Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"As a revenue tax targeted on a narrowly defined set of companies, the Digital Services Tax is not one of those smart measures. It risks making investing in the UK less attractive"
Investing? I think he means "selling in". The tax gets charged irrespective of whether they invest or not. In fact the whole thing could be structured so that real investments are offset against income.
"Third, you don't want X thousands of FB shareholders screaming to their congresscritters"
The people at whom they should scream are FB manglement for getting into this position. And FB manglement are pretty well insulated from this because one of them has a controlling vote.
"set aside $3bn in anticipation of an FTC smack-down, leaving the biz with $2.43bn in profit"
This could be clearer but I'm interpreting this to mean that of the $5bn they had to root down the side of the cushions for $2bn because they'd already put $3bn in the swear box. So the profits for the first quarter would have been $4.43bn. Pro rate that means that annual profits are of the order of $17 to $18bn. But that $3bn set aside had to have come from somewhere, presumably profits in some other quarter. Even if the cost of the fine was spread over multiple quarters it must still have come from overall profits and is well over a quarter of that pro-rate estimated annual profits.
If I were an ordinary shareholder I'd be a bit narked to find that the business's playing silly buggers had resulted in a fine of over a quarter of a year's profits. In fact, I might be inclined to vote against the board at the next AGM. Of course, this being Facebook that would have no effect whatsoever due to the strange share structure.
It's one thing to state things in an indictment (or "Bluster" might be a better word) and another to produce evidence to that effect in court. It seems unlikely that they'll ever have to do the latter so they cold actually claim it included a solution to the travelling salesman problem if they wanted.
"Suggest you visit a logistics company. I think the (largely off-the-shelf) systems they use to track packages through their distribution and delivery network are more than capable of handling rail freight."
Evidence says they're all too often not capable of tracking stuff through their own networks. It's OK when everything goes as it should but the use cases for nicked stuff, failure to deliver or whatever are due in some much later sprint.
"Some marketing moron"
More likely the moron would be a beancounter totting up the "losses" on the licenses - price of everything and value of nothing etc. Much as I expect marketing to be staffed entirely by morons I suspect that this time it was marketing who realised the consequences.
There's an implication (but not an outright explicit statement) that training had been given. If that's so and the other trainees didn't have this problem then one should exonerate the trainers.
In any case she'd been told that this is the way it's supposed to be used, that it's not an error for Microsoft to fix. If she couldn't accept being corrected by someone whose job it is to know then I think there's a reason to escalate the issue, IT manager to her line manager. Frankly, she needed to be kept away from sharp objects. Am I the only one who can see the dangers if she had access to email? At least she left and became SEP.
"you don't save it on your machine anymore, everything is saved in the cloud"
But what did you do to save it on your machine? And why should you do something different just to save in in the cloud? After all, "the cloud" is just somebody else's machine. There's no implication that you do something different. Even if you misunderstood the first time you should be prepared to accept correction from someone whose job is to know.
"So continual saving means a new file format designed for that."
ODF formats have "flat" versions, i.e. not zipped and compressed. I thought that maybe they were intended for use with versioning systems built on diffs - SCCS, git and anything in between - which would overcome this. But no, elements are sequence numbered and a small change near the start causes the rest of the elements to be renumbered when the file is saved. It's no more suited to that than MS Office formats.
Clearly it would be possible for a file format intended to be saved economically in versions. It would also enable remote saving by means of a proper client server protocol instead of relying on emulation of a file system, something that would help protect against ransomware.
Perhaps it's time to start thinking of a new, open format based on these lines.
"It's also annoying that 2 days later her parents contacted the school complaining that 'we'd' lost her data and refused to help her get it back"
Does the school emphasis - from the start - that multiple copies must be saved? It would be good practice to run spot checeks with students; "How many save copies do you have? When did you last save one?".
"Others might start pushing other solutions to their clients and they would be in better position to know which clients could ditch MS either partially or fully."
If they really see their future as running servers for their customers to connect to they maybe don't care what clients the customers are running and if they can ditch Windows altogether then they don't have to support it.
"Its 'non trivial', it takes a lot of time and effort to get things to function properly."
It's exactly because we know that that we don't trust them.
"I'm a retiree -- one of those old people that are regarded with amusement because we don't understand computers....or maybe we do, since we've been riding them up from the beginning."
Well so am I. See my comment above.
"not linked to any personal or identifiable information"
If the recording contains personal identifiable information it doesn't need to be linked to anything else - it is not "all well".
"We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies"
Translation: somebody blew the whistle on us.
"It is intended to ensure that two people working side by side in a similar role for the same employer pay the same employment taxes."
Fair enough - provided security of employment and all other employee benefits are considered a taxable benefit in kind.
If they're not then IR35 ensures they aren't paying the same taxes.
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