Posts by Doctor Syntax 33095 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Much the same thing with custom fonts. Why have them? They've been proven to be a feasible vector for malware. It's the crayon department mandating them but even the OP seems to accept they're OK if you host them yourself. That might be an even more dangerous option than letting Google police them.
"why is HMRC so keen on wiping out the individual independent consultants?"
Because their tax system is modelled on their world, a world of what the Japanese call the salaryman. It's a system devised by salaried employees for salaried employees. The notion that anyone would work - and prefer to work - on their own as a business, accepting the risks of trading as a business other than buying and selling things is beyond their comprehension. They can probably grasp that the solo plumber or sparky etc. who comes to fix things for them at home is doing that, otherwise they'd have to accept all the complications of being employers themselves but that's an exception.
Years ago the IR as they then were, predecessors of HMRC, obviously decided that they weren't going to let that game be played on them and inserted a "key man" clause in a standard contract for provision of services (note the plural - a contract of service, singular, is an employment contract, for services in the plural is a commercial B2B contract). This allowed them to specify that the supplier could not substitute part of the team without agreement from themselves as client. A sample contract was posted on their site. Under IR35, of course, such a clause is deemed to make the contract one of service. Somewhere along the line that standard contract get quietly removed from the site.
I'm surprised they see transport and warehousing hit. I'd have thought they were the beneficiaries from the decline of bricks and mortar retail. Facilities management is surely going to be hard hit but if working at home is made permanent then there's likely to be a boom in home extensions to make way for proper home offices.
Not to any great extent. It appears from the article that they looked at the versions of Firefox from Mint were visiting Yahoo. That means that the options were limited to browsers. It raises the question of whether Yahoo constitutes a representative sample of Mint users.
I avoid the mental strength to tackle Firfox updates by seldom using Firefox because of their interface; I only use it when I start to wonder how Firefox handles some problem site - or the problem site simply refuses to work without some named browser (not a good sign anyway).
I mostly use Seamonkey, which has relatively few updates and did roll back their latest version almost immediately as it had knackered the address groups interface.
"That's how black and white politics has become"
Are you allowed to say that?
In reality what's at the root of this issue goes back some way beyond Trump. Society is going through one of its puritan phases. It happens.
Reactions happen too. At some point everyone will start pointing and laughing at the PC/Woke mob.
"Given that sentences are only counted in days, how exactly does recalculating them multiple times per day help?"
It doesn't. All it means is that either (a) they run batch processes a couple of times a day (that counts as multiple) to process any changes that might have come in since the last batch or (b) they they process changes as they come in and there are normally two or more per day. Either way they're recalculating several times a day even if they're not recalculating them all. Presentation is everything.
Either that or they get a different answer every time they run the program.
"And if Rupert's girlfriend had been willing to wait for a month for the next container ship to dock at Felixstowe"
The whole promotion of this sort of thing is based on scarcity. If you let slip an indication that they're common as muck nobody wants one. The choice of being willing to wait for the next container to arrive to buy one doesn't exist. Either they're rare and therefore wanted RIGHT NOW!!!! or there are plenty here or on the way in which case nobody cares.
"It's not really about the links, but about the rich snippet that gets displayed alongside it on FB/Google News."
They have a trade-off. They can simply forbid indexing, then nothing gets seen. Obviously they reckon they have more to lose that way. Cake and eat it comes to mind.
I started reading your post thinking you were describing newspaper owners in general and Murdoch in particular. Although in general I'm not a fan of Facebook or Zuckerberg I think the greater threat comes form monopoly control of newspapers. The more important aspect of this row, however, isn't about monopolies, it's about the attempt to undermine the principle on which the web works: it links material together so if you put something out there expect it to be linked to. If you don't want links to it don't put it there. It's as simple as that. If you don't want it indexed there's a mechanism to prevent that, robots.txt, If people are copying and pasting material that is a different matter but AIUI it's about links and, frankly, if you don't want to have stuff linked to, don't put it there in the first place.
"30,000 installs out of how many millions?"
I don't know but from the Red Canary article; "According to data provided by Malwarebytes, Silver Sparrow had infected 29,139 macOS endpoints" so the answer is however millions are running Malwarebytes AV on Macs which is presumably just a subset of the overall millions of Macs.
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