"anti-competition commissioner"
Oh? Well, that explain things.
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
What I mean is that the first word of the title was "Google", not because it was the most relevant thing about the story, but because people click more on any title containing the word Google.
And John went one step further, and apparently deduced that it was Google's fault. Maybe he's thinking about the Oracle lawsuit.
US copyright laws are probably the world's most restrictive so it is the 'safest' choice as they don't have to worry about someone from Ghana coming along and claiming something that is public domain in the US is copyrighted there.
That's a terrible argument. By that argument, Google should follow the most restrictive censorship laws on the planet, so that "they don't have to worry about someone from Ghana coming along and claiming something that is [free speech] in the US is [illegal speech] there."
I understand it's not at all rare for large corporations to have an embarrassingly complex reimbursement system, which are not at all optimized because you optimize very hard things for users, and you don't care about optimizing paying money to suppliers.
I remember a story about a similar company in which for anything over a couple of hundreds of dollars, a supplier needed to first get introduced into the payment database which was maintained by a third-party contractor in Poland, which meant that first-time suppliers needed to wait months until they saw a dime.
If I remember correctly, there was a story on this very web site about Google being sued by a supplier over a ridiculous amount of money, because after months of waiting, they still saw nothing coming, and that was the only way they could see of speeding things up.
Ooh ooh, and because the twin was in space, he's going to be younger than the one who stayed on Earth, right? Despite being twins, one is going to look like the father of the other one, and then some really interesting things is going to happen and…
Staying 340 days at the ISS, which does 7667 m/s, he's going to be younger by… (compute compute) a hundredth of a second. Hmpf…
…Never mind, then.
I assume that all the amateurs and hobbyists who are coding an app or two for fun are mostly coding it for Android, since they are more likely to have an Android in the first place. On the other hand, people who develop anything for Windows are more likely to be professionals who fully intend to make real money out of it.
You would probably get similar results comparing say Python vs. Cobol developers. People who code in Python are dime-a-dozen and go from professional to high-schoolers, but nobody codes in Cobol unless they have somebody paying them good money for it.
Innovation regularly makes whole industries redundant. That's a fact of life.
People in those industries can have trouble adapting. We may be able to help some of them.
For all the rest: This is why we need a good social security system.
The one mistake we should not commit is to refrain from innovating in order to protect existing industries.
What I would like is a web site reporting clear metrics, displaying a graph of how much of the time during the past year there was a good service for 90%, 99%, and 99.9% of users.
This would be much more informative than irregular articles stating "there's an issue affecting some users today".
To be honest, I find that YouTube comments being broken is a clear upgrade on what YouTube comments used to be. (see https://xkcd.com/202/ & https://xkcd.com/481/)
or it is possible to read the data off the flash chips and attack it in a VM until the password is brute-forced.
I don't see how it could be possible to stop this from happening. If a system exists that allows to enter a 4-digit code and decrypt the device, then surely, it is possible to reconstruct that system so that it does not erase the memory after N attempts.
The only way I can see to prevent this from happening is to protect the device not with a 4-digit PIN, but with a decryption key that is so long that trying all solutions would take centuries. But I frankly doubt anybody would want to type something that long every time they want to check their email.
Something that Google could have done is offering links to multiple services. They actually do that when you look up stock quotes like https://www.google.com/search?q=amzn; you get a box showing the data, but if you want more detail, you need to click on one of the small links below, choosing between Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.
It's interesting that they do that for stock market data but not for maps. I'd be curious to know why. Maybe it's because Yahoo Finance has more users than Google Finance, while Google Maps was probably #1 by an overwhelming margin for a long time.
The ten years do not mean that Google has ten years to pay; they mean that Google did not pay enough tax for the past ten years, and they have to pay the total amount now, or at least very soon.
Actually, they certainly have to pay interest on that sum, so it would actually benefit the government if Google took a long time to pay.
Leap of net neutrality from "carriers shall not charge some content more" to "poor people shall not get free partial Internet" = astounding
With all due respect to Andreessen, there's very little difference between "charging some content more" and "offering some content free". Whether people who get it are poor or rich.
Now, whether the benefits outweigh the issues in this case is disputable. But the leap is not astounding, and it is in fact not a leap.
I tend to dislike arbitrary constraints on the use of products. For instance, it took many years for the whole industry to settle on USB, and it's hard enough to reach such a result, but then Apple specifically made sure that only iPods could connect to iTunes, and not the competing MP3 players…
Also coming to mind: HP selling printers cheap and ink for an arm and a leg, and using cryptography techniques to make it difficult for others to build compatible ink cartridges.
That said, I wonder how they plan on enforcing it. How would they notice if somebody modifies the product to run on Google hardware?
This UserFriendly strip already predicted the end was near: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070812
Nine. Years. Ago.
I'm not clear on what the decision of the UN panel was taken? Considering that nobody is forcing him to stay there… Having breached his bail, it seems pretty normal that he would be arrested if caught, without even mentioning the Sweden thing.
One way or another, I doubt the UK cares about that UN ruling…
I wonder how it is to be in the jury in the Eastern District of Texas. What do they do to get that kind of record? Is it judges that are giving biased instructions? Do local newspapers defend the place as the last bastion where patent holders can have their rights recognized? Or does everybody simply know that the lawsuit industry is bringing money into a region which would otherwise be bare and desolate?
That's rubbish. Google is an advertising company, so the 'economic activity' he talks about is selling advertisements, which happens in the UK (and France, Germany, US,etc.).
Are you the type of person who thinks that Sales is making the real money, and the company would be so much better off if only you could get rid of cost centers like Engineering and data centers?
It might work fine for massive companies, but what about a small business in say Germany making just a few sales into the UK, would they register for, and pay for an accountant who understood, UK taxes? Or just say 'lets not bother with the UK' (in German).
This is of course the reason why the single market was created: it allows small companies to sell anywhere without incurring the massive fixed cost of declaring tax in every country where they sell.
It was not, or at least not openly, created so that global corporations can shop around for the smallest tax rates and sell everything "from that country", even though they also have operations in every country to which they sell to.
A solution would be: if a corporation owns operations in the country of the customer, it must declare its income there. I believe there are precedents for similar rules about Controlled Foreign Corporations.