Posts by Number6 2293 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Surely you don't expect it to make sense? This is the country that is shocked by a nipple on TV but is quite happy to have guns and violence, the loud group that protests about contraception and abortion but then makes no provision for raising the unwanted children born because of such policies.
The US is not the only country where the thinking is clearly not particularly joined up, but it has some really glaring examples of it.
The UK has council tax - vaguely related to the value of the house in the distant past. Cambridgeshire is charging about half a percent of current value, others may vary. However, I'm not sure they can confiscate your house for non-payment, so it's not quite as bad as the US.
The US system has some things in its favour though - starting from the date of last sale, California property tax is assessed as 1% of that value, and it increases by a nominal amount each year. That way, you buy a house knowing what it's going to cost you in future years. It also means that if you bought a house dirt-cheap many years ago and it's now worth several million, you're not expected to pay property tax based on its current value, over which you have no real control. This is way better than a mansion tax which will hit people who may have very few assets other than a house with a hugely inflated value. As with council tax, it's distributed locally.
When switching countries you need to look at what tax treaties exist. In theory it should allow you to claim back tax from one side.
As for the American Way, all sorts of things seem to be set up to make you spend your money. California in particular has the smog test for cars, for which you pay eight or so dollars for a certificate and something a lot more to whoever does the test. Unlike in the UK where the MOT test has a maximum price mandated by government, California does the true market economy of letting all the smog testers compete with each other on price, although in practice most of them end up the same. If you've got a modern car, it's ten minutes interrogating the car's engine management system and you're about seventy dollars lighter. That's a good hourly rate. Sadly it's not possible to just read the numbers yourself.
If you want to do anything to your house you need a permit. I can see that for structural stuff that may be sensible, given the earthquakes, but you're supposed to do the same for all sorts of other stuff too. Much stuff has to be inspected by someone with the appropriate license (with an 's'), so that's even more money required.
On the subject of taxes, it usually costs you money to do that - a lot of people pay someone to do all the paperwork, or buy a commercial software package to do it themselves.
As for the comments about petrol prices, it does vary wildly. Back in January (when Cambridge were still in the FA Cup) it really did get down that low. At the moment it's floating around three dollars a gallon. Don't forget the obscene amount of tax and duty on UK petrol - if the crude price doubles then it can cause the pump price in the US to nearly double, whereas in the UK it's going to go up 20% because most of what you pay is a fixed amount
At this point I'm quite prepared to believe that if one was to do an audit of the police department computers, most, if not all, of them would be found to be infected with the malware and the bigger question ought to be about who's stealing information from the police and what have they already got?
An interesting line of approach for the defence: "our client is incompetent, not malicious".
On the plus side, you don't get bombarded by all the banal advertising that one gets on US TV and UK cable TV. (Just tedious trailers about how wonderful the BBC is.)
There's always a debate on it, it is not a tax because if you're not receiving live TV broadcasts then you don't need to pay it. The contention comes when someone says they never watch any BBC stuff so why should they pay for a licence to support the BBC just to watch other stuff.
If there's one thing guaranteed to spawn more copies of the book, an attempt by a clueless politician is it. People will host copies just because someone wants to ban it.
You don't fight extremism with censorship, you fight it with education. Or by making a few copies readily available for download and logging the IP address of those who actually do.
I was going to make the same comment, with the additional note that if there isn't a suitable VPN provider, you can be sure that someone will start one.
I like the data pollution idea, will see if I can implement it even without an AT&T connection. Perhaps someone could do an app for Verizon users and their unique cookies, too.
I just consider it a shame that more vendors don't produce Linux versions of their software. That way I wouldn't need a Win32 API on my machine.
As for the update in the article, it appears to be installed on the machine here (a Dell) which has successfully rebooted at least twice since the update was installed, so Im clearly missing out on the fun and excitement too.
I remember the IT department in California installing an upgrade at midnight their time and then going home, only to be hauled out of bed by an irate CEO because the UK office, which was just starting its day, had lost all connectivity. When you're a multinational, there is no quiet time in which to install upgrades and it's therefore probably better to do them at the start of your shift (unless the overtime rates are good) so you've got maximum time to shovel the shit when it goes wrong.
There's clearly some confusion as to what is meant by a dog roll. It occurred to me that it's what the dog leaves, not what the dog eats. that would definitely be gag-worthy, even if it tasted OK with a bit of spice to mask the flavour. Probably still has some meat content, too.
Apologies to anyone eating when reading this, just be careful which door you open.
A BIOS is basically a Ring -1. It can intercept any verification and return good results.
I wasn't thinking of situations where it's already hacked, because such a BIOS can report good results by any means, even on the boot-up screens. It was more an informational thing for people to be aware that there is a BIOS update available, in the same way they get informed of other updates. I bet most people aren't even aware they can upgrade the BIOS anyway - how many of them ever go through the BIOS settings? (OK, I suspect a higher proportion of Linux users are probably aware.)
Once your BIOS is hacked, it can probably simulate being upgraded too, so you're into some sort of JTAG reprogramming to be sure.
This is where someone with the necessary skills could do well with Linux - a nice little program to run that checks the BIOS version, compares with some friendly on-line database and reports back if you need an upgrade. Or does dmidecode already provide the information that just needs a parsing script and the friendly website?
This is why you should always re-read an email carefully before hitting send. For the truly paranoid, type it in a text editor and only cut-and-paste when you're happy with it, lest the email client auto-save a draft of a rash comment.
I use email, but there's stuff I've declined to send after typing and reviewing it, and times when I've gone to speak to someone or called them on the phone rather than put it in email because it's ever so easy to click "forward".
However, I chanced upon the Graham Norton show the other night while channel hopping and it looked AWFUL in HD: the set design and lighting were utterly crap.
Many years ago, back before he moved to the BBC, I went to see one of his shows live. It was very entertaining, but in person the set looked very cheap and tacky. I think it was designed to look good on a standard CRT TV which was still prevalent back then. I suspect the effective video bandwidth of a digital signal is much higher - in theory you could encode adjacent pixels as white and black, whereas an analogue signal was much more restricted (test card with frequency bars, anyone?).
Obviously the set designers need to be updated to deal with modern technology.
Also, it'd give y'all an expense-able reason to be somewhere not snowing in January
Not noticed any snow in Silicon Valley this winter. It did manage to rain a bit today though. If you want snow, you nip up to Tahoe for a bit.
(Note that San Francisco itself is colder than further round the Bay, and has a lot more rain.)
The US Constitution was written with the understanding that the state had immensely more power than the individual and that's why criminals can get off scot free if the agents of the state don't stick to the rules - it provides an incentive for the agents to do so, and so attempts to prevent abuse of power.
I'm lucky - my phone rings and I can afford to look at it before getting up to go get a cup of tea in the hope that it's stopped ringing before I get back. At some point I'll have IT disable my voicemail box after I record a greeting that tells people to email me instead. The same for my mobile, if I don't recognise the number then I don't answer the call (family calls come in with a different ring tune).
Some people may recognise this story - company gave out Visa cards to people who needed them, all was well. Company was acquired, cardholders told to trade in their Visa for an Amex as this was the preferred card of our new US owners. At least one of the staff read the Ts and Cs for Amex, realised that the cardholder was personally liable, unlike the corporate Visa, and pretty much everyone refused to agree to the new Ts and Cs and I believe a compromise was reached where they were allowed to continue with the Visa cards (I was a bystander, not travelling enough to need a company card). To add spice to the tale, I had arranged to meet someone from another company site at Amsterdam airport on the way to a client meeting, and he had a corporate Amex which, as it turned out, was not accepted at the airport train station back then (and still may not be) so ended up using his personal Visa to buy our tickets. Needless to say, this tale got reported back to our site too.
I remember being invited into the project manager's office along with a few others to witness him calling the accounts department to tell them that if they didn't get their act together and stop delaying our purchase orders (usually a problem around the end of a month) then he'd be telling his team to book to the waiting time overhead number if the stuff we'd ordered didn't arrive.
I once spent a day in a car with someone who came out in a rash (he was a teacher, too) during the day that was diagnosed as measles. I didn't catch it from him, so I assume that my childhood illness set up my immune system properly and that experience was the equivalent of a booster vaccine.
As for Frisco, I thought that was something one used in cooking, until I realised that C and F are close on the keyboard and my brain had suffered a typo.
Yes, the dielectric does slow down the propagation of the signal. If you look at coax cables they usually quote a velocity factor that depends on the dielectric in use. 0.66 is typical for cheap coax. PCB material has similar effects on the tracks, fibreglass has a dielectric constant of about 4.2-4.3, which slows the propagation down to about half that of free space (square root of the dielectric constant).
To some extent it's the wrong solution to the problem. One day, probably 20 or 30 years from now, pretty much anyone of working age is going to have something embarrassing on-line somewhere and it'll become the norm. Employers will learn to distinguish between evidence of current bad behaviour and what you did as a student but have outgrown. The world will end up with a "so what?" attitude when dodgy photos from the past get dredged up and they'll largely cease to matter.
I was lucky, in that I never quite got around to getting the first recall done. I've got paperwork for the second, but interestingly they say that there aren't enough replacement devices to go around so they're prioritising areas such as Florida where there's heat and high humidity as evidence suggests they're more likely to have a problem than other areas. In the meantime, it is recommended not to carry front-seat passengers.
Last time I tried setting up my phone to talk to the Outlook cloud server, it wanted me to agree that the app could wipe my phone back to a factory reset if it felt like it. So I don't have it on my phone. If my employer wants me to have access, they can provide their own device for it.
You can be to the right of the Tory party and still be considered a socialist or a liberal in parts of US. They don't really know what one is, apart from the fact that the First Amendment doesn't apply to them and they shouldn't be allowed to say their piece.
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