bluelu

A long time ago, we deleted/disabled our aws account and I assumed that all my files on s3 would also get deleted.

When we reactivated the account a few yearss later, we were retroactively billed for all the files in the s3 bucket. We got the money back though.

So in other words, protonmail is only safe if you use it for tax evasion, as there the swiss authorities won't help foreign governments.

This would be called "abandon du poste".

In the worst case, you would risk getting a "faute grave" added into your police register ("casier judiciaire"). Your employer could also sue you for damages.

Best is always to find an agreement with your employer.

There can't be too much or too less electricity in the grid. So it's normal that the power operators can shut off larger producers, as they can also shut off large consumers.

This has nothing to do with corruption.

You should take a holiday and really think about what you would like to achieve next and why you want to sell.

If your decision is to sell (not now, but it will take some time...), then talk to 2 or 3 of such companies, explain your situation, and ask them how they think you can maximize your earn out at the end (should you invest aggressively, expand into new markets, what are the KPIS which are relevant, etc...), and when you should go to market. Sure you will have to pay for this advice, but you can certainly afford.

And then you decide if you want to do this and invest/grow the company, or let the profits roll based on their input, and then start a process one year later (or whatever they say) when you have shown track record.

Normally, you won't sell to a strategic if you have not have had a business relationship with him before and he sees significantly value in your business.

As for private Equity, it probably depends on the fund, but I would assume most of them look for growth companies.

So then the question is who is left? Maybe another entrepreneur looking to diversify, then maybe you could try at one of those market places where you can advertise your website. However I wonder if you are not to big.

Evaluation depends on where you are located (US, Europe, etc..), target market size, competition, metrics (growth, churn, potential), Software as a service vs services/consulting, etc... If you are not selling a product (Saas), or you are not growing (which seems to be your case), be prepared to be valued at a multiple of your earnings, and not total revenue. As for growth, everyone will look at past growth to extrapolate future growth. If you have no past growth, no one will believe you that you will grow your business next year 50% more.

As for the fees, I would expect you to pay a fee when you bail out because the price is too low, or decide not to sell, as they have also done work on their side. Otherwise no one wants to work with you anymore as well in the future. Still you should increase their revenue share the higher they sell. Don't expect though that they know all the companies to target, or have all the connections to those companies.

Most buyers will also require you to stay onboard for 2-3 years.

You should provide more details about region, type of business, market, growth rate, then you can get better replies.

Many years ago, there were discussions here in Luxembourg to build a nuclear power plant together with the French in the east of Luxembourg. The "greens" at that time were against it, so it was not being build.

But the french build it then in France just 10km from the border (the biggest at that time with 4 reactors), and it's closer to our capital then your nuclear power plant to yours.

Depending on the ingredients used to form the concrete used when building a dam, it can happen that the concrete inflates and puts enormous pressure on the damn.

In that case, they let the water out of the dam and use a diamond chain saw to cut it from the top till the bottom, in the middle of the dam. The concrete will then use this space to fill in and reduce it's pressure, so that the dam can be filled again.

Here is a german video showing this procedure for a dam in Switzerland.

https://www.20min.ch/story/10-tonnen-beton-werden-aus-mauer-...

I'm not a lawyer, however from an European side, I think it really depends on your contract with them. If you are paid as independent/contractor, then they can probably terminate the contract how they please depending on the conditions which are stipulated on the contract with them. They probably don't need to provide any reasons then.

The European governments has foreseen protections (e.g. they can't fire you when you are sick, or notice leave, etc...), but these only apply when you are an employee.

I sincerely hope though that you manage to receive a compensation for the wrongdoing they did to you. Like the other poster mentioned, maybe checking out with a lawyer in the US would be the best way to go forward.

I know that this is unpopular here, but a lot of people (including me) don't mind that they get targeted ads.

If you fear for abuse, then there should be clear laws what should not be allowed and severe punishment for this.

But forbidding facebook to track behaviour and then allowing apple to do so (e.g. they even track what programs you run, is just wrong. Who knows, maybe apple will even start its own "privacy" network later on.

According to https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/19/former-google-engineer-ant...

"Instead, Alsup sentenced Lewandowski to 18 months, but delayed his prison time until the pandemic was under control. Levandowski also agreed to pay $756,499.22 in restitution to Waymo and a fine of $95,000."

So he didn't even spend a single minute in prison. Wow

Is it really so easy?

Doesn't elastic also use Amazon trademarks in their code and documentation? (e.g. ec2, etc..)? I'm not a licence expert, but maybe if you have a have a legal licence to run it, you probably can also name it like that?

I don't want to infer that this is their only goal. But it's certainly a strategy they will be pursuing and they certainly wouldn't mind introducing the famous apple tax on all ads shown on their devices.

I also don't mind being tracked. If I must see ads, then I rather see relevant ads. There is nothing bad in this.

I don't understand the facebook/google bashing here. It's not as you could advertise on apple for something against apple.

It should also be clear to you what game Apple is playing here. Their end game is to do the tracking themselves and then they will slowly introduce and sell ads themselves. Their marketing department will then call it "privacy ads", but it's going to be the same as todays google/fb ads.

Let's hope that they catch all those who did this.

In germany, they are also going to vote a law before christmas that the crime can still be followed up after 10 years in order to bring all of them to court who did this in germany.

Indeed. It's normal that you get only a small portion, or even none at all of the amount of shares you requested if there is a lot of interest (in Tech there normally is). Maybe you are more lucky if you are a customer of the bank preparing the IPO, or extremely wealthy.

So even the non average Joe does not get access to it.

How can this be GDPR compliant? Apple tracks each users behaviour and know exactly what software they use and how often, so they can launch their own services and cut out competition on popular services.

This is exactly the kind of application Facebook was called out for (https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/). Just here it's much more worse as it's installed and activated by default on all Macs.

If someone would really want to break the Google search monopoly, they would seperate:

- Crawling and document parsing. Imagine something like archive.org where all search engines would get the content from. This could also be used to enforce copyright legislation (e.g. deletions of documents, etc...). Today, it's nearly impossible to collect the data as google does, because most website owners won't even allow that you crawl them (e.g. distill networks anti bot protection, etc...)

- Metrics (e.g. data from google analytics, dns resolvers, browser toolbards, browser statistics, etc...). Again this data should be available to everyone from a central authority.

Then there could be more independent search engines building on top of that data. If that doesn't happen, then there will never be any competition. Todays copyright and data privacy laws even further strengthen a monopoly position, as smaller players will not even get access to some data (or at different pricing then google does)

That you only have to pay after 30 days, chargebacks, etc.. they are all in your favor.

How do you buy online then? Prepayment? Good luck with that :-)

Apple wants to block Google and Facebook from tracking users for "privacy" reasons. But you will see, that 1 or 2 years later, they will launch their own "privacy protecting" ad network or demand a cut from facebook or google so they can show their ads on apple devices and access user targeting features under the disguise of privacy approved partners.

If your app would scrape videos from netflix, disney+, etc... and save them locally, how would that be different from what you are doing now?

You would be blocked as well.

That's not true. In some cantons, the very rich get extra deals, called Lump-sum tax, independently of their revenues. E.g. the Ikea founder only paid around 165000$ in total taxes in 2014 on a fortune of 46.5 billion US $ and all his revenues which he had.

Source: https://www.20min.ch/story/so-wenig-steuern-zahlte-der-ikea-...)

China does not prevent american businesses to do business in China as long as they follow the law.

European and foreign businesses get much higher fines compares to local businesses (e.g. Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank, Bayer (e.g. just after buying Massato), Toyota, etc...)

On the other hand Europe allows american businesses to access the european market without following the local laws. No user data can be transfered to the USA where protection clearly is not adequate, still they do.

EDIT: You can downvote me, but it's all true:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/business/dealbook/volkswa...

"Criminal fines in the United States from 2001-12 were on average more than seven times the size for overseas entities than for American companies"

Funny thing about Gutenberg is that he was also lobbying the german government in favor of Wirecard. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/karl-theodor-zu-g...

I'm currently working on something similar for the a new house I'm building, but for the inside.

I plan to have multiple ESP32 nodes with sensors (luminosity, temperature, pressure, moisture, presence detector), ble scanning (in order to detect who is in the room), and microphones for voice control (picovice porcupine library for stop word detection, then google speech 2 text). For the microphones, I'm still waiting for my mems microphnes to directly include them on the sensor node, or I will use an additional board like the esp32-korvo which works very good (already tested). For audio playback in the rooms, I'm planning on using the up2stream amp devices with ceiling speakers. As for powering it, I'm still unsure on what to use. I first ordered some olimex POE esp32 isolated (so you can power them from both POE and USB at the same time). However the ethernet interface will go up/down in an endless loop after a few minutes of sending data over mqtt. Strangely, the non ISO version works though as it seems, I haven't run it though in a box (higher temperature). So I'm still unsure if I use POE or a 220V->5V converter in each case, or feed them directly with 5V from a central place (which would require more cable length planning)

I did some programming at first, but then quickly switched top https://esphome.io/ which allows you to include your sensors without writing any code. It has support for all kinds of sensors, integrated API, mqtt, webserver, etc... and you only have to configure one yaml file which will then automatically generate the C code and compile/upload your firmware. No need to reinvent the wheel!

It's also easy to include your own components in case you want to do anything custom. The only disadvantage is that it's still based on esp32 idf 3 (in case you are adding components, I would prefer to do it for the new version and not the old one), but the v4 was only released a few weeks ago.

If it's a friend and only takes 2 days, why not just build it for him?

If you plan on only working on it 2 days with minimal maintenance afterwards, and your friend is working on it full time (marketing), then you should own 0%.

It's even worse. Everyone who you link to has the right to claim damages(in case they are press). So you will have to be careful who you link to since a single link could already fall into the new legislation depending on the member state.

Tumblr is not any better. No ways to access any page without clicking OK

https://www.tumblr.com/privacy/consent?redirect=https%3A%2F%...

Indeed. We will be switching away from google to an internal tile server for reasons I won't go into detail for now. Our account manager told us that the pricing of the new Google maps will change with their newly announced platform changes and our current usage would cost us now even less than before. When we asked for an offer from mapbox about a year ago, it was already much more expensive than google. I assume it's going to be even harder for them now to win against google now.

If they were consequent about paying less or more depending on where you live, they would also charge their customers less or more depending on where they live.