Posts by Intractable Potsherd 4162 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
If i was that uninformed about something, and unable to understand the answer but unwilling to admit it, I'd appreciate a simple response like that. It's a reset - the context becomes clear immediately. The owner was clearly an arsehole who didn't appreciate either being talked to as an a) adult, or b) child. There was no way he could have been addressed that would have suited him, as evidenced by "Do you know who I am?" - always the response of idiots with more status than substance.
I have difficulty with this situation. I definitely don't think that there was any "espionage" - Assange and Wikileaks were acting as journalists uncovering acts that were in the public interest. The rape accusations (innocent unless proved guilty) appear coincidentally beneficial to the USA, and there are some apparently strange aspects to it. However, JA's actions regarding those accusations do not make any objective sense at all. He placed himself in harm's way by remaining in the UK, clearly broke the law by skipping bail, and pissed everybody off by staying in the Ecuadorian embassy, losing a lot of sympathy he might otherwise have had. I really don't think he should be extradited to the US "justice" system - there is as much chance of getting a fair trial as there is of gravity reversing - but he is the architect of his own downfall.
Unions are very variable in their performance. I've been a member of Unison (through one of its predecessors), the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), and the University and Colleges Union (UCU). Of those, only Unison was sufficiently responsive to both local and national issues (this back in the 1980s). I can't remember why I left them to join the RCN, but they were hopeless at both local and national level, as are the UCU. The last branch of UCU I was involved with were, and still are, actively avoiding getting involved in supporting members in a culture of harassment and unlawful discrimination on multiple counts. Once I thought about it, I realised that the union subs would buy a really good legal expenses insurance package (essentially all I need from the union), and cancelled my union membership.
Mrs IP, originally from a mainland European country, still can't get used to the British habit of walking wherever we want on pavements, regardless of direction. She regards it as very messy. When we visit her home country, I regularly get grumbled at because I don't observe whatever arcane rule applies at any given time.
It's not the same thing at all. Clothes are temporary external adornments with thousands of years of evidence of no ill-effect (though I did read a hypothesis years ago that syphilis went from being a common skin disease to a venereal disease because of clothing). Vaccines are internal and permanent (or at least long-lasting). Compulsory vaccination is a serious interference with the bodily integrity of people, and should only be enforced by governments. It is not for private business to insist on what goes into people's bodies.
In the introduction to one of my Czech language textbooks, the authors claimed that the Czech language was the ultimate secret weapon and the reason that the country had never truly been conquered. They cited the (not quite accurate) example of most textbooks for foreigners not including the verb "to say". Nonetheless, it is a very difficult language to learn, and contains many shibboleth (in the original sense)!
Yep! Until recently, we lived in a fairly rural part of Scotland. Many well-used roads were (just) two modern cars wide on average. My terror was always seeing a Range Rover/Discovery/soft roader coming towards me - always 18" to 2' from the unkerbed edge of the road, and no deviation to the left in case the tyres got dirty.
That is indeed the current situation, but the question is whether it ought to be. There are very good reasons for having cash retained as at least a back up - it maximises resilience, as demonstrated in this case. Cards/electronic payments are a significant point of failure in a number of different ways. Cash doesn't fail in anything like as many ways.
I had a friend (RIP) who was a professor of accountancy. His opinion of accountants was that every single one of them has forgotten what accountancy is for, and that the lot of them should be fired... from a large howitzer. He was very big on business ethics, something that and I agreed was an oxymoron, but something to strive for. Business is about much more than making money.
Public phones are a public good, and should be retained at as many locations as possible. As you've mentioned, Danny, claiming that "most people" have mobile phones doesn't cover all the situations. Leaving aside the coverage/battery/credit issues, mobile use can be monitored. I'm not particularly talking about tracking, even though we know it can be done relatively trivially, but simply by looking at call logs and Internet history. I know women whose male partners went through their phones every day to see who they'd been calling. These women desperately wanted to be out of the relationship, but couldn't use their phones to call support organisations or the police. Easily accessible public phones would have saved them anxiety and beatings. Children have similar problems, but they may not have a mobile at all.
Public phones should be much more accessible than they are now. As someone down-thread mentions, they don't necessarily need to be in ornate boxes. Shops and fuel stations would provide some protection from vandalism, for example, and would probably see regular usage because if the number of people passing through. This isn't an insurmountable problem, and we can roll back the post-Thatcher assault on civil resilience.
Maybe I'm missing something (my life isn't quite as complicated as yours!), but Google Calendar suits me well for the different groups I inhabit. One general one shared with Mrs IP so we know where each other is due to be at any given time, then one for work purposes, one for my motorsport activities, and one for wider family, with access on a need-to-know basis. For those that use other calendars, there is a handy export function. Many's the time people have tried to convert me (or insist on me using) the abomination known as Outlook, but none have yet succeeded.
I think the key part of that sentence was at the end : "We have industry leading programs to study the effects of our products and provide transparency into our progress because we care about getting this right ". "Right" for whom? Well him and his shareholders, obviously - he doesn't care about the users one jot.
"... if the person(s) receiving it are bone-headed enough to find it 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character', or worse, malicious enough to claim they do even though they don't..."
Here is one of the big problems - the focus has moved from a semi-objective "man on the Clapham omnibus" to a subjective "ooh, that upset me". We need to return to what the average person would find "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character", and ditch the Mary Whitehouse test currently in place.
Any business, club, charity, etc. that has nothing but a Facebook presence gets blackholed by me. Some members of the village hall committee I was chair of until recently wanted to go Facebook only - I was delighted that several other members very vocally slapped that down before I could!
It is implied that the service contract required any significant changes to the server environment to be notified as soon as possible (or maybe during planning). If "Col" and his team had been notified, preferably during the planning stage, something could have been done to mitigate the damage (perhaps, mount to something better than fibreboard). That wasn't done, so the service contract did not apply for damage caused as a result of the changes.
If I remember correctly, most of the running-gear was from the Morris Minor, down to the friction-pad dampers, with a new body stuck on top. Hence, all the major parts and relevant knowledge were already there and so it was a cheap, easy-to-fix car. The quality of the bodywork was a problem, though, especially compared to the Minor - I think there are over 12,000 Minors still on the DVLA database, whereas the number is less than a tenth of that for the Marina.
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