So now you have no benefits that aren't costing you tax from your salary too. So the value of the benefits plummets and thus people just demand a higher salary instead. Which, believe it or not, costs you more - the point of the incentives is that the person couldn't just earn that amount of money extra and get that incentive themselves anyway, it works by having expensive one-offs that mortals couldn't afford, and them remaining company property, etc.

You can't make outsourcing illegal. It's just a legal minefield and there's always a way around it. It would also cripple any modern economy overnight. This is truly a stupid suggestion in its own right.

End visas? No problem. But there aren't many countries in the world that have put a block on visas because they already have enough in-house talent. Believe it or not, this will make immigration drop which, again, will cost you all money.

The numbers may look bigger on the balance sheet, but the costs go up as well and may not be immediately noticeable.

The stock/futures things? Too complicated for me to tell what would happen, to be honest. Chances are there's a way to scam it to make enormous profit and not pay tax on it.

However, if you just tax the companies properly - a fixed portion of their income earned or brought into the country, and a definition of income that excludes any kind of "pay your own subsidiary" shenanigans - the prices for the consumer may well go up. But equally consumers will go elsewhere.

And maybe, just maybe, like Starbucks UK, you'll find that the prices have gone up because NOW they have to pay the right amount of tax. And if that means they can't be profitable, then their competitors who HAVE been paying the right amount of tax all along will win (e.g. Costa Coffee in the UK), because they can compete on a level playing field finally.

Tax isn't complicated. A fixed portion of what you earn. It's that simple. The problem is that to get their own 10% the lawmakers and accountants make things incredibly complicated to define exactly what you've earned. And they wrap it up in a thousand tiny taxes rather than one big tax.

Can someone explain why it wouldn't be better to have a "personal income tax" and a "corporate income tax" and scrap everything else? It's used for disincentives (e.g. tax on smoking in the UK) but, honestly, is that really worth it compared to just banning it or letting the markets speak?

It took 40 years to get to the point where smoking costs us more as a country than it makes in tax, and now we have a huge legacy of health problems ahead of us and STILL we haven't properly banned it but pissed away money on disincentives like plain packaging, hiding them away in the store, stopping their advertising, removing their capability to sponsor, etc.

I can't help but think that just the simplicity of "half what you earned" (which is about right for most first-world countries) would cut out so much red tape, confusion, administration and difficult enforcement that it would actually get you back MORE than all this complicated mess of exclusions and kickbacks that are in place now.

I pay road tax (road fund licence, technically, but it's a tax on road use the proceeds of which go to road maintenance - no different to taxing road use and the government having to maintain the roads generally), income tax, national insurance (healthcare tax), VAT (sales tax), a specific tax on petrol, a tax on pensions, a tax on insurances, a tax on bank interest and god-knows what else.

"How much money did you make from all sources last year? Give me half" seems to be pretty much the same as we have now, but without all this mess of shit to fall foul of and allow companies to scam.

"Untaxed" foreign earnings. Does that mean not taxed at all, or not taxed by the US? (They may well have been taxed in the foreign country they were earned in. If they weren't, I'm sure those foreign countries would love to know about it given that it was earned there and then shipped out of the country.)

What you have here is a problem of a global economy trying to deal with local taxation, and maybe even an attempt to double-tax.

If you're a large company that deals internationally, you have two options. Set up a company in each country and have them pay the tax of the local country, or set up one company and then pay the tax in EITHER those foreign countries or the home country of the company, depending on how you declare it.

For a company to have foreign earnings that are untaxed, they either have a home country that's not being paid tax (Why not? What kind of stupid taxation system is that if they're clearly based there, wherever they do business?), or they're not paying proper taxes in the foreign country (same parenthesised comment applies here).

I'm sure there are a lot of companies not paying proper tax. Starbucks weren't paying millions in tax in the UK because all their profits went to their US division as "payment for intellectual property rights" (i.e. Starbucks US let Starbucks UK use the Starbucks name for the small price of 100% of their profit, thus making them a zero-profit entity in the UK and not liable to UK tax, which is obviously a scam and should be legislated against).

But if you have to do a one-off tax to make things right, that means your everyday tax is slowly cocking things up ALL the time. And how long because the next "one-off" tax?

You have to pay about $450 for the camera. AXIS work great for this.
tell your customer to stop being a cheap bastard and spend the money on the real deal.

I wonder how the Mystery Goo is going to behave in that orbit.

Probably but I don't see how it will work. What is to stop companies registering themselves elsewhere so that they are no longer US companies and then only their US operations will get taxed? Even if this strategy does not work they have an army of lawyers using the legal system of every country in the world to figure out workarounds that will work.

Exactly.

And the ability to overwrite such a critical file should really be something huge and manual because it's so critical.

I'm also thinking DDoS situations - malware replacing your SSH keys with their own, stopping you logging in at all or adding their public key to all your normal ones granting them a kind of hidden back door.

Sure, they can do all that in other ways, but one way built-into the SSH protocol as an extension is something we can do without.

So, I have to trust a server to automatically replace a trusted key with a new trusted key.

Yeah, this is the type of thing I'll try when it's been in the code for five, ten years.

I'm perfectly sure, as a mathematician, that you can use some kind of secure exchange to make this work but - fuck - I won't be trusting implementations of it for a while.

Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that, half-assed, will generate security problems for years to come and yet still seems to be outside the SSH protocol and has to be a custom extension? Is there an RFC for this?

Sorry but as far as I'm concerned key management shouldn't be a part of the process that's handling connection authentications, etc. Why can't this be an outside protocol entirely? For decades, we've been waiting for some kind of automated decentralised, anonymised key-store and surely the effort going into securing this very dangerous piece of code would have been better put into moving the problem away from SSH and allowing multi-protocol use of such things.

Are the factoring in that most inner city schools learning and getting good grades is considered... "acting white" and looked down upon?

I suggest identifying the smart kids and removing them from the caustic peer environment that is designed to keep them down.

Except for very bright students, Then it is discovered that the teachers and dumbed down education hinders students more.

If you are on either side of the bell curve you need special education. Low IQ need more hand holding, High IQ need the teachers to get the hell out of the way.

Actually, disabling substances are used in the vast majority of rapes. The most common is alcohol (trying to get the victim too drunk to resist or looking for someone who already is, in about two thirds of rapes), but drugs are used in about 20% of additional rapes. Very, very few rapes follow the classic Hollywood script of "stranger leaps out of the bushes with a knife" - so vanishingly few that the scenario is statistically almost nonexistant. Disabling substances are extremely popular because 1) they work very well, 2) the victim often can't remember the attacker well if at all, 3) the victim is not in a state to be making a report until long after the event, 4) the victim's ability to make legally reliable testimony is compromised. Why would people choose the Hollywood way over that?

And I'm sorry, but if you think that you can watch everything you consume every second of every evening you're out and not slip up, you're an idiot. And yes, the reason people get mad at people like you is that the problem is that there are people out there drugging other peoples' drinks en masse and thinking that this is acceptable behavior, not that victims haven't gained supernatural abilities to hyperfocus on everything they may potentially consume at all times and never slip up. "Look, I'm sorry that you're dying of pancreatic cancer, but you should have been getting pancreatic function tests daily and working two jobs to pay for weekly MRI scans to find it before it could have posed a threat to you, and because you weren't, it's your own damned fault, and don't act like I'm a jerk for pointing this out!" That's how you come across when you take that tack. The problem is the f***ing cancer, not the victim.

No, I may have mistyped because I'm lazy, but I only work in "Mbps" being bits. When you want to talk bytes, I use "MB/s" like everyone else has does for years. Pedantry over the captialisation only came later. Generally, nobody states in "MBps" and means bytes or "Mb/s" and means bits.

ALL numbers in my post? Mbits. Fuck multiply by 8 if you want and it's still - on average - worse than the 4G on my phone in the same area, but that's NOT the number I'm getting.

And if Gigabit is already commodity hardware at home, and bog-standard small business switches are built with 48 ports of Gigabit plus whatever backbone for a few hundred quid for the last ten years, what do you think serious ISPs and datacentres have been using all that time for, say, leased line and stuff.

Of course it requires upgrades but they would need to have been a generation ahead since the start and kept replacing or they would not be able to handle anything.

BT are a telecoms company. They handle the international fibres for the UK and all kinds of stuff. Internal switching on their networks must be fantastic already, even if our end-user experience is shit.

If you're not on Gigabit already, I'll be surprised.

Even basic cheap laptop wireless, smartphone wireless and wireless routers are in the, what? 300Mbps or so range? Two or three of those and you can flood a Gigabit connection.

You would need a new router with BT anyway, because it's a new protocol. And then you'd need to throw away the BT router and buy a real one after the first week when you read how crap and insecure they are.

But there are £200 routers on the market that have triple WAN failover (including USB 3G/4G) with VoIP, VPN, wireless, and Gigabit switches built-in.

And networks have an even easier problem. Buy one Gigabit port and push all your dozens / hundreds of users over it who almost certainly all have Gigabit ports anyway. Bottleneck before you even start. And if you don't have at least a Gigabit network backbone and 100Mbps to the desktop, you are technically worse than every primary school I've worked in in the last 15 years.

More likely is that your webfilter/VPN will struggle to process that amount of traffic, but it's unlikely if you've bought anything half-decent. The last VPN/Firewall I saw that couldn't handle more than 100Mbps was an old Netgear thing about the size of a pack of cards that was so old it refused almost all modern browsers thinking they were Netscape.

Er... crap.

I have a street strewn with telegraph poles. My parents live in a streeet strewn with telegraph poles. So does almost everyone I know. Most of those people live in London, for a start, and it's not limited to just there.

Fuck knows where you live but if you don't have pole at the end of your street with cables going to each house, I'm guessing it's a new build estate (which are in the minority compared to, say, 30's/40's/50's/60's houses).

However, what you might mean is that those poles will feed the cables from each house down to a green box which may have some kind of fibre/copper backbone that goes under the street. But it's still copper... FTTC hasn't arrived in many places.

But if you live in a UK town and are more a few hundred metres from a telegraph pole, I'd be surprised.