You think MS don't scan emails? Than how are the naked pictures my next girlfriend sends me as attachments are automatically sorted in the quick views named pictures?
>Less kids get STEM scholarships and more H1B visas.
And more taxes would just put well meaning hard-working fellow Tech community members out of work at Apple. It's not such a clear trade-off as you make it seem with your logic.
And frankly, the issue comes down to the key quote in the WSJ article:
"The investigation found no evidence that Apple did anything illegal."
You should be upset at your Congressmen/women that make the laws rather than the "big bad corporations" that obey them.
It's quite the opposite. Congress makes laws to protect corporations. (i.e. Hollywood, TeleCos, Insurance, Health Care, etc...). It's not people championing and cheering companies for their business practices. I think you're confusing it with the way people might support companies by buying their products or services. But here's the trick question. When no company is truly good and your government, essentially wrote the book on the shareholders dilemma; who is really at fought?
Sounds like the government crying over milk they spilled.
Give me a break. When Rand Paul and his posse of clowns demand that Apple is owed an apology, they are the ones doing the confusing.
Like I said in my previous posts, the point the committee has made is multinational companies like Apple have a choice in how much tax they want to pay on profit.
This is the only point worth making. Any other point being raised about good or evil, competence, legality etc just distracts from ever addressing that point.
I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat.
Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on their chat client.
> I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned ... Also, Yahoo ...
The author explains why he didn't consider them in his second paragraph: "Moving, for example, from Google Calendar to Yahoo Calendar solves very little in the long run, because Yahoo’s business interests are exactly the same as Google’s: advertising and consumer lock-in."
No love for Yahoo? I'm not an employee there, but even I find it annoying that even when there is solid good news there's a heap of people on HN trying to tear them down at every decision/move they make (let's not forget about the "forbidding working remotely will be the death of Yahoo..." tirades)
On one hand there were people trying to say that Apple deserved every bit of its stock drop, but when Yahoo gets a boost it deserves no credit?
These (Yahoo team) are your fellow tech community members who are passionate (hopefully) about what they do and have life savings and paychecks riding on this -- let's cheer them on and offer some constructive feedback.
Tumblr really has blown up in terms of users and content created (anecdotal evidence from some folks I know that used to intern there) -- however their issue is they waited too long to figure out how to monetize. And to be honest the formula for monetizing requires experimentation and iteration.
So now it isn't just Microsoft posts that are getting flagged, but everything not Google? Give me a break, that will absolutely get your flagging privileges revoked, and quickly.
Does it really surprise you that Google is receiving large amounts of exposure today? Really?
Edit: Apologies, I assumed your intentions poorly.
I've said this before and I'll say it again -- why the complaints now, when Google has been doing this for years? Essentially, they can collect your information from emails, purchasing habits & financial information from Google Wallet, income, and combine that with Google+ social data, files you put into Google drive, and you have a complete profile that's ripe for advertising.
Google's marketing has done a better job of presenting themselves as "not evil". I won't comment on the accuracy (or not) of that; I'll just note that I only log onto Google accounts in an incognito window.
I don't quite understand this either. Google have been doing this for ages and no one has said anything, but now all of a sudden its a thing?
I just want people to acknowledge that what Google has been doing and what everyone else is doing is essentially the SAME THING. No reason one company should get a pass over others.
Now as for whether privacy is a legitimate concern or not is another matter entirely and I think comes down to a bit of personal preference too.
I for one, don't care about my privacy -- to an extent. There I said it. I don't care if Google knows that I eat somewhere or do something because it's trivial to me as long as my data is SECURE and I have fine grained privacy CONTROLS. If you give me security and control, then I'll gladly hand over my data for a useful service such as mail, or chat, or photos or whatever it may be.
Privacy in 2013 is different, and we must acknowledge that. This is a new generation, a new era. If you want to stay disconnected, then you don't get to experience this new world and if that's your preference, that's perfectly fine. (note: there will always be a subset of vocal technically inclined people like many of us on the forum that will try to resist, but in the long run, we won't prevail; I have ghostery installed for the hell of it, but a large amount of people don't even know what it is).
I think moving forward, every individual is going to have some type of public web presence that will be as much a part of who they are as anything else. Some parts of this presence will be private and tucked away behind anonymous usernames and private content. Other parts will be open for the world to see. To an extent, all of this is already true, but think about all the kids born from 2005 onward. They're only 8 years old now and are going to be part of the new, always connected generation (meaning, they've never known a world otherwise).
Therefore I think security of data is more important than EVER. Every company should make security of user data a TOP priority. In addition, every company should provide FINE GRAINED privacy CONTROL to allow the user to decide what he/she wants to show and to whom. On the other hand, a user should expect that a web company pays its bills through targeting via user data, and should reflect upon his/her expectation of privacy on the web.
The web is the new TV, but different, and more powerful, much more powerful.
'There is no shortage of tech workers' != 'There is no shortage of GOOD tech workers'
What has been bothering me about this study is that almost no effort has been made to quantify or even investigate the quality of these workers. A community college can pump out STEM folk by the bundle, but they're not the quality that a school like MIT will produce -- the latter of which we desperately need and the former of which are f*ing worthless.
Read the actual study (linked in other comments). The whole first section is on "high-performing students", and how the US' supply compares with other countries.
