thnkas fro merindgni em.

I certainly have not seen Surface tablets in the corporate world like I have iPads. A few people have them, but many still have their iPads as their go-to device for everything but actual Office and work stuff.

On the whole, people seem to like them about as well as they like their iPads, but there's been no giant rush to migrate. Most people who "needed" tablets are already on their second iPad, and they have heavily invested in their apps. To switch, not only do they have to buy a new Surface (and a keyboard), but they have to walk away from perhaps hundreds of dollars of app store purchases and lose data in the process; there just isn't a compelling reason for what is essentially a lateral switch for most users.

It depends what you really want when you say, "boost the economy". The reason so many EU economies are trashed right now is because they were fundamentally weak for a long time, ever since the flight of manufacturing to Asia really, and this weakness was covered up through extremely large amounts of borrowing and government deficit spending. In the UK for instance large parts of the north were almost being kept afloat by large deficits run up under Labour. In Spain a lot of employment came from an unsustainable housing bubble that triggered over-construction - construction being an industry loved by politicians because it employs lots of relatively low-skilled labourers.

So these economies were already "boosted" for a long time on what amounts to economic caffeine, and like all caffeine-fuelled energy streaks eventually it comes to an end and the drinker has to crash for a while to catch up on sleep and get things back to normal. People that were being pointlessly employed through bubbles or government jobs programs have to find something more useful to do, which is often really hard and involves complicated retraining, assuming they can even afford that, and then of course such huge amounts of resources were misallocated for so long who even says there are jobs for them to take? In fact there often aren't. This "crashing out on the sofa for 24 hours" is a recession.

Meanwhile tax takes drop, interest payments go up due to the cost of banking bailouts and thus deficit spending rises still further. But that process of adjustment is still required.

The US economy is doing marginally better than most EU economies (except maybe Germany?) because it is still jacked up on caffeine, it never had the crash, specifically, it's jacked up on massive government work programs and the resulting secondary employment, like all the towns that revolve around military contractors working on pointless boondoggle projects. Common sense tells you that the US does not need to sink so many resources into advanced weapons programs or building yet more jets or aircraft carriers. But those people and resources get directed towards such projects anyway, partly because the excuse of national security means it's easy to exclude foreign contractors and get Americans working. American can afford this much longer than most countries can because the dollar is very large, US Treasuries have a privileged place in the worlds financial system, and the Fed has basically broken the US bond markets by buying vast amounts of government debt using newly created money. Theory tells us this should cause inflation. In practice it hasn't become a huge problem yet because the dollar is such a very very deep currency, so it's possible to print more money without impacting the overall supply, and because so many prices are indirectly connected to the price of food and fuel, both of which are very cheap in America.

You do understand the reason that companies like Apple come up with such convoluted tax arrangements, right? It's because the US tax system is fundamentally broken in a very important way - it tries to tax income regardless of where it was earned or who earned it - for people this is "citizenship based taxation", for companies what it means is if they earn money overseas and spend that money overseas, not only does the overseas government take a slice but the US wants a slice too. That's not how other tax systems work. If this was actually enforced properly then every US company would get double taxed on foreign-earned income, which would make them less competitive against foreign companies that only pay tax on income where it's earned. The reason it's NOT enforced properly, is exactly because closing this "loophole" would be very harmful.

Generally the rule is that if a US company brings the income home, then it gets double taxed. So big tech companies which are very profitable end up stockpiling profits outside the USA. They don't want to bring it back to the US because then they'd lose a lot of it, after it was already taxed once. But they don't have anything to spend it on outside the US either. They instead sit it out and hope for a "tax holiday". From time to time politicians grant these because it doesn't make any sense for the money to be sitting around outside the reach of the IRS waiting for investment opportunities abroad, when it could be spent inside the US instead.

Companies that are not US based don't have this problem.

Awesome. More cities should keep their police under surveillance.

-

I laughed when I read this followed by your sig:

The Guardian has a great companion article detailing several ways the government has used the term "threat to national security" to cover up nothing more than embarrassing facts about the way it conducts itself.

One example:

National security was said to be under threat in 1972, journalists were bugged and blackmailed by police, and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, when the director of public prosecutions ordered Scotland Yard to identify the source of a leaked document.

The reason? The document, from the Ministry of Transport, disclosed that ministers were quietly considering the closure of 4,600 miles of railway lines - almost half the nation's network. And if the culprit would leak that secret, the ministry and the DPP reasoned, what else would he or she expose?

For snapchat at least it's only phone accesaable I believe, so it's a good strategy for that app.

No, in fairness to Clegg, he has stated he wants to update oversight of the intelligence agencies:

British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is to start conversations in government about how to update the legal oversight of the UK's security services in the light of disclosures by the Guardian that powerful new technologies appear to have outstripped the current system of legislative and political oversight.

Between the copy action and the paste action, the NSA was able to get in, read the copied text, parse it and then subtly alter it in order to cause confusion and distrust among us. We must act now!

I found an apt quotation from Edmund Burke we should all take to heart regarding acting against the NSA. I'll copy it here:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do something."

The writing random bytes thing, but only on Windows, is rather puzzling. It seems like one way to build confidence that's faster than setting up a deterministic build (which at any rate, would not necessarily be accepted by the TrueCrypt authors it seems), would be to open up the binaries in IDA Pro and figure out if the bytes written there on Windows truly are random or if they are not.

Because "Enter" is used everywhere else to create a line break in a text box.

It's also due to the militarization of US police. They view any non-police as the "enemy." They believe themselves to be different and special (note the use of the term "operator" by SWAT units, as if they have any resemblance to a military operator).

SWAT units justify their existence mostly through raiding locations where there is no expectation of a violent response. They also routinely discharge their weapons when there is absolutely no cause, because they're amped up on their own exaggerated expectation of violence being necessary to use even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The police have no more common sense; they operate on the basis of their own (usually imaginary) sense of superiority. This is why many Americans immediately view police with suspicion, fear, and distrust.