duke_sam

Also in some parts of the world there is a leading H sound, specifically Ireland.

We also pronounce R like 'or' instead of 'are' which causes endless amusement every time I use the abbreviation HR in the states.

One of the concerns of the 2nd amendment was protecting the people from an unjust government. Back then I could see a citizens militia being able to violently protect their rights as a form of last resort. These days unless you live in a fortified mountain cave you would have great difficulty protecting yourself from the US military (if it came to that). Luckily the chances of the US military/government staging an overt violent coup are slim to none. Unluckily there are a range of new means to subvert freedoms that you can't resist with guns. Mr. Calyx holing up with a machine gun would have done nothing to preserve the rights he thought were being violated. Today we need a new form of the 2nd amendment that prevents figures of authority trying to prevent people recording them when they work[1][2], and protections for people's privacy both in person and online.

[1]http://www.pixiq.com/article/maryland-motorcyclist-spends-26...

[2]http://newsone.com/nation/newsonestaff2/chad-holley-brutally... - the video was initially suppressed

I'm also pretty sure this is why software houses run as widget factories will produce sub-standard solutions. The hierarchical structure gives more weight to the ideas of the people managing. This works if the manager is an expert (or at least as knowledgable as their reports) in their field but with software it results in the most informed opinions being ignored or devalued especially if the costs/benefits are not immediate, so lots of technical debt. If you are managing a team of good developers your role is one of administration and occasionally cat herder (someone has to call time on yak shaving arguments).

I've seen a bunch of government software contracts go down this road, they all try to use the same "tried and trusted" solution even when the assumptions that underpin it have changed wildly (developers are just looking to play with fancy toys and so can't be trusted). They hire based on cost, 3 developers being paid 20k are worth as much as one developer being paid 60k and generally won't fight to retain staff. I find this incredibly ironic since government projects are often challenging and novel, they are dealing with scales or activities that businesses (mostly) don't touch. It always struck me that the area crying out for a creative, original solutions implemented by a film crew team.

The bank bailouts made very little sense, the biggest toxic bank, Anglo Irish Bank, was not a retail bank. They specialised in property financing. Letting them go under would not have resulted in the Irish Government having to cover huge amounts of deposits. The current majority party (Fianna Fail) has a history of connections to property developers and this connection is what a lot of people though spurred the saving of Anglo. Now more information is bubbling up about the exposure of European banks to Anglo and the other Irish banks. Europe (especially Germany) wants this mess cleaned up because if the Irish Government drops the guarantee then their own banks will have a huge hole in their finances. These were essentially risky investments made by foreign banks that the Irish taxpayer is now being forced to pay back.

Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank were profitable (extremely so in the context of the Irish economy) and if kept in government hands would eventually make back their losses. Anglo made it's profits on the back of the property bubble, not something that will be repeated any time soon.

This is the perspective of an Irish economist on the debacle: http://www.ronanlyons.com/2011/01/18/the-irish-bank-sandwich...

This is pretty awful. I have some sympathy for the support staff though, if their tooling allows them to irreversibly delete someones account (and it's history) they need better tooling. The realisation that they just deleted someones 5 year old Pro account and 4,000 photos... oh shiiiiii

So in an effort to be as good as a competitor MS is watching what you do when you interact with that competitors website and sending that information home. Seems like a really big reason to suggest to anybody you know that they uninstall the Bing toolbar.

Is it me or is the ISP business getting steadily more anti-customer? Between trying to double charge for bandwidth (charge me a monthly fee and then charge company X for access to me) and attempting to push through lower and lower caps. I understand the increasing costs of infrastructure to provide for users streaming content but would this not be part of their business plans and budgeted for? Or did they expect everybody to continue using the internet like it was 2000? I know the service was always sold on the assumption that the majority of people are low bandwidth users but can ISPs really get this defensive when people start trying to get what they pay for?

Also SMS still takes the cake for most crazily overpriced communication medium, over $1000 per Mb.

This doesn't seem to be the case: http://twitter.com/#!/olaonline/status/31020613325819904

Also seems to be backed up by others: http://twitter.com/#!/olaonline/status/31020613325819904 http://twitter.com/Firas_Atraqchi/status/31010020443299840 http://twitter.com/#!/beshr/status/31037492174004225

Possibly patents on methods of raising money online for political campaigns or patenting a method for organising large groups of people to congregate in a public area for the purposes of hearing political speech.

Hasn't Andy Grove been talking about this for a while?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-amer...

There is some[1] evidence to show that higher corporate tax rates result in lower wages so it's at least partially equivalent to a higher income tax rate.

[1] http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

I'm surprised they are acting like this in the UK. There's a much better choice of carriers in Europe and you don't have any problems with different wireless standards (GSM vs CDMA).

I knew the choice in Ireland was pretty awful but I figured competition in the UK would keep dick moves like this in check.

Reminds me of the Chicago professor who was complaining about repealing the tax breaks for "rich" people[1] (his household income was in the 250k range). As a bunch of commentators pointed out he felt like he was just scraping by because he was attempting to live the life of someone earning 350k+ not the life of someone earning 150k+.

A growing trend is how quickly the income of those at the top is increasing relative to those at the bottom[2] and the disconnect this brings[3]. At what point does someone earning minimum wage stop and think "How exactly is someone working in a hedge fun worth tens of thousands of me in yearly salary alone?". Would they push for legislative solutions? Can you even use something as blunt as the tax code for this?

[1] His blog posts were taken down but you can see commentary: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/21/todd-henderson-rich... http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/09/in-defen... [2]http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/ceo-pay-historic-lead-bestb... - for reference $1 in 1989 is worth around $1.70 now so inflation does not account for a near 6x increase. [3]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise...

It reminds me of the attitudes in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999171 This is a system that a very small portion of our (middle/upper class) population is going to experience. With the chances of interacting with it being that low we ignore the problem and run a numbers game that our lives won't be unduly affected by it (akin to not being too worried about being killed by a falling satellite). So the situation deteriorates because people are under the impression that if you are in prison you deserve it and ignore the damage it causes to some individuals/families who under different circumstances would have been our neighbors or friends.

It reminds me of some welfare recipients claiming welfare should be cut for others. As long as it's someone else benefiting from an action it's ripe for cutting but if I'm benefiting then it's justified.

When the word of an officer is worth more than the word of a member of the public being able to record the officer in the course of their work is the only way to defend yourself. Yes this might lead to an increase in people getting off on technicalities but saying that is a good enough reason to turn law enforcement into an entity above reproach is very dangerous.

The ability for the courts or police to shutdown any practical oversight by members of the public turns changes the power dynamic completely. Any person is one pissed off cop away from having to deal with being arrested. It becomes a big game of chance. The (vast) majority of the time we don't interact with cops/the courts, the (vast) majority of cops are concerned about the general good and protecting people but even 1% of 1% in a country this big leads to a lot of hardship.

I'm hoping that this is finally the straw that breaks the camels back and people start to push back on these "security" measures. Not traveling via air is an option for some people but for most when they fly they aren't any reasonable alternatives. Making these invasions a prerequisite to flying means you are going to have strangers looking at you naked regularly or being groping (which I'm presuming is meant to be as invasive as possible to encourage use of the scanners). The alternative to this is turning down a job away from anybody you would like to see regularly, or any job that requires frequent travel or going to college in another state etc. And boy is your life about to suck if you travel with kids or someone elderly.

Can she not use the DMCA to request that any offending online copies be removed and then sue in small claims court?

I'm always amazed at how any copyright law doesn't make it any easier to seek compensation if you are an individual. To the point where copyright only seems to have meaning if you have a team of lawyers on staff.

But individuals do take advantage of tax loopholes. What you are talking about is that entities with more money have more options on how to minimise the amount they give to the government.

Ireland usually gets a bad rep from this but companies like Intel, Google and MS are the biggest employers in the country. If they were there for purely tax reasons you'd expect them to be shell companies, rather than having multiple fabs in the case of Intel or a few thousand employees in the case of Google.

As the article points out they have an obligation to maximise profits. If there was a way to cut your tax rate from 20%+ to less than 5% and they didn't use it, it would be a breach of their duties.

It's amusing to see how effective industry lobbyists have been in shutting down any reform that would close these loopholes. Lets talk about slashing entitlements but completely stonewall any attempts to get corporations paying more tax...

Alastair Reynolds "Revelation Space" series is fantastic. He also writes some great stand alone pieces (House of Suns for example). He is also quite strict about being hard sci-fi (no faster than light travel for example).

Also The Culture series by Iain M. Banks is pretty amazing but tends to be multiple independent stories within the same universe. He is also much softer on the science (quite a lot How does it work? Quite well thank you descriptions).

Some of the claims in the article are a bit far fetched. The "curious but deadly Ekranoplan" for example just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Games are designed to be engrossing and entertaining in ways that other media can't approach. It's hard enough for adults to consciously think "X hours of gaming a night is too much, maybe I should work on this side project". I can't imagine how distracting it is for a 15yr old when the side project is say a French essay.

At the end of the day the only way I win the argument is to realise that spending 100 hours playing Dragon Age is great but it's 100 hours I could have ploughed into fixing tickets for my favourite OSS project. One of those has a lasting benefit. Still a difficult decision to make when I have Mass Effect 2 sitting there unplayed...

And of course you need to worry about pest management when growing that much of anything in such density. What sort of mechanisms you would need to harvest? Can't see a combine harvester fitting in the freight elevator.

There's a million and one things wrong with this idea. It's depressing how many news outlets haven't done any real journalism and checked with someone who actually grows any kind of plant for a living.

I'm not arguing that American companies aren't taking advantage of this. All I'm saying is that they aren't just shell companies setup in Ireland. There are Eastern European countries with lower corporate tax rates, if the only reason they were in Ireland was the tax break they would have upped and left year ago. The only reason they are still there is because they actually have infrastructure and campuses.

Most of those companies have pretty large complexes in Ireland. Intel has 2 fabs, Google has a large (for Dublin) office complex as their HQ and MS has their own campus.

As far as tax havens go we actually had quite a lot of people from those companies employed, it wasn't just your standard shell company running out of a solicitors office.

Was is the correct tense there. The current round of bank bailouts have been pretty crippling. We aren't quite Iceland or Greece but we are up to our necks in debt.

Except Ireland. We're generally very good at getting the hell out of dodge when the government manages to do something horrible to the economy.

It also has security clearance implications. Also if he moves back to Finland but remains a US citizen won't the IRS still be able to go after him for tax?