As a thirty year sufferer of PTSD, I think I have a lot to contribute here.
As someone who, for a very long time, had to worry greatly about the possibility of being triggered as it could result in hours of lost time or days of emotional turmoil seemingly without cause or apparent reason, the current concept of avoiding triggering others is utterly and completely useless.
What triggers me as a PTSD sufferer is not the same as what triggers others. It could be a phrase or a seemingly benign picture, anything which may be associated with the cause of PTSD and doesn't actually have to have anything to do with violence or suffering.
In my experience I've found that standard NSFW or NSFL markings are sufficient for most as they typically classify things which would cause the kind of mental & emotional echoes that torment PTSD sufferers beyond the little things which cannot be accounted for. Ultimately there is no knowing what can do it for any particular individual.
Last but not least, I find the trigger marking epidemic somewhat offensive. We are not children for you to care for. I am already very isolated in my ability to tell people about these experiences since they are so far outside the common reality as to be incomprehensible and quickly becomes the abnormality to avoid or curse. I do not need to be further maligned by an ignorant society's attempt to fix the world for me. Fix the world for the children who are getting PTSD today and leave me the hell alone.
Do they operate in Brazil? They apparently have no offices there and are only available over the internet (as is true of all websites throughout most of the world.) How can anyone expect to hold what amounts to a random IP address on the internet responsible for anything?
This argument looks like it can also be applied to even malware. If I put something illegal doesn't has the judges right to stop the distribution of that app in the country?
Another question is if what Watsapp did should be illegal. But if the judges can't stop internet companies from doing something illegal who do you thing should do it?
No, he does not have that right. By that same logic brazilians shouldn't be allowed to visit websites from any other country where there's a discrepancy with brazilian law. With a government like ours next thing you know we have our own Great Firewall.
This kind of thing can't even be enforced, being so easy to bypass.
No it's not a minor detail, because it's easy to bypass, specially if its a decentralized service. Nevertheless its an outrageous retrenchment of our freedom.
they have bank accounts and deals with many tel co to operate as they do in each country they are.
you do not get pre-installed on the three biggest mobile operators phones (99.9% of market) and get deals where data to your service do not count as part of the limited data-plan on two of them, by just "being an IP address on the web".
Right now, it's more of a benefit to phone manufacturers to pre-install whatsapp than it is to whatsapp itself.
Same goes for the telcos. Offering free whatsapp and Facebook is a thing. And it's not because whatsapp had a "deal". It's because the telcos want more users.
Developing countries eat that up. People explicitly want to see whatsapp support or they don't buy the phone and many terrible devices have been sold on this premise.
Source: 20+yrs on the online advertising industry.
Nothing that lives of ads or telecomunication companies survive only by "serving the user". The telco only pre-install something on the device if: A. they are paid upfront, B. if they get a percentage of the ads.
yeah, serving the user is good, but remember that you are talking about companies that charges for SMS. the day they have to rely on "pleasing the user" hell will freeze over. They rely on regional monopoly, just like in the US.
We have a clear market leader, but it's by no means a monopoly.
People constantly switch network providers here since we have number portability.
My wife, me and many of our friends switched to Vodafone cos they were offering a really great Internet package.
Free Whatsapp, Facbook, Twitter, Instagram,and Snapchat plus 3.5 GB for what's essentially $9 a month. Here that's unbeatable and unheard of. http://support.vodafone.com.gh/customer/portal/articles/1813...
I doubt all these services are paying for for Vodafone to do this.
you can't do that in brazil without having the papers to do business there. in fact, you can't even sell anything without the right documents. Just like everywhere else.
I don't know portuguese so I didn't actually read what the deal is.
Is this a service where subscribers pay the carrier a fee for 30 days of unlimited data traffic to whatsapp servers (VoIP excluded) + 50M of data ?
If yes, does that constitute a transaction the consumer makes directy to whatsapp via the operator? I understand that likely whatsapp and TIM (an Italian company btw) might have made some deal and exchanged some money for the use of whatsapp logo etc, but I guess that transaction could have been done anywhere.
My apps are in the Danish Google Play and Apple App Store...
I never been there, I don't read or write danish, I never interacted with danish government, or met any danish person.
If the dane government wanted something from me, and sent a letter to some random person, written in danish, even if it reaches me, I wouldn't understand it anyway.
Thus, having app in some other country store doesn't prove much, except that you clicked "publish" somewhere on Google or Apple uploading interfaces.
> except that you clicked "publish" somewhere on Google or Apple uploading interfaces.
At which point you agree to adhere to their laws and regulations.
A famous example of someone operating legally under local law, but who got prosecuted for having merely a website accessible in another country, was Kim Dotcom.
That’s the current state of international law, either lobby to change it, or accept it, but don't ignore it.
>>At which point you agree to adhere to their laws and regulations.
Uhm nope. If my app(published on Apple Store/Google Play) violated a law in Saudi Arabia and they sent me a letter requesting me to appear and subject myself to 100 lashes for violating their law, I would very promptly disregard said letter, to put it politely.
You might do this and then you get convicted in absentia, Saudi Arabia will send a request for extradiction, your country will say no, done.
Except: better not travel to Saudi Arabia or any other country that will extradict. Also Saudi Arabia will propably ban your App, which is what is happening in Brasil.
> You might do this and then you get convicted in absentia, Saudi Arabia will send a request for extradiction, your country will say no, done. Except: better not travel to Saudi Arabia or any other country that will extradict.
And that is the problem. You can't actually expect people to hire lawyers from 108 different countries to see if their app is legal in each of them just because they're going to distribute it on the internet, to say nothing of what happens when two countries have mutually contradictory laws (e.g. privacy vs. data retention). And a person who goes to see the Great Pyramids shouldn't have to worry about being hauled off to Saudi Arabia and then stoned to death because their app doesn't prohibit blasphemy.
> Also Saudi Arabia will propably ban your App, which is what is happening in Brasil.
Which only increases the proliferation of tools to bypass the restriction.
VW has an actual office in the US - it's not VW Germany selling cars in the US, but VW America.
If you purchased a VW car in Germany and had it shipped over to the US it would be on YOU to make sure it complies with all requirements of your country, not Volkswagen's.
They have every right to pull your app, arrest you and prosecute you if you ever do go to their country, and apply to have your extradited under relevant treaties.
While I agree that whipping someone, execution via stoning, and other punishments are inhuman and no country has the right to exact them, I stand by my point in general.
I can’t sell medical marihuana in most states of the US – and I don’t go and try, and then complain about getting arrested.
Instead, if I wanted to start a business doing that, I’d check out where it would be legal, and in which ways, and sell my product in those markets.
Why do you assume you can sell your product in markets without having checked the legality, and then complain when they ban your product because it violates the local law?
Hmmmm your example isn't exactly valid. If I was selling something on ebay out of EU, and you ordered something from me to US, I would almost definitely not get in trouble for sending it to you, unless it was an item which has export restrictions from my country. Or to go back to my example of Saudi Arabia - if someone from Saudi Arabia bought something from me I would definitely absolutely not bother to check if what I'm sending is legal in there. If it isn't, then customs will confiscate it and the person buying it will be in trouble, most likely.
My point was - is there any reason why I, as a developer, should not check "all countries" when publishing an app? If Saudi Arabia wants to ban my app later - let them, I literally don't care.
If you sell in another country you are subject to their laws, an obvious example is consumer protection laws. This is a fact. Whether or not you are going to follow any rulings made against you is another matter, in that case all the country can do is try to block you in whichever way they can (like Brazil just did) and possibly prosecute you in absentia.
But...I'm not selling anything in another country. I'm advertising online and someone who bought the item asked me to ship it to Saudi Arabia - sure, whatever. I don't have an office there or a business presence. How would they prosecute me? What for? Their citizen bought something from me and then had it delivered to their home in Saudi Arabia - if he's breaking the law, then it's on him. Now cut out the post from this equation - imagine he came over here, bought the item from me and brought it back with him - how would I be held responsible for what he is doing with the item and where he is taking it?
And yes, consumer protection laws absolutely still apply. The laws of my country - if my country says that I have to give him 2 years warranty - of course he gets 2 years warranty. If his country says a seller can be subject to 100 lashes for selling prohibited materials - they can go and try executing this, I wish them all best luck.
Because if you're not willing to do the legwork to see if your app is following the letter of the law in those countries, you may be subjected to being banned due to violation of said laws.
That's not really an argument. Go ahead and ban it. There's no reason anyone should preemptively ban themselves just because someone else wants them banned.
It's a bit like saying "You should hang yourself, because if you don't, I'll hang you." The proper response is "get on with it then."
> A famous example of someone operating legally under local law, but who got prosecuted for having merely a website accessible in another country, was Kim Dotcom.
That's a pretty shit example, given everything that happened around that case.
The app stores operate there as distributors. Just because my product is distributed somewhere by a third party doesn't necessarily mean I operate there.
If an art dealer sells a painting to someone in brazil, does it mean the original artist operates in Brazil?
I think the difference is that you /knowingly/ (to an extent) sell your app to Brazil. If you sell your art depicting, say, women in power to Saudia Arabia to someone here and they move to Saudia Arabia and sell it, it's not your fault. But if you told him it's ok to sell that painting in Saudia Arabia, I would assume you can be held liable.
(Not that I agree with that, but that's what it looks like)
In the artist/dealer scenario, only the latter is actually under the legal jurisdiction of Saudi Arabia and could be legally compelled to follow a court order. They can choose to hold anyone liable but their legal and practical ability to compel an entity to comply doesn't extend beyond their state unless they have an agreement with another state.
Apple has a corporate office in Brazil (google too) and they're the ones who distribute and approve the application for sale there. They're legally required (I assume) to respond to legal notice they're served with. WhatsApp is not legally required to do so, and others have pointed out that it might not even be legally feasible for them to do so.
Of course this situation is more complex because obviously Apple doesn't have the data and I doubt Brazil wants to get into a legal battle with Apple. And although Brazil doesn't have the ability to force WhatsApp to comply with anything, they do have the leverage of being able to shut down their service. Should make for an interesting story to follow.
At the very minimum, if they had served Apple/Google instead, they would have had a legal requirement to actually respond. I don't know much about the actual case so these are mostly assumptions.
I highly doubt that powershell is better than bash, unless you're perhaps only counting bash and its builtins and disregarding the whole environment of binaries around it.
I've spent quite a bit of time recently with PowerShell and I have to say that at best, I'm underwhelmed. I can see the potential with PS but there are too many things that are just left out by default.
The documentation seems incomplete and very clunky to actually use; it's hard to find what command you want and some docs are just plain wrong. Even using third party docs is frustrating. Honestly, it reminds me of the PHP docs, and not in a good way. Job control seems to be very clunky. I can't seem to push things into the background reliably in a PS1 script. Some things seem to work OK but others just background and disappear. Another problem I've had is appending to files; you can output log information to a file (ie. ls > ls.log) but you can't append to a log file (ie. ls >> ls.log). There may be a way to do it, but it probably involves writing a command and loading it somewhere.
That's the most annoying thing I find when living in the Windows world; there doesn't seem to be a good representation of $HOME. Where do I keep my SSH keys? When I create PS1 scriptlets how do I ensure they are loaded in a new PS1 shell? I'm sure there are answers to this but, as I said before, the docs are not the best. Maybe Microsoft should author a BASH --> PS1 translation guide. :)
I think the OP meant that there should be a 'buy' option with no commercials and unlimited viewings, and a rent option possibly with commercials and a limited number of viewings.
Correct. At first it annoyed me that I was paying Hulu Plus for content and then they also layered in advertising but after speaking with a friend who works there, the margin just wasn't great enough to make it work without ads. Content is expensive.
Every person that I know that has considered starting their own business has decided against it for one reason only, health insurance. They have always been the obtainer in chief of health insurance for the family and it is too risky to go without.
I strongly suspect that a public health option would blow the job market wide open between folks who want to retire but can't because health insurance is idiotically expensive and those of us who would love to start a business but cannot put a whole family at physical risk for a potential monetary reward.
I start a business means my present job opens up, as well as any additional hires my business would need. Jobs problem gone.
Well, I learned the same logic in school. I found it compelling, too. And I guess I still do.
Our teacher said: 'Because we have this safety net here in Germany, we can take more risks.'
Yet, I see more risk taking in the US than in Germany.
I suppose, its rather that Europeans are less risk taking, so they also support a better safety net. I know its not my business, but I can't help being scared about the idea, that the most dynamic country in the western world might slow down because of copying Europe.
Israel has a German-like safety net (health, food, unemplouyment, training and otherwise), and more risk taking than the US - at least where technology is concerned (only silicon valley tops israel in startups per capita - even California does not). So neither explanation is good.
I think the difference is more cultural than anything. Making your own fortune is very much part of the American identity (from gold rushes to tech startups), whereas Europe has experienced over and over again that boundless ambition can lead to horrendous things (war, war, more war and genocide).
The US getting more universal health care coverage will not change that.
There are other ways to achieve the goal of breaking the link between employment and healthcare without a public insurer. Public insurers eventually become the predominant insurer by a large margin because they can use their size to obtain lower prices. Markets with few buyers or sellers are less efficient at providing the products people want at the prices they want than those with many. The result in this case would be less profit to be made in healthcare than people would be willing to pay for, so less effort would be spent to do so. Seems undesirable.
This is trending a bit off topic. Feel free to respond, but I won't.
Except that nations with socialized health care have single or few providers yet manage to get extremely low prices because they have the negotiation power of an entire nation behind them and lots of alternative providers.
Your theory may be interesting but is completely opposite from reality.
This is so true... if you don't have a spouse whose coverage you can utilize, the cost of health insurance is prohibitive, ESPECIALLY for anyone over 30 who has a spouse and kids. At that point going without insurance (as I did when doing a startup, and so many other entrepreneurs I've seen do) is not just risky, it's irresponsible and foolhardy. Taking financial risks to start a business is fine - but you shouldn't have to risk your health and your family's health.
If the government wants to see more people starting new businesses and taking risks, it needs to remove the HUGE disparity in healthcare costs between working for a large corporation and going solo. There's just no reason it should exist.
Out of curiosity, what is the large source of the disparity? I was aware you don't get as nice of a tax break (though that will become irrelevant when you are making no money). Individually, I'd be surprised if your family had to pay over $1,500 a month for everyone, which is pretty comparable to group rates.
Oh quite true, but then you can view it is salary. e.g. you aren't quitting a $80,000 a year job to do a startup; you are quitting a $100,000 a year job to do so.
(I find it hard to accept that a lack of free health insurance is keeping that many would-be entrepreneurs at their day jobs any more than a lack of free housing is. If you have some form of disease that keeps you from getting insurance, I completely sympathize (and I believe the health care law will solve that issue), but for most people it is just another cost to consider before leaving - like housing, transportation, etc.)
Housing and transportation can't bankrupt you (unless it is some crazy circumstance that is so rare that most people can't possibly fathom). You can walk away at anytime from your home or have your car repossessed. You simply cannot walk away from your chemotherapy unless you want to die.
If we can somehow find a way to rein in costs of health services (perhaps by disincentivizing supplier-induced demand through price ceilings in both malpractice awards AND gasp healthcare service price controls a la Singapore, Japan, or Switzerland), we can get further away from our dependence on large corporations to employ everyone.
A friend of mine was considering dropping his current job and doing some contract work for a while. He has a wife and two kids, and was worried about insurance. He found that he could insure his entire family with a decent plan for about $450 a month (after spending a little time on http://ehealthinsurance.com/). Now, I'm not saying that's chump change when you're bootstrapping a business on no salary, but that's not insurmountable, either, given some up-front planning and saving.
Would a universal health care system make it even easier? Sure, no doubt. But I often hear that it's so difficult and costly to purchase individual health insurance, and that just seems to be untrue. Are there other factors I'm not considering?
Not everyone can afford the short term hit of paying 3-4X what they're paying now for their health insurance. If your monthly group policy is $1200/month for your family, but the employer's paying $800 of that, and you're only paying $400, you'll get quite a shock when the COBRA bill comes.
No one has to pay 3-4X what they're paying now for their health insurance. They have to pay 101%.
It's possible that they didn't understand the nature of their compensation, and mistakenly believed their compensation was lower than it was. But in that case, I'd suggest they simply failed at financial planning.
(Note: if you can't do proper financial planning, don't do a startup.)
Or we can tell companies to charge amicably across the board else they risk losing patents on drugs sold to Americans at grossly inflated rates. A drug patent should give a company the right to sell/license the drug, not the right to gouge people with it.
Clearly this lacks details, but the concept would work after the first few nullified patents.
Or we can tell companies to charge amicably across the board else they risk losing patents on drugs sold to Americans at grossly inflated rates. A drug patent should give a company the right to sell/license the drug, not the right to gouge people with it.
> Clearly this lacks details, but the concept would work after the first few nullified patents.
Of course it will "work", but are you sure that you'll be happy with the result?
Some other countries have said exactly that, the result being that folks in those countries are paying production costs but not R&D costs. If the drug companies can't recover R&D costs in the US, how do you think that the R&D costs will be paid?
If they don't think that they'll be able to recover R&D costs, what do you think that they'll do?
If you think that they can charge less and recover their costs, why don't you do so and drive them out of biz?
