Posts by Dazed and Confused

Brit retailers tell Amazon and Google to pay their taxes

When the Euro officials wrote the laws

They never anticipated the wholesale cross border trade we see today.

They only thought cars would be a problem.

So with cars you pay VAT (and other taxes) where you live.

For booze, fags and other stuff you pay VAT where you shop

Amazon are based in a lower tax country than the UK, so people get to go shopping more cheaply there.

This has happened for years. A colleague from Belgium once told me that where he came from on the boarder one side of a road was in Luxenbourg and the other in Belgium. Everything was cheaper to buy on one side of the street, so guess where people go shopping.

The situation with booze and fag tax in the UK has meant that for years people pile down to Dover and hop the channel to go shopping.

Its always been the case that you could phone a shop in another country and buy things straight from them.

It is just that the Internet and online shopping has made this easier.

Boffins biff over ‘twisted radio’

Re: Second Law of Thermodynamics

>authors argue

Isn't that the fourth law?

Google fine-tuning iOS mapping app for Apple submission

Just jail break it

Why bother trying to get the Maps onto the Apple store, just provide good clear instructions on jail breaking the iPhone. Apples customers are complaining about the Apple mapping SW, sounds like the perfect to slip a wedge between Apple and their once fanatically loyal customer base.

Software sucks these days - and just maybe it's all YOUR fault

Why bother to make it better

Since SW makers have convinced themselves and seemingly the world, that normal laws don't apply to them, why should they bother to make it any better. You "agree" to a license that says the only right you have is the right to hand over your money on their demand.

Until they are forced to accept that they are responsible for failures in the products they expect to be paid for (an act normally referred to as selling) why the F*&^ should they worry if its sh*t it won't cost them anything.

Apple to settle with Samsung? Korean honcho: 'Fuggedaboutit'

We won't negotiate at all

Mean's

We can get a damn sight better price than that.

Wait a few more weeks and they might pay us to go away.

Wait a few weeks longer and we can probably put the parts prices up again.

When they pay us and agree to our quote for the new screens order, then we'll sign.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks are 'immoral' and 'ridiculous' over UK tax

Re: Who wrote the laws

> MPs don't write laws.

It's MP's job to write laws, the fact that they are useless and out source the drafting of laws to "interested parties" doesn't stop it being their fault. They can't blame anyone else if the laws they are responsible for are bloody stupid.

Who wrote the laws

OK, so who wrote the rules here?

If you run a company you need to play by the rules you are given, you don't write them

The MPs are paid, by us the poor sods who have to pay taxes.

If they are unhappy about the countries tax laws they should bloody well do their jobs and write better laws.

You can't complain at someone for obeying the law, especially when you wrote the damn law.

Patent troll sues just about the whole tech biz over 4 years

How freaking obvious can you get?

Surely this is the basis of just about every computer based encryption system since 1946!

Apple tries to add Galaxy Note, Jelly Bean to patent slapfest

Patents being thrown out

I thought the US patent office had decided that almost all the patents Apple was using in the case were total tofu and was close to flushing them all down the head.

HP upgrades Linux Foundation membership to Platinum

Re: The way the wind is blowing

HP was donating to the Free Software Foundation a long time before Linux.

Re: Internal investment

> HP Intelligent Provisioning application on the NAND looks like it runs some form of Linux.

Certainly their SmartStartScripting toolkit runs on OpenSUSE.

Configure all the pre-install stuff and kexec into your Linux install of choice. Makes building these things a treat.

Torvalds: I want to be nice, and curse less, but it's just not in me

Re: So the new paradign for successful project management is the same as motor racing.

Or as the manager of Porsche's team once said

Nice guys don't win races

Firm-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's tax dodge profit shift? Totally legit

Re: Why is this so difficult for governments to understand ?

> I disagree. If Starbucks has a loophole that allows it to pay zero tax, it will choose to pay zero tax whether the nominal rate is 5%, 15% or 50%. The solution is to close the loophole not to lower the rate

The loop hole is that it is cheaper to pay corperation tax in the US than in the UK. Since as the law stands they can choose where the profit is made they choose to pay US tax rather than UK tax. I'm not sure how anyone will ever come up with a scheme that can exactly tell how much should be due in which countries. OK with the likes of Starbucks then it guess they don't spend a lot on R&D, but take say a drug company who are paying billions to develop drugs in say the UK and then sell some of the drugs in say France. How much of the profit from selling the drugs in France should stay in France? Should they be able to say that AcmePills.com/fr should not contribute any of their selling price to the R&D? and should therefore pay French tax on all the sales price less the raw materials costs & French salaries?

Where do you draw the line?

The argument for lowering corporation tax is that if the tax rate is lower in the UK than in the US, then MegaCorp will chose to pay UK tax instead of US tax.

If you could end up with a higher take home and a higher standard of living if you moved, would you choose to move?

In an ideal world, sure they and everyone should pay a fair share of tax, but how is this going to work in practice?

We live in a world where there is choice

If the went down the road and there were two shops selling the same thing, and one shop charged 25% higher than the other, would you choose to shop in the cheaper or the more expensive shop?

Companies take the same approach. That is how everyone's laws work.

If the MPs don't like it they should try and change the law. They might find that other countries also changed their laws in ways that we don't like too. Getting upset with someone from the tax office is dumb, they do write the laws, the MPs do, so if they aren't happy they should yell at themselves.

Naughty-step Apple buries court-ordered apology with JavaScript

Re: Contempt yet?

> You don't contact the judge, you contact Samsung's legal team.

No, you get the El'Reg journalist to ring the judge and ask for there comments.

then duck

fast

Sony KD-84X9005 84in ultra-HD TV review

Re: Will it ever be cheap?

£25K might be expensive, but its a lot cheaper that Sony's first HD TV was. When Sony lent us one back in about 1990/91 for the computer graphics show at AllyPally I seem to remember it was worth about £40K. They wouldn't let us put it on our own stands, insisting they'd bring their own, just in case.

Made a damn good monitor for my workstation though, but then Sony's HD spec was 1920x1200 not the LoRes shit we've had to suffer more recently.

Hitachi buys Horizon to save UK's nuclear future

Re: Still just a Uranium-heated kettle

Yes I thought this announcement was a bit:

a) telling

b) ironic

50 years ago, my father was out in Japan helping commission some of their first nuclear power stations (well before Fukushima). Now 50 years later we are having to re-import the technology we invented.

EC tells Euro rebels: Hike up your ebook tax to 15%, or else

Once again the EU fail to understand the meaning of competition

The EU needs to realise that they are not alone in the world. We live in the world of global trade. If countries want to exist in this climate then governments need to compete with one another. What the EU wants here is not competition and free trade, what they want is protectionism, I don't know about them, but when I voted, I was voting to join a free trade organisation.

Sure governments need to raise revenue to provide all the services we expect them to provide these days. But if a government works out that they can increase their overall tax income by lowering a rate of tax rather than raising it, then they should be free to do so.

US patent office prepares to kill off Apple's bounce-back patent

Re: Of course...

When I first started writing X code (back at X10.4) I wrote a toy to just make users windows bounce around all over their screens, xbounce was a little boring after a while, the windows only bounced when they got to the bottom of the screen, I wanted windows to bounce off other windows too :-)

Incidentally xbounce (and my toy) would also both bounce drop down and pop up menus, since they are both implemented as discreet windows.

Re: @Dazed and Confused

Please go back and read my first posting on the subject.

> Anyone who has ever used a large card indexing system knows that if you pull out the draw quickly is keeps moving under its own momentum and that when it reaches the end it bounces back.

I would argue that scrollable lists are just a computerised implementation of a common storage problem. I'll grant that the Apple implementation is nicely polished, their stuff so often is. But I still feel it is just an implementation of something that has existed for many years in the physical world.

As to why no one has done it before, I don't know. I certainly haven't. I spent some years writing GUI SW. I implemented a couple of examples of oversized scrollable drop down menus in Motif back in the early nineties, but I had sufficient real estate to tackle the problem in another way. But I was aware that I was just mimicking something I was used to working with in the real world. GUI's work best, IMHO, when they do. When things just work the way people expect them too, they use them without thought. I still don't think that it counts as inventing things.

Re: @Dazed and Confused

But my whole point was that if you throw things at the end stop they bounce. That is what happens. You can not claim that this is an invention. Making this happen to a menu instead of a ball is immaterial. Things bounce. You can't invent it.

Re: Of course...

> If bounce back was so obvious though, how come nobody implemented it

They did,

its called Pong

Certainly lots of games make things bounce.

In the same way that making a blue wheel is obvious once black wheels exist. Bouncing menus on a screen is obvious once any bouncing object exists on a screen.

I'm not saying it isn't a neat feature, its just not innovative.

> Lots of patents and designs are "just mimicking real life - or nature/physics at least".

That is one of the problems with software patents, people think that they can patent just about anything, when they shouldn't be allowed to. Using computers to mimic real life is as old as the computer industry, mimicking it is slightly different ways shouldn't be allowed to count.

Re: cannot gain a patent on a wheel

I wonder how long it will be before Apple sue BL for making a rectangular wheel with rounded corners?

Innovate like an Allegro :-)

Re: Of course...

> Neg me all you want, but deep down you know Samsung don't have the creativity to come up with a feature like that.

I'm not sure why you feel that Korean's can't innovate?

But the whole point here is that bounce back is not an innovation. It is just mimicking real life. Anyone who has ever used a large card indexing system knows that if you pull out the draw quickly is keeps moving under its own momentum and that when it reaches the end it bounces back. That is the way the world works. Newton explains the what was going on here hundreds of years ago.

All the so called bounce back feature is doing is mimicking this normal physical phenomenon. The long menus you have on phones etc are just a computerised implementation of a real world object which is an old as the hills. They aren't an invention and there is no innovation here, they are just a different way of building a card index. Making them bounce back is just a way of making them mimic it a little more faithfully.

Apple slips bomb into ITC filing: Samsung being PROBED by US gov

Re: Double standards

> The ND in FRAND means non-discriminatory, you can't charge a different rate just because you're a rival to someone.

As I understand things, Apple refused the license on the basis of "what everyone else had agreed to" and wanted to enter into their own negotiations. Then they couldn't agree a price.

The 3G patent pool was originally only of interest to people who made phones, so they all contributed and they all used each other patents. Samsung's standard license included an agreement to cross licensing. Everyone else had signed this, Apple wouldn't. So that takes them outside the "non-discriminatory" clause, since they insisted on being discriminated.

The problem was that Apple came into the game with nothing to offer the player already at the table, who had all shared. Then to make matters worse they tried to claim they didn't need no stinking licenses no siree, not me.

Apple unsheathes MacBook 13-incher

Re: The only snag...

I would have thought the big snag was the brain dead decision not to include a network port. Why would anyone want to have a laptop without an Ethernet port?

I'd be tempted to ignore my loathing for Apple Inc as a company and buy one of their laptops as they seem to be the only people of the market fitting decent res screens, but even on a baby laptop a can't live without a network port.

And no, I don't want a dongly adapter piece of tat, thank you.

Majority of humans still don't have a mobile

Re: I am majority, biatch!

But without a mobe how do you connect and manage your babies when you're not there?

All those poor computers will get lonely if you're not giving them enough love and attention.

New Oz road rules forbid touching mobes

Can't see whats wrong

with getting people to put their phone in a holder, its not like they are saying you can't have your phone in the car with you, you just can't cuddle it, its not actually a teddy bear you know.

Many modern cars (ie not mine, the wife gets the new car) have built in bluetooth and you just use buttons on the steering wheel or dash board to drive the phone.

I still can't see why its more dangerous to talk, hands free, on the phone than it is to have screaming brats in the car with you. But you aren't ever going to see a road safety advert suggesting you do a Cameron, are you now?

Apple banishes Java from Mac browsers

I can gues at two reason

1) The world's most profitable company remains the world most profitable company by not spending its own money when others will spend their's instead. So why pay developers to write a JVM when Oracle will do it for free. Makes economic sense. Pity, they used to employ some great engineers. But hey, you have to pay lawyers somehow.

2) It just works, well that's the marketing slogan. Well for Java its not true, so if Apple stops making its own implementation it can place the blame back on Oracle when (as usual) Java breaks, again. Helps them claim that all their stuff works and its not their fault when life doesn't.

Pirate Bay moves to the cloud to confound copyright cops

Re: Time for my favourite quote again...

I'm sure that predates 1993. I remember seeing something very similar on a usenet posting back in the 80s.

Quite contrary Somerville: Behind the Ada Lovelace legend

Re: Behind Every famous woman...

Sadly behind any successful women is a crowd of others with their claws out.

Back in the 80s HP ran some job ads looking for support engineers. The feminist readers of The Grauniad went up in arms because they used a picture of one of the Engineers from the support centre, only the feminists could accept that it could be a Engineer in the pictures, so they must have used a model. Duh.

Skydiver Baumgartner in 128,000ft plunge from brink of space

Re: "My moneys on Gravity just being a bitch"

Gravity ain't no one's bitch.

Just ask a black hole

eBay frets as right to resell comes under scrutiny

Re: There is a difference...

Why should sw be any different to anything else you hand over your money for in a shop.

SW companies have managed to get away with this fallacy for far too long, SW should not be any different to buying a book, a CD/DVD or any other such stuff. You should hand over your money in return for owning your copy.

Perhaps I should be allowed to say that the money they receive from me may not be sold, trade or exchanged with anyone else.

The small print is meaningless

I've no idea about the law on this in the US, but over in the UK many books have small print saying you can't resell them, but you can still find them in second hand book stores. The law is quite clear. The publisher has the right of first sale after that its yours to do with as you wish, read, burn or sell on. The only thing you can't do is to copy it, that is what copyright is all about. Copyright doesn't give thieving bastards the right to control what you choose to do after you've handed over the money.

Experts mull 'kill switch' for stock-wrecking techno-blunders

Re: What went wrong with the Facebook IPO?

Yepp, what is needed is a kill switch to stop people totally over hyping their company prior to an IPO.

Boffins: Our memory film is like your girlfriend - transparent and cheap

Re: Earth to boffins:

Maybe the boffins have also discovered cheap girlfriends?

I've always found that girlfriends to be very expensive, (actually since I'm married girlfriends might be rather more than very expensive).

Perhaps if they could find a way to invent cheap ones it would be a great step forward ?

WTF is... VoLTE

Re: Erm, like, who cares???

I rather liked the idea that the AC thinks he has friends

From Russia with gov: PM Medvedev glad-hands Zuckerberg

Re: in soviet russia, website profiles you!

Just what do you think Face book does?

completes what the KGB never quite managed

keeps tabs on whole population

EU, US edge closer to mega-transatlantic patent system

Re: Forget US-EU harmonization.....

The above quoted set of rules would have laughed the whole case out of court and told Apple to go away and grow up.

The country patent offices are still keen to patent things that are obviously banned by the rules as it encourages more patents to be filed and therefore more patent clerks get jobs and patent bosses get bigger empires and therefore are bigger cheeses.

Re: Does this mean the existing US patents will be valid in Europe?

I bet this is exactly what this means.

In case of all conflicts, the European patent holder will be put against the wall and shot, so as not to spoil the US lawyers gravy train. It make such a mess of your suit if you spill gravy all over it.

US court lifts ban on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

walled garden

Its a walled garden in that if you want to run an app that Apple didn't want you to run, then you can't unless you want to jail break your device.

So if tomorrow Google decided to easy your pain by writing a new Google Maps app for your iThing and Apple decided it wasn't in their interests for you to be allowed that choice (like they won't allow you to run an alternative to Safari) then you'd be stuck.

This is what people refer to when they state that iThings are in a walled garden.

Basically your choice is proscribed for you by Apple.

If you are happy to only do things that Apple approve of, then that's OK.

If you don't like the idea that any company has the right to tell you what you can do with the product you feel you bought and therefore should own. You either need to jail break it, or buy a product from someone else.

Its about who's in control.

Motorola's Germany Xbox sales ban castrated by US judges

@why not mention Office and Hotmail as well just for good measure.

Because this week M$ are only paying marketing $$$ for mentions of Windows8

@How long before the german court tries to sue the american court?

Why bother, just declare the US judges to be in contempt of court. If the poor fools ever make the mistake of landing in the EU they could then find themselves subject to a European arrest warrant and having their arse haulled in front of the German beaks to explain themselves.

Icelandic town demands vulva museum

will this

be an immersive experience museum, or an old fashioned "boring" dry just look at it in a glass cabinet type of place?

mines the dirty one.

European Commission: Cloud will save us from economic doom

Not: An emotive response perhaps...

Customers want the data to be stored in the UK?

There are many practical reasons why businesses would want the data stored in the UK. Firstly it would then be subject to UK law, so if anything went wrong they could deal with local legal services rather than trying to sue an overseas provider in their own native courts, where being a foreigner could be seen as being rather like walking around with a sign saying "kick me" painted on their backs.

But getting away from business reasons and concentrating on technical matters. A key factor in cloud based storage solutions is always going to be latency. Now I wouldn't put it past the EU to declare that the limiting data transmission to the speed of light is illegal, but in the real world distance == time. The further away your data is, the slower your access to it will be. If the data moves to the US for example access will cost you best part of 100ms for the East Coast and over 150 for the West. This can't be avoided. So performance is going to suffer.

Euro watchdog to charge Microsoft on web browser choice boob

Monopolies

As much as I'd like to see Apple whacked with the sort of fine that they alone are in a position to pay, Apple aren't a monopoly in the way that M$ are. Most people are forced to use M$ SW whether they want to or not. There is no competition, and the reason there is no competition is that there is no competition full stop.

Yes I know that is a circular argument, but that is the way the monopoly plays out in this business. You can't get SW to run on Linux because there aren't enough desktop Linux customers, and there aren't enough desktop Linux customers because the SW they need isn't available. It isn't a question of what's better or friendlier, its a questions of what SW is available. Personally I find the Linux GUI environment to be much friendlier and better than Windows XP or 7, but when you think in terms of user friendly you need to think it terms of which user and nothing that is strung together on top of the Window's registry can ever be thought of as friendly in anyway shape or form.

Apple aren't a monopoly player in any market segment, they're small fry in the desktop world, middle fry on phones and big fry on tablets, but they haven't managed to make monopoly status yet. Of course it is their avowed intention to prosecute every customer in the world who refuses to buy their products, so maybe one day they'll manage to elevate themselves to the point where the EU and other competition body can aim at them. If they were a monopoly they would be in big trouble.

Google in new Maps patent row - but not with Apple

Re: If you can't patent it then you won't succeed in starting a business doing it, simple as that.

Millions of people successfully run innovative businesses without patenting what they do. Most of the world lived quite happily without the stupidity of software patents or patenting business practices.

RDF is not a new technology, and even when it was invented I'm sure that those involved would have considered it "obvious" and therefore not something that you are allowed to try and patents anyway. Designs for practical implementations and antennas they'd likely have wanted to patent but the idea? No I don't think so.

Patent fail again

How can you patent shit like this. Location finding by knowing the location of radio transmitters is at least 70 years old.

They said it wasn't right for biz - but Samsung unveils TLC SSD

Smashing time with glass disks

There is usually a small whole in the outer casing with a foil sticker covering it and warning label. I peel the label off, pop a punch through the hole and hit it with a hammer. Not quite as satisfying as using a sledge, but a lot less mess to clean up and they do make a really satisfying noise as they go :-)