Another fiasco of which I am reminded as I race to upload some holiday pix and get them in front of customers' eyes in time for Christmas ... it takes several days for them to show up in searches, or even to show up in the private lightboxes to which they were added.  I know they've got millions of files and thousands of keywords to index, but what did they implement their DB with, freaking BASIC on Commodore 64's?

If Google was to buy IS that's a bug that would be fixed, pronto.  The proof: I just searched at google for [site:istockphoto.com <my keywords>] and they already found - as the 4th item in the text results - an image that I uploaded a few days ago and which is still not indexed at IS.

I wish they would fix this, but I'm not sure that they even recognize it as a bug which is hampering their sales and profits.  If seasonal images are not promptly indexed and made available for sales in time, then they are stuck storing them on their servers for almost a whole year before they will generate any revenue.

... I don't disagree that most governments have some corruption, but I think for the sort of facts you're posting you need some references (and I mean statistics, studies, etc back up by some scientific plan, not an article from FoxNews) ...

An article from Fox News, LOL.  I never watch it.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that probably if you watched Fox News for a little while, and then compared their opinions to other networks, you would conclude that all of these networks are pro-(big)-government, and they only disagree on which areas should have Big Government and which areas should have Really Really Big Government.

Here is the case against government, it rests on logic and not on statistics.

A government is by definition a group of people who claim a monopoly on the use of violence in a particular geographic region.  Violence is the beginning and end of government power (if you don't believe it then try subtracting from your tax payment the money which you feel is being wasted or stolen, and wait to see what happens).  Yet, governments claim that this violence is necessary for them to perform beneficial acts of charity and cooperative "public works".  That is a logical impossibility - governments are saying, "Let us help you ... or we'll kill you."  That is not charity, it is brigandage.

... I've heard all too many times about the long lines and people dying because they can't get a surgery, but very little in terms of proper numbers. I can definitely understand how overhead goes up due to strong unions, misuse of money and so on. But to go from that to saying that all these systems will collapse, especially without numbers, might be overdoing it.  And this of course is a completely different discussion from the one that decides just who is allowed to have medical access in each system ...

With the possible exception of Norway, Alberta and a handful of oil sheikdoms who can (for now) afford to pay for exorbitant social welfare programs, there is NO country right now that I am aware of who provides welfare, medicare, government pensions, etc. and who can balance their budget.  None of 'em.  Go google it if you want, I think you'll find that all of these countries are facing not only budget problems right now, but are also facing more and more severe problems in the next few decades because of demographic problems.  They will have many, many more old people who expect receive pensions and free medical care than they will have young, working people who could be taxed to support the old people.  Whatever savings that older people might have put away are being severely eroded through monetary inflation (printing money) so it's hard to see how any of this is going to end well.  Laughably, what the EU considered to be a "good" amount of unbalanced budget was to borrow "only" an extra 3 percent per year of the value of the entire production of the country.  Even that is digging a hole then pulling down the walls down on yourself (and your children and grandchildren) but many of the countries, especially the benighted PIIGS, simply lied about their deficits and were allowed to participate in the Euro welfare scam anyways.

Any system that gives away "free" stuff will end in the same way.  When the cost of something (to the consumer) approaches zero, the demand approaches infinity.  Stated another way, there is no such thing as a free lunch (unless you steal it).

What happened was this - the politicians who created these social welfare programs did not give a cr_ap whether they would be sustainable for 20, 50 or 100 years.  Being politicians, they sought to grab power only in the next election.  That is the only horizon that matters to any politician.  Every "social program" is in fact a pyramid scheme.  The neatest example I can think of is a little old gal called Ida May Fuller, the first ever recipient of US Social Security.

By the time of her death, Fuller had collected $22,888.92 from Social Security monthly benefits, compared to her contributions of $24.75 to the system.

Nice little scam!  And she didn't finish collecting the free money until around 40 years after the politicians who created SS won their election in 1936.  Did they care?  Why would they?  Not a single one of them will still be alive when SS collapses in a cesspool of unfunded liabilities in a decade or two from now.

If you dig a bit into the origins and future of every other social welfare program - such as Canada's Biggest Sacred Cow (medicare) you will find the same, scummy, political opportunism and the same, hopeless financial dead-end.  That is why I say that government welfare programs are not just a little bit corrupt and inefficient, but they are inherently corrupt.  It is an irrational fantasy to believe that politicians can create or sustain wealth in a country by collecting money under threat of violence and redistributing it to their political supporters so that they can win the next election.

I am a canadian living in the US as a student. Canadian taxes are skyhigh compared to here. Most people I know in Canada and with whom I've at least mentioned finances are quite content to pay their taxes, even those taxed at 50%.

I am really curious why (some?) people are sooo eager to not pay taxes here in the US. In my mind, the equation was very simple, more taxes = more social programs, infrastructure, etc. (of course, assuming no excess of corruption)
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Excess of corruption?  All of these social programs are inherently corrupt.  The famous Canadian health system (using Ontario as an example) has maybe 80% of its funding skimmed out of the system by bureaucratic "overhead" which is about what you would expect of any government monopoly.  I have some inside knowledge of this because of a friend inside the system who had access to a confidential audit.  And the system is corrupt.  You won't read much about this in the papers or see it on TV but when it comes to getting jumped up in the queue for hard-to-get medical services (like MRIs) there a lot of favoritism, bribes and extortion going on.  Not out-and-out cash bribes AFAIK, but more like people getting bumped up in the queue if they are a crony of a politician, or getting an immediate upgrade to their hospital care if they threaten a politician that they will complain to the press and expose the crappiness of the system.  That's for medical care.  For the awarding and paying out of government contracts, I'm sorry to tell you that there is a lot of blatant corruption going on, as in envelopes of cash changing hands.  A little bit of this came out over the sponsorship scandal, but some ex-government employees told me some stories indicating that sponsor-gate was not the exception to how government contracting works, but the norm.

I believe that there is not a single province in Canada which can balance its budget right now (with the possible exception of Alberta) and the federal government is running an all-time-record deficit.  The money is disappearing into the pockets of the politicians, their cronies who have government contracts, and the unionized bureaucrats.  Meanwhile, the infrastructure is crumbling.  The highways and major roads of Ontario are so full of cracks and potholes, you'd think you were in a third-world country.  In Quebec the highway bridges have been literally collapsing because of lack of maintenance.

Government monopolies don't work - that's why in Canada the health care is rationed and people are dying on waiting lists for operations, and in North Korea the food is rationed and people die of malnutrition.  The reason why monopolies don't work is that the people who run the monopolies have no competition and therefore can abuse the system and make it as expensive as they want, and they will not lose their "customers".

This system, the one in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia is probably not going to last much longer.  Foreigners are not going to keep lending money to these governments forever, so that they can skim all the cream off the top and then offer crappy "social services" to the sheep.  The tax base is already crumbling because all kinds of businesses, big and small, are being pinched because their customers are getting poorer and taxes and regulations are getting more onerous (see 1099).

You can do what you want with your own money, but I don't think that it will help anyone (least of all yourself) if you pay any more into this mess than you have to.

I noticed that these two figures on the user_view.php page do not go up in sync, but when there is a sale the "account balance" is incremented first, and "total earnings" goes up some time later.  Sometimes it seems to be shortly afterward, sometimes it takes a day or more.

Does anyone know (or care) what the algorithm is for this?  I wouldn't mind but I haven't had a sale for a while (the "account balance" hasn't budged since yesterday morning) and neither has the "total earnings" moved, not even to reflect the sales from yesterday morning.

When web site updates appear to be so irregular and mysterious it makes me wonder what the heck is going on - if it's really a computer program (which you would expect to perform updates on a highly regular schedule, if not immediately) or if it's just some person randomly deciding when to click on a "compute totals" button.  Or is it a computer program which happens to crash frequently and must be manually restarted?

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No idea what Canadian tax whistle blowing pays :-)

Probably, a kick in the pants.  The witness protection part would be a bus ticket to Flin Flon, Manitoba.

If you have any other photography income, e.g. RM, wedding, portrait, etc. you're OK ... but if exclusive at IS is all you sell then maybe you're vulnerable.

I heard of someone who was an IT contractor for several years for just one company, and then WHAM they got nailed.  At another big hi-tech company that I heard of, a contractor actually SUED the company to try get retroactive benefits.  All the jerk did was get himself a huge bill for expenses he had previously deducted which were no longer considered eligible, another huge bill for employee payroll deductions (SS or whatever), he gave the company a massive headache (because the gummint found hundreds of contractors in the same position), and spoiled things for a lot of other contractors.  After that fiasco, this large company refused to hire ANY contractor for more than 42 consecutive weeks, lest the taxman come and wallop them upside the head (again).

This is all the government's fault, with their swinish taxes and labyrinthine rules, but you have to be practical about trying to keep them out of your hair.

Photo looks good.  Anyone who has used a camera before should be able to see at a glance that the highlights are not in the places they would be if you had used on-camera flash.  I would scout it, and include an on-camera-flash version of the photo (if possible) to show how absurd the rejection was.

I assume that having too many rejections overturned by scout results in some kind of downgrade or dismissal of reviewers?  Or at least they should feel chastened ...

Since approximately September at IS they seem to have practically no interest in accepting anything other than plain, ordinary, front-lighted, studio-softbox shots.  From non-exclusives anyways.  (Based on what I have been submitting, and not based on any kind of analysis of other people's portfolios or on "newest images" searches)

That's a pretty amusing article. So is a law that they can't possibly enforce really a law? ...

It's a law, in the sense that while it may not collect any significant revenue, it will mean that whenever someone angers them, for example by being an outspoken critic of the government (or for any other reason), they can audit them and screw them over with fines and imprisonment.

When you have a legal and tax code consisting of several tens of thousands of pages, to which legislators add thousands more pages every year, then the effect is that EVERYONE is technically a criminal and tax evader, and ANYONE can be prosecuted on a whim.  Plus there are governmental organizations which work outside of any legal framework, who can fine and imprison practically anyone they want, at their own discretion.  The FTC is such an organization.  If they suspect that people have been illegally "conspiring to form a cartel" (for example by discussing selling and pricing strategies on a forum such as this) they can swing into action and even if they don't win their case, they can easily bankrupt any individual or small to medium sized company they want to with legal bills.  Sic semper tyrannis (thus always with tyrants).

I find that long delays in inspections will discourage me as much as periods with no sales (which usually happens every weekend anyways).  I frequently doubt myself, and slow down the rate of processing and uploading files, telling myself, "Let's just wait a bit to see if these are going to fly, eh?"

But it's not the agency's fault, it's a matter of personal confidence and determination.

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If the money doesn't find its way back to contributors until after December 31st, perhaps that helps their books - a no-interest no-consent loan as it were.
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Losing the plot on tracking and payment of contributor earnings is a very worrying thing.

In theory, the amount they owe to contributors is recorded as a liability and their books are no better than if they had paid up already.  If they owe the money but are not counting it as a liability then this is the kind of thing that eventually trips companies up.  Sooner or later they can't (legally) hide the weakness on their books and in this situation companies can have a hard, painful landing.  In my experience, companies sometimes play these games and let the crap pile up off-balance sheet, and they're waiting for something big to happen in which they can finally reckon in all the junk without it being noticed by shareholders and analysts.  Such as a blowout quarter, an abominably bad quarter, or a takeover.

My last few DLs are: S,S,XS,M,XL,L,XS,XS,M,XS,XS,M,XS,XS,M,XXL

That's about my norm.  I do have periods when it seems like there are nothing but .28 to .30 XS downloads so I can definitely sympathize.

Given that they have mulltiple openings for App developers, it just seems like they have some incompetent IT staff. I would expect IT to be top priority  for any company that deals in financial transactions online after maybe marketing. What else do they really need to do besides those two.

Maybe the top IT people from istock are still the same people who started with the company in its infancy and isnt qualified to oversee an operation the size of istock.

Sometimes it's a management problem, that they don't hold people accountable.  It's a common problem with small, young companies where the "early days" employees are treated with kid gloves.  But c'mon, this is e-commerce, it should never go down except in very rare, unavoidable circumstances.

Perhaps they are unable to find IT people with the experience they need in Calgary?  If so then they should consider relocating, pronto.  Nobody can afford outages of their main revenue stream on busy weekdays.