France not entirely daft - shock

from Ecommerce News Europe:

The French Minister of Finance told newspaper Le Parisien that the proposed tax is aimed at companies with worldwide digital revenue of at least 750 million euros and a French revenue of more than 25 million euros.

He wants to target commission-based online platforms, like Amazon or Booking.com. Companies that sell their products on their own websites, like French ecommerce company Darty, wouldn’t be targeted.

Good start - the point about these platform/intermediary companies is that their value is in network effects aka rent, and rent is the main thing that governments should be taxing. You have to be able to distinguish it from true earnings, which is why companies like Darty are exempted. People only use Facebook, Twitter etc because everybody else does.

In total, there are about 30 companies that would be affected if the tax plan gets greenlighted. These companies are mostly American, but also German, Spanish and British, as well as one French company (Criteo) and several companies that are originally from France but have been bought by foreign players.

According to Le Maire, a taxation system for the 21st century has to be built on what has value today. “And that’s data”, he said. The minister also added it’s a matter of fiscal justice, with these companies paying some 14 percentage points less tax than small- and medium sized enterprises in Europe.

He misses two points. It's not so much control and ownership of "data" in itself that indicates a rentier status (some companies store lots of their own data, and good luck to them, that's not rent, that's good record-keeping), it's "other people's data" aka network effect etc. And how much tax other companies pay is irrelevant, if they are earned profits in a competitive market, then they should be taxed at lower rates (or not at all). But never mind.

"Enter the first, fourth and fifth characters of your unique word"

Sometime when you login somewhere, you are asked to enter certain characters from your unique word, which is surprisingly difficult and often takes two or three attempts.

Some clever internet chaps have realised that this is waste of everybody's time and have set it up so that you have to enter the appropriate characters in the boxes and skip the asterisks. This makes it a lot easier because you can visualise your unique word as you type the characters in. Well done them!

□* *□□*

Internet Bullshit* Of The Day, Probably.

Emailed in by James Higham from The Register:

If you worry the Internet of Things is bollocks and that the industry's just milking an old idea, think again: research outfit Arcluster has declared that the “Connected Cow and Farm” market will become a US$10.75 billion concern in 2021, a rather nice jump from today's $1.27 billion.

Byte-blowing bovines are going to drive most of the growth, says Arcluster's research director Arun Nirmal, who says “the intersection of highly sophisticated automation and M2M technologies combined with the application of Industrial Internet of Things in this space is set to disrupt the industry over the next decade."

How will cows be disrupted?

The Connected Cow market apparently comprises seven sub-markets, namely:
•Health Monitoring
•Mating Management
•Herd Management
•Automated Milking
•Comfort and Cleaning
•Automated Feeding
•Others

* In the context, more accurately "cowshit".

Let me help you with that "digital detox"...

"How cows are taking over the Internet"

Spotted by James Higham at RT:

Cows’ gaseous emissions are already blamed by many for spoiling the air and exacerbating global warming, but now bovines are carving out their own corner of the online world through videos of their hijinx…

Followed by lots of links to spectacular cow videos.

"Reading and writing is eroding human memory"

From the BBC, some time in the late Middle Ages:

An over-reliance on using maps and reference books is weakening people's memories, according to a study.

It showed many people jotted things down and referred to them later instead of memorising information. Many adults who could still recall their childhood friends' birthdays could not remember birthdays of people they met later in life. There is an alarming trend of people using 'shopping lists' to remind themselves what they wanted to buy.

Maria Wimber from the University of Birmingham said the trend of looking up information which people had first written down "prevents the build-up of long-term memories". The study, examining the memory habits of 6,000 adults in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, found more than a third would turn first to written sources to recall information.

The UK had the highest level, with more than half "looking in the Encyclopaedia, parish records or maps for the answer first". Ms Wimber gave the telling example of a parish priest who read out loud from The Bible instead of learning the relevant passage by rote.

"MI5 boss warns of postal terror risk"

From the BBC:

Privatising the Royal Mail and opening up postal services to competition are allowing terrorists to communicate "out of the reach of authorities", the head of MI5, Andrew Parker has told the BBC.

The serving boss of the UK's home security agency told Today it was becoming more difficult to work out what information people are each other sending in the post, and even if they know the addressee, senders can remain untraceable..

He said mail companies had an "ethical responsibility" to alert agencies to potential threats. But MI5 was not about "browsing the lives" of the public, he added.

Ministers are currently preparing legislation on the powers for steaming open envelopes or X-raying them. But Mr Parker, in the first live interview by a serving MI5 boss, said what should be included in new legislation was a matter "for parliament to decide".

"It is completely for ministers to propose, and parliament to decide. It's a fundamental point about what MI5 is. It's for us to follow what's set by parliament, and that's what we do.

"But we would strongly advise members of the public not to open a parcel if it's ticking."

The most popular search term on bing.com

Predictably enough

Tied up in Red Tape

From the Telegraph

British pornography will be censored by new rules which ban video-on demand films from showing acts like spanking and caning.

New rules mean that paid-for porn watched online will have to comply with the current British Board of Film Censors guidelines, which cover DVDs bought in sex shops.

In the internet era, about as much use as adding some more obstacles to the Maginot Line. Anyone who wants to watch a bit of spanking can just go to a website abroad.

"Internet trolls face longer sentences"

From Revealed Tech:

Days after describing online abuse suffered by TV presenter Chloe Madeley as “crude and degrading”, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling told the Mail on Sunday that he was determined to “take a stand against a baying cyber-mob” and would allow magistrates (who can currently impose jail terms of up six months on internet trolls) to pass serious cases up to crown courts, who in turn would be able to impose maximum sentences of two years.

Shiny Happy People, Not Holding Hands

Nuts Magazine

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Gondor Skypes for Aid

Faster than lighting beacons, I guess.

If anyone's got a better headline, shoot...

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (318)

Those who pretend that only the real economy (and all its advances in technology) exists and who have a massive blind spot where the Land Monopoly Black Hole is concerned argue thusly:

We are no longer an agrarian economy. Agriculture is but a small part of our economy and with improvements in communications and transport, land/location and land/location values are no longer so important.

Exhibit A:

With growing numbers of people going online to perform tasks ranging from work to grocery shopping and streaming entertainment, good broadband has become critical. Homes without can lose 20 % of their value.

Or by implication, having good broadband (and presumably mobile phone reception) adds 25% to the 'unimproved' value of a home.

Exhibit B:

According to the real estate boffins at Knight Frank, suborbital space travel “presents the opportunity to radically shift global property markets”.

It seems an odd subject for the consultancy to tackle, but travelling outside Earth’s atmosphere will make getting around an altogether speedier affair (think London to Sydney in two hours) encouraging the world’s wealthiest to take second homes further afield.

Note that they are referring to "second homes", and by implication third and fourth homes, thus pushing up demand and hence prices/values. They are not suggesting that people will move their first home, which would free up their old home for more efficient use and/or tend to dissipate any upward pressure on prices/rents.

Excel is really good for page layout and photo collages

Inserting pictures and logos into a Word document is usually a right old faff, because they keep disappearing off the page, resizing themselves and re-formatting themselves.

I had to help my little girl put five photos on a page for her geography homework project, we downloaded five suitable ones from the Internet and did a nice layout using Excel in the space of five minutes; we set all column widths and row heights to one centimetre as a guide, and used the cells beneath the photos to type in the captions.

Result!

Here's a screenshot, the gridlines don't print off:

Cameron is a Tit

From the BBC

"In the most serious crimes [such as] child abduction communications data... is absolutely vital. I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device."

That was to a parliamentary committee: The reason we need a charter is because CSI:NY use data to find abducted children. Which if you've ever watched it is, has highly entertaining, but highly unscientific forensics. It's like saying that New Yorkers on average incomes have huge apartments because you've watched Friends and Sex and the City.

In reality doing things like deep packet inspection of data is going to yield you nothing about child abduction because it's an individual thing. No-one is out there Skyping their friends that they just abducted a child (unlike say, drug dealers who communicate with each other). The useful data is cellphone location data from either the adult or the child, and we already have that.

And even with deep packet inspection, everyone is now encrypting their data packets, so unless you've got the public key of every single site out there, you can't read them. So, you're knackered.

"Looking back into the mists of time"

From the BBC:

... Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger dismissed the claims that the rain would have overwhelmed the river system even if it had been dredged as "pathetic".

"It is an absolutely ridiculous excuse," he said. "This never flooded to this level ever in living memory, and we've got people who have been here for a long time. If you look back into the mists of time you don't have this."

Let's have a look back into the mists of Wiki:

The Somerset Levels.. is a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland area of central Somerset, South West England, running south from the Mendip Hills to the Blackdown Hills...

The Somerset Levels consist of marine clay "levels" along the coast, and inland (often peat-based) "moors"; agriculturally, about 70 percent is used as grassland and the rest is arable...

One explanation for the county of Somerset's name is that, in prehistory, because of winter flooding people restricted their use of the Levels to the summer, leading to a derivation from Sumorsaete, meaning land of the summer people...

People have been draining the area since before the Domesday Book. In the Middle Ages, the monasteries of Glastonbury, Athelney and Muchelney were responsible for much of the drainage.

The artificial Huntspill River was constructed during the Second World War as a reservoir, although it also serves as a drainage channel. The Sowy River between the River Parrett and King's Sedgemoor Drain was completed in 1972; water levels are managed by the Levels internal drainage boards.

Do MPs not even do the most cursory background reading about the area they are supposed to be representing?

Ah... only in The Daily Mail

From The Daily Mail:

The mother of a gifted young ballerina who threw herself under a train demanded action yesterday against the ‘toxic digital world’ of the internet that glamorises suicide and self-harm.

Tallulah Wilson, 15, had been hooked on photo-sharing websites, where users encouraged her to harm herself...

Tragic, tragic. And what's The Mail's special angle on this..?

Tallulah, the youngest of three girls whose parents are divorced, lived with her family in a £1million house in West Hampstead, North-West London...

Hat tip, Anorak

Whatever is the world coming to..?

From The Mirror, February 2013: Mum, 22, arrested on child trafficking charges after 'trying to sell her kids on Facebook for $5,000'

From The Mirror, January 2014: Pregnant teenager 'sells unborn baby on Facebook for just £68'

Facebook is a social networking site! If you want to sell stuff you use eBay or Gumtree.

More perils of social media

As well as social media distracting you from sex, it's well known that Facebook is used by employers to check job applicants. This is usually reported as a threat. "Be careful what you post", the pundits say.

However, this could be a two-edged sword. It would not be too difficult for a cunning young person to subtly enhance their employability by implying skills, activities and travel that they don't have, don't do or haven't done. It's not their CV, after all, and they haven't asked their potential employer to look at their Facebook page, so there's no obligation to tell the truth.

Just an idea...