Jamiecon

I think that the tax break the article is talking about is the fact that in the UK, if your 'main residence' is elsewhere, you only pay income tax on your UK earnings. That's different to the US where (I believe) citizens are expected to pay tax even if they are non-resident. I'm not sure why it's mentioned to be honest as income taxes are not related to just buying a house in the UK - which anyone can do whether they are a citizen, resident, or whatever.

Council tax in the UK is payable by the building owner or tenant, and is much lower than, for example, the US property tax. Council tax is supposed to just pay for municipal services. IIRC, they even break it down into bits on your bill 'Police - £xx, Fire Brigade - £xx' etc etc

I suppose my points were firstly that it is unreasonable to compare UK council tax and US property tax, and secondly that a tax directly related to a home's value can impact people disproportionately due to the crazy rise in UK house prices over the last few decades.

All that said, the idea of a property tax level resetting when a building is sold is very interesting - I didn't realise that was the case in California and it certainly makes sense. However, there is still the issue of our system of government being different - local governments can't create new taxes (and it would need to be a local tax since the problem is restricted to one geographic area), and the economics are different - people just aren't set up to pay high property taxes. Not insurmountable problems, I accept.

And yeah, 99 year leases are weird, but not uncommon. It gets weirder. For example it's not that unusual in the UK for properties to be totally surrounded by land owned by others. Also, land ownership in the UK (London especially) often has crazy disputes just due to the age of the records.

It's a straightforward way to tax people who have homes that are worth a lot of money. Not entirely the same as being rich.

What if you live in one of the leafier parts of the east end, where only 30 years ago you could buy a house on a blue-collar wage. Now your house is worth more than £1m. But you're retired and on a basic state pension. You don't want to move to a cheaper area because your friends and family live close to you and are able to support you.

High property taxes based on the value of your assets would force you to move away or re-mortgage. Not ideal when it comes to maintaining a sense of community or caring for the elderly.

I assume by 'proper' property taxes you mean 'the way the US does things'. I'm not sure that it would work in the UK with our different economics, system of government and geography.

IMO, war is nowhere near as clinical as it would need to be for remote controlled tanks, helicopters and other vehicles to be effective.

I've just finished reading Generation Kill for the second time - I highly recommend it for an idea of what things are actually like.

This was my favourite Reader replacement. I suppose losing it serves me right for not donating earlier!

Problem with SNI is that you lose IE users on XP. In the UK at least, that means entire organisations with thousands of employees such as Lloyds bank and the NHS. According to our stats anyway.

To be perfectly frank it was a throwaway comment - I was being facetious.

I don't consider accusing someone of naivete to be particularly pejorative but if you are offended on his behalf, I suppose I would qualify the comment by saying he strikes me as the kind of bloke that would pay full price at a market stall rather than haggling. As do lots of Americans :-)

Scoble - enthusiastic about everything, always all-in, naive, friendly, innocent, perfect teeth, health obsessed self-publicist

Paxman - cynical, jaded, sarcastic, hates politicians for a living, lives on tea, coffee and cereal*

This is like the cross-Atlantic friendship society! Talk about wheeling out your national stereotypes. Well done BBC. Again.

* may not be true, but he looks like it

For those visiting London (or who live here), I highly recommend a visit to Greenwich. There are several museums, including one at the Royal Observatory, a planetarium, a brewery that sells its own creations at the naval college and a huge park for those rare moments of sun.

http://www1.rmg.co.uk/

I actually remember first using this by dialling 2580 about 10 years ago. At the time it felt truly magical.

Nottingham, United Kingdom - full time, on site

See Tickets (http://www.seetickets.com) are a stable, profitable and technology focused online ticket retailer covering the entire live events market in the UK and select events across Europe.

We work primarily in .NET and are seeking web developers with experience in this area. If you have an interest in Postgres and devops we'd also love to talk to you.

See our Stackoverflow ad and apply here: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk/jobs/33038/web-developer...

Not to defend the indefensible, but why not make a couple of discussion points...

If you have a huge application and a high staff turnover you want to minimise the amount of information in your developers' heads. Strictly architected code can do this to some extent, and can go some way to reducing need for that other 'enterprise bane' - documentation. This is less of a problem in a startup type environment were you can find out about a particular piece of code by walking over to the kid that wrote it and having a chat.

Code generation (mentioned elsewhere on the thread) is another example of something that is less necessary in a small environment. Matching an enum to the contents of a database table or whatever can be done by convention to begin with, but it's less practical if your development team is spread across three timezones. Better to invest the time in letting computers do the work.

> well, you've been fired from the company you worked for for 5 years, but hey, at least you have fresh drinking water

I'm not sure whether it's my brain, or 'me' that's saying it, but this is pretty much what I tell myself every time something 'bad' happens to me. Works like a charm.

Agreed. I love Tesla. I'm really excited by what they're doing, and have nothing but admiration for Elon Musk.

However, Top Gear have made their reputation winding people up. He was being pretty touchy by responding.

Here's what I posted at the time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856821

Of course, only time will tell in the case of the NYT.

I haven't downvoted you, but I would hazard a guess that the reason for the downvotes as at least partially due to the combative nature of your tone.

As to your point, I have no idea about the legalities, but it seems to me that if law enforcement officials are going to operate in a foreign country they might want to go through official channels before turning up.

Regarding the private plane, I would imagine that the article mentions it because it (accurately or otherwise) enables me to better visualise a group of brash Americans turning up via the most expensive mode of transport and expecting the little Icelanders to be so awed by the powerful FBI that they won't ask for little things like, you know, governmental authorisation.

I really want to like America. There are so many things to love about it, especially on paper. And then I read about stuff like this and wonder if it really is that much of a mystery why much of the world has such distaste for the country and the people.

Not that I'm claiming the UK is any better, mind. And our teeth are much worse.

Economist articles have no byline as editorial policy.

Can't comment on the rest of your points.

Just wanted to add my thanks for a great product. We are a pro license holder where I work, I believe.

Not sure if this was your point, but I assume that you are using a lot of MSI and Windows API hooks, in which case this is a great example of the flexibility and integration options of Windows being leveraged for the good, as opposed to the crapware blight, which must be as frustrating for Microsoft as it is for us.

What's the point of having open, published standards if you only have one implementation?

You might ask, what's the point of having more than one rendering engine implementation, but look what happened with IE6.

Edit: Fixed formatting and reworded while I was at it.

Difficult to disagree I must admit, but what do you think happens to their web stack in your future?

Yes I do, although in fairness my experience has been that Verisign and Thawte at least will ring the number you provide at some stage. I guess they also do a Companies House[0] lookup in the UK as they request related details IIRC.

What's more of a scandal is that Verisign at least 'license' their EV certificates to be used on a given number of servers [1]. Now if the 'service' provided is identity verification, that practice is the real scam.

[0] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/

[1] http://www.verisign.co.uk/ssl/ssl-information-center/ssl-bas...

I have been a paying GAFYD user for ~ two years and wasn't even aware there was an 'account PIN'! I fear for most people this simple solution may come with the benefit of hindsight.

> I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is (...) that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt

I must say that this choice of words rather took me aback as well. The problem is, it's difficult to call someone breathtakingly arrogant (which was my first reaction) when they have so much to be arrogant about!

I'd love to see some more insight on this from pg.

Edit: It's since occurred to me that pg may have meant at that particular moment rather than lacking a train of thought in a general sense. If that's the case, my comment is unjustified - apologies.

In fairness, if the parent was referring to online services you are absolutely correct - Google are streets ahead with their data liberation work. Microsoft and Apple are worryingly closed in that area.

The huge number of hooks that Windows provides to third party developers is both its blessing and its curse. I highly recommend Raymond Chen's blog for a (often hilarious) description of this world.

AFAIK, Windows 8 takes interoperability further with new features like intents, while still offering the full Win32 API (on x86 builds).

Play / pause controls are a good example. Applications have been able to integrate via global hotkeys since.. Vista? Maybe XP. Either way, I am still able to control Spotify on my Win8 laptop using the hardware controls. As I would be able to with any application that chose to implement support.

Windows continues to be the only OS to provide this kind of deep out of the box support on a broad range of hardware from multiple suppliers.

Edit: grammar

I've believed that building a payments platform is the road to riches for Facebook for a long time. They have such a headstart on the fraud and identity issue, and they have both the merchants via FB connect, and the customers (obviously).

Where I work, our > 15 year old ticket retail system was developed on a platform called Dataflex [0], which provides a character mode user interface. We have since migrated the datastore from the embedded ISAM database to Postgres, and built eCommerce and other web applications around the original schema.

Our administrative and call centre staff continue to use the original character mode interface to interact with the data and do their daily work. The software works and we have no reason to redevelop it anyway, but seriously, you should see the speed with which experienced staff move around the system. Editors can input hundreds of events an hour and call centre staff are amazingly efficient - they can practically use the thing blindfold.

There's a lot to be said for consistent keyboard controls and a distraction free interface in the workplace. Line of business applications from the last couple of decades, mostly mouse driven, are often tragically inefficient.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflex

Would love to see technical detail on this if anyone has a source.

Weird that I agree with all three parents at once (no pun intended).

Grownups can make their own life choices to some extent, but society everywhere forbids certain behaviours and activities.

An OS with a software distribution platform that tries to prevent the average user from making mistakes, and that attempts to prevent malicious activity while avoiding being overly restrictive seems a good model.

Not a bad shout for government as well.

App store == France, Marketplace == UK, Play == US?

Or something like that.

Anyone that wants to administer HP network gear via a web interface, to pick one example.

But yeah, I take your point.

All fair points. My response was a little harsh and possibly ad hominem. Apologies for the aggression.

In fairness their explanation is not a model of clarity, but the impression I get is that there are legacy concerns here. Perhaps they are using some type of split horizon DNS for access to internal services.

The resources necessary to make this kind of change aren't necessarily raw compute power (which as you point out can be purchased cheaply), more the necessary people and access to investigate the impact that such a change would have, then assuming it's viable, document the change, get signoff, then make the change.

I work for a company that has < 500 employees, but our IT infrastructure (which includes corporate IT and a web site handling a comparatively tiny 3m uniques / month) has a history that can be traced back around 15 years. Changes can be hellish, however small they first seem.

It's also worth bearing in mind that in a large organisation, independent projects (such as the Eyes on the Solar System product) are so much easier to get done than those which require interaction with other departments.

Basically, getting shit done in large organisations is hard. A lot of it is paperwork, which is annoying, but a lot of the paperwork is necessary - in a 5 person startup you can just shout across the room (or drop them a text if they've left the company), but at an organisation with hundreds (or thousands) of employees there must be protocol and documentation in order to competently deal with employee churn and similar.

No idea if I'm right about this, but hopefully it was more constructive :-)

Looking at your profile, which indicates you are technically proficient, I'm struggling to understand how you have come to the conclusion in the headline. Unless you're just looking for attention, in which case er, well played.

The two hostnames point at two completely separate pieces of infrastructure.

If you want to support every URI under www.nasa.gov on the naked domain, you would need to deploy web resources on that separate network to handle the redirects, and maintain them.

Perhaps a willingness to be pragmatic and leave this job for another day is the reason they are successful in other areas such as, you know, putting a robot on Mars.