temp667

HN would be up in arms and lobbyists would be running to congress and DOJ to get google and others in major trouble - but if google and apple just stopped supporting H.265 it would go away.

Block uploads and streaming on youtube of 265. No support in chrome.

This would never happen, Apple in particular is in premium / everything costs big $ space so often doesn't mind the fees. But a few big players would make a big difference if they took action.

Again, anti-trust being used because other businesses are hurt - rather than focusing on consumer impact.

They attack the Amazon basics brand. The Amazon brands do well because there is such trash out there that regulators do absolutely NOTHING to stop. For example, battery packs with totaly garbage capacities - no regulatory action is taken to shut these folks down.

"The FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising in any medium. That is, advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers." - https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/adv...

Amazon notices a trust deficit, and then makes a set of batteries you can be somewhat more sure are accurately described. Now consumer has a choice. They can buy from maybe a trash brand and save a few bucks (and I'm sure folks do) or they can buy from Amazon.

Given folks don't actually trust regulators such as the FTC to actually, you know, do their job, they begin to trust amazon more and more.

Apple is going to benefit from this as well. It's not that there are not better tablets, but you have to trust it won't be a crapware filled thing, and after being disappointed a few times it's just not worth it.

Meanwhile, after not doing their jobs at ALL with respect scams online, these regulatory bodies ARE sure to come down on the brands users apparently trust as regulatory bodies tend to do when being shown up somehow.

The only reason amazon does this is because their third party provider requires it.

Same with book prices. Lots of cheap e-books, and then I see "price set by publisher" and its $29.99.

I think part of this is the FAANG companies have so much money they can afford to hire these huge quantities of folks to fight the company while getting paid by the company. No one else could afford to do this because it just wouldn't work business / productivity wise. The only other example is perhaps the govt which generally does fund people who then sue the govt around policies the govt adopts.

Do google employees actually do work or just rallies, protests and walkouts.

Seriously, google staff are walking out / protesting / rallying behind stuff every week. How can you afford to pay 120,000 folks who seem to be focused on being outraged, striking and walking out all the time.

I participated in a walkout ONCE when I was much younger, over an issue that was pretty clean cut (this was before me too, things had to go WAY WAY over the line - we'd call it a crime now - to get a walkout going). It was still a bit cheesy, but ...

Do I have this right - a google employee doing public attacks against other google staff / how to apologize etc? And googlers want this kind of culture, where having a discussion get's you social media blasted? It just seems these cultures are getting very unhealthy. Why do this all working for google?

Google must just have boatloads of cash to be able to afford this all. Do customers for GCP ever worry that some staff will protest what they are doing and take some kind of direct action?

Try doing the slack step of clicking on the phone icon to start a call, then adding screen sharing.

We pay for gsuite and we pay for slack. google chat is no where yet.

I have had good support retail side (granted, I'm not expecting much on my $20 item). On AWS I've had very good support.

Also paying user of google products and GSuite - support not great on the gsuite side, but retail order for Google Wifi etc pretty OK.

Why not do this for Oracle? I've not found SQL Server to be too bad from the crazy Oracle stuff (light experience only - maybe bigger players have it worse?).

Are you sure. The EU mandates much MORE monitoring in most cases. Self driving cars may need to have camera's on occupants to monitor them during driving etc. A lot of the safety stuff in EU is MUCH more nanny state and CCTV is much more widespread it seems. Also very power data collection and centralized databases about everyone in the EU (ie, I don't think "states" or localities issue local ID's).

That's bad training. If they are stuck in a country because they won't pay the $20 exit fee because authorizing legislation was not properly adopted, then apple are idiots.

It will take one person dying because of this policy for apple to be sued to hell and back.

Exactly, and it's clearly permitted to pay in that case because being able to travel involves routine govt action. I have no idea where this legal advice is coming from.

If the gift is to secure business this is likely true especially if the business relates to some govt or official of another country. Very strict there - you can't pay a bribe to get business or as part of business development.

However, if you need to pay a "facilitation fee" to exit the country (called routine govt action) that is not about securing business or getting a competitive advantage such as a customs waiver, then paying the fee may be permitted (for a number of reasons).

What I think US folks don't realize is some dept's overseas basically pay their staff through these unofficial fees, they set some rates for service, but nothing goes through treasury and no enabling legislation exists. But they also don't get money from their treasury to operate (or its stolen by folks above them) so that's how they keep operating.

You are spreading misinformation here.

In many countries everyone has to pay a facilitation fee (aka bribe) for routine govt actions.

These are for things like:

obtaining permits, licenses, or other official documents to qualify a person to do business in a foreign country; processing governmental papers, such as visas and work orders; providing police protection, mail pickup and delivery, or scheduling inspections associated with contract performance or inspections related to transit of goods across country; providing phone service, power and water supply, loading and unloading cargo, or protecting perishable products or commodities from deterioration; etc

How in the WORLD to folks giving legal advice here not have even this basic understanding of the law?

"That is illegal according to US law."

Can I ask if you are an attorney - because this is absolutely 100% false. You are spreading misinformation here.

If your employer fires you for paying a facilitation fee to advance a routine govt action or travel then you should absolutely sue them.

Scary - you would have to trust EVERY fingerprint reader not to capture your fingerprint AND you have to trust that you don't leave it anywhere for pickup. It's very hard to change your fingerprint as well, so having images of it out there is not good in general.

It really highlights how terribly trained the pilots involved are - temporary inconsistency in measured speeds (there are still plenty of reasonable speed sources) in almost all other planes does not result in the plane crashing. Heck, my GPS can do groundspeed easily enough and you have basic pitch and power settings.

How did they not notice their altitude was climbing as they pulled the plane up - they got into a CLIMB rate of 7,000 feet per minute - that's STUPID! WHY climb like that? This has nothing to do with airspeed.

The stall alarm goes off 75 times!

They reduce power to idle for a bit??

It's total nonsense, anyone who has flown a single engine cessna for 200 hours or more would have been able to get out of this easily just based on stall buffet and stall alarms.

By shoveling loads of cash at TSMC - does anyone know how much - it's got to be millions/billion?

On HN every action by anyone is seen as some evil plan.

Apple wants to alert users to genuine / non-genuine batteries (to mention latest downvote blast). That is evidence of how evil apple is (not even considering how many folks were getting screwed by all the trash batteries going into iphones pretending to be real).

Zoom is so evil for X/Y/Z reason - except zoom is actually easy to use which is what most non HN folks care about - so their "evil" is just optimizing for different goals in some cases.

The negativity and the myopic focus on personal need / preferences really highlights sometimes how just out of touch with the rest of the broader world HN can be.

For folks with a family office the question is not too complicated. Someone says, would it be beneficial to have another passport (EU). The answer is yes (sometimes also intended to benefit kids by giving them lots of options in terms of schools etc). Then someone else does all the paperwork. You need to buy property worth $400K? That is not even an expense. This is not a "high cost" approach.

I was never confused, but am more technical. I mean, how do you terminate to POTS, do the mix-ins etc without zoom decrypting on their end? If it's E2E encrypted and I have a dial in number - it's not E2E in that sense.

Same with me - I'm over $80K in purchases based on my data request to them (excluding business where I admin a business account with multiple purchasers).

Critical reviews do get taken down (I've no idea why). My reviews are legit - I don't have time or interest in anything other than providing feedback. Most stuff is fine, but some is obviously fake or junk. I'm always specific, they could literally buy the product and test it themselves.

THis is interesting - is this an Trump opposition dump on Biden? Pretty good timing if so :)

And for all the folks going on about taxes.

1) Rich people can already avoid taxes by investing overseas and not generating realized gains so funds stay untaxed overseas. I don't think being a citizen of EU would change that much.

2) US citizens are taxed regardless of second citizenships as US citizens.

"If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, the rules for filing income, estate, and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad. Your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you reside."

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/us-c...

Simple, this was probably in motion during Trump era - and for whatever reason (ability to work overseas, live overseas in EU, own property etc) there was an advantage to having an EU passport. This gets him that.

Not totally unreasonable for a global CEO.

This really illustrates how ignorant a lot of HN comments are outside of the high wealth / tech bubble.

Swollen batteries, bad batteries that were third party batteries were a pretty major iphone repair issue. Trying to cut down this obvious type of brand damaging behaviour is obviously good business to preserve reputation. I've been in line listening to a store employee try to explain that this wasn't their battery (before the whole crackdown). People literally still think Apple should repair these swollen phones (I bought it from XXX who told me that battery was good - it showed 100%, now its swollen / broken - fix it!).

Apple doesn't know the battery life of a made in china battery. They charge an insane premium (including in used form) because of the flat out trust folks have in these devices. The tech inside does not generate this premium - their margins are mind blowing for what could be a commodity.

The slow down issue was because apple was trying to extend useful life of their devices, at least that is one, not unreasonable view. Note - they support their devices far far LONGER than their "open" competitors - which often ship with old software (adware laden) and then never update.

I keep my phone about 3 years and it's never been able to get latest iOS. My elderly parents kept their phones for 6 years and theirs was getting point releases still of an older iOS (not sure how that works but it did).

for my parents especially - the trust issue is absolutely huge. They just don't trust that HTC or whomever won't ship with impossible to uninstall crap on the phone. same with carriers - again, apple has locked down much harder and so carriers are not "free" to install their stuff - lots of complaints, but for many users (not all) this is a positive not a negative. They don't have time to research which carrier installed app is crap, they don't know how to uninstall them etc.

I'm going to let this one lie because any defense of Apple just get's voted into oblivion.

You and others fail to understand that if a scam can be run it will be run.

Apple is trading on its reputation. "It's only OK to show non-genuine once". Scammers love this. They install the bogus battery, click through the warning, then when they show you you are screwed.

Why can't apple disable features, like battery life indication, for batteries they haven't profiled for the service? This is what makes users trust apple, if your phone says battery life is 80%, you can be pretty sure it is 80%.

Great - after the cookie wall nightmares from the EU we get this. Good to see the EU continuing to innovate.

IF you know the associate and trust them and think they will screen the right way - the small team can often be folks who know / trust each other. It can be hard to add someone particularly outside your standard networks.

I know a lot of folks on HN don't like what Apple does to confirm genuine product (ie, battery notification if a third party is swapped in etc).

I feel like a lot of folks on HN don't buy used / second hand products - especially in non US / EU settings. If you did, you would IMMEDIATELY understand that if a cheapo battery can be dropped in that shows 100% battery life - IT WILL BE. And then your phone will die in a month or two.

This extends to everything. Conversely, some telecom services overseas are insanely cheap by western standards. Anyone know why / how this is?

For india it's $4-5/month for 3GB/day of data.

I had the same thought. There should have been a play where you were the trusted metadata layer (across clouds even), but allowed actual images to come from S3, GCP, Azure directly (ie, serve metadata + hashes / signatures). Obviously AWS and everyone would spin up their own mirrors, lots of bandwidth would be saved (by Docker too) and they would still have a role in the center.

Does AWS raise prices like this (I know Oracle does - OUCH).

I've yet to be hit by one of these price increases and have been on AWS since the beginning. Until I migrated they supported my SimpleDB app FOREVER (I mean, it wasn't even on website at one point but the calls still worked!).

A small part of AWS success must be because of this confidence they will stick around, keep a service running.