Posts by PatuTessa

Australia's contact-tracing app regulation avoids 'woolly' principles in comparable cyber-laws, say lawyers

Cool app, could be very important

Personally, I support the COVIDSafe idea. We don't have a vaccination yet, so contact tracing is important. The app is very easy to install and innocuous to use. Since it could save lives, great, though I would prefer for it not to use AWS. This puts our data under the control of a third party and possibly a foreign government. Really hard to understand why this is necessary except as a short-term expedient, as there is open source software and locally owned hardware that could be readily used for the data storage required, which doesn't appear huge.

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

Make it attractive to pay tax

Charles 9 has an excellent question. One must somehow make it a better idea to pay taxes than not. Naturally, appealing to ethics is unlikely to work. And removing police protection from Amazon warehouses - on the grounds that they haven't paid for such protection - seems likely to have consequences that may be even worse.

One possibility is to have a deductible tax on transactions, like a sales tax. Such taxes would only be levied on organizations not paying income tax, and would be levied at a rate making it advantageous for Amazon et al to book their corporate profits where they earn them. The difficulty is to work out the details to be less unreasonable than present tax laws.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the data centre temp's delightful

Hot?

Here in Melbourne, we get up to 46 occasionally, actually rather bracing as long as its dry.

'It's back to the drawing board...' Innocent axions found not guilty of dark matter crimes

Re: Modified Newtonian Dynamics

This problem exists with all measuring devices. We have no absolute yardsticks anywhere. Clocks are compared against each other. If they pass consistency checks, they become the standard of time, which is now defined in terms of atomic transition frequencies. The exact transition chosen is updated as the technology improves. That is all we can know.