They can hold their annual meeting anywhere they desire. Their bylaws say as much. That has nothing to do with where they are based.

I grew up in Kansas. I moved to the Seattle area. Identifying myself as a Kansan after living here for 13 years would be ridiculous.

If UPS still had major operations here outside of the same sort of operations they have anywhere else I think you'd have a case to call them a Seattle company, but they don't.

Boeing moved to Chicago, but a pretty good case can be made to call them a Seattle company in that they still have a very large operations here.

However, if 80 years from now Boeing has no production facilities here and only have a similar support infrastructure that they have at various airports around the country. Has moved their corporate headquarters 3 times since leave Seattle. Then I'd say you're just as absurd calling it a Seattle company as you are for calling UPS one.

If you're insistent on calling UPS a Seattle company, then I guess we'll just have to disagree.

UPS is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Atlanta. Except for history pre-1930 UPS has no more connection to Seattle now than they do to anywhere else they deliver packages.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9NDU4NTF8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1

UPS hasn't been headquartered in Seattle since 1930. You might want to update your facts.

I'm opposed to this but this initiative actually removes the B&O tax and lowers propert taxes by about 20%. So no it would not double your tax burden.

I just don't think income taxes are a reasonable way to pay for government. It seems ridiculously inefficient and prone to non-compliance.

The B&O tax on the other hand seems rather fair to me.

Sure, but it's not simple to ask the IRS for a list of everyone in Washington making more than X dollars. You have to account for joint filings, potential differences between state tax law and federal tax law (the initiative ties this to federal tax law, but this sort of tying rarely stays in place for long).

I'd imagine that the IRS would be willing to share information but probably isn't willing to do the number crunching for you. So I'd guess the state tax agencies will need to build resources to process the federal information, figure out who should be filing and go after them.

This is far more complicated than figuring out which businesses have business licenses but are not filing their B&O returns. Given that you can't open a bank account for the business without the UBI number you get from having the business license, it's pretty darn hard to operate an effective business without filing your B&O returns.

There are probably some small proprietorships that fly under the radar but the state already has a small business write off credit that makes these businesses have no B&O tax. So the only advantage they get saving themselves the bother of the paperwork. At the cost of a potentially hefty fine for not having the business license.

The business of course could lie about their business activity, but that's why we have audits and there is no difference between the B&O versus an income tax in this respect.

So in my opinion it is much more difficult to enforce an income tax.

I'm not making enough money to have to pay this tax, I live in Washington State and I'm opposed to this. Why? Washington State has no income tax at all right now. Unless you require everyone to file you will have low compliance.

This initiative may be cost neutral by getting rid of the Washington Business and Occupation tax, which means the resources directed toward that can be used for processing the income tax returns. It does not require that all citizens file. Instead it only requires those that would actually have to pay the tax to file.

I think it's clear where this is going. The state will end up generating less revenue than expected due to this non-compliance. It will then either have to raise the tax or extend the filing requirement to more people to identify the people who are not complying.

Finally, it is very likely that this income tax will expand beyond the limits that it has now, either by no action on the part of the legislature as inflation raises the amount of money that people earn over time or by direct action of the legislature to raise more funds.

Rather, as a former business owner in this state and a citizen I support the state simply effectively enforcing the Business and Occupation taxes we have now. Microsoft has been avoiding paying this tax on a huge proportion of their revenue by running the revenue through an office in Nevada. I'm sure there are other companies in the area that have been evading this tax.

If the state is unable to force a large and very well known tax evader to comply with tax law, it's unlikely that they'll be able to force a large number of individuals to comply when they don't even have the information to determine who they are.

The Kansas Department of Health has had their systems offline for nearly a month due to a hard drive failure. As a result nobody can get birth certificates.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWdp8MfL7qrxjB8X8UWvKYC8Jw-AD9HRDAI00

I fail to see how this is a problem. If you don't want to be running an open access point then don't. The scope of data collection shouldn't be relevant. It's worth pointing out that Google is by far not the only company collecting access point locations. It's also worth pointing out that while the companies are providing services that use this information, not a single one has published a list of which access points are where. They have no interest in doing so since doing so gives the data to their competitors. Building the software to do the location is a hell of a lot easier than collecting the data to actually do it. So it's a good bet they will never do something like this.

However, other people have already produced mapping data of wifi:
http://gwifi.net/
http://v4.jiwire.com/search-hotspot-locations.htm

There are open wifi points just about everywhere. More and more of them open and intended for public use. I just don't see how the world having access to where they are as some sort of huge issue.

This whole issue isn't about google mapping wifi spots anyway, it's about them saving payload data while mapping wifi. You'll note nobody is having a fit about skyhook, which was mapping the same information. Why? Because skyhook hasn't admitted to saving payload data.

When I first got my EVO i bought into this. Then I downloaded SystemPanel:
http://android.nextapp.com/site/systempanel

At the time all the features of the pay version were in the unlocked version. So I got to play around with the profiling features. I have since paid for the app.

This is what I discovered. The Sprint apps don't do jack if you never use them. The only app that actually runs despite me having no need for it is the voicemail app because I don't use Sprint's voicemail.

What people don't understand is that Android loads applications into memory on the idea that you might use them. Which applications it thinks you might use is based on what you actually use. So when you first get the phone and it doesn't have any history and not many applications loaded on it. There's a very good chance that the Sprint apps are going to be the ones getting cached. The cached apps use no CPU time. They're just in memory in case you decide to run them.

I've stopped using a task killer, my battery time hasn't gotten worse. Nothing about my phone has really changed.

In short, yeah it sucks you can't remove those apps and they're taking up space, but they're not hurting performance. They're not even running unless you run them.

See also this explanation from the developer of the SystemPanel app as to why automated task killing is a bad idea:
http://android.nextapp.com/site/systempanel/doc/autokill

Seriously, who thinks this info is private? We're talking about payload data from unsecured wifi. For that matter we're talking about payload fragments.

Obviously, Google shouldn't have collected this. Obviously, Google shouldn't disclose this information to anyone, including governments.

The data should be destroyed and everyone should move on.

Google didn't collect anything that someone with a wifi card and some easily obtained software couldn't obtain.

Simply put, if you're concerned about privacy secure your wifi because without some encryption you really don't have any privacy.

The law is not nearly as simplistic as you make it sound. Some laws require mens rea. Some laws are strict liability. Some laws require specific intent. I can't say I'm knowledgeable of the situation with the laws that Google violated, but they may be guilty of anything depending of how the law is actually written.

I'd suggest that you search for some of the terms above and read up.

Yeah detractors totally wouldn't find something else to whine about if everyone used stock UIs. *rolls eyes*

The whole point of Android being open is so people can build on top of it. If you don't want vendor modified UIs and OS builds, go get an iPhone or root your phone. If people are so short sighted as to not realize that the "fragmentation" is a strength not a weakness of Android that's their own problem.

I don't really see what's wrong with Sense. I've got it on my EVO. It's fine. The screenshots are there to be shots for the bookmark applet. If you don't want them made you can just delete the folder they're being put in and created a text file with the same name on your sd card. Should HTC have made this feature more clear and given a way to disable it, yes. But it's not the bloody end of the world and there's nothing wrong with Sense. Maybe you don't like it but I do and oddly it seems quite a lot of other people do.

For that matter, nobody is forcing anyone to buy a phone with Sense on it. There are phones with stock UIs on them.

You're reading way too much into those articles. Nobody said they were upset that google didn't bother to call them.

Simon just said it isn't open source due to the field of use restriction in the patent grant and that it hasn't been submitted to the OSI. And ASKED google to submit it.

And Michael's article only briefly touches on the situation with the VP8 licenses and all he does is ask questions.

You're reading emotion into these posts where there is none.