Re: Not sure I follow

Agree with your conclusions. I wouldn't say it's El Reg making the claim, more that they are reporting that others are making the claim. And if the company is headquartered in the US, that's going to be the case in a maturing market. The guys doing the trading on the exchanges mostly look to company growth to establish what's hot and what's not. If you're an old but profitable company in a mature market you typically fall into the Not category. If the markets were largely driven by reality, that would be an opportunity to make a tidy profit by buying against conventional wisdom on the old companies. But it seems to me that one of the unintended consequences of retirement account money market funds is that the emotional buyers who follow the what's hot and what's not memes are swamping the real market with their trading sprees.

Re: Tax on business is fair

I'm not defending Google. I'm outright telling you your definition of "fair" is immoral.

Corporations are people. Tax those people and you tax the corporation. Playing this "fair" game so that you can demonize corporations and then require the corporations to collect taxes from the people to whom you want to five other people's money is dishonest and immoral. Even if Google were sending checks to British government every month in the amount you think is "fair" they still wouldn't be paying the taxes. Their customers would, but not Google. Because corporations only know costs and revenue and everything else is derived from those two facts. A tax is just another cost. And if you're in business, you have to make a profit on all your costs, including collecting taxes on behalf of the government.

Re: In this day and age

The advantage of being rich is that no matter how tightly tyrants try to tie the tax noose, you can usually avoid paying them. If they jack the sales tax up on your $100,000 yacht you don't have to buy it, or maybe you can buy it at your summer house in another country where there is no sales tax. If they jack up your income tax, you don't have to work.

Payment in shares is easy enough to deal with. If you haven't bought with money, it counts as income. Now if you are objecting to making money from dividends on shares you've paid for in cash, you can sod off.

@Kristian Walsh

Thank-you for the thoughtful reply.

The way you lay everything out is logical and rational.

I still have to wonder about it though. I frequently don't agree with the way Google's policies tend to move in a Progressive direction, but I've always found their business practices to be driven by logic and rational self-interested thought. Which makes me wonder if there's a missing fact which turns their apparently irrational act into a rational one.

Re: I know full well the reaction daring to call Sunde - and Piratebay

Downvoted.

Not because the overall description of The Pirate Bay is wrong, but because you chose to libel my political beliefs (which are contrary to The Pirate Bay continuing to suborn copyright infringements) by including them in the middle of your rant.

Re: @Mole5000

There's law and then there's the real world. If the political creatures pass a legal law repealing the law of gravity, you'd still be a damned fool to ignore it. Same thing goes for investing. And these days investing runs publicly traded companies. Which is why Dell the man is trying to take Dell the company private again. He recons he can rebuild and save the company in the long term, but it is impossible with publicly traded shares. Even if he were chartered out of Australia instead of the US.

Re: down vote a link to a statement of fact?

because good little socialist minions never let a fact get in the way of a two minute hate.

@Uffish

The real problem is that you've bought into the socialist demonization of corporations and expect to bleed them dry instead of rationally examining real-world problems and fixing it that way. I'm no fan of the progressive income tax or the privacy invasions that come with income taxes. I accept however that a flat income tax eliminates the issues you are ranting about. Regardless of whether the Google employees in London are marketing or selling they are undeniably being paid for a job in London. Tax their wages in London and you get the revenue.

What's that you say? No sane person would ever pay the income tax rate that would be required to support your government programs? Not my problem. Not Google's either. That problem lies in the evil you and the rest of the people who voted with you have created.

Re: Google don't pay taxes.

Google pays it employees and stockholders more. Care homes and poor houses aren't needed. Kids not only get to eat, they get to pay for college. Ergo Google are not Evil!

Re: high taxes would not be so high if people paid them

Seeking low taxes is a rational behavior. If Google were seeking to pay the HIGHEST taxes they could, I'd invest in another company. Same with Amazon. Pretty soon both would be broke. Just because you think it's the appropriate tax rate doesn't mean anybody let alone everybody else does. That's why there's supposed to be an objective legal standard by which compliance is measured. Yelling and screaming about it in public is just demagoguing it. I really would expect Brits to be more familiar with the inevitable outcome of the bread and circuses route than 'Merkins are.

Re: An open letter

Except if it isn't a commission on the sale but a bonus for marketing success and it just so happens that the way in which you are confirming the marketing success is the increase in sales.

Re: This comes down to the issue

First up it's 'semantics.' And I'll agree with the bit about everybody spinning them to their own advantage. I'll disagree about the bit on who is right. The lawyers will tell you that you don't have a sale until the contract is signed. If the signing is taking place in Ireland, that's where the sale is made. The lawmakers can always update the law to change how the lawyers have to interpret it. I also concur about lowering taxes, but then I'm one of those crazy 'Merkin rednecks the UK socialists who visit El Reg consistently downvote on economic issues. So even though you're right, it won't get any traction.

Re: next step is a court case

assuming of course the MP has actual evidence as opposed to a well written bluster that plays well with the masses he is trying to buy off with Google's money.

Re: it sounds like the possibility exists

No it doesn't. It sounds like a politician is pissed off and demagoguing the issue. If MP has the evidence he should produce it. If it is a real whistle blower there are laws that protect them so long as the government wants them protected. Or is innocent until proven guilty even less of a reality in Old Blighty than it is in the US?

Re: Irony

Might have gotten their start that way, but there is now good all original content on YouTube. And they depend on their ads to make money. Kill the ads and you kill that forum. A forum that if generally supported might actually dislodge the other content hoarders from their perches and generate more creative and original entertainment.

Re: has no access to the Youtube ad API

Now wait a minute. You're telling me that out of all the devices and all the programs that can access and serve ads from YouTube, the Google API sniffs out and only prevents the MS win8 phone from showing the ads, regardless of what IP address it might originate from?

Sounds fishy to me. Sounds more like MS didn't include a protocol which is required by the API in their OS. Although since MS has release essentially the same win8 code on desktops and nobody there is whinging about not getting YouTube that also sounds odd to me.

Of course, I'm not a programmer so maybe I'm wrong.

Re: why not

Nah, Nobody could ever use anything like that to build a complex programming system! It would be unwieldy and confuzing.

/end sarc

Re: Meh.

First you roll up the street dealer and make him squeal on his supplier. Then you move to his supplier. This is money laundering they're talking about here. Excluding maybe the Swiss, there are all kinds of multi-lateral agreements in place for money laundering and drug trafficking charges. Because none of the governments get their protection money from either of those practices.

Re: A non-merkin writes....

In two words: Drug trafficking.

DHS actually had nothing to do with improving homeland security; it was just an excuse to roll a bunch of agencies up into one even more uncontrollable tentacle of Leviathan. DEA was part of the roll-up. Part of the way DEA tracks drug traffic is money laundering. Bitcoin looks to me like a great way to launder money.

Re: Why renew anyway?

I suspect the inclusion of PCs in baskets is more to mask inflation in the rest of the economy. As everybody here indicated it use to be you buy a new PC every 3 years. I buy bread once a week. But (at least on this side of the pond) they include the PC (down measurably) in the inflation basket but not the bread (up significantly).

Re: PC shipments ffailing for ONE reason

It's a combination of a lot of things: recession, decline ROI on computer upgrades (your reason restated in bean-count speak), and the release of Win8.

No matter how you slice it, Win8 came out to horrible reviews by the actual tech support community. If they ain't recommending, people ain't buying unless they absolutely have to. For as much as we use them, PCs are still a luxury item. You can limp along on the old one if you don't have a Want to upgrade.

Re: MPs will want this discussion in parliament.

You know, I smell an opportunity here. You guys set it up and invite our guys to debate by your rules in the forum. On our side of the pond we set it up as a Pay Per View event. You guys do whatever the corresponding thing is for your side. The broadcasters bid to produce it up front, that cost gets deducted from whatever gets collected. Then we split what's leftover 50-50 and each government gets the cash.

Re: Strange..

I'm pretty sure I can construct an algorithm that isn't neutral. But in the case of the methodology Google uses for their searches, I'm inclined to believe they are neutral. I'm also inclined to Google's side in this case, but more because it does involve futzing with the algorithm in a non-neutral way.

Having said that, I have to disagree with you on the last statement. It is possible to not be engaged in associating with crappy things and still have your name associated with it. Take Richard Jewell (RIP) for instance. His name is pretty much forever linked to Olympic Park bombing in a negative way even though he was truly a hero and did truly save lives.

Re: marrying of content producer and device manufacturer is bad for consumers

The problem is, if you don't marry the device manufacturer (patent) to the content producer (copyright) the device manufacturer is constantly in a snake eat snake battle with other commodity producers. Effectively it becomes a slave to the content producer.

The real problem is probably in the IP laws, but until that changes you have to expect linkage of the two just to sustain profits for the company.

Re: Misguided notion of romance

I wouldn't say entirely misguided. We tend to prefer fleshies be the ones making the decision about whether or not to kill someone. That's sort of the point of the movies like War Games and Terminator.

Re: look at the intervention (or lack of) in Syria.

That's because of The Big 0 and What-his-name on your side of the pond, not because of the intrinsic situation. Ronnie and Maggie would have sacked that sorry SOB by now given the current world situation.

Re: spying != legal interception

That might be technically true. But as many posters have so frequently posted in other forums, given the international reach of the internet it is very easy to tell the government to 'sod off' on their legal intercepts. Which then moves you into the 'spying' realm in order to get what the country deems a legal intercept.

None of this is to deny that the Saudis aren't brutal dictators. But sometimes your choices are limited to two bad actors. Frankly, they are better than some of the alternatives they are investigating. I'm just glad my lesser of two evil choices are usually limited to whether to install a known insecure version of java for a web browser or not being able to access certain required websites.

Re: Same old same o

95B was decent and pretty stable too.

Re: I'm willing to be reasonable,

I am too.

now that I've heard the good news that Microsoft is being reasonable for its part.

But I'm not so sure about that second thesis.

Re: Developers, developers, developers, developers....

I think he already left, which is why they are now able to start deploying the fixes. The complicating bit is all the PR FUD they've already spread about the New! and Improved! Better than Sliced Bread! interface.

Re: Call yourself nerds?

No, we call ourselves IT support techs. And we support people who aren't nerds, they're you know 'mundanes.' And they don't give a shit about your nifty nerd tricks, in fact they get rather annoyed about having to use them even if your baseline image does have them already built in. And really, why should we have to hack the interface to make it work for mundanes? The whole point of a mass market OS is that it is supposed to come with a useable, reasonably secure default interface that doesn't require extensive customization to work for the average (mode) user.

@Eadon 20:26 GMT

Post like this more often, and your down vote count will diminish.

Your first post was way over the top. This one is reasonable and reasoning, even in the spots where I am doubtful of your predictions. I'm doubtful about the phone bit. Mostly because they've been telling me that it, like my flying car, is just around the corner since before I started working in the IT business. You might be right. This time it may be true. But based on my experience, I'll wait and see.

Re: complaining about a preschoolish

The XP interface to which you refer is at least middle school. When I think preschool I think AOL v3.x back in the dial up days. And I'm not sure that wasn't a more grown-up UI than Metro is.

Re: How about pinning those programs to the task bar....?

And have even more indecipherable icons on the screen with kaleidoscope eyes?

No thanks.

@Kubla Cant

I think the whole recognition thing came from the marketing department as an attempt to sell a cost cutting feature.

Yes, in English you and I (probably) think faster in words than pictures. Not so much in Spanish or German and God forbid trying to decrypt even non-kanji Japanese. If you are releasing programs in all those languages plus 40 others, you start to run into issues with screen layout because the words are different lengths in different languages. Make it a picture with a word balloon if you hover over it and you solve the programming issue as well as reducing your code base. In short it's a win for everybody but the users.

Re: someone who designed builds for corporate laptops/desktops

Agreed.

When the Help Desk can't assume they can start an instruction with "Click on the Start Button" because a user might not know what the Start button is, lockdown is the only choice.

We offer some choices at the desk I work on now. I don't want to tell you the number of dead silences I get when I ask "Which browser are you using? IE, Firefox, or Chrome?" Or worse, the number of people who confidently answer "Firefox" and then when you visit their desk or remote it, they are running the Big Blue e, version 8* (which you know doesn't support that Google Apps feature and would have made troubleshooting the problem so much simpler).

*yes I know, IE 10 is out, 11 will be soon. We consider it a victory we were able to get them off IE6. And there are troubling but legitimate business reasons to keep them on 8.

Re: I don't believe MS are past the denial stage yet

Even marketing types are subject to the discipline of the market. Given that Reller has access to the real numbers from Win8 and not just the fluffed up press release numbers the rest of us read, I can believe they have been sufficiently chastised to rescind their bad choice.

Of course, that also means those numbers are really, really frighteningly bad if you are an MS exec.

@Steve Brooks

Agreed.

It's even more interesting that so many lawyers who formerly worked for SCO found work at Apple.

(ok I don't know that they've actually moved there, but it sure seems like they're sporting the same 'tude.)

Re: "How about you spend that fat cash on making a better product "

I disagree. Apple is free to license tech from any of the other companies, they just have to pay the patent tariff like everybody else. If their R&D department does come up with something new, they can keep it to themselves and make that their case for best of breed.

Except all of that is based on the false assumption that Apple started by being the best of breed. Jobs never actually made money that way. He made money by being the coolest. The best example of that was the Mac vs. Windows guy commercials. The Mac dude was cool, the PC guy was a dweeb. The Mac dude always had a zippy zinger, the PC guy always fumbled his come back. Sure he let you believe the Mac was a technically superior product, but he never explicitly made that claim. He made other claims (mostly true) that cause you to think he made the argument that the product was technically superior, but not the actual technically superior claim. The problem at Apple is they have either forgotten that or never knew it, only Jobs did. And with him gone, so is their edge.

Re: So basically

No, we users are weary. The Dell BoD needs to be wary.

Actually, they need to be paranoid and even then it might not help.

Re: I give it 3 years before

So you're with the glass is half full crowd, eh?

@Peladon

If the AP had gone after The Big 0 for Benghazi the way they did Nixon for a stupid set of debate papers you might have a point. But near as I can tell, nobody died as a result of Nixon's debate papers malfeasance.

@Grumpy Gwen

No, it could also be schadenfreude, which is a close relative.

Although quite honestly, there's sufficient reason to believe there are legitimate processes and approvals in place for this. There was a security breach, the AP is known to have participated in it, and the government is empowered to investigate an prosecute those individuals who leaked the information, at least if they are in the US.

Maybe I'm jaded, but it seems to me the Banghazi hearings are starting to bite. We have bad news about the IRS and now the spying on the AP both trying to knock it out of the LSM headlines. Even Arias and the American Castro couldn't quite dislodge the revelations that are starting to come out.