Well, given that one of the linked articles on NVidia's firmware signing is now 7 months old (September 2014), it's not getting worse all that quickly, it's just that the people who were complaining about it before are complaining about it again. And as they point out, there's a perfectly fine proprietary driver; they just don't like those drivers. The problem, of course, being that the Open Source driver can't legally use the Sorenson CODECs, or the MPEG-LA patent pool without violating the law in many countries.

Quit conflating trademarks with domain names.

Make a ".trademark" TLD. Everyone will ignore it, of course.

Problem solved.

This applies to personal income taxes, not corporate income taxes. Although corporations are nominally people in the U.S., it isn't true worldwide, and it's actually not even true in the U.S., or there would be no distinction between personal and corporate income tax rates, or, in the U.S., S-corps vs. C-corps.

Try again: find a specific treaty dealing with apportioning of corporate income tax *which caps that tax*, as a total, to the higher of two states, when apportioned between those states.

You aren't going to find it outside of some place like Myanmar (Burma), a country with which the U.S. does not treat, and which corporations will not touch with an 11 foot pole.

I believe you missed the part where I called up ADP and pretended to be an entirely unrelated company potentially interested in contracting their services. This is what ADP said to me, and it confirmed what Apple had told me. This was in the middle of my negotiation. In the end, I negotiated moves in place where they could move, using the vacation accrual as a lever. So it all worked out.

Yes.

If you're part of the interview team, and they are in another country. The interview team could be spread all over, but usually, it's only one or two people who do the phone interview. However, in that case, they're usually in the conference room at a google facility, so you have full on video conference capability, even if it's a two person room. Usually they use a 4 person or larger room so that you have a whiteboard on the wall with a camera pointed at it, and can switch viewpoint and see the whiteboard.

If you can't travel, they'll also do them, and if you passed the phone screen, but they want a technical opinion before they bring someone on site (mean fly them in), and they happen to be pretty far from any Google office.

I don't think the above discloses anything that should not be IOTTMCO.

The phone interviews I've given were all real interviews, not just phone screens. On the other hand, being in a position where the recruiters tend to like you, and the hiring committee tends to trust your opinion, you see more of those than most people.

The corporate policy exists to prevent one bad interview, due to bad chemistry, a hangover, or whatever excuse for having an off day the interviewer happened to have, from damaging the interview process overall. Google employees can screw up too, and if they do, it shouldn't cost Google a good candidate, and it shouldn't cost the interviewee their confidence in the remaining interviewers, where they might prove to be incredible people to hire.

A lot of passing an interview process has to do with confidence, and if you shoot someone's confidence in the head, even if you don't think they'd be a good fit, then (a) you're an incredibly bad interviewer, and should either redo the training or be barred from doing future interviews; that's OK: not everyone can be great at everything!, or (b) you've made a mistake, and you probably need to immediately tell the recruiter managing the interviews, and the next interviewer on the way in, at a minimum, and then disqualify your feedback to the hiring committee, and tell them why, so they can look at the remaining interviews in that light. The absolutely worst thing you could do is make a mistake and not tell anyone about it. They're not rewarded, but unless they are habitual, neither do they cost you; you tend to get +1 integrity points (that's not a real thing).

Yup. Me too.

LOL

Made my day!

Usually, it's because someone has travelled a long distance underground, and you are either opening it to let them out, or opening it to provide equipment for their next leg (like an air blower), or you are sending down an expert or tools to do something with whatever cable or whatever they dragged with them from the point the went in.

I'm not seeing the reciprocal agreement here. I'm seeing a cite of a document that says the U.S. is weird about income taxes, and that New York is weird about income taxes, and that establishing a nexus obligates both parties, assuming the foreign power chooses to be obligated (why opt in when you can opt out?!?).

I don't see an 11% income tax in Singapore and a 25% income tax in California for an income generating transaction between the two resulting in no more than 25% out of pocket (however you apportion it) for the person receiving the income.

Try again.

No one is suggesting denying anyone a patent. What's being suggested is that if something is patented, it shouldn't be part of the standard which everyone has to follow to compete *at all* in the market.

A really good example of this is the Qualcomm CDMA patent. They did a lot of great work, behind that patent, and they deserve the patent. But you shouldn't have to implement it in order to implement a cell phone that works, and be completely locked out of building cell phones otherwise. It should not be part of the standard infrastructure.

And, in fact, it's not. Most of the world is GSM, because they are unwilling to pay the $35 royalty per device for CDMA. And they shouldn't be required to do so, just to be able to build a cell phone. In fact, within the cellular device industry, we call this "the Qualcomm tax". Some are willing to pay the "tax", other are not; neither position prevents them from building cell phones, although the choice tends to restrict your devices to one set of carriers, or another (assuming you even have CDMA carriers in your country), unless you build a device capable of both (at which point, you pay the "tax", even if you never use the capability.

Nice, thanks for the info. Nvidia would be nice, as I want to run blender. Is there a good comparison site for various laptops with high-end graphics and CPUs you know of? I've been poking around online for a while, but determining what the best supported higher-end laptops are for Linux is far from easy.

If Apple's recent stream of security failures has not convinced you to switch to Linux or BSD, you are basically hopeless.

Oh, I've been running Linux for years and years. I was going to dual-boot an apple laptop with osx+linux, but now I have no interest in having osx any more than I do windows. I'll take a look at the new dell.

My Grandmother (she is 85) has an Intel based Core Duo Macbook and Apple has stopped providing security updates [...] When we bought the machine (new) I thought the macbook would be more usable for her than a Linux laptop. While it has been a good machine, being orphaned on security updates is bad form by Apple.

It's not too late:

http://www.odi.ch/prog/macbook...
http://www.codingepiphany.com/...

We are talking apple users here, not Linux users. All three Apple users who know these steps have probably already done so. The other several hundred million are fucked, and Apple has now publicly taken a stance that they plan to hang those millions out to dry.

Ironically, I was going to buy an apple laptop for sheer convenience (and to run more recent versions of scrivener), but now I most certainly won't. Time to research good Linux laptop alternatives instead (ideally with high-end graphics capabilities that support blender's cycles module ... wonder how well Optimus is supported these days). Oh well, it will probably be cheaper anyway. Maybe I can treat myself a 4k monitor with the money saved.