"pokemon go killed noone."
No it didn't he's still alive, is Mr Noone.
1501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007
If you think about it WikiLeaks isn't much of a threat. WikiLeaks just publish information that is handed to them by idiots. The threat is therefore the idiot, not WikiLeaks.
Conspiracy nuts are mostly just nuts and although the activities of some of those nuts have becom popular with the press/other nuts they don't present much of a real threat since they ether just wander around screeching tinfoil helmet stuff (as in this thread) or they manage to hack into a "Sekrit Government Internet Service" which later turns out to be something like the order list for office delivery of milk or the prices in the canteen.
"Apple historically haven't jumped at gaming opportunities."
I think it still pains Apple that in the 1980s Microsoft, IBM and Harvard Business School dismissed the Macintosh as "a games machine". That said I have a soft spot for some of the games that did appear on the Mac in the early days, things like Myst, Prince of Persia and the many good titles available from Ambrosia. I can run most of those on my phone these days.
"Wow, live translation of text via the camera from Google.
"Jesus, my first Windows Phone had that, 4 years ago, and all of them since."
<shrug> The first live translation of text app that I used was Word Lens on my iPhone 4 in 2011. I doubt that was the first such app either. If you're going to wave your willy, make sure that it's not a tiny shrivelled one. BTW you do know that even M$ has admitted that Windows Phone was a bad idea, badly executed, don't you?
"It'd be a brave man who asks his wife if he can don some goggles in the marital bed to make her look like a pron starlet."
Lawer: You are seeking a divorce.
Wife: Yes, on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. My husband wore AR goggles for sex.
L: And you object to him choosing to replace you with some other woman's avatar?
W: He was using Nigel Farage's avatar!
"I have absolutely no desire to have an iPhone (or any other smartphone, for that matter)."
And there's no point picking those grapes that are too high for you to reach because they are sour.
Phaedrus recounted a pithy summary of "The Fox and the Grapes".
Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.
"Well exactly. That's the weird thing about this study. They have put cameras on officers and expected people to act differently around them and are surprised when people don't."
Many of the interactions that the police have with members of the public occur when the member of the public is out of their gourd on booze or drugs. Sometimes they are just out of their gourd on testosterone and adrenaline.
Most of the time the suspect isn't bothered by the presence of six burly police officers, handcuffs, pepper spray and leg restraints. In the USA these people kick off despite the officers having Tasers and guns. It's therefore most unlikely that any of the people confronting the police, or being confronted by them, are aware of a camera or would care if they knew everything was being recorded. In those circumstances how can a camera modify their behaviour?
"ooh, you got a downvote, Teflon suit man must have read your post. Have a balancing upvote."
Thanks. I think "Charlie" is worried that his manhood is threatened.
As to "virtue signalling", meh. I've complained about the bloke through the system and told him to his face that he's a cowardly prick. It's also not "one incident", it's evidence that within an organization the systems that should protect workers from abuse are subverted to protect the abusers from consequences.
"From what I've read on this, pertty much all of the attacks (I cant think of a better word right now) happened to actresses at the start of their career. So yes they all kept their mouths shut for fear of their careers being destroyed before they get started."
The recordings of Weinstein released via The New Yorker reveal him making what are not-so-veiled threats to an actress if she doesn't let him molest her.
“Don’t embarrass me in the hotel. I’m here all the time….You’ll never see me again after this, if you embarrass me in this hotel,”
“Five minutes. Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”
Of course "never seeing him again" would mean "never working for him again" which given his grip over production and distribution would mean being excluded from a broad range of work.
At conferences in recent years I've been guilty of stating that the IT industry seems to be making headway in cleaning up its act. I've observed generally improving standards of behaviour towards women and have worked at a couple of organisations with a more-or-less 50:50 balance of gender. So far, so good. I don't feel that I can support that view any longer.
Last month I was treated to a full on display of misogyny and victimisation surrounding the removal of a female consultant who has done nothing worse than the job she was paid to do, and doing it extremely well. One powerful individual took exception to the presence of a woman in a senior role and set out to bully, harass and victimise the individual. This included personal abuse, setting tasks that were inappropriate, demanding reports to be delivered "on my desk within an hour" and other nonsense intended only to make her life misery. She stoically put up with all of this, met all the deadlines and produced some excellent work. Her reward was to be dismissed by the back door - her contract was cancelled and no one told her.
All of that was bad enough, but the sad part of this business has been the inevitable cover up. The HR department has moved to protect the bully and has rejected all complaints about his behaviour and the fact that he drove a coach and horses through company HR procedures. He's been quite open about the fact that he doesn't want any "interfering women" on his team. No one above him cares.
This is deeply shameful and his Teflon suit seems to be provided by the all-male club in middle/senior management.
If anyone is doubt, my gender is male and I have no axe to grind against the male manager in question, other than the fact that he has shown himself up to be a deeply unpleasant individual.
"Same as under 16s not being allowed to buy disposable razors."
The Offensive Weapons Act 1996 makes it an offence to sell to anyone under the age of 18 any knife, knife blade or razor blade, axe or any other article which has a blade or which is sharply pointed. That appears to include wooden skewers, pointed sticks, needles, knitting needles screwdrivers, chisels etc. Because of course the first thing anyone aged 17 years and 364 days would try to do is to stab someone as soon as they got their hands on a sharp object.
Disposable razors don't seem to be permitted but razor blade cartridges are if less than 2mm of blade is exposed. Single and double edged safety razors are banned.
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Just how long after this brain-dead legislation pops into being it will be before the first report appears of a victim having concentrated sodium hydroxide thrown in their face? It's not an acid, it's easy to find in several places.
Then how long after this before the knee-jerk is to ban all alkalis?
On a separate note, has anyone started to think about how much acid they transport on a regular basis? Car battery, that's a couple of litres of strong sulphuric acid solution. Any cleaning product that claims to be good for removing limescale (a lot of these use hydrochloric acid) etc.
We could change all the car batteries to LiIon polymer. Of course they happen to full of alkali and they are so dangerous that people who work on Prius/Tesla batteries have to wear head to toe rubber suits. It's clearly inconceivable that anyone would use an old LiIon battery as a weapon, isn't it?
You seem to be struggling to understand why techies are laughing at you. Apparently you think that the error that you made was a small one, that could be overlooked because it doesn't matter in the great scheme of things and that it's just some sort of cruelty on the part of "techies" that causes them to laugh at a jolly good person who is getting on and doing Very Important Stuff That Needs To Be Done.
Let me explain. As a techie, well actually I'm a scientist with slightly better qualifications than your own, and I'm used by now to politicians calling me a "techie" or "boffin" or even "nerd" and "geek". Clearly since my qualifications are in science, not all-important History and because none of my ancestors shagged the monarchy I'm not really of any consequence, but I think even from my lowly position I can give you a flavour of the magnitude of your cock-up.
Imagine me as a techie talking to you about history and I say that At 5:40 a.m. on the 21st of October 1805, Nelson commenced an engagement with the French and Spanish combined fleet that he would win decisively because of his creative use of the recently invented Gatling gun. How much would you sneer at me? Clearly I would be talking ignorant drivel about a subject that I barely understand.
That's you that is.
"What I found more worrying is the gaol time for those viewing "terrorist material" on-line."
Here are some things that have been used in terrorist attacks. Each of them can, therefore, be considered to be "terrorist material". Presumably reading this post is an act of sedition.
Pressure Cookers; Nails; Screws; Nuts; Bolts; Ball Bearings; Flour; Fertiliser; Diesel Oil; Motor Vehicles; Knives; Batteries; Countdown Timers; Shopping Bags; Plastic Buckets; Mobile Phones.
Lots of others but I don't want to be accused of writing a Terrorist Cookbook.
"A contractor did a bad thing" didn't save anyone at MoD from the consequences of the EDS data leak when an unencrypted laptop containing 600,000 records of military personnel was stolen, leading to the revelation that this had happened three times before. The Burton report of 30 April 2008 resulted in shortened career paths.
"I'd forgotten Smith Associates changed it's name after Billions Above Estimate bought them."
You can't have "forgotten" that because it never happened. It's more like you just made that up.
Smith Associates renamed itself "Detica" in 2001
BAe bought Detica in 2008
"I dont know why an aeroplane company is running a cyber security business"
I don't know why you don't know that. It was very well publicised at the time.
Companies buy and sell other businesses all the time. When your market is shrinking it makes some sense to diversify.
It's a natural reaction when one has been involved in an accident involving another human being to saw off their head and limbs then add weights to the torso and dispose of the remains at sea. I can't understand why all the scepticism.
As to his earlier statement that he dropped her off on an island about three hours into their trip he clearly misspoke because what he intended to say was “I lose my foothold and the hatch shuts, Kim had been severely hurt and was laying with an intense bleeding. There was a pool of blood where she had landed.” and that he immediately performed the recognised emergency procedure of removing all her limbs and head to make her more comfortable in the confined space of a submarine.
"Not over the Internet, no. No way. Not in a million years."
There is an awful lot of military traffic that goes over the Internet. I suspect that it's probably "most" military traffic. And the Internet isn't a million years old yet. Then there's all the military traffic that is broadcast over a huge geographical footprint.
Can you work out why no one cares about this?
"The only way to be sure that these very expensive tools are not vulnerable is to not have them link up."
Bullshit.
"Sure some abuse it"
Interestingly, the ones that abuse it seem mostly to be those appointed by government to a position in a public body. Either ex-MPs or other political favourites appointed as "directors" of an agency, trust or quango with a whopping salary that they don't want to pay tax on. Politicians think everyone else is on the fiddle, because they are.
"the government is trying to have their cake and eat it by treating you as an individual instead of a company?"
No, the government is trying to have their cake and eat it by treating a company as if it were one of the employees of the company, when it suits them and treat a company as a company when it suits them.
For reasons that are bizarre the government chooses not to tax a company as an entity in the same way that people are taxed. Thus it's the government fiddling the tax system.
If the government wished, it could apply a level tax structure with the same taxation rates on profits, share dividends and income tax. However the government wants to give some companies a big tax break and some shareholders a big tax break. What it doesn't want is for those tax breaks to be available to the inferior middle classes. Hence the attempt to treat small companies differently from the ones that employ MPs as "consultants" or directors.
As a consultant one has to pay every penny of tax owed or face fines/criminal charges. What government is trying to do at present is to fool people into thinking that small companies are doing something illegal or immoral when they do neither.
"IT contractors in "everyone should pay tax except IT contractors" shocker"
Nope. IT contractors in "We should only have to pay the tax we actually owe" shocker. The Government is trying to have their cake and eat it, as usual. The Government is trying to claim that some companies are different to others. There's no legal basis for this, the Government just decided overnight that lots of small companies, each of them paying their full tax burden, were somehow trying to defraud HMG and that there was more to be wrung out of these companies by treating the entire company income as a salary paid to an individual. Not only that but the individual would also have to pay employer's NI as well as the employee contribution. Claiming that all IT contractors operate illegal tax avoidance scams with companies in the Caymans is simply defamation.
This from a government that lets giant companies operate without paying taxes in the UK, they also pay massive subsidies to those companies to stay in the UK, no doubt swayed by the contributions to party and individual MP funds that they receive from those companies.
The Schadenfreude is because the Government were warned that any attempt to crack down on IT contractors and impose unjust taxation would see many simply leave. They poo-pooed that idea, and as ever with government they only see the mess when their nose is rubbed in it.
I gave up government work three years ago when it was made obvious that they were going ahead with this nonsense. Since then my day rate has doubled and I now get to spend more time doing what I like, both at work and in my leisure time. The Government would have to pull some astonishing rabbits from their hat to entice me back.
Bwhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(gasp)hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(wheeze)hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(croak)
Stop it, you're killing me, I can hardly breathe for laughing. Government takes aim at foot, pulls trigger, and hits the target.
"You're thinking too far down the miser scale. It's a Yorkshire accent."
Too far down? You mean Scotsmen are less miserly than tykes? I can agree on that one, after all it's a Lancashire maxim that a Yorkshireman is a Scot who has had the generosity kicked out of him.
"If you can persuade people to pay good money for a coffee pod because cleaning a cafetiere is too hard (or even rinsing out an aeropress)"
Both a cafetiere and an aeropress make awful coffee as does the "Nespresso" machine. I have both a bean to cup machine (at my main residence) and a pod machine at the flat that I rent for work. The pod machine needs cleaning, so it's not that it reduces the labour involved, so it's not "lazy". The reason for using a pod machine is that it's cheap - EUR 40 compared to about EUR 250 for the bean to cup version. Yes, like an inkjet printer you pay the cost in refills but the pods are good for occasional use. Also you can let someone else use the pod machine (as long as they buy their own pods!) without worrying that they are going to break it by failing to follow the maintenance regime needed for a bean to cup machine.