* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

Apple yanks international travel plugs over shock worries

ratfox
WTF?

Round thin pins slightly slanted inward

Oh, so it's on purpose that the pins for continental Europe are slanted inward? I always thought it was a fabrication defect. Anybody know why this is?

Investors furious that Amazon only made $482m last quarter

ratfox

Well tough luck for them. Bezos doesn't give a shit what they think, and he's very much in charge of the thing...

Google and HMRC face Parliamentary grilling over £130m tax deal

ratfox

Re: "Based on UK-based advertisers"

The only proper way to do it is to calculate the value of the advertising shown to people inside the UK.

It might well be easy for Google to compute this; but it's definitely not what the law says they should be paying. That depends of where Google is selling from, or where the salesman is seeing the customer, but certainly not where the user seeing the ad happens to be.

How El Reg predicted Google's sweetheart tax deal ... in 2013

ratfox

Well actually no, that wouldn't work. Because countries that do not play nicely and make corporations pay a reasonable amount are not invited in the EU. It's taken a little while, but Ireland is actually getting in trouble for the generous tax deals it has offered big corporations. It is considered an illegal subsidy. The rules kind of work, it just takes a while.

Apple CEO visits EU regulator to discuss tax bill

ratfox
Angel

It feels to me that there are two issues.

On one hand, big businesses like Apple pay very little tax to the UK because they claim to sell everything out of Ireland. From what I've read, this is a perfectly straightforward application of the free trade agreements, possibly morally dubious but absolutely and completely legal!

On the other hand, big businesses like Apple pay very little tax to Ireland because of accounting and tax loopholes that would make a knot theory expert pale with envy.

The EU here is examining whether Apple shouldn't pay more tax in Ireland. Even if they achieve their goal, this does not necessarily mean that they will start paying tax in the UK.

That one weird trick fails: Google binned 780 million ads last year

ratfox
Angel

Re: 780 million?

That's probably a small number compared to the total number of ads they have. If they make it harder for the scammers, they make it harder for all the other customers too… And you don't want to lose good customers now do you?

Facebook Messenger: All your numbers are belong to us

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Skype??

Is Skype really the top messaging app? I would have thought that WhatsApp was way in front…

Nude tribute to Manet's Olympia ends in cuffing

ratfox
Paris Hilton

How could those pictures be controversial in the 19th century, considering renaissance artists had been drawing nudes way before that?

It's Wikipedia mythbuster time: 8 of the best on your 15th birthday

ratfox

Re: Er, I like Wikipedia

For most movies or actors, I find the Wikipedia article as informative and vastly better presented than IMDB. Though if I'm looking for trivia, goofs or quotes, only IMDB will have it…

Eight-billion-dollar Irish tax bill looms over Apple

ratfox
Happy

Re: The cash

It's tax money. Ireland normally gets around €40bn each year, so that would be a cool +20%. Ask your politicians what they do with the money!

Yahoo dumps 13.5TB of users' news interaction data for machine eating

ratfox

The Yahoo finance website is excellent; I believe it is far more popular than the Google one.

EFF wants Cisco in front of a judge over tech for China's 'Great Firewall'

ratfox

…Are they also suing Smith & Wesson?

Turkish carder scores record 332-year jail term

ratfox
Devil

It sure is good to know that seeing such sentences are handed, people will stop hacking and become honest citizens! I mean, once your crimes are already good a hundred years in jail, anybody would immediately stop doing illegal acts, in order to avoid risking further prison sentences!

Google's head in the clouds: Cut, cut as fast as you can. You can't match us, AWS plan

ratfox
Windows

Pricing isn't everything

A lot of businesses also compare the available support.

As a general rule, Amazon's is considered excellent, while Google typically elicits the question: "What support?"

Google used to be "one of the big three" cloud offering; it is now often considered below "the big two". My understanding is that support is one of the main reasons.

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

ratfox
Megaphone

There is no safe level…

…of radioactivity

…of crossing the street

…of eating chocolate

…of doing sports

…of not doing sports

…of staying in the sun

…of staying in the shade

…of listening to inane politicians

Having a beer right now.

Invite-only bug bounty criticised for turning up the heat on Tor

ratfox
WTF?

Let me get this straight

“All they have done is turn up the heat for these black hats to get some bugs in Tor sooner rather than later. The shelf life of any bug they may have found or will find might become a lot shorter.”

His argument is that, because maybe vulnerabilities are going to disappear soon, bug hunters have an incentive to find vulnerabilities now, before it's too late? So the diminishing value of the vulnerability increases the interest of hackers?

Australia's smut-shocked senators seek net censorship (again)

ratfox
Angel

"The motion claims pornography is easy to get online"

O RLY?

Curiosity Rover eyes Mars' creeping dunes

ratfox

Alu Alu! Nokia gobbles French rival Alcatel-Lucent in €15.6bn deal

ratfox

Re: I Don't Think This Will End Well

I do think Paris waiters act somewhat less than polite, but I think Americans have especially high expectations, coming from a country where the staff constantly engages in ass-licking to get their tip.

ratfox
Angel

Nokia moving into the mobile business again

The first time want enough?

Remembering those who logged off in 2015

ratfox
Pirate

There is somewhere a huge life-timer carried by four elephants on the back of a turtle, and the sand has settled in the shape of a landscape with a tall mountain in the center. A man wearing a hat emblazoned with the word WIZZARD is sitting on the edge, and an Orangutan is climbing up the sand clock using three hands, the fourth one is holding a book.

SO THESE QUANTUM MECHANICS SAY THAT THIS EXISTS WITH A VERY SMALL PROBABILITY, AND THEREFORE IT MUST EXIST SOMEWHERE, RIGHT?

Apple coughs up $350m – 2.3 days of annual profit – to make Italy's taxmen go away

ratfox
Pint

I'm impressed

Apple is usually known to play hardball; and the Reg's very own Tim Worstall repeatedly claimed that Italy didn't have a leg to stand on.

Facebook must face furious shareholders in class action over IPO

ratfox
Devil

Re: Is this the new trend?

Considering they could have doubled their money if they had only waited for a few years, I'd say the "overvalued" part is not going to hold…

Death Stars are a waste of time – here's the best way to take over the galaxy

ratfox

According to some kind of silly Star Wars fanfiction I've seen, your auto-replicating robots are no match for an army of Gungans led by a stupid general.

City of London cops in Christmas karaoke crackdown shocker

ratfox
Devil

How can you be arrested for giving something away free for private use, that's not available to buy publicly?

This is in a nutshell the paradox. On one hand, if it's not yours, you're not allowed to use it, period. On the other hand, if what you are doing literally cannot hurt anybody, why is it forbidden?

In a way, it's quite close to "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Drivers? Where we’re going, we don’t need drivers…

ratfox
Headmaster

Re: Get a grip on reality

When faced with the reality that AVs will get people killed

Citation needed.

On average, around 90 people die every day in car crashes, in the US alone. It's hard to imagine that "AVs" will do a worse job.

An on-demand video subscription isn't just for Christmas... Oh. It is

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Re: OTT = Negative Connotations

What is the other terminology?

…For that matter, what does OTT mean?

I can turn Yahoo! around claims hedge fund manager

ratfox

Re: Nice buildings, good location

I'm not interested in sports, but Yahoo finance is still really good in my opinion.

Curiosity Rover digs into humanity's first alien sand dune

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Surely if the dunes move one meter per year, we only need to wait a bit to know what's under the sand?

US House okays making internet tax exemptions permanent

ratfox

Re: Totally Skewed Outlook!

What is skewed is that things sold online are technically also taxed. It is the buyer who is supposed to declare what they bought, and pay additional taxes (and of course nobody does that). Because in principle, it is the buyer who pays sales tax, not the business.

I sympathize with the States. The lack of sales tax imposed on online sales is a true loophole in the principle that they are allowed to tax anything bought by a resident.

Judge adds new army to Uber driver suit

ratfox

Fully agree. I don't understand how courts can sometimes accept these clauses as legal.

In-a-spin! Yahoo! clutches! Alibaba! baby! to! breast!

ratfox
Go

Makes sense

Most of the value assigned to Yahoo's market share comes from the Alibaba shares they own. Spinning those out incurs a significant risk on taxes.

The value assigned to Yahoo's core business is either small or negative, depending on who you ask. No tax penalty, go ahead!

Unsourced, unreliable, and in your face forever: Wikidata, the future of online nonsense

ratfox
Boffin

Re: I'm puzzled by the example

It's true that due to Arab and Moslem threats everyone moved their Embassies to Tel Aviv, but it's not the capital.

Er… I think you'll find that the reason everyone moved their embassies to Tel Aviv is, officially at least, that they consider Tel Aviv to be the capital of Israel.

In fact, even the US State Department officially does not consider Jerusalem to be part of Israel at all. A US citizen born anywhere in the world normally has their country of birth listed in their passport under "place of birth". Except when born in Jerusalem: In that case, the passport shows "Jerusalem" instead of any country. This behavior has recently been confirmed by the Supreme Court. And that's not an Obama thing, it was the same under Bush.

'Paedo hunter' who made £40,000 from blackmail jailed for 9 years

ratfox
Meh

Additionally, he described himself as being very close to a family in Thailand

*shudder*

Most businesses collecting data they never use, survey finds

ratfox
Holmes

Obvious

Scientists measure everything, just in case they might need it. Companies record everything, just in case they might need it. Engineers store everything, just in case they might need it.

You have to work hard to figure out and throw away everything you don't need, and you might regret it later. There is simply no incentive to do it.

Revenge porn 'king' Hunter Moore sent down for 2.5 years, fined $2k

ratfox

Re: Interesting Tweet

Take care of the customers, and the investors will take care of themselves.

Infosec bods rate app languages; find Java 'king', put PHP in bin

ratfox
Windows

It's not the language

It's the people who use them.

In the same way that it's not the BMWs who drive like twats; it's the people behind the wheel.

Sysadmin's former boss claims five years FREE support or off to court

ratfox
Happy

Lawyers at Setsquared's new employer quickly sent off a missive to quash those threats

It's nice that sometimes you can have corporate lawyers on your side. It doesn't happen very often, so you should treasure the opportunity!

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

ratfox
Coffee/keyboard

Windows 10 is bad for your privacy, and it is damaging Microsoft’s reputation as a trusted consumer brand.

Ex-IT staff claim Disney fired them then gave their jobs H-1B peeps

ratfox
Mushroom

I hope they have proof in writing… And I hope they get $$$ from Disney.

The H1-B program exists for a reason, but cheaters give it a bad name.

Randall Munroe spoke to The Reg again. We're habit-forming that way

ratfox
Boffin

Re: “I call bats 'skin birds'"

The word was deformed from the Latin which meant owl-mice. Supposedly, owl because it flies and is nocturnal.

ratfox
Windows

Re: Biannual

My dictionary claims that bimonthly can mean any of twice a month, or every two months.

I'm honestly not sure what use such a word can be anymore. I blame descriptivism.

Suck it, Elon – Jeff Bezos' New Shepard space rocket blasts off, lands in one piece

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Lacking context here

So is this just a fun hobby for a billionaire, or is there any kind of plan to monetize it or use it for Amazon?

EDIT: Never mind, looks like space tourism is the goal here. Apart from having fun with big rockets.

Russian cybercriminals steal $790 million in three years

ratfox

Re: Subsidiary in Bermuda

It's my understanding that the government cares about you paying taxes a lot more than they care about how you get your money. Gaining money illegally and not pay tax on it is a lot harder than gaining money illegally, declare it as income, and pay tax.

Hillary Clinton: Stop helping terrorists, Silicon Valley – weaken your encryption

ratfox
Meh

we need Silicon Valley not to view government as its adversary

Too late.

Seven-year itch claims Splunk CEO

ratfox

Splunk?

Never heard of them. The world is big.

US 'swatting' Bill will jail crank callers for five years to life

ratfox

Re: Loophole?

Yes, that earned a WTF from me too.

Apple's Watch charging pad proves Cupertino still screwing buyers

ratfox

Re: Don't understand the rage

The problem is not the price of the device, it's going out of their way to make sure it cannot be replaced by the numerous alternatives that are cheaper and already widespread.

That's like Audi making sure you can only fill up with the extra-expensive fuel they sell in very few locations.

'Hacked by China? Hack them back!' rages US Congress report

ratfox
Unhappy

Pot, kettle, black

It's would be funny if it wasn't so important.

DS5: Vive la différence ... oh, and throw away the Citroën badge

ratfox

The question then is, can a mass-market car maker move 'up market' in Europe

That I remember, Audi also used to be fairly mass-market… Wasn't the TT their first "cool car"?