"70% of constituencies with Labour MPs voted Leave."
It's amazing how you can find out this stuff when the count wasn't done by constituencies.
3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"Judge Canut was it?"
No. It was Cnut.
"Issues order that the tides may not come in - aka that things posted on the internet must vanish."
This is one of those annoying memes (using the original Dawkins definition), a viral idea that reproduces and gets stuck in people. Cnut forbade the tide from coming in to demonstrate that his power to decree was clearly limited.
"If money changes hands then even in the UK the minimum legal age for sex is 18, not 16."
If money changes hands then it's not legal, at least for the payer, of course. Sex is the only service that it's legal to sell but illegal to buy in UK law. I understand the reason for this, but it still offends my sense of logic.
"Less good was his decision in 2018 to, allegedly, pay $500 to have sex with a 16-year-old girl he met through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com."
Amusingly, in the US it's legal to own a gun, but illegal to have sex at age 16 (I know, not in all states, before you start). In the UK, it's the other way round.
"How do you actually quantify how many 'bots' your company has?"
I wondered about this as well. I eventually decided it must mean that the bot system will have the capacity to handle 600 calls simultaneously. They seem to think it'll take a quarter of the time to resolve calls with the bot than a human. Somehow I find that unlikely.
"I don't rewrite my C example code just because someone won't install the C compiler that requires, or wants to use some other programming language - not unless I'm being paid and given the time to do that."
Do you work in the public sector, where people are required to use your services, and is the C compiler paid for? If not, bad example.
"...Do HMRC seem to target IT contractors almost exclusively?"
They don't. But if you think about who all the 'independent contractors' are, they are either zero-hours delivery drivers, or high-earning IT contractors and TV presenters. I bet the DPD driver pays the right amount of tax, and as we know here many IT contractors have set themselves up as John Smith Ltd (unlike the DPD driver). So where exactly do you expect the Eye of Sauron to fall?
"unfortunately the brunt of their dying will be borne by the contractors"
I have no sympathy with contractors who went looking for tax schemes that promised 1% income tax. They knew what they were getting into, it's obviously a scam and hey were hoping to make like bandits. There are (not many, but a few) permanent, normally salaried people whose companies paid them like this so that the company itself could evade the tax. Save your sympathies for them.
"RTFA. He didn't "dodge" a tax bill of £240k."
I did read it. He did dodge taxes. Tax avoidance and evasion are both dodges, the difference is which is legal.
People say Starbucks (for example) dodges taxes all the time, and there's no suggestion that that is evasion.
"Moot in English means it is something worth debating at an Anglo-Saxon moot."
From what I'm reading it looks like something that should be decided at a moot, originally.
I was only aware of the US definition, of a debatable point that no longer has practical consequences.
A poster below links to an article that suggests not using moot in an international publication. I think that's a wise move, although I am glad to be aware of this alternative definition.
"Australia and IIRC China have also made similar noises."
That would be the same Australia that has a virtual hermetic seal around their border?
And who actually wants a free trade agreement with China? So tariffs of their goods are reduced, and they still find some excuse not to buy anything from us? No thanks.
"They don't need to. The regulation is very simple - EU citizens get treated the same as natives. If the NHS is free, it is free. The end."
Yes, and it ended with Brexit, so slow hand clap there.
"Of course, many of these problems would be utter non issues if English people didn't have such a phobia of carrying identity cards like, well, everywhere else."
Or the EU could grow up and realize that not all regulations can work across 28/27 completely different countries.
"Add the UK having "free at the point of delivery" residency-based healthcare, it should have done more to implement such rules."
The European Court already put the kibosh on that. Because the NHS is free at point of delivery, the Court said that there were no requirements for private health insurance in the UK.
One of the main issues (for me, not for Brexiteers) with the EU was the way their regulations didn't take into account the different systems that existed in different countries. It seemed as though the authors of regulations looked at the situation in France, Germany and Belgium, and then just assumed everyone else had the same system.
I am reminded of this xkcd topic, which debunked that particular myth.
"And was proved wrong."
Thank you for correcting me. I have withdrawn my original post, and (boo hoo) all 11 likes it had garnered were lost.
I knew that C4 was publicly owned, but it appears to be commercially run. It has been floated on several occasions to receive some money from the Licence, but it has never happened.
"You can't have it both ways."
There's a difference between rejecting service because of who someone is, and rejecting service because of what someone will do.
It should be illegal to refuse to bake a wedding cake in general. However if,when purchasing it, the person said they were going to strap someone down and force-feed them the cake, then you probably should refuse to serve then. Regardless of who they like to screw.
"No taxes, no space police, fiat law. Colonists of the new world did much as they pleased when they landed, why should space be any different? It's even easier without any natives (that we know of)."
Any Martian colony will be completely dependent on resupply from Earth. That gives Earth-based authorities a pressure point.
"and its false positive rate was pretty high"
When Turnitin was first introduced to the maths department, of course someone would decide to break it. It turns out that by replacing whitespaces by non-breaking spaces, you can take a page of text from another source any obtain any percentage plagiarised you want.
Of course, our students are not clever enough to actually do that.
"Very simple - the results looked reasonable so everyone assumed it was working as intended.
Proper testing would have revealed the problems."
I just found a problem in a short script that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I had a list of variables and as I slowly solved the equations I substituted in the determined variables. What I hadn't noticed was that I searched the list for the variable name and then changed it. If one unknown was proved to be exactly equal to another, then my script changed the first instance of it, not the correct instance of it.
This problem did not appear until quite a long time after I started using it.
"Fascinating that folk downvote personal experiences."
Because it's stupid posting a 'I am not experiencing issues' comment. It would only be useful if the question is whether something was down for everyone or just a portion. But we know the software is buggy, because lots of people have experienced bugs. The fact that you haven't is uninteresting and unimportant.