Posts by ratfox 3465 posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
From the protesters point of view, if buses stopped running, Google employees would move out of SF rather than facing the hellish congestion in and out of the city.
They actually consider the congestion as a feature which keeps rich people from living in SF and driving up prices, so they are angry that the corporate buses are bypassing the congestion.
These bus stops are normally reserved for public transportation, as in buses that anybody can ride on. If the tech companies want to use these bus stops, it is normal that they pay for their use. I understand that generally, an event happening on a public square requires renting that square from the town, e.g for putting a circus tent. This is no different.
Of course, this is not going to solve the main problem, which is that residents of San Francisco have worked hard through regulations and activism to have a super cool city, and now they are very disappointed that they cannot afford to live in that super cool city, because their own choices have made it too expensive for themselves. There is a great article on this here: http://www.sfweekly.com/1999-08-18/news/welcome-home/full/
Currently, the USPTO has all the incentives to accept just about anything as a patent. More patents accepted is seen as more productive; I believe applicants even have to pay more, once a patent is accepted, to actually get the patent, than if the patent is rejected.
Instead, ask full price to apply for a patent, and give back a small percentage if the patent is accepted. The incentive to apply for real patents instead of bullshit is not very important; the important part is that now the USPTO gets more money for rejecting a patent than for accepting it.
Apple and Exxon are giving back dividends, while Google is not. It would be fairly logical if Google kept growing faster than them.
The thing is, Exxon and Apple put limits on investing in new markets, while Google does not. I personally find it a bit disappointing from Apple. They do nice products, but they are unwilling to double down in less successful products. Look at iCloud, and their maps: They are not interested in making them available to everybody. The maps are offered to people who have an iPhone or a Mac. That's it. Not even a web site!! They are a hardware company, and all their services only exist to support that. They could probably grow a lot their software and services, but instead? They give back a dividend. This is openly admitting that they don't know what to do with the money. That they don't plan on growing.
Can you imagine Google doing that? Google will invest in all kind of crazy projects trying to find something interesting. And that, I believe, is why Google will be a trillion dollars company before Apple.
That said, though I'm not surprised that the data from private messages is thoroughly harvested to select what ads should be shown to the same user, I would be astonished if the target web site of a URL shared privately was notified of which particular user sent or received the message.
Honestly, to get better maps, you need more users. Maps is not a small thing you can reserve to your walled garden. But Apple would have trouble doing that…
Apple only does software if it helps sell hardware; while Google and Microsoft only sell hardware if it helps sell software. They cannot change this easily.
"Products can be changed to suit the need."
In the case of the iPhone, I would doubt it. It's not like Apple is going to make a different iPhone from now on just for China Mobile. If anything, China Mobile would have waited until they saw a iPhone (5c?) they liked before signing a deal.
If the legislation allows it, they might even only have to include a "standard-to-proprietary" adapter, and keep having proprietary adapters everywhere.
Here's to hoping the American government does not decide to pass the same law, and go for a different standard. That would actually make the phone manufacturers happy, since that would make importation between countries impossible.
That said, I am against the legislation. All other matters aside, Apple has bloody good connectors for its laptops. Having a legislation like that (adapted to laptops) would have made these connectors impossible to introduce.
The double Irish and Dutch sandwich are stratagems which allow Google (and Apple, etc.) not to pay tax anywhere in Europe. But were these to be stopped, the companies would still be able to pay income tax in a single European country, whichever they prefer. Typically, that would not be Italy. And that is what this legislation is trying to stop. And that is what is the problem with the legislation, because the European laws were precisely designed to allow doing business everywhere in Europe and paying income tax in a single country.
A couple of days ago, I repeatedly tried to open an account on outlook.com, but every time I tried to send my very first email, it told me my account has been locked down for being suspicious, and to please give them my cell phone number so they could send me a verification code. And that, even though I gave an alternate email address specifically for doing this. What's the point of asking for an alternate email if you can only verify your account by phone??
It provides actual, honest-to-God, proper transportation to Google employees. If it were not for those buses, Google employees would stay away from SF in order to avoid the hellish traffic along the peninsula.
In other words, public transportation is so bad, that the resulting deadlock at the entrance of SF has come to be seen as a feature which keeps rich people from living there.
If the buses are allowed to go on, it means that soon only rich people will be able to live in cool places!
PH icon representing how confused the whole situation is.
Oh, the sales taxes are already based on the location of the customer. What is broken is that currently, out-of-state businesses do not have to charge the sales tax to the customers; it is the customers who are supposed to report to the authorities the fact that they bought something from an out-of-state business, and that they want to pay sales tax on it.
Surprisingly, they quite often forget to do that.
"Everything in a EULA is absolutely binding unless there is a constrasting local, state, federal, international or other law or legal allowance. "
I doubt that. Instead of killing your first born, try "I owe Microsoft one million dollars for every second I use this product". Giving money is legal, but I don't think it would fly either.
"The consent, required by law, for the combining of personal data from different Google services cannot be obtained by accepting general (privacy) terms of service"
I would be very interested in having a better idea on distinctions such as this one. Most EULA and T&Cs are accepted without reading any of the details whatsoever. On one hand, the responsibility technically is on the user to actually read and accept the terms before clicking on the button; on the other hand, you certainly could not add "and the user owes us a million pounds" to such a document and expect it to be held up in court.
Unfortunately there is a world of gray between what is clearly fine and what is clearly not fine; I severely doubt that a law could be written which would make the distinction with any clarity. No wonder companies just write whatever they want and wait for the government to complain.
Ultimately, my opinion remains that the only way to have proper privacy T&Cs is to have the government dictate them, and apply them to every company. Call it a Privacy Code, like the Tax Code. Considering how fuzzy the law is, you simply cannot expect the corporations to write T&Cs which make sense.
Get out of the Tardis, in the field, and have a look around. Anonymised horse, sheesh.
The buttons on the control panel have tooltips indicating what they do.
Oh, and if you use the red button for the map, you can go back to Earl's Court Road, use StreetView and get inside the Tardis again, while being inside of the Tardis.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with having the Tardis on the inside of the Tardis, since it's bigger inside…
People used to mostly have privacy, unless somebody cared enough to pay a man to follow them around. Remember when divorce cases involved private detectives taking pictures of the unfaithful fooling around? It seems old hat now that we have Internet (though I'm sure it still exists). But apart from that, people used to have privacy.
However, anonymity has barely ever existed, outside from anonymous letters to newspapers and graffiti. The anonymity that people take now for granted on the web, and which they are outraged about when they lose it, has existed for max 20 years. How the world changes…
I don't know where he gets this idea from. Apple has almost no cash available. In fact, it had to raise money from bonds to pay its dividend. All the cash Apple is hoarding is overseas, and Apple cannot bring it back into the US without paying tax on it.
What Icahn is proposing is borrowing money on the basis of future presumed returns, and give that money to investors. It's kind of the reverse of investing for the future.
Unfortunately, laws are not and cannot be written in a way which defines clearly and exactly what is and what is not legal. There are always grey areas, corner cases. The only way to determine whether something is "legal" or not is often to wait until the end of a lengthy trial; and the worst is that the outcome depends on which side has the best lawyers! This sounds ridiculous, especially to scientists and IT people who live in a world defined by clear rules, in which claims can indeed be "proven". But nobody has invented a better system yet.
In those circumstances, this kind of settlements save a lot of time. It sends the message that what they did was probably wrong, and that anybody doing this will have to pay for it one way or another.
"I don't see any progress that couldn't have been accompished by a team of 30 people."
Considering apparently nobody else came up with it, it might well be that they needed thousands of people to make many trials, and 30 of them came up with the right solution?
More probably, you are severely underestimating the amount or work to create the iPhone. That I remember, it took years for the competition to come up with a phone that was about as good as the iPhone. (I'm thinking Galaxy Nexus, which came out four years after the first iPhone.)
People are always at their most clever in hindsight.
Despite the seemingly cheerful tone of the article, I find losing 5% of the world's forests in 12 years is extremely worrying. Unless a huge effort to reverse the trend is done, there won't be any forests left in just two centuries.
I would really not be comfortable with kicking the can and just say "our grandchildren will take care of that in a hundred years".
There might well be something to the idea that Google makes it easy for people to view images without visiting the websites. This is an especially big problem when you can see the images in big resolution directly from Google. This is not like an article excerpt, which induces viewers to read the full article on the web site; in many cases, you don't even need to visit the web site after having seen the image.
On the other hand, I fail to see how Google is particularly abusing of its dominant position in search in this.
This fits in every way the definition of child pornography. Except that when politicians suggest upending the way the whole Internet works in order to fight child porn, they probably don't have this kind of petty crime in mind.
That aside, the Snapchat claims seem completely bogus to me. Surely you can just snapshot a snapchat, and keep the picture forever…?
Indeed, this would seem a great accessory for Photosphere.
I love photospheres, but it is a bitch to do right. I tend to have to make at least three attempts to get something correct. And if there are people walking around, then you have body parts flying around.
My wife tends to get annoyed at having to wait for me while I turn slowly around…
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