Posts by Will Sheward

Hi Amazon, Google, Apple we might tax you on revenue rather than profit – love, Europe

Quite apart from the reporter's inability to tell the difference between Europe and the EU (I think he missed out one of "Europe's largest economies", even if he did mean the EU he's a year or two too early), this is really just extortion with threats to cover up EU and nation state incompetence.

Google, Apple etc are simply obeying the laws as drafted. If the EU, or its individual member states, want to levy more tax then draft better laws.

AFAIK finance issues require unanimity from EU member states, can't imagine the Republic of Ireland would be too happy with this proposal. This is just pointless EU grandstanding.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

Re: Jerry will be sorely missed

It wasn't "profligacy", it was an economic and political system that worked versus one that didn't.

So yes, the Beatles and Levi's Jeans (and the economic/political system that enabled and allowed them) won the war by enabling the US to finance an SDI project which the Soviet Union and its fellow travellers could not afford to match.

Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven were, along with an inherited (from my Mum) fondness for Clark and Wyndham, the foundations of my interest in Sci-Fi.

So sad to think I'll never experience a new Pournelle book. At least not until the family tendency to develop Alzheimers kicks in, so I suppose I've got that to look forward to :-)

WillS

Apple has that syncing feeling over MobileMe

Why pay?

The whole mobileMe thing is just a wrapper over a load of different services you can pick up for free elsewhere. I sync contacts by using Plaxo (free) to keep contacts up to date across various desktop clients and Gmail contacts then get my iPhone to sync with my Gmail contacts. Gmail's calendar (synced with Thunderbird/Lightning) and accessed from the iPhone takes care of appointments.

As for mail, the whole point of IMAP is that you don't need to layer another service on top of it to have access to the same inbox from multiple accounts. And who needs yet another email address? And as for 20Gig of online storage, why not just use Amazon's S3 service via Jungledisk's web interface?

UK Reaper drone wrecked in Afghanistan

Presumably £17m includes....

OK, so £17m for a Watchkeeper is a lot of money but presumably that figure includes non-vehicle related items like groundstations, spares, etc. that aren't part of the Reaper £10m replacement cost. You're making a very fair point about MoD idiocy but not really comparing like with like, cost wise.

On the subject of the Watchkeeper not being able to carry armaments, haven't the Israelis armed some of their Hermes 450s? Personally I cannot understand why we didn't just buy Hermes directly from Elbit instead of porking the whole thing out with 'modifications'. I understand the the UK is already using Hermes 450s as a stopgap until Watchkeeper is delivered so we're obviously satisfied with the unmodified platform.

WillS

www.boilingthefrog.co.uk

Microsoft versus BlackBerry versus, er, BlackBerry?

Open Standards

Whilst I can understand some companies going down the proprietary route either for the device management benefits or job safety issues (the "nobody ever lost their job buying the market leader" argument) I find it hard to see why so many Email service providers seem content to let their market slip away by either inviting in another brand (blackberry) or just completely ceeding the market for mobile email to mobile operators.

If there really is, as your panel survey suggests, a market in taking POP3 email services and enabling them for mobile use, why not just go down the IMAP route? There's a market out there for POP to IMAP conversion that email service providers should be getting involved with, to safeguard both their brand and their bottom line against the RIMs of this world.

And whilst we're on the subject of big brands muscling in on service provider business, I wonder how much of an impact Google will have in the small business space for these services in the near future?

British forces auction old kit online

red Guards not Red Guards

"...or a rather splendid Red Guards uniform, which could be yours for just £30".

I think you mean red Guards uniform rather than a Red Guards uniform. Unless, unknown to the public, the MoD did a bit of souvenir hunting after the fall of the Soviet Union?