Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26124 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>you find that people start dying because they can't afford healthcare.
But that isn't a failing of capitalism, it's the whole point.
Until you get to the point of the poor being reduced to the point that a shortage of labour drives up wages.
The point is to pay them enough to keep them alive while they work and spend, no point in wasting money on the faulty ones
The USA required telcos to be able to track cell calls to 911 to within 300m (although the enhanced 911 system it was supposed to support never really worked.)
It doesn't say how the telco has to do this, typically they can't force your phone to return a GPS coordinate - you can turn GPS off to save battery
The Eu has a proposed system called Advance Mobile Location which will force the phone to turn on Wifi/GPS and send that position on request. So far only the UK is using it AFAIK - it was originally a UK govt / BT idea.
>leaving the market side unchecked is how slavery came about
Keeping a long term depreciating asset like people as Capex makes no sense when you can rent them as needed. Then you also get to charge them for all the training they need to do the job, and charge them interest on the money.
Say what you like about slavery, nobody managed to make them pay student loans.
> when lots of glass was made with some Uranium content,
The uranium in glass is perfectly safe, it's the safest (although expensive) way to store radioactive waste.
All glass contains some radioactive bits of rock - it's a pain making some optical detectors, you have to chemically purify the glass to get the background down
There are also a whole bunch of optically really useful glasses you can't get any more because they contain lead. Lead chemically bonded inside glass inside an optical instrument sent into space = because won't somebody think of the children !!!
Meanwhile you can buy lead crystal glasses to drink from in any antiques shop.
> China COULD compel Huawei to put in backdoors.
Which is exactly why you should use them.
Which is better security?
A, buy kit from china and check it for backdoors, weaknesses, vulnerabilities.
C, buy kit from a company HQ in Finland (but with chips made all over the world) and don't bother checking for any flaws, vulnerabilities etc but trust it implicitly cos Finns are really nice people.
The best example is that the USA put "national security" tarrifs on LCD screens because they might be use din jet fighters. So Toshiba and sharp had a lot of laptop shaped LCD panels that they couldn't profitably sell in the USA - so they decided to make laptops instead.
It will be interesting to see what the Chinese targets are going to be. Probably GM and farmers since that hits Trump's base - just as electioneering starts for 2020.
Then wait for Boeing to be really suffering from the 737Max before announcing a ban on Boeing in China (airbus manufacture there)
Now the HR director of cultural awareness would demand that everyone had the right to their tartan on the desktop. Then they would be fired (with a huge payoff) and the new director would claim it was insensitive to non-scots and ban tartan, at which point they would be fired (with a huge payoff) .... repeat...
>I find it remarkable that a civilian contractor would be considered able to recruit effectively for the armed forces.
They don't do the choosing they do the admin.
Would you find it remarkable that you take somebody train them to the peak of physical fitness, teach them to use a variety of cutting edge weapons, obey orders without question and kill on demand - and then have them work on Crystal Reports and Oracle Whatsit Generator while paying for their food and housing ?
Here the army admin stuff is all done by soldiers. However the admin depts doesn't seem to demand exactly SAS levels of fitness. So the local donut shop has a queue of 50+ year old 'soldiers' in uniform with machine guns wearing what are probably 48inch waist camo fatigues
I assume this reassures the ordinary citizens that our way of life is being guarded from the Russians/Chinese/Belgians
It's more an example of attitude.
If the police and security services feel that the laws don't apply to them and their job is to get around these fiddling legal niceities, then the people lose any trust in the system.
Tried living in a country where the police are just the gang with the nicest uniforms? It doesn't lead to widespread social and economic good
ironic because monoculture is precisely what made open source successful.
You publish some source code for Linux and you could be sure that your users are familiar with cmake, build with GCC and have the standard Linux libraries. Before that you needed autoconf to support the little differences of a dozen mostly-posix Unixes
But back in the old days of Windows you would need to ship separate code and build instructions for a half-a-dozen free versions of Windows C compilers and IDEs all with their own build systems and incompatible shared libraries - it was never worth the effort, so everyone concentrated on Linux.
Also some insane requirements:
Initially it had to run on both electric and non-electric lines and go between them at speed, so needed a gas turbine engine in addition to all the electric gear - this got dropped after all the prototypes were built.
Health and safety said you couldn't ave electricity in a passenger car, so it had to have a separate power car, but passengers couldn't go through it - so it had to have 2 dinning cars on either side. This got dropped after the project was abandoned for all other electric trains
Then there were the typical 70s strikes, the designers were from aerospace so the railway engineers wouldn't work with them, the drivers went on strike because it didn't have a stoker etc
