well that sounds nice except that history teaches us that warmongers often come out on top in civil wars and continue the carnage abroad after consolidating power

...at least in this day and age. The trick is to remember that any information that is recorded to any form of media, can be stolen, copied, or given away. If you want to maintain something in privacy, it can't leave your head. You can't write it down, or draw, or paint the idea. You can't make a tape of it or a video of it. You can't say it to your lover or spouse.

Of course that makes it incredibly difficult to act on what you maintain in privacy, but that is more of a problem of getting others to work with you in suport of that idea.

There is a presumption of privacy codified in law, however that presumption does not seem to be all that relavent to our current state of govornment or business, so you are pretty much stuck with what you can control. At the moment that's pretty much restricted to what's in your head.

No, I'm not much happy with that either.

The wage gap is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is self entitled democracies, and the fiat money banks created to accommodate populist demands. It'd be like trying to cover up herion convulsions, with seizure medication. It reminds me of the old south. When the plantation masters beat the fuck out of their slaves, they wanted to micro-regulate the treatment of slaves, instead of getting rid of slavery. In retrospect, the people advocated those regulations, were just prolonging the problem, and head so far up their fucking ass, they were beyond stupid.

Today, our fiat/populist systems create all these credit bubbles, housing bubbles, stock bubbles, excessive government debt, high prices, inflated executive pay. And these retards want to go around regulating everything, instead of attacking the problem at the source. Fuck them, just fuck them. Irrelevant worthless idiots who will accomplish nothing anyhow.

Yeah, great. So the idiots who want free movies will get DPI implemented across the board, thus dramatically lowering the bar for all other kinds of censorship in future. This whole thing reminds me of the drug war. These tele-addicts simply don't have any lines they won't cross in order to get their fix, and attempts to stop them thus spiral downards into ever harsher and more aggressive monitoring and control.

BITTORRENT USERS - JUST BUY THE DAMN MOVIES ALREADY.

As I read the comments, it looks like people are missing a bet on what the practice that the cariers are doing can provide.

People are noting that techincally competent people can easily bypass the restrictions, and others are noting that the vast majority of the public is not sufficiently technically competent to work around it.

I'm reminded a bit of the drug dealer situation in most places. It's trivially easy for most people to find a supplier for nearly any drug that someone has an interest in getting. Most people don't go looking for them for whatever reason, but it's not because they don't know where to go, or at least if they thought about it a bit they could figure it out. The same is likely to be true of media content.

So, user George doesn't know how to get around these filters, but it's likely that one of George's friends does, or one of George's friends knows someone who can. If this ever became a significant issue, I suspect that people would set up secure chat servers (or even a https based site) where they let their neighbors know they can request whatever movie they are interested in, and through a bot on the server they get back a link to the file already downloaded, or to the file being downloaded, and they can start watching. The link may be to a torrent proxy that goes and gets the bits of the files from other people offering the same sort of a service, and none of the people providing this service actually have copies of the files maintained on their systems either. (Yes, that somewhat defeats the purpose of a torrent, but the idea is to provide a service to end users, not necessarily be a good torrent netizen.) To reduce the likelyhood that the person providing the service is adversly affected, he or she may require that the 'customer' run a torrent proxy on their system that the load of torrent traffic gets distributed across. Better operators will do something like build their software package to prevent spam bots from running on the customer's computers. That may even be all that the customer is asking for from the service provider, and the torrent operation may be going on completely transparently to them.

I know, that seems complex. But from an end user perspective for the movies, it looks like I log into a secure web server, identify the movie I want to watch, and get a link to that movie. I click on that link, and I start watching the movie. Perhaps George texts or IMs a movie title to Bill, who texts back a URL that George then enters in their web browser, or even follows right on their phone or pc.

In time a network of providers of the service will exist, or several networks. It might be done through something like IRC, and the various providers will check to see who's closest to the end user and get a link close to them.

A lot of banks outside the EU already are pretty secure, using hardware second factors to authorize logins and wire transfers to unknown/new destinations.

If you see bank details being sold that only have a username/password, it's probably an American bank. The 2-factor auth system used outside the USA is based on EMV (it's a variant called CAP). In the US they never deployed EMV aka chip and PIN so the banks don't have any pre-existing secure hardware issued to end users they can auth themselves with.

I'm going to echo that you need to know what the exam criteria are. There are exams that have the limitation that the only capabilities that your calculator is allowed to have are plus, minus, multiply and divide, which would eliminate all of the scientific capabilities listed through this thread. Often those exams don't really need a calculator at all, except to allow the person taking the test to feel that they can check the result that they got through other methods.

As for having the ability to use a slide rule, I've found that pretty much everything I need to do that I can use a slide rule for, can be handled just as fast using a basic four function calculator. An exception would be figuring out square roots, which on a four function calculator involves a lot of trial and error, and for a slide rule is essentially a single slide to solve.

Both are breakable, and neither functions very well as a defensive tool in situations where batteries are unavailable.

:%s/there/their/g
ZZ

Hey, considering that your phone is communicating your contact list through your cell phone carrier with Apple, Google or Microsoft (a couple of other possibilities of course, but pretty much all of them happening across your phone carrier data infrastructure) it's likely that your contact's pictures are already being indexed by the NSA.

It's there ass on the line when you call, or they call you.

If the bursts happened 10 billion years ago were common all over at that time, (as was asked by the ggp a/c) then the observations would be dirstributed much more randomly across the sky than observation indicates. Observation suggests that the large number of gama ray bursts that happened 10 billion years ago, appear to have happened across a region of space that is heavily weighted in one direction. A circle with a radius of 10 billion light years has a circumfrence of 2*pi*10 billion light years, or a bit over 68 billion light years. In that circumfrence, a region of 4 billion light years spans (4/68 * 360 = 360/17 = ~ 21.17) or just over 21 degrees of arc. This is a little more than the arc of the sky that the sky moves in a period of an hour.

That is not to say that we are not observing gamma ray bursts in other directions at an approximate distance of 10 billion light years, just that there appears to be an unusually large number from within this region of space at that time.

You have asked a separate question, which is 'if aliens did the same measurement far away, would they see a sphere-like structure centered around us or them?' While I think it's a reasonable question, it does have an ambiguity, and based on my understanding of Einstein's general relativity law may not be such a reasonable question. The ambituity is 'far away', what is 'far away'? Accross the solar system, galaxy, or the visible limit of the universe?

However a thought experiment based on the question seems to me to be reasonable. Let's assume that some level of simultaniousness can exist. (which has problems I won't get into.) Let's presume that both the cluster of events we're seeing, and we, have a sphere 10 billion years in diamater centered on each of us. There should be a 'ring' where those two spheres intersect, that is 10 billion years from each of us. Take a point on that ring, and lets assume your aliens are there. That point would appear to us to be some 60 degrees across the sky from this cluster of events some 10 billion years ago. What would they see across the sky at a distance of some 10 billion light years? Well, we know they won't be seeing us for at least another 9.5+billion years. Additionally what we are seeing as an arc of approx 4 billion light years across is unlikely to be a perfect match for what they see at 10 billion light years, however we'll allow for the fact that they should see some variation of what we see. That said, a sphere some 4 billion light years across from the point in common 10 billion light years away from each of us, would still span an arc of approx 21 degrees for them, as it does for us. Based on the information I'm mentally working with, they are likely to see a cluster of gamma ray bursts from within this region as well. They are likely seeing a different appearance of the structure than we do, but they would be seeing it from a different angle anyway. They are unlikely to be able to perceive the events as a sphere around either of us, just as we do not perceive of this structure as a sphere around us, or anyone else at this time.

Does that help? (And if someone with a better understanding of cosmology than I have want's to pipe in with a correction, I'm OK with that.)

The observation that we are not seeing them commonly appearing across the universe at a distance of some 10 billion light years.

Yes, they were doing pretty great, so great that the name "Celtic Tiger" was invented specifically to describe the Irish economy.

Like most economies that have inflationary currencies, this led to exuberance and dumping of money into a housing bubble, on the theory that whilst money inflates away houses don't. Being in the Euro had nothing to do with this, it's a disease that affected the USA and the UK as well, even though they have their own currencies and central banks. In fact these governments (but especially the UK) were all desperately trying to push people into the housing bubble due a massive and misguided social engineering program rooted in the belief that home-ownership is an end rather than a means.

But this is not specific to Ireland. It's actually a problem fundamental to an environment with compound inflation (recall that at 2% per year, prices go up every year by more than the previous year because inflation is expressed as a percentage rise on the previous year, not a fixed reference point).

Quoting the wikipedia article I linked:

During that time, Ireland experienced a boom, which transformed it from one of Europe's poorer countries into one of its wealthiest. The causes of Ireland's growth are the subject of some debate, but credit has been primarily given to state-driven economic development; social partnership among employers, government and unions; increased participation by women in the labour force; decades of investment in domestic higher education; targeting of foreign direct investment; a low corporation tax rate; an English-speaking workforce; and membership of the European Union which provided transfer payments and export access to the Single Market.

So they went from one of the poorest countries in Europe to being equal to some of the best in only a couple of decades, and a big chunk of that was due to low corporation tax (but not necessarily low taxes in general, mind you) combined with access to the single market.

The Irish people love their low corporation taxes and did not really raise them even during the global recession, because they have attracted tons of very high-skilled jobs from well known, rich corporations - companies like Apple, Google, Intel and others. The latter two alone created tens of thousands of jobs, which in a small country is a Big Deal, and they're far from the only ones. So not surprisingly, a policy that has created a spigot of good local jobs is popular - a government with higher tax revenues but that spends it all on welfare is not obviously a better state to be in.

This isn't necessarily a strategy that can be replicated everywhere: Ireland was catching up from behind during its boom years, not accelerating ahead of all the other countries. And some of its appeal to international companies was the fact that it wasn't very rich, so wages weren't extremely high. But there are other parts of Europe that are now also behind (think: Spain, Portugal, northern England), so perhaps they can consider whether the same strategy would help.

Some will say this leads to a race to the bottom, and there's some truth to that, but the question is does it matter? It's not like taxing corporations is the only way to raise revenue. Indeed, if you trace a money flow, you'll see that when someone buys something, there's sales tax/VAT paid on that. Then (ignoring the case where the money is sent back to HQ abroad for a moment), it's booked as profit and tax is paid on that too, and then the company pays its wages and possibly pays employment taxes as part of that, and of course property taxes for the place where the employees work, the employee pays income taxes on their wages as well, and in some places also pays a wealth tax at the end. So by the time the money has flowed from one person to another (which is what we really care about, given that economies are ultimately made of and in service of people), it's been taxed many times repeatedly. Rebalancing that does not imply a lower overall tax take, but it may imply a simpler tax system, less paperwork and lower deadweight costs!

All of that is the sort of argument you might find in an academic discussion of tax incidence. What really happens is that corporation taxes are used as a way to try and address social inequality because corporate profits are perceived as making a handful of people extraordinarily wealthy (whether this is the best way to address that, is a matter I leave on the table for further debate).

They do business in Italy. They get money in Italy.

They do business in Ireland and they sell to customers in Italy. The whole point of the EU is it's a single market, that means, you can establish your company once and sell to everyone within that market. If you set up in Ireland and sell to Italians, not only is that not tax evasion, that is the point of the EU in the first place!

These companies have all had exactly the same tax arrangements for years and as Apple point's out in the article, have been repeatedly audited and passed. In fact Italy appears to have audited Apple three years in a row, which seems only explainable as harassment - tax audits are supposed to be semi-random spot checks to ensure compliance. If you pass an audit, getting audited the next year is just a waste of time and money for all concerned.

What's happening now is that a lot of governments around the world, having spent many decades promoting trade and economic integration when times were good and they had excessively cheap credit, now decided that maybe free trade isn't such a hot idea after all. After all, it might mean that other countries who you trade with end up more appealing to do business in. Ireland has had a long-standing policy of aggressively attracting international businesses with low tax rates, it's a very popular policy amongst the people in Ireland, and in fact until their government foolishly panicked and committed to a full bailout of their banks their economy was doing great. If the Italians are now mad about it, they have two choices:

1) Start rolling back the EU single market, then they can pass rules that say "if you want to sell stuff to Italians, you must run your business out of Italy and pay whatever taxes we want to do that" (of course this means some companies won't bother)

2) Deal with it and find other sources of revenue, whilst enjoying the fact that when Italian companies sell to the Irish, the Italians get to keep the corporate tax from that.

Right now governments are trying to do both simultaneously, which is why they grind to a halt in an internal deadlock of contradictions and you get bizarre setups like companies buying things from themselves.

Apple specifically will "solve itself" after a while because probably, Ireland will start making them corporation tax in Ireland safe in the knowledge that it's still more appealing than the alternatives. However this will not satisfy other members of the EU who dislike tax competition.

By the way, your post is very emotional. Tax should not be an emotional topic. Tax is (or rather should be) a technical matter in which people analyze the most efficient ways to raise the revenues governments need to function. Whether corporation tax is even a good idea at all is a matter of some debate in academic circles - the fact that you're trying to tax an entity that doesn't actually have any specific physical location is one reason why everyone ends up feeling like it's "not fair".

These companies have been running in Ireland for years, if it was illegal don't you think this would have been noticed by now? Here, read this and you may gain some clarity on the matter.