Posts by Doctor Syntax 42420 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
From the article: "appears to have taken advantage of rules that legally allow firms to minimise tax bills when their profits are unpredictable."
Unpredictability of profits is what business is all about. That's why business income is treated differently to PAYE on a regular job but as the above furniture item says, the rules I'm aware of wouldn't account for what the article says. Unfortunately it doesn't spell out what rules were used.
@A/C
I take it you don't work freelance yourself. Why not? Are you too moral to undertake what you consider to be a tax fiddle? Do you think you're not good enough? Or is it just too much for your risk appetite but still haven't worked out that the risk factor is why it should be treated as a business and not employment?
"Unfortunately, the board has a legal requirement to put the interests of the shareholders first."
Interests. Long or short term?
"If the shareholders can prove that they haven't, they can sue."
If the shareholders aren't happy they don't need to prove anything. They can vote out the board at the next AGM. If enough of them get together they can probably call an EGM and do it sooner. Whether they're happy depends on the nature of the shareholders and the above question applies. Long or short term?
"Loans and mortgages that have 25 or more years of life in them were seeing the Y2K "problem" by 1975 or sooner."
I remember reading of a company being asked to tender for software to manage a property registry. Their proposal mentioned 4 digit years as Y2K was approaching. The prospective client said they didn't want that. The company noticed that the spec mentioned leases running back into previous centuries. They decided not to tender.
"The keys are somehow linked to the maintenance contract."
I had a client who reverse-engineered the keys because the vendor's maintenance was so dire. He reckoned I did a better job. Over the years I certainly dug out a few very peculiar things they'd done. That's apart from the things discovered right at the start such as the scripts to set up the system which had .sql suffixes and weren't SQL.
"My company sells permanent licenses for software but issues activation keys with expiry dates. The keys are somehow linked to the maintenance contract. It makes no sense and the bosses keep contradicting themselves about what the rules are."
Perhaps you should enquire if they've checked with their legal advisors. It sounds as if there's a distinct possibility of it being considered fraud.
"I wonder if it's time to give 6.1.5 a spin."
Seems OK. The bundled icons seem to be the extremes of line drawings my granddaughter would have discarded when she was 7 and the slightly garish. Fortunately the Oxygen add-on still works. I don't know why, under Linux, they can't just use the current icon set from the OS.
I wonder how long it will take 6.2 to settle down. The prospect of being able to use KDE file dialogs on KDE is appealing.
"The new version 6.2 is the first release in 2019. 6.0 appeared just over a year ago and 6.1 turned up in August."
I wonder if it's time to give 6.1.5 a spin. Last time I tried 6.1 it seemed problematical in various respects so I stepped back to 6.0. Unreasonable? No, at that time 6.1 was the bleeding edge just as 6.2 is now. 6.0 was the choice for "just works".
What continually amazes me about Amazon is that how they repeatedly make themselves appear inept at the operation of that shopping cart.
Only this week SWMBO required seven pens which were ordered as one item in the cart, qty = 7. Amazingly seven separate emails were sent over the space of about an hour reflecting that each pen was separately packed, posted and delivered.
I can't imagine any business I've worked with getting away with that and the many other logistical faux pas I've seen from Amazon without being bankrupted. It seems quite likely that when they say they don't make a profit it's no more than the simple truth.
"Had we all had to pay for email and search and social messaging etc right from the start"
As regards email we generally do pay for email even if we don't all use the paid-for provision. All ISPs I've used included email in the bundle. People who've been burned by finding it ties them to an ISP they want to leave will then usually turn to Gmail or the relentlessly rebranded Microsoft option.
On the broader point having to pay for an ISP still excludes the poorer who may then have to make use of some public facility such as a library. For these the free email providers are essential.
Given email I remain unconvinced that so-called social messaging adds anything useful.
"the fundamental problem facing publishers – the fact that Facebook and Google dominate the online ad business and online content discovery channels."
The publishers have only themselves to blame.
In print they've sold advertising space and put it on the pages themselves. Online they chose to hand it over to Google.
For search - and this applies to far too many vendors' sites as well as publishers - on-site search is generally so poor that all too often it's easier to go to an external search engine than try to find what you're looking for on the site itself. This includes at least some of the largest tech vendors who really should know better.
The inetrnet took a tragically awful wrong turn in permitting the "free use" to arise in the first place.
How would "the internet" allow or disallow this? It's a communications network, nothing more, nothing less. Get a domain, set up a server with the protocol of your choice and link its address to your domain. People will use it or not as it suits them. From my point of view a paid for mail service is worth while, a paid for search engine at present isn't. The economics of free search engines probably depends on the balance between those of us who use ad blockers and those who don't; yes it's still September.
"your browser only has Google & Bullshitipedia as search options and apparently nothing else exists?"
Here's a tip:
1. Navigate to the search engine of your choice on the browser of your choice.
2. Find your browser's setting for home page - every browser I've seen has one so if yours doesn't try a different browser.
3. Select the current page option - see comment on 2.
4. Save the setting.
5. When you want to search just go to your home page.
"Nonetheless, in light of the nature of the allegations published by Mr. Bezos, the Board has convened and determined that it should promptly and thoroughly investigate the claims. Upon completion of that investigation, the Board will take whatever appropriate action is necessary.”
Translation: "We're choosing a scapegoat."
Between "could be hacked only by determined skilled hackers with enough time and resources to find a a previously unknown vulnerability" and "can be easily hacked by a casual script kiddie" there is a big difference.
And all too often the big difference is only a matter of months - if that.
"Instead, he pointed to a one-page assessment from the German federal agency Bundesnetzagentur that the watch didn't violate that country’s Telecommunications Act."
I once had to investigate a case where a home-made roof ladder broke. I'm sure it didn't violate any country's Telecommunications Act but unfortunately that didn't help. The bloke who fell off the ladder was killed.
"EE told the BBC that its own internal polices weren't followed in the case, but that its employee had been given the heave-ho."
Employee in the singular is a problem here. There are at least two involved, her ex and the one, or maybe several, who "didn't follow procedures" in handling the complaint.
"Microsoft's traditional model only worked if customers needed to routinely update to the latest version, and so pay for it"
That model worked fine when the format of a .doc file changed with every version so victims had to upgrade whenever someone sent then a file in the new version.
Then they got sucked into having to arrange an international standard format for themselves. Now they can't play tricks with the file format. They got round that with a change of UI so that once a cohort of new recruits had been trained on the new UI by the MS education programme hit employment they had to have the new version bought because they couldn't use the old one.
You can't play that game too often so they discovered subscription - lock-in on steroids.
Politicians across the EU have for a generation found it expedient to blame "Brussels" for anything unpopular even though they have more than likely voted for in the European Council.
The fact that they're choosing to deprive themselves of that expediency cays a good deal about their capability of forethought.
"Notice that the emphasis for Brexit is all about trade - all of them are deliberately ignoring the destruction of the countless rights, agreements, treaties, subscriptions, memberships etc which we enjoy under EU membership."
Which, essentially, are about trade to a greater or lesser extent. Even things like food quality, worker protection etc. have a trade element in them to prevent one country within the group gaining trading advantage by adopting lower standards. If the things you list are things you care about, you care about trade.
