Once you've earned the 2000 reputation to edit without peer-review, you can edit as little as you like. But until then, your edits are reviewed by other users before they're applied, and there has to be a certain threshold so these (volunteer!) reviewers don't just waste time by reviewing tons of mini-edits.
In my experience reviewing tiny edits creates little to no burden on the reviewers. The backlog of ~500 flagged posts (where you often have to read the question, the answer and then decide whether the flag was really warranted) is much worse.
And then there is the other problem where edit reviewers have no clue of what they are rejecting and instead alienating the person who suggested the edit (rightfully). But that's a completely different point, admittedly.
Still, I don't think less-than-six-character edits would be a particular problem to handle as the edit review queue is often enough empty or very short.
> Just working alone and from time to time a face2face meeting won't establish a relationship
I disagree with that. We had the first real in-person meetup about half a year after I joined the company. Up to that point, I knew everyone else pretty much only through text chat (Google Hangouts didn't exist yet).
But when I met everyone in person, it felt like we already knew each other quite well. It may not always be the case that your online and real-life personalities are aligned enough to get to know a person via chat, but in this case it definitely was.
I work for Stack Exchange in Germany (where they have no presence except for me), and I'm a regular employee with all German taxes, social security etc. that entails. These things can be made to work.
How do they do this? I seem to be having a mental block as to the logistics of this. (On a side note, the pragmatics of having cross border employees when you have no presence in that country would be a very, very interesting blog post, and one I'd read with interest.)
From another comment I understand they also have a UK presence. Are you a true-blue employee or a contractor who takes care of their own taxes and affairs, and just issues monthly invoices? If you are an actual employee (in the legal sense), are you employed by the UK or US company, or something else? Do they have to have an address there, or a foreign subsidiary? Presumably there's no German legal entity, so how have they registered there to pay tax?
This is something I'm prospectively interested in doing for my own business, but I'm not sure how I'd make it work from a tax point of view.
I'm a regular employee (of the UK presence; it's all EU, so I assume that makes things a bit easier). There's a German tax office that does the wage accounting to make sure that it follows all the rules.
The only difference to a standard German employee is this: While in Germany legally the employee owes the wage taxes, they're usually collected by the employer and passed on to the authorities. But the German tax authorities don't like to do that with foreign companies (basically because they can't hunt after them when they don't pay). So from a legal perspective, I pay the wage taxes myself (but the tax office takes care of that as well).
I never knew that was possible! I'd have imagined it could have been possible as a contractor, but not with this arrangement. Is there any particular benefit to being an employee in this case as opposed to a contractor?
I may be wrong, but if they have a presence in the UK they most likely do not need a presence in Germany. Through EU agreements, Germans are allowed to work legally in the UK.
They are allowed to live, work, and study in the UK without any significant restriction, and the tax issue would be a non-issue if they were domiciled in the UK. The reason it's interesting and complicated is because they're apparently living and working in Germany as an employee, without FogCreek having a German entity. They wouldn't be subject to British taxes and there's no German business entity to register with the German tax office.
A UK company (or a company of any jurisdiction) can establish a subsidiary in another EU state, in much the same way you could register a NY-incorporated company as a foreign company in CA, but this doesn't appear to be what's happened in this case.
In particular this means that this is anything but open source (at least if you go by the OSI definition, which I do).
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I know some pedants argue that OSI don't have a registered trademark on "Open Source" and that they "don't get to decide what is or isn't open source." But in practice, many (most?) of us do acknowledge the OSI definition as being the de-facto definition of "Open Source."
> According to German-language magazine WirtschaftsWoche, a Google spokesperson confirmed that the company has complied with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers.
This isn't true; the WirtschaftsWoche article doesn't claim this. It says this could happen, but the claim that this article says it already did happen is a lie.
Not that this means it hasn't happened or is unlikely.
Die US-Regierung könne "auf außerhalb der USA gespeicherte Daten zugreifen". Der Konzern habe schon viele solche Abfragen erhalten, schreibt ein Sprecher des Unternehmens.
-- Rough, sorry: --
The US government is able to to access 'data stored outside the USA'. The company already got a large number of these requests, comments a spokesperson of the corporation.
--
Put like this, next to each other, is a strong indicator (yeah, it's still on the edge) that they did, in fact, already comply in the past.
First part is 'would/could/in theory' style, but the following sentence says they got these requests in the past and 'diese' (these) builds a rather strong link to the sentence before.
So - I'm not 100% sure, but let's error on the side of caution: They did it in the past.
I assume that WW would have used a much stronger phrasing, had the "Google spokesperson" actually said that. And a Google spokesperson is obviously careful when talking to the press.
Yes, it's not unlikely that they did -- but Softpedia is blatantly misquoting here. They base their writing solely on the WW article, and that one doesn't include anything to back up the claim.
