Rather than creeping you out by peering over your shoulder waiting for you too blunder so he can offer unsolicited advice instead He just sits there and serenades you with the Beatles song "Number Nine" until ask him a question

The problem is that it is really easy to move "profit" from one place to another. A common ploy is to have one part of a company that is in a low-tax area to charge other parts of the company "licensing fees". In some cases this "licensing fee" means that the other parts of the company now make no profits.

If you try to tax revenues rather than profits, then you wind up really hurting (true) low-margin companies, and wind up under-charging (relatively) high-margin ones.

The best proposal I have seen yet is to tax companies on a percentage of the global profits based on the percentage of revenue earned in that tax district. However this would be really difficult to enforce in a reasonable way because 1) How do you audit all of the books in all of the countries to make sure they are not just hiding things? 2) It is still difficult to define profits, especially when you have multiple countries laws to deal with. 3) There is a major possible loophole in just moving all of the profits from one company to another using the same "licensing fee" trick, and having the licensing company have a presence only in a tax haven country.

It depends on your design goals.

In Asimov's story universe, the Three Laws are so deeply embedded in robotics technology they can't be circumvented by subsequent designers -- not without throwing out all subsequent robotics technology developments and starting over again from scratch. That's one heck of a tall order. Complaining about a corner case in which the system doesn't work as you'd like after they achieved that seems like nitpicking.

We do know that *more* sophisticated robots can designed make more subtle ethical systems -- which is another sign of a robust fundamental design. The simplistic ethics is what subsequent designers get when they get "for free" when they use an off-the-shelf positronic brain to control a welding robot or bread-slicing machine.

Think of the basic positronic brain design as a design framework. One of the hallmarks of a robust framework is that easy things are easy and hard things are possible. By simply using the positronic framework the designers of the bread slicing machine don't have to figure out all the ways the machine might slice a person's fingers off. The framework takes care of that for them.

Are you sirius?

I don't think you've really grasped Apple's design sensibility. Job one for the designers is to deliver a product that consumers want but can't get anywhere else.

The "camera bulge" may be a huge blunder, or it may be just a tempest in a teapot. The real test will be the user's reactions when they hold the device in their hand, or see it in another user's hand. If the reaction is "I want it", the designers have done their job. If it's "Holy cow, look at that camera bulge," then it's a screw-up.

The thinness thing hasn't been about practicality for a long, long time; certainly not since smartphones got thinner than 12mm or so. They always been practical things the could have given us other than thinness, but what they want you to do is pick up the phone and say, "Look how thin the made this!" The marketing value of that is that it signals that you've got the latest and greatest device. There's a limit of course, and maybe we're at it now. Otherwise we'll be carrying devices in ten years that look like big razor blades.

At some point in your life you'll probably have seen so many latest and greatest things that having the latest and greatest isn't important to you any longer. That's when know you've aged out of the demographic designers care about.

As a geek, working in a technical job, with a liberal arts degree, I (and my various employers over the years), have found great value in the breadth of my experience, flexibility, and less specific-tool-oriented approach. I'm sure a CS degree will get you an immediate job hacking on code, but adding a second degree, or having a vibrant life outside the digital world adds value to not only your life, but your long-term career prospects.

Also, don't sweat your undergrad degree specifics. It's an amazing chance to learn a ton of disparate, crazy stuff that will enrich your life. Read Ulysses! Learn philosophy! Study physics! I think the only undergrad courses I've never really drawn on were the most quotidian "requirements" courses, and I've never felt "held back" due to a lack of "focus" in my undergrad. Grab a MA/MS or even a Ph.D. (or, you know, life experience) if you want to focus.

Bezos's Blue Origin Part of Boeing Team Bidding for Taxi to ISS

http://slashdot.org/submission...

Submitted by Baldrson on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:58AM
Baldrson (78598) writes
"The WSJ reports that: "The long-secretive space ambitions of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., suddenly are about to get a lot more public. Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter.""

I believe SpaceX has partnered with Bigelow Aerospace, which already has two space stations in orbit.

So THAT's all the gunk around my router. Silly me, I thought it's dust.

So where is the line where it is ok to break the law for law enforcement? What crime do they have to prosecute so they can ignore any and all rights you have?

Well, it costs multiple thousands for the laser, so I guess after the first use you know for sure which ones your enemy will field.

The sooner SpaceX gets away from reliance on government-as-customer the better. They are within a hairs-breadth of a dramatic drop in launch cost and if the effect of this is what I expect it to be, there will be an explosion of business in space as new regimes of space activity open up with SpaceX the primary transport.

Of course not, because there was no "contract" for a single provider of all tablets. There should not be a "contract" for delivery of space cargo either. NASA is doing it wrong! Instead of "picking a winner" they should be building a competitive market. Each delivery should go to the low bidder for that delivery on that date.