Not necessary. The system has already been rigged by propagators of the Laffer curve myth so that the government collects only a small fraction of the taxes necessary to pay for its operation. So you're already not paying most of your taxes.

It's easy to be "free" when the companies in question aren't actually IN your country. The government-provided services the freeloading companies depend on are paid for by the non-dodging taxpayers of the countries in which the business actually operate.

If I'm not so special, then why do my mundane activities need to be recorded? What benifit does it serve? Certainly not mine; the activities being recording are so unexceptional the only people to gain by having a recording of them are my loved ones who want a momento of the event or people looking for dirt on me. If I don't know you, but you are sending video of me into some cloud service, then no good can possibly come to me as a result. The most likely outcome is that nothing will come of it. But that is also the best case. The less likely cases are that I could loose my job, or be convicted of some bullshit crime.

I can appreciate the argument that you shouldn't do things in public that you don't want people to know. However the areas that are considered a "public space" has been expanding conciderably to the point where your personal home is the only real private space. But people aren't solitary creatures. They need to be able to congregate with others like them without having their activities scrutinized by the entire world, just by the community that they are interacting with. We need freedom to not spend our lives living like a PR representative on the stage every hour that we are outside of our homes.

You should have placed the emphasis where I explain the reason for the pole shift. Chuckle.

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Back in the 80s and early 90s I was working in New Jersey and often doing projects in DC. Taking the train was a lot less stressful than flying, and typically took only about 15 minutes longer, but sometimes I'd fly from Newark to National Airport. There were shuttle planes every hour, you only needed about 15 minutes at the airport to catch your plane, and if you missed it there'd be another one an hour later. (Except occasionally, with bad weather or whatever.) So we'd usually aim to get to the airport 20-30 minutes before our flight, and if you didn't get a bad Metro connection downtown you could walk at the airport, or if you did you could run and usually still get on.

Between Boston, NYC, and DC, Amtrak runs the really fast Acela trains, the pretty fast Metroliners, and the slower local trains. There's also lots of commuter train service in the Northeast that isn't Amtrak, such as New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad, SEPTA, DC Metro, etc. Back in the 1980s and early 90s I used to take the trains from New Jersey to DC (before the Acela started, so Metroliner if I could, or the slow trains otherwise.) Depending on where I was going in DC, it was often faster to take the train, because there's a lot less "hurry up and wait" and the train stations were more centrally located.

Outside the northeast, Amtrak runs passenger service, mostly long-haul, with occasional shorter-distance service like the trains from San Francisco Bay Area up to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. That service runs on the same rails that carry freight trains, and freight has higher priority, so sometimes the passenger trains have to wait. I've never been on one that mixed passengers and freight, but I suppose it's possible that they're doing some of that these days.

Back when I was taking the trains, Wifi hadn't been invented, most people didn't have cell phones, and cell phones mainly worked near the city; there was a big service gap between Baltimore and Philly. I was once in one of the dining cars, and the old guy sitting across from me had the smallest cellphone I'd ever seen (a Motorola flip-phone analog), the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (a 6-pound IBM model you could only get in Japan), and an alphanumeric Skytel pager (which was also cool.) He was Professor Dave Farber, then of UPenn, and he'd just been working on the EFF founding :-)

No, it hasn't been blocking third party cookies for years. This is the core of why such policies are a bad idea. It says it blocks third party cookies, but there are actually lots of exceptions to that rule in order to avoid as the summary says "false positives". You can read about what really happened with Google on Lauren Weinstein's blog, it's very different to how you paint it (there was no "trying to circumvent" involved).

The only thing 3rd party cookies are useful for is tracking you. Anyone who says otherwise makes their living out of stripping you of your privacy.

Reading fail! The summary itself says the policy is being delayed because of false positives, ie, things that they are blocking that is causing users to complain.

This is exactly what happened with Safari. Somebody decides that "privacy" can be viewed exclusively through the lens of particular technologies, that advertising is bad and they will "save the users" from targeted advertising that's wrecking the web (or relevant advertising that funds the web, depending on your perspective). Then they discover that 3rd party cookies are not exclusively used for advertising, and start punching holes in the policy, until it gets to the point where any site that wants to can set a third party cookie by writing their code in a different way. Then some company offers their users a feature they can opt in to that requires third party cookies, so the documented workarounds for the blocking policy are used to make it work, then there's a big media story about how said company is "working around privacy protections".

For example, this happened with Facebook and Safari. The Safari guys got bug reports that their users were being randomly logged out of Facebook but not when other browsers were used. After a long time, they tracked it down to third party cookie blocking interacting badly with the Like button, which is the sort of thing that uses them. So they added yet another heuristic to try and distinguish "good" stuff such as Like buttons from "bad" stuff such as adverts, and ended up making the policy so weak it could even be triggered by accident!

Google does not use stack ranking in the sense you are referring to it (the form that promotes competition between employees to avoid being in the bottom X% that gets fired or top Y% that gets promoted).

(usual disclosure: I'm a Google engineer).

Those are all really bad examples.

Retiring ActiveSync for consumer accounts is not "trying to prevent Windows Phone from syncing calendar and contact data". Not even close. ActiveSync is a Microsoft-specific protocol which is so heavily protected by the patent system it requires fees. There are open equivalents for all its functionality. Perhaps if Microsoft doesn't want to implement CalDAV or CardDAV like its major competitors do and would rather its competitors pay them per-user license fees for the privilege of using a crappy syncing protocol, they should not be surprised when support for said protocol goes away. They can catch up with everyone else and support the non-licensed calendar and contact syncing protocols instead. For corporate users, well, they pay so the costs of ActiveSync can just be passed straight through.

By "hindering the development of a YouTube app" you actually mean requiring Microsoft to obey the terms of service, right? The sort of co-operation Page was talking about doesn't mean Microsoft can do whatever they want, demand whatever they want, and everyone gives it to them on a plate for nothing. It means cooperating to find a reasonable solution that works for everyone. In this case, there's already an HTML5 website Windows Phone users can access, and if WP becomes popular enough then probably Google would make a native app that follows content creators requirements and allows the site to be funded. Or maybe provide the access they need to build a proper app that does follow the ToS. After all, that's what happened with the iPhone app despite the iPhone being Android's biggest competitor (it started out written by Apple and later moved to being written by Google).

The sort of thing Microsoft does here is exactly what Larry was talking about. They must have known when they were developing the YouTube app that the features they added were not allowed - because it says so right in the YouTube ToS. So what was their goal here? Apparently to try and confuse people and try to score points when they got inevitably told to stop. And it's working on you, isn't it? It's exactly the same kind of immature behaviour they're pulling in so many other ways. This is not co-operation. It's playing politics instead of building better technology. Larry isn't the only one that's sick of it.

Lots of big corporations have more complicated tax liabilities that can't be handled by being registered in just one company. It's not uncommon to have multiple layers of corporate shells, with different layers being the ones that officially do some part of the business in that country so as to minimize overall taxes. One such approach is the Double Irish Arrangement often with a "Dutch Sandwich" in between, and Wikipedia identifies Google as one of a number of well-known large companies doing things like this.

Yeah, I thought about that, but the meter had a screen on the front that counted down the amount of time remaining. When you point coins in, the time goes up. Pretty simple actually. So I am not sure how I could have been accidentally cited for that either because there was over an hour left on the meter when I left. I suppose there could have been some other infraction I'm not aware of, though.

I had two weeks to file an appeal, only one of which I was going to be in the country. That's filing, it doesn't mean it's resolved within two weeks. Also, unfortunately I only noticed the ticket under the wipers after driving off. So I didn't take a photo of where I was parked. Apparently the guy who issued the ticket is supposed to take a photo, but I have no idea how to see it (probably can't).

There doesn't seem to be any online appeals process. I was told I'd have to send them a letter by the post. If there was an online process I might have been tempted to use it. The City of Santa Cruz website only has the ability to pay tickets, not file an appeal or complaint.

What do you think LibreOffice should do to make its brand more recognizable?

I've been using LibreOffice for a number of years, and love it (having written two, and typeset three, books with it), but the name is a hindrence. When I speak to my wife and use the term LibreOffice her eyes glaze over, whereas Open Office has a natural name people understand.

Free Office would have been better than LibreOffice, or any of a dozen other names I can think of (Community Office, OpenSource Office, New Office, World Office, even abbbreviating it to L-Office ...anything like that would lead to far better name recognition).

That said, LibreOffice is great, and I wouldn't necessarily spend too much energy trying to get agreement to change the name at this late date (well, maybe the abbreviated "L-Office"). You've all done fine work...now the word needs to get out.

I also find the stats suspicious...Gentoo folks like me are probably counted in the stat as downloads occur on an emerge, but how many copies of Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, RHEL, etc. have shipped with LibreOffice and aren't counted?

I don't think it's just Florida that's abusing traffic citations for profit. I visited Santa Cruz, CA on Sunday and parked by the beach. There were cars on either side of me, white space dividing lines and a meter right in front of the space where I parked. I got a $48 citation for "parking in a red zone". So I called them up and asked what this meant, it means "no parking at any time under any circumstances". That means the ticket was quite obviously wrong as no-parking zones don't have parking meters in them.

I don't see any way this can be an honest mistake. You can't write out a ticket saying a car parked in a no parking zone whilst standing next to a meter with plenty of time left on it.The ticket itself, their contact line and their website all make the appeals process rather prominent so apparently they get a lot of appeals. Unfortunately you only get two weeks to appeal, I'm not staying in California, I'll be on vacation next week and then I return to my home in Europe. So I'll probably just pay the $48, there's no way it makes sense to appeal a parking ticket for a rental car from the other side of the world whilst on vacation.

This whole incident leaves a bad taste, it appears to be open and unchecked corruption on the part of municipal governments. The kind of thing I expect in a banana republic, not America.