Posts by breakfast

It's happening already.

I reckon the mark of an angry deity is almost certainly a chihuahua on a hedge.

Re: Amazing

Certainly it should be able to tell by the way you use your walk you're a womans man no time to talk.

Re: What is important is what was not said ...

They say there is no sound in a vacuum, which may explain why there is so much outside a Dyson...

Re: Yes, the Linux repositories are safer. Sigh.

I use Audacity a lot and around the current version there's not much difference between platforms.

If you're dealing with a lot of VSTs that is a little different, though they do often work under Wine, but those tend to be more in the realm of serious studio recording, for which one would plausibly use something like Ardour on Linux rather than Audacity.

Re: Interesting...

If you are running through a Ltd company in a standard way, you are paying a fair amount of tax - the combination of corporation tax, income tax on dividends certainly adds up to a significant percentage of my income, not ever so far from the proportion I was paying when I was permanent and that is ignoring VAT which is its own thing. I prefer to work this way but it has nothing to do with paying less tax and the same is true of most of the contractors I work alongside.

I think where people really do it for tax avoidance they may be more at the level of chief executives working through consultancy companies and the like. That seems quite common - particularly in the public sector - and it does seem as though there might be reason to mitigate it as possible.

Re: Actually there is hard science behind this

I just don't know that long lice are something you would want.

Re: Freedom of speech angle

And likewise, if I am the landlord of a pub and you exercise your freedom of speech to abuse my other patrons, I am absolutely within my rights to kick you out on your ass and bar you from coming back.

Re: Perl? Perl!

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but if those who do learn from it have to do so by reading a whole lot of Perl then they might as well go ahead and repeat it anyways - nobody will be able to figure out what it is doing or how it is doing it, let alone why.

Re: France is pushing slyly to poach much of the rest.

There's a little more to it than that- from what I could understand of what I was reading yesterday ( not a finance specialist! ) banks have a passporting system to trade in Europe. France look to be pushing for a deal that lets Britain have most of what they want from a post-EU deal aside from passporting our banks. We get free trade with some migration controls, they get the financial sector, but nobody here minds aside from people working in the financial sector and politicians because most people hate the banks.

I don't know how much veracity there is to this suggestion, but it's interesting and seems like it would be a good move for France.

Re: "thats democracy after all"

I have a bit of sympathy for Adam, with our first past the post electoral system it is quite possible this was the first time he cast a vote which did count.

Ironically, had he cast his vote in European elections it would have counted...

Re: don't blame me. I voted to remain

We'd be stuck in the EU, with no credibility, and no power to change it

Whereas in a post-Brexit agreement that gave us access to the free market, the legendary "Norway style" approach, we would not be in the EU, but we would still be bound by the majority of EU rules with no credibility and no question of having the power to change it. It's a little hard to see how that is better.

Also if a substantial number of people voted based on claims that were immediately revealed to be simple lies ( almost everything the Leave campaign said ) then it doesn't seem as democratic as it might - a misinformed choice that goes against one's best interests puts one onto difficult ground.

Re: We all know what happened

Yes.

As someone who felt Remain would have helped us better, it seems to me that now we're leaving there is a real need to make Britain a better place. We're British, we make the best of things and muddle through and we need to stick with this.

But we also need to talk. A lot of people voted Leave because they were angry and close to the edge and that didn't happen because of the EU - if anything they were probably benefiting from EU investment - but their sentiments were whipped up by a particularly malevolent campaign and they were already close to the surface because of decades of cascading failure on the part of multiple governments. We need to be able to engage with these people, to help them find a positive direction. I don't know what that will take, but I don't think it exists on the current political landscape. Post Brexit Britain will be what we make it, so maybe we all need to work on making it something amazing, rather than the disaster the Leave campaign so urgently desire.

Re: Missed one

It's because of all those stairs up to the stage. A bit much work for him these days.

Re: Swiss efficiency

Yup.

The kind of large scale engineering project that only goes ahead in a safe Tory seat.

It does seem that their ideal monetisation strategy would be to get media companies to pay to reuse twitter content for lazy journo stories, which is to say most of them. A small fee with a bit of that income to Twitter, a bit to the creators and you have a path to something viable albeit nothing close to their market valuation.

Re: "oops, there goes Vienna".....

This means nothing to me.

Re: Computer "science" grads need to be less employable

I did an MSc conversion course because it seemed to me as though Philosophy was probably not going to pay the bills.

I loved it and found computer science suited me well, although it was a really steep learning curve, but in the group in my year, I think maybe three or four of us came out of the course actually knowing how to program to a practical level, which would be a quarter of the group at best. Everyone else was getting by on sharing code, which was not entirely discouraged by the department as far as I can tell. I suspect I sometimes got worse marks for having written my own code than a lot of the class got after copying one of the other experienced programmers' work.

I do wonder how many of that group are still cutting code twenty years later. Not that many of us, I suspect.

Re: Nice to see the Reg report on this

Presumably anybody earning a PhD out of this will be a literal spin doctor.

Value and values

Those kinds of musicians are often the most interesting - an artist whose work doesn't draw a lot of people in any specific location, artists who have physical or psychological reasons for being unable to perform in front of a crowd - is their work without value because of that? If they are using experimental instruments and arrangements that aren't easily transported or created as one-off performances that only exist in recorded form, does that mean they deserve no income, no matter how great their work is?

I suppose one question might be: Where do we derive value from music? I have been to a lot of gigs down the years and enjoyed them a whole lot, but the real value for me has always been listening to recorded music as the soundtrack to my life. If I was to pay by how much I valued it, that is where my money should go, and as an old-fashioned throwback who still buys albums, that is where it does.

I don't think that people derive less enjoyment from music now, but it seems that even the ones who talk a lot about free markets ( perhaps especially those people ) are unwilling to think of that as an enjoyment that is worth any money.

Re: changing non-proliferation treaties in a hurry.

Save the Wales!