Posts by John Brown (no body)

Activision Blizzard accused of union busting, intimidating staff in complaint to watchdog

Re: You don't have a right to a "more equitable, sustainable, and diverse workplace".

"There is no law that states every employer must have his employees represented by a union "

True, but there is a "right to assemble", yet companies seem to think they can override this by doing everything in their power to stop the formation or joining of unions. Isn't "freedom" part of the constitution? If a majority of staff choose to join a union, and do so outside of "work", using no "work" resources, holding meetings away from "work" premises, why does do you think the employer has a right to even object, let alone actively discourage it even by legal means, let alone the illegal means referred to in the article?

Of course, for the employer, it's a "problem" because, even an unrecognised union has resources and can offer legal advice and resources to those employees who are members and provide support in employer/employee grievance procedures. Legal help which an individual might not be able to afford or even be aware of.

(I freely admit that not all unions are "nice", some have taken their power to the extreme with "closed shop" environments that can be just as toxic as employers hiring "union busters")

Re: The modern HR department

And became the toxic mess it is today when it changed from PERSONnel to Human RESOURSES.

Boffins say Martian colonists could pee in buckets, give blood if they want shelter

Re: I wonder if fecal matter could be used

I've not seen many Martian cows though. Nor fields of straw :-)

Running on empty, out of battery, power draining... three things the UK government definitely isn't. Oh no

Re: Running on empty? @WSG

"It's like the cars that turn off the engine at traffic lights and call themselves "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle""

My car does the stop/start thing too, but I've never seen it called, referred to or even associated with the phrase "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle". In fact, I've never even heard that phrase before you posted it here.

South Korea fines Google ₩207 billion for forking up attempts at creating Android variants

Re: Too little

"Not likely to change anything. CEOs just do what the shareholders want up until they jump ship

CEOs, especially of company's the size of Google, do what THEY want. If the shareholders disagree, then things may change, or the CEO and board will convince the shareholders to back off. In general, all a CEO has to do is keep the company making money and growing to keep most of the shareholders on side.

"or the shareholders don't want them."

..yes, IF enough shareholders can come together to try and oust the CEO, a relatively rare happening.

DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats sue NYC for trying to permanently cap delivery fees

Re: NYC... permanently cap delivery fees

And whatever the figures, we'd need to know the relative risk from the particles worn off the tyres compared to the various noxious fumes and particles coming from the exhaust pipe.

Re: Tepid or cold food delivery isn’t my bag

"you get freshly fried stuff that is the best it can possibly be."

In the case if chippies, I much prefer the fish that's been in the hot storage for a good few minutes to properly drain off the oil. Straight out of the frier isn't "the best it can possibly be". Same applies to anything battered.

Re: Tepid or cold food delivery isn’t my bag

"I pick up myself, every time."

Same here. I use local independents, and they charge the same (minus delivery charge) whether I phone, use their website, use JustEat or just rock up at the shop and order/wait. Picking up myself means no delivery charge, I know I'll get home while it's still hot and the takeaway keeps all the profit and stays in business longer.

The only reason many of them are signed up with JustEat and their ilk is because they were losing business to others who had signed up. They were forced into it and didn't get the early "sweetheart deals" the others got for the first year or so. But they had to do it as smaller profit is better than no profit by going under.

Re: Increase delivery prices for customers!

If they need to charge more than 20% of the order total, then either they are delivering a lot of low value orders and subsidising that from the fewer high value orders, or the business that has been subsidised by venture capital isn't actually viable unless there's only one or two players in the game.

I think what another poster said is right andt that the bill should be fully itemised for the services, just like it already is for the goods.

Vaccine dreams: A trip to Oxford to see a biscuit tin, some bed pans and ChAdOx1 nCov-19

"I don't know of anyone who has had to pay or wait for a Covid vaccination in our area. They are widely available at no cost."

Apart from some queue jumpers "going private", I don't recall reading of any vaccine recipients paying anywhere in the world. But the vaccine producers certainly are charging for each dose. The point is how much profit are the producers making? I doubt the Chinese or Russian producers are making much, if any, profits from theirs either. It'll be interesting to see if anyone does some research and investigation into this in the aftermath and produce some nice graphs show who made huge profits out of all the misery, suffering and death. Likewise, it'll be interesting to see who defends the profiteers and the PR spin put on it.

When you can make billions of doses of a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic and humanitarian crisis, you WILL be judged on how you responded. If the response is Billions in profit when others have stepped up and genuinely helped, then there really isn't much of a defence.

It'll be interesting to see which, if any, of the big pharmaceutical companies get "incentives" to move to different States or Cities in the US when at least some will have made billions out of vaccines.

Well, AZ say they have 25 manufacturing sites in 15 countries delivering to all parts of the world. It's also sold/used under other brand names so it may not always be obvious at first glance just how widespread that specific vaccines distribution is. It's also manufactured under licence in at least the USA and India and is now distributed in the EU under a new brand name so you don't hear so much of AZ vaccines in the EU now.

I'm not sure of the pricing, but I think the list price is something like $4 per dose, but may be cheaper where countries have invested in production or other subsidies. Not to mention the significantly cheaper distribution infrastructure than is needed for the very low temp vaccines.

Music festivals are back in the UK. So is the background bork

You never once saw a guitarist romping across the stage and yanking the cable out of the amp mid-riff?

It is every AV tech's nightmare

They could alleviate that nightmare to some extent by setting up their local screen and remote huge screens as extended screens instead of mirrored. At least that way, when it goes Total Inability To Support Usual Psychedelia, all the audience will see is the wallpaper, which could be something suitable to match the gig ambience on that display. Meanwhile, the AV technician can be frantically clicking stuff on the local screen where the windows and icons are still showing.

It may not solve the boot process display, but that depends on the hardware at the start of the boot process and the OS defaults during the OS boot phase, which may default to mirroring until drivers and settings are loaded.

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

Re: Sill they be armed with…

"It just isn’t the middle lane anymore - I regularly drive the M1 from London to Yorkshire, on the 4 lane stretches, the sheer numbers of morons sat in the 3rd lane from the left is shocking. Well, it was shocking, not any more."

Yeah, I do Leicester to Leeds and back regularly too and yes, twats sitting in lane 3 of 4 at 60mph is definitely a thing too. If lane 4 is doing 65, I have been known to pass them in lane 1 at 70, with an empty lane 2 between me and the slow traffic.

Re: From RIPA to Reaper

Yeah, I can understand the Police using military resources at times to assist with operations, but Local Authorities? What might they currently use aerial surveillance for? Anything thing they'd normally need, I'd expect them to hire in the relevant commercial services, eg aerial photography or whatever. Military aerial assistance implies some sort of emergency and the emergency service, eg fire and police should be dealing with that.

Re: Sill they be armed with…

Sadly, it's not just them any more. Since the first lockdown and large numbers of people not driving much, to a summer where going abroad was risky, time consuming and potentially exorbitantly expensive, we now have people who pre-pandemic rarely drove far, during pandemic barely drove at all and now are driving all over the UK on holidays and think the left lane is only for lorries and have taken out membership of the Middle Lane Owners Club.

Lenovo blames 'firmware' issue for blank-screened Smart Displays, says Google's working on a fix – 6 months after complaints started

get a refund from the retailer?

Clearly it can no longer work as advertised and it's way past time for a reasonable fix. Take/send it back to the where they bought from and demand a refund as it's clearly no longer of "merchantable quality". If I'd have been insane enough to buy one of these spy in the bedroom devices, I'd have done that long ago, not waited 6 months.

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Re: USB Tat

Havana Syndrome 2.0?

That's because they sold out of the compressors very early on and never got any more in. But they had 10 times many of each accessory.

The current item I've noticed sitting on the shelves for months on end is electric Churro makers. They just don't seem to be able to shift them, or maybe they just have an inexhaustible supply. Maybe they thought they would be popular with stay-at-home Brits pining for Spain?

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

"only to discover that the volume wheel at the bottom of the laptop had been turned all the way down."

I miss those. very useful :-(

Re: me too

I'm typing this reply on an oldish Toshiba which also has a physical WiFi on/off switch. There is no indication as to whether it is on or off other than to look very closely with a magnifying glass to identify whether left or or right is "on". (It's left, I checked when I found it, confirmed what it did, and have never turned it off since.) I suspect it's a hangover from when turning off the WiFi saved some battery power when not needed and the hardware could not be turned on/off with software settings and, for that matter, WiFi was a lot less ubiquitous.

Amazon to cover 100%* of college* tuition* for hourly employees* in the US

Re: What is wrong with people?

"I don't have to think Amazon is a soft and cuddly NGO to consider this is a reasonable employee benefit."

True. But looking at the big picture and Amazons past record of employee treatment, it does make one wonder what the ulterior motive might be.

Re: Plenty of future potential...

I must admit, I didn't think much further than "oh dear, Amazon approved education course at Amazon approved education partner schools". Your suggestion takes it to the next dystopian level!

On the other hand, US style capitalism has inspired many SF dystopian futures where corporates take over the country/world. Luckily, at least for now, most of the rest of the world is much further from that level of dystopia.

Tennessee agrees to pay Oracle $65m for Nashville location plan

Re: Larry, you tease!

"Perhaps the next big thing should be luxury recreational vehicles (RVs) for the nomadic corporate HQ. "

RVs? i thought they were called SuperYachts?

Amazon says Elon Musk's wicked, wicked ways mean SpaceX's Starlink 2.0 should not be allowed to fly

Re: Corporation Tax

They also claim they have invested something in the region of £30billion in the Uk over the last 10 years or so. How much that actually benefits the UK and the economy is another matter, but there are at least three massive Amazon warehouses that have appeared with 20 miles of my location over the last few years.

"See also, Amazon paid just under 3% corporation tax on it's profits in the UK this year."

FWIW, they paid 3% tax in total. The majority of which was employers NI contributions. The portion of the tax they paid that was corporation tax was very much lower than 3%.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

Re: rules-of-grammar + random number generator + dictionary search API -->

"But "bu****it" is 8 letters."

Yeah, but it used to be 2 x 4 letters. Bull shit. :-)

Re: "Then she starts putting concepts together and learning grammatical rules; "

"I think a lot of AI types spend so long on their little corner they forget that language actually evolved to do update other peoples internal database."

Maybe the best way to train all these natural language AIs is to let them loose talking to each other? I've chatbots do that and it tends to rapidly degenerate into nonsense :-)

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

Re: The importance of Darwin in tech.

"Any global corporation that cannot be arsed to provide an emergency contact address that is actually monitored, for such breaches, deserves all it gets."

Wile I agree, it's probably for the same reason that postmaster@, admin@, webmaster@ abuse@ etc are rarely monitored, probably full, or don't even exist in the first place. They not only get hammered by every spammer, but also anyone who has an axe to grind and thinks they are being ignored through the usual channels.

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

Re: "collect social media details from people they stop and talk to"

"I plead the Fifth."

Isn't that just confirming that you are guilty of something and only going to encourage them to dig even deeper into your life?

Refusing to answer on the grounds you may incriminate yourself always struck me as a dumb thing. Yes, I can see the point of the protection it offers, but surely, as I just said above, if "they" want you, "they" will get you, they just need to dig deeper for the evidence. "Pleading the 5th" is only another way of saying "I ain't doing your job for you" and will almost certainly go against you in any future sentencing if found guilty, ie being uncooperative.

Luckily, not all cops get that way. The ones who do should be leaving the job and looking for something a bit less stressful. Maybe take a job as a lion tamer or alligator wrestler.

Re: Not sure about that

Once something is in print (FB post / tweet / whatever) the law doesn't differentiate very much and the poster has a high bar to cross in proving it's not indicative of their intent or actions.

Sometimes, even when it's clearly just letting off steam, the "written" word can still land you in trouble

Re: But ...

That does sound a little odd. Surely if the Police have been called to an address and suspect a crime in progress, then they have "reasonable suspicion". A "joke" doormat should not be an excuse to just walk away, although a lazy cop who can't be arsed to do his job might feel it's a "reasonable excuse". They could at least have had a walk around and peered in the windows.

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

Re: "... failure is not a crime"

Yes, but in theory, once the sentence is served, they can be asked again and put away for another 5 years if still refusing to give it up. One defence might be that after 5 years in pokey a "reasonable person" couldn't possibly be expected to remember it.

Re: "... failure is not a crime"

"Lawyers must not lie on behalf of their clients."

That's why defence lawyers are very, very careful about what they listen to from their clients, which questions they ask when working up the defence strategy and always, always warn the client not to tell the lawyer anything incriminating. That way, the lawyer can present a defence "in good faith" because any lies they tell are only because they didn't have all the information.

Of course, that's where a good prosecutor is supposed to ask the right questions and get "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" from the witnesses and/or defendants (if the defendants can be put on "the stand")

Re: LOL no

"The law does usually care whether you deliberately deceived people or were just wrong. The problem here is that no-one believes it wasn't deliberate."

This! Lots of law, but fraud in particular, depends very much on proving intent. Otherwise it might just be naivety, a mistake or incompetence, which could lead to a vastly different outcome on whether the accused is found guilty or not and if so, how severe a sentence might be.

Australia rules Facebook page operators are legally liable for user comments under posts

But as the OP said, it could be argued that Facebook is the ultimate account holder on the platform and everything else is "3rd party comment". I'm sure lawyers will be looking very closely at all possible implications of this ruling.

Re: Back to the roots

I haven't read the full judgment, but from the article and the quotes in the article, there's a lot of references to commercial entities and Facebook. It makes me wonder how narrow or wide this judgment might be. Of course, if it's treated as precedent and case law, it might/could/will be applied to other platforms too.

3 years, 17 alphas, 2 betas, and over 7,500 commits later, OpenSSL version 3 is here

...and a partridge in a key pair!

Patch now? Why enterprise exploits are still partying like it's 1999

When there are big data breaches...

...do the prosecuting authorities take into account the (lack of) patch levels, especially if the breach can be shown to have happened because of a flaw where a patch has been made available and there could be a reasonable expectation that it should have been patched eg within the past year at most , thus stopping the breach from happening?

Lenovo throws everything it's got into TruScale ITaaS – even its in-house AI

Re: Best Sim Racing Monitor for gaming

Which article are you commenting on?

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

Why is there a shortasge of candidates?

Clearly the CV scanning system is assigning scores based on some sort or analysis of the CV. If the employers say "send me 50 CVs of candidates" then surely it's not beyond the wit of an agency to send the best 50, even if they can't find enough to pass the usual specified threshold. It sounds like the agencies are only sending CVs of applicants who pass the 95% threshold of their algorithm, or something like that, and so artificially creating a scarcity by eliminating those people who can't or don't know how to create a CV to "pass" the arbitrary screening process.

Re: And that degree ...

"It's like the old rule, never hire a thin cook... :P"

On the other hand, said skinny applicant for the cooks job could be the best cook in the world and simply have an overactive thyroid :-P

Re: To which you can add ...

"I've not encountered that --- I'm in my late 50s and haven't found getting new jobs a problem the last few times I've got fed up with manglement or been in a project team which got dropped."

A few years back, our corporate masters decided to be magnanimous and started offering "long service" bonuses. The first one becomes valid after 5 years of employment. Any company who thinks 5 years is "long service" clearly has problems. On the oither hand, if they think 5 years is a long time, there should be no problems hiring older, more experienced people if the biggest aspiration is to keep them working for 5 years.

I've also seem both employers and recruiters discriminate against loyal and longer service employees because "they don't have enough experience" because they didn't jump from one employer to the next like mayflies.

Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft

"The problem was people didn't want to run as a non admin user because they didn't want to have to log off and back on to change settings, so just ended up running as an admin user all the time. This led MS to implement UAC."

Of course, if the settings the user needed to change only affected their own account and were stored in their own part of the registry or a settings directory off the users home directory, it would no longer be a problem and UAC would not be needed.

UK gov blocks the acquisition of Welsh graphene fiddler Perpetuus Group over national security concerns

It's a shame...

...there doesn't seem to be the same level of investment in the UK. We seem to be good at inventing stuff but shit at getting it to production or even marketing it.

Likewise, there doesn't seem to be the same culture of venture capital as other countries such as the US seem have. Is it a problem with the UK tax system or something?

Likewise, in the US, we hear of people making millions or billions from a new company, then selling up, moving on and starting all over again. Here in the UK, it seems that people make their millions or billions, get a knighthood or made a Lord and become government advisors or just retire. There doesn't seem to be the same concept of serial entrepreneurship here.

ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

Re: Your data belongs to you

Also worth remembering that data about you is not necessarily your data.

"Otherwise there is nothing to trackback once delivered if you use disposable gloves."

...and remember not to lick the envelope!

The trenchoat with the dark glasses in the pocket. And the Fedora ----------------->

Met Office signs 32 vendors to £30m framework to put the wind up data platform

Re: And what for?

Agreed. The weather forecasts we get today are way better than 10, 20, 30 or more years ago and aimed at a much more local audience. But no one can predict with any real certainty precisely when or where the weather will be. A prediction of rain, and it passes by a few miles away, and the people who didn't get wet then whinge that the "weatherman" got it wrong again. I travel a lot around the UK and the weather forecast is generally what I see as I travel. It's pretty accurate most of the time by gross region and even gross time. But some people seem to think they should be getting 100% accuracy 100% of the time. Even the BBC weather maps can be reasonable, but look at the weather forecast a few days in advance, remember it then check again as you get a day closer and it's clearly been refined as more data comes in. That's chaotic systems work. You keep gathering data and refining the prediction as you get closer to the event.

Re: There's a small trough coming and it's not the weather

It's not split over 32 suppliers. It's a menu of suppliers who have won the right to sell the relevant service for part or all of the items on the framework. They buyer now knows these companies can supply some or all of their needs and can now choose who to buy from. It's entirely possible to for a company to "win" a place on a government framework and then not sell anything to the customer. The Met Office, for political reasons, have probably been told to buy from as many suppliers on the framework as possible, getting the best prices, but in practice, they will purchase related services/goods from only the larger suppliers who can supply all the related services/goods. You really don't want two inter-related products from two different suppliers as any problems will result in a game of blame-tennis. The smaller ones may get some crumbs of business, some will get nothing.