Posts by veti 4497 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
I don't believe you've ever smelled a durian.
There was an instance, just a few months ago here, where a whole six-storey office block had to be evacuated because someone left an inadequately-airtight durian, in a backpack, outside the building. I believe it was initially suspected to be a gas leak.
That would come under "unfounded assumptions of higher productivity", then.
If the worker isn't getting sick pay (etc.), then they're not really getting more money because they have to accrue against all those eventualities (which is more efficiently managed at aggregate level by a business, rather than individual level). It may feel like more, but that's a dangerous illusion.
Training and equipment? If the worker needs those to do the job, then they need it regardless. If they don't, then we're not talking about the same worker.
As for line management - that's another way of saying that self-employed people have to do a bunch of unpaid overhead work for themselves. So, basically it's shifting time costs from the employer to the employee. Again, the "more" money to the employee is an illusion. It also assumes that all managers (including both line managers and accountants) spend more time on managing their direct reports than they do dealing with contractors - that may be true, but it's far from self-evident. Someone has to check all those invoices and timesheets...
The legislation has been in place for 20 years, it's Section 702 of the Telecommunications Act 1996. And in case you missed it, they first requested this investigation back in February. If the FCC doesn't think it's competent to produce such a report, it should have said so then.
But nice try at muddying the waters there.
"The state of Iowa" can't just grant permission to break into anything they like, just because it happens to be in Iowa. If I were an Iowan householder (read: voter), I'd want to be very clear about that.
In this case, it seems pretty clear that the sheriff's real target is the state-level officials who authorised the test. If he can establish that the guys who did the breaking-in were doing something illegal, then it follows that the people who commissioned them to do it were, at the very least, accessories to that. I don't know what local politics are in play, but I'm pretty sure that's the goal here.
True. As early as 1868, Cardinal John Henry Newman was trying (not entirely convincingly, but still) to defend Darwin's theory (as applied to humans, even) as being perfectly compatible with scripture and church teaching.
Neither the Anglican nor Catholic churches ever condemned Darwin's books or his theories. (Plenty of individuals did, but plenty others spoke up in their defence, so on balance - a wash.) The only people really offended were those who insisted every word of the Bible must be literally true, which is to say, fundamentalist churches that prize blind faith over reason.
Trustworthy hardware is in Google's own best interest. From their point of view, this is a way of neutralising the inbuilt advantage that Microsoft and Apple have from being literally in control of the hardware.
It leaves them all with no alternative but to compete for data, on level terms, in the online world - i.e. Google's home turf.
"Rockstars" are notorious for every kind of bad behaviour. This is true in the musical genre that gave us the term, and it's an inherited trait in every other business that lets itself be beguiled by the same idea. By definition, they are people to whom the usual rules don't apply.
Hackers, similarly, are often motivated by a dislike of rules. In some cases they try to act as if they don't apply, and have to be harshly reminded that they do, by those of us who value our peace. Many hackers secretly, or not so secretly, aspire to "rockstar" status as a sort of superpower that will allow them to transcend the frustrating limitations of mere mortals (which explains why that godawful sophomoric bilge The Matrix was so popular in certain circles).
I will never willingly work with anyone who considers themself a "rockstar", or who aspires to be one. While this rule may make me miss out on a 1% chance of getting insanely rich, it will also spare me a 99% chance of getting brutally abused and/or set up to take the fall for a sociopath.
No, that's another example of the same confusion. The "facts" we can agree on are that the Earth is here, has been here for some time, and it seems to change somewhat over time, thus leading us to infer that it was very likely markedly different in the past. Oh, and that there exist stories that describe "creation" of the Earth.
But "God created the Earth in six days" is not something that can be observed at first hand, it requires interpretation of the observable facts. This particular one relying on a specific written account being true (and many others being false).
Correction: in the Great Horse-Meat Beat-Up, it wasn't "mince" that was mislabelled, it was products containing mince. Mostly, beefburgers and pasta sauces. The "mince" sold by supermarkets was (as far as has been revealed, at least) fine. Which chimes with your point about more processed food being dodgier, but not so much about local butchers being more trustworthy.
Your local butcher may indeed make their own burgers with locally sourced mince, but probably not their own bolognaise.
Ah, common error. You're confusing "truth" with "facts".
We used to agree about facts, but differ about how to interpret them (truth). What's happened in the past few years is that "facts" have become inseparable from interpretation, nobody believes in "objectivity" any more.
The committee can only issue a subpoena if the whole Senate has asked it to conduct an investigation into - something that the subpoena would be relevant to. I don't know if any such investigation is currently open.
If not, then it's not just members of the committee, but the whole senate that would need to be squared.
It makes sense that boycotts are a preferred weapon of the left. To make a boycott effective takes collective action - a large group of people acting together, rather than one person taking a stand. The right-wing equivalent would be lawsuits.
Harassment campaigns, however - such as this story is about - those come from both sides. Organisations like 'moveon' and 'media matters' are merely the left-wing equivalents of Breitbart or the Daily Caller. The thing about "the left" is that it needs to mobilise large numbers of people to do anything. "The right" can generally get the same result just by spending money.
As for "bullied by the left", the choice of words there is telling. "Bullying" is what the strong do to the weak. If you feel your team is "bullied by the left", that means you feel your side to be weaker than them. Why do you think that is? And if it is true, then why isn't Donald Trump in jail yet?
They'll be called "Scots".
The Scots have already had one independence referendum, with the full participation and blessing of the UK government. It's hard to imagine what would stop them from having another, once the dust from Brexit has settled. Comparison with Catalonia is silly.
Au contraire, there's a lot you can do within the constitution. Anti-trust law is one thing. Laws that regulate the behaviour of publishers (which is all Facebook is) are another.
In the last 30 or so years, the USA has completely dropped the ball on anti-trust. Compared with Europe, US citizens are paying more, for less choice and poorer services in, say, broadband and mobile services, because it's allowed local monopolies to develop. And the same thing has happened online: Facebook and Google have conned politicians into seeing them as like national flagbearers or champions against supposed European or Asian competition, which means they get supported rather than slapped down.
When your private information falls into the hands of scammers and criminals, what difference does it make whether it got there by malice or incompetence?
With apologies to ACC, I suspect sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (And I'm damn' sure that malice is sometimes disguised as incompetence. See Donald Trump's CV, for instance.)
The whole reason for the problem was that Boeing wanted everything about the MAX to be the same as for older 737 models. So I'm sure the passenger-level safety information was the same. Thus saving airlines the expense of maintaining an extra set of - well, everything really, but certainly including safety instruction cards.
I wouldn't call PDF a "text editor" format. And I'd hate to rely on it in a time-critical scenario, given how often large documents will freeze, crash, or just go completely blank if kept open for too long.
PDF is a very useful format, but if a flight crew is relying on it to keep the plane in the air, I'd worry about that.
I don't know what it is, but I imagine Google (of all people) do have a metric for that.
Something like "if the user clicks on at least one of the first page of results, and then doesn't return to the results, or enter a related query, within X hours - that's a 'successful search'". I'm sure it's not that simple, but I imagine that's the basic idea.
Because they find them useful, of course.
If you carry a smartphone, your privacy is already badly compromised. If you use it to browse the Web and make comments on ElReg, even more so. And if you read your email on it, then... Really, at that stage I'm not sure what more you think you have to lose.
But lots of people do all these things, and I haven't even mentioned Facebook yet.
It's a trade off. It may not interest you, but it seems unreasonable to expect it not to interest anyone else.
The RSPCA last year took £41 million in contributions, and spent £96 million on animal welfare services (i.e. excluding fundraising, prosecutions, campaigns, science, education and lobbying). I don't know what that highest-paid employee is doing, but someone there is clearly doing something quite remarkable there in terms of getting value for money.
It's more sporting that way.
Directly taking control of someone's car is only 1 point per violation you can get them to commit. But indirectly causing crashes through messing with road infrastructure, that's 2 points per vehicle you can get into the pileup. (Plus 3 points for an abandonment or towaway, 5 points for bursting into flames.)
Not entirely. It's true that most EU law has been codified into UK law, and all that will continue to stand - but some of the legal decisions and precedents set under the old regime will no longer be valid. And some rulings are not statutory, but only guidelines/regulations made by gov'ts, in some cases to comply with EU obligations.
So yes, there will be changes immediately. Just - not very big ones, as the article shows.
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