Posts by AdamWill 1411 posts • joined 4 Nov 2010
I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, but:
1. This is an international site. Not everyone reading here is in the UK. I'm in Canada, for instance. There are lots of Americans here too, and the IRS is notoriously...grabby.
2. It's not just about you paying your income tax. Various taxes your employer pays or credits they claim might depend on your physical location or tax residence (which, as you note, aren't the same thing).
3. Your employer might have rules and policies that, while they aren't laws, you're still going to have to consider. Mine, for instance, only allows you to work from another country while getting paid at the scale for your "home" country for two years. After that your pay gets changed to scale for whatever the new country is, which if you're in the Caribbean is going to be "lots lower", most likely. And if you don't tell them you moved, you're in trouble.
I'm not saying anyone shouldn't do it, I'm just saying it's not as simple as "get visa then bog off to beachside paradise". You're at least going to want to tell your employer about it first, and yes, they *can* raise hell if you do it without agreeing it with them, unless it's somehow written into your contract that you can do it.
Sure there is!
However, it involves taxing the money from the people who saved it - well-paid workers, upper management, and companies themselves - and giving it to the people who lost out.
Now, go check out the results of the last several elections and consider the likelihood of this actually happening.
"And before people start with the conspiracy theories that this is government tech gone wrong, LAX is about 100 miles from Edwards Air Force Base, 160 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base, and 270 miles from Area 51 – and all would likely be well outside the range any wearable flying device would be able to travel."
Well, that's all *you* know...
That's not what they "suggested", though. They "suggested" that as long as the division of childcare and other domestic work is documented to be substantially unequal at a national scale, the legal point that scheduling work events outside of contracted work hours has the effect of indirect gender discrimination holds.
This has nothing to do with anybody "judging" you or your partner.
1. $20bn? Twenty freaking billion dollars?
2. How do you even buy "the US operations" of a determinedly international social network? What *are* the "US operations"? Does the network split into a US one and an international one? This whole "US operations" thing keeps getting mentioned like it's a perfectly reasonable concept, but I'm yet to read a convincing explanation of what it's actually going to *mean*.
3. Microsoft and...Wal-Mart for some reason? What?
4. A 'profit-sharing' deal? Does TikTok actually make any profits? I thought the answer was no.
Plus, you know, it's important to keep a sense of perspective about just how terrible the consequences of so-called 'cancel culture' are.
I'm familiar with some of the specific examples that open letter cited and I do think a few of them could've been handled better. Sure. But, you know, perspective. A handful of generally extremely privileged white people got punished kinda clumsily for pretty minor alleged transgressions. This is a bit regrettable, yeah. AFAIK, most or all of them 'fell' immediately into similarly cushy and privileged jobs to the ones they had before.
This is hardly the worst human tragedy of our times.
For most people, the alleged evils of cancel culture don't even amount to this, they amount to "some people were mean to me on Twitter", which, you know, again, perspective. Some people have been way meaner to JK Rowling on Twitter than she really deserves (and that whole newspaper front page thing was a really bad idea on someone's part), but she has not been 'cancelled' in any practical way. She still has a giant platform to say whatever she thinks. She still has multiple publishing contracts. She's still, AFAIK, working on multiple major movies that are coming out in future. She's not exactly been banished from society, has she? Ditto Atwood, Chomsky and co - they all don't exactly seem to have any trouble getting their perspective in the news any time they feel like doing it...
What I like is that the branding company cunningly built obsolescence into the new name. In five years they'll be back to get paid another eye-wateringly large sum of money to change it to "Rackspace Solutions".
"Have you ever tried to play a Blu-Ray DVD in Linux or *BSD? What about streaming 4K Video from Amazon? How about playing "The Division" or "Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord" or "Destiny 2"? All of these will required breaking the T&C's to work, if they work at all."
Sure, but none of them are things you need to do (or ought to be doing, if your employer is paying...unless you work for a game developer...) on a professional workstation.
I dunno, I used to care about that stuff a lot more, but a decent blu-ray player costs like a hundred bucks, and everyone streams movies these days anyway, don't they? Plus a PS4 plays blurays just fine. Plus it or just about any cellphone can stream video fine. I gave up worrying about whether I can play movies or games on my desktop/laptop computers, oh, I dunno, a decade ago or so. I have other things for doing that.
"You must be Barking and Dagenham, the east London borough"
You could just say "you must be Dagenham", which is already (fairly obscure) slang for "completely mad". The (possibly apocryphal) story is that it was a nickname of Margaret Thatcher's, because Dagenham is two stops on from Barking...
to be a bit fair here: the 'smart' functionality of all the 'smart' appliances I've seen so far has been basically bolt-on extras. My fridge has some 'smart' features, so does my washing machine, so does my range. I haven't set any of them up or ever actually connected them to the internet and they still cool things, wash things, and burn the eggs (respectively) perfectly well, so far.
The price points cited also seem kinda misleading because, in general, 'smart' features go along with other upgrades. There isn't usually a choice between two models with identical features otherwise, but with/without an internet connection; the model with 'smart' features likely also has several other upgrades over the model without.
I believe your objection is covered under "5. I personally only ever need to fly to New Zealand non stop with an entourage of 500 people and my race horses."
Magnix is based in the Pacific Northwest, and is working with small local air carriers. The geography of the Pacific Northwest is such that we have quite a lot of small planes doing short runs with a small number of passengers and very limited luggage. Vancouver to Victoria, for instance, is a 30 minute flight which Harbour Air runs with 19-passenger seaplanes:
https://www.harbourair.com/about/aircraft-fleet/
they run various other short flights out of Vancouver and up the coast, and there are similar operators down in Portland and Oregon running similar short flights with small planes.
Those are exactly the operations that Magnix is targeting. Their goal is not to fly a 747 at full load for several hours.
They are already working on this, but you have to jump through a *ton* more regulatory hoops to fly a brand new plane design with batteries than you do to fly an existing, extremely-well tested plane with the power source changed out. They're doing these tests with retrofitted existing planes to work on what they can until all the relevant approvals are in place for the planned purpose-built electric plane models. And to get a bit of publicity, of course.
"Finally and definitively, NASA boffins call it duct tape and it saved Apollo 13. As boffin Ed Smylie, who designed the CO2 scrubber mod, said "One thing a Southern boy will never say is, 'I don't think duct tape will fix it.'""
Unless that quote was written down, you can't tell what spelling the boffin in question would have used, because spoken aloud "duct tape" and "duck tape" tend to sound exactly the same (you can't presume that anyone who thinks of it as "duct tape" will carefully pronounce that final t). So what you're getting is the spelling of the journalist who wrote down the quote, not the spelling of the person who said it.
"Wot! Has Trumpo sold off Hawaii and Alaska and didn't tell anyone? Was that money going to be use to buy Greenland?"
Shh, don't tell anyone, but - yeah, he did. I bought them. I'm planning to buy a really big angle grinder and a really big tugboat and have them switch places, just for the lulz.
"You'll find this anywhere. It's just that Amazon is one of those places that are huge, touch many people's lives, and hence end up in the press. Google has similar issues, Microsoft has similar issues, software engineering companies and hardware engineering companies have similar issues."
Not...really. Google, maybe, if we consider all the folks they contract out their nasty grunt work (Youtube content moderation...grrk) to. But not really Microsoft, or any random given "software engineering company". They don't really have huge, poorly-treated groups of manual workers in anything like the way Amazon does, because they don't sell huge quantities of physical products.
All companies have their own issues, of course, but I don't think you're right to say that they all have similar issues to Amazon's.
"Our latest battle was persuading them that Satellite didn't work they way that they thought it did"
Good news! We seem to release a new major version of Satellite every week and they all work differently, so if you wait a couple months, chances are high that this will be fixed ;)
"Strong work, since the outdoor temperatures tend to be somewhat on the low side in that part of the world during December."
Well, Metrotown (same thing, it's officially called 'Metropolis at Metrotown', but everyone calls it Metrotown, no-one calls it Metropolis) is a (pretty large, and *extremely* popular) *indoor* mall. And, to the point, one at which management for some inexplicable reason keeps the HVAC set to "freaking tropical" all winter. The fact that probably about half the people who are there got there on transit and thus had to deal with the outdoor temperature and thus are probably wearing three layers they can't easily take off and carry and thus are melting in the 25 degree heat doesn't ever seem to have made it through to them.
"Most people recover. Is that anecdotal?"
No, it's a universally-reported fact. Just about every jurisdiction reporting stats on COVID-19 includes a 'recoveries' number. It is invariably significantly higher than the 'deaths' number. Wikipedia's current worldwide count is just under 2 million cases with 128,011 deaths and 500,996 recoveries, so 4x as many people are confirmed to have recovered as are confirmed to have died. (The recovery number on any given day is also a substantial undercount compared to the death number, as you can't be counted as 'recovered' until like two weeks after you leave the hospital, but you can be counted as 'dead' pretty darn quick...)
"Five days on hydroxychloroquine saved my cousin's life and got him out of the hospital after he was weaned off the respirator."
if your story is true, I'm happy for your cousin. But you have no idea whether hydroxychloroquine saved him, because you do not have (I'm presuming) an in-all-other-respects identical cousin who received the same treatment but without the hydroxychloroquine, and died.
If you get sick, go to the hospital, and eat a bag of M&Ms every day, you will either a) get better or b) die. Whichever happens, the M&Ms probably didn't cause it.
"And that doesn't just mean enduring the keynote sound system booming the audience into an impersonation of enthusiasm at 8am as a CEO bounces onto the stage to declare a golden dawn in their computing dynasty. It's not about sleeping through the 4.15pm breakout session addressing the intricacies of data transformation in R."
*ahem* I'll remind you that this is El Reg, and here we sleep through the *keynote* and make sure we're awake for the intricately detailed technical sessions, thank you very much!
...okay, okay, who'm I kidding, we drink our way through both.
Well, sure, but as you say, this is all perfectly normal and par for the course and the expected experience of anyone who deals with bug reports from anywhere. It seems a bit rich that IBM are effectively claiming it's an entirely unexpected thing and a significant factor in the delayed deployment of the software...
yeah. This bit struck me:
"Newman sees great value in continuous delivery, where software is automatically built and tested and therefore already ready for release."
It made me think, wait, he's been dealing with people trying to do microservices *without* CD? Like you I sort of thought that was the whole point...
"GCHQ's infosec arm has 3 simple tips to secure those insecure smart home gadgets"
1. Unplug it
2. Hit it several times with a hammer
3. Take it to the recycling depot
OK, OK, I kid (kinda). I actually have robot door locks and a robot garage door opener now! Never thought the day would come. On the one hand, I'm sure someone sufficiently dedicated could hack them over the internet while wearing a hoody and mumbling "I'M IN". On the other hand, I eventually decided, someone sufficiently dedicated could also just chuck a rock through the large window that's right next to the door, and being able to check whether I remembered to lock the damn door when I'm ten minutes down the road (and open the garage door without remembering to take the annoyingly chunky remote out with me) does turn out to be handy...
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