Posts by ratfox

Worse than sociologists? How about literary critics?

http://xkcd.com/451/

I thought Europe did not do software patents?

Or is it a design patent?

Celebrate a holiday?

When there are sales after Christmas, do you also attribute this to stores celebrating Christmas by offering cheaper prizes as gift to their customers?

It is not naive

It is not naive. This is exactly what Apple and Google are doing with their Bermuda/wherever offices. Most of the income they make in countries outside of the United States is declared in there, because royalties paid by their subsidiaries all over the world ultimately end up there. Most of that money never comes in the United States, and they don't pay tax on it in the United States. And the US government knows it, and does not say much about it, because it is in fact legal for a US company to do that (Finland might be different, though).

A slightly perverse effect of this is that companies now have an disincentive to invest that money inside of the United States, because if they did, they would first have to bring the money in the country and pay tax on it. And so, they lobby the US government for a tax holiday, which would allow them to bring the money with lower or no tax, arguing it is better for the United States if the money is invested there rather than just growing in an offshore account. This article gives some details.

EULA are worth little more than the paper they are not written on

Strangely, even if the EULA contained the terms "you agree to give us all your money", it would not mean Facebook can take all the money of their users.

This is not South Park; there are laws.

Get your names right

It's Alice and Bob, not April.

Way to miss the point

It does not matter whether Google changed their privacy policy or not; they have to give the information to the government. The fact that Bing, Amazon or Facebook do not publish transparency reports does not mean they are not giving information to the government.

"Crash in much less time"

Perhaps you meant "Crash much less often"?

Re: Android fragmentation is logarithmic

Logarithmic? This word, I don't think it means what you think it means…

Re: Nothing about Apple losing their suit against Motorola with prejudice?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/05/us_district_court_throws_out_apple_patent_lawsuit_against_googorola/

Re: Could you actually buy an unlocked iPhone?

More to the point, this is a class-action lawsuit. Lawyers can make money out of this, but the people technically bringing the lawsuit can earn at most a dozen bucks out of it.

First, there were those lottery-type lawsuits where one guy could earn millions, not because that was the extent of his damages, but because that was how much the company had to be made to pay in order to stop screwing with consumers. E.g. Ford wouldn't even notice offering a new car to every guy who bothered to complain, they would only fix the problems with their cars under threat of multi-million lawsuits.

Then the class-action lawsuits were invented, so that individual consumers would hardly have an incentive of suing big corporations for a return of just $50 each. But the lawyers still had incentives, because they still earned millions out of such lawsuits.

So now, companies remove the right to class-action lawsuits from their customers in T&Cs. They can now act however they want, and it is not the worth the trouble for any single individual to sue them.

Ok ok, since you want to know, I'll tell you.

Microsoft 8 will be a failure.

Steve Ballmer will eventually get kicked out, but only after a long drop of market share.

Microsoft will never have so much influence as it did, though it will keep a niche business for corporate solutions.

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.

Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.

You will also meet a dark stranger under the influence of Saturn.

Deal

Don't let the door hit your back on the way out.

Silent H

Putting "a" or "an" before a word depends on the pronunciation, not whether the word starts with a vowel or a consonant. E.g. you write "a university", even though u is a vowel, but you write "an hour", even though h is a consonant.

So you are correct that one should write "a herb" if the h of herb is pronounced; but if the h is silent, you should write "an herb".

Re: bond...?

You are not mad. Looking at any article in a category shows the different subcategories of that category on the second row. Bond is currently the only subcategory of the bootnotes category, and this article is in the bootnotes category, as shown rather discreetly by the fact that the word in the menu bar is in bold.

As for the xxxx, dunno. Related to Bond, maybe?

Re: when life gives you lemons, make Lemon Meringue Pie

Very American-centric. Apple had no such exclusivity contracts outside of United States, is the market share of iOS vs Android any different?