and stuff that should have chocolate on it.

Don't shoot the Messenger: NASA's suicide probe to punch hole in Mercury

At least Beagle 2 hit the correct planet. This is the American government - can Venus expect an example of "friendly fire" ?