Posts by Yet Another Commentard 449 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2011
"In fact, as is well-known, the Guardian has no shareholders at all."
Except, of course, the shareholder you then go on to name, which owns all the shares in the Guardian Media Group (owner of the Guardian and Observer, the latter of which seems to be under a constant death threat). So it does have shareholders, albeit just the one.
There is some value in sub-editors who check the inaccurate things professional journalists inadvertently type.
You are correct, plus a bit more.
Drones (as someone notes below) are haploid and male, workers and the queen are all diploid and female. They are not identical clones because firstly of meiosis which mixes things up, and secondly on a mating flight a queen tends to be very promiscuous and mate with six or so drones in an afternoon. Which must be quite tiring for her, not quite as bad as for the drones whose knackers explode at the climax of the act.
So with the semen of six drones in her the workers are half-sisters sharing six different fathers.
In a further mind-bending thought, when you think it through a drone has no father and cannot have any sons. He has a grandfather and can have grandchildren.
As that great philosopher Winnie The Pooh said "You never can tell with bees."
If Song's claim is true then it's pretty poor from an ethical standpoint regardless of whether they are assembling iPhones, motherboards, or things for a NASA probe. It's the compulsion that's the issue.
It may be worth noting that, if they are volunteers, then interns at Foxconn would still seem to be paid about £153 per month more than interns in the UK. Remind me again which state is exploitative?
At a guess if they found a problem it would be over to the duplicate on earth, try to replicate the problem, and then work out how to fix it, or what can be done with things in a less than optimal state. So with this gravity calculation stuff on the boom, if it's wrong, rewrite the software, bung an update across, try again etc.
Better to know now there's an issue than halfway through some actual test which could damage the science. Quite why here and not over to the right I could not answer.
Re; CmdrX3
Perhaps Kparsons84 epitaph should be simply "a man of whom even Winston Churchill said 'Who?'".
For Mr Armstrong, no comment is worthy. A few moments quiet reflection on the passing of another of my childhood heroes and a simple curiosity of why there seem to be no more of them will do for me.
<silence, respectful silence>
Bermuda already has white roofs on all of its housing. It's for a different reason though - there is no freshwater, so every house collects its rainwater in a big tank for use in drinking, washing, cooking etc. The white roofs are limestone (often painted too, but still white) and stepped. It helps kill the bacteria in the rain. Allegedly.
I have no data on how effective that is for the albedo of Bermuda, but collecting water like that is a seriously handy proposition for anywhere with rainfall but constant hosepipe bans and water restrictions (ahem, UK, I am looking at you).
Is that there is no way 22 witnesses at less than four minutes each will be called. The point is that Samsung have to prepare for all of them, when one or two will be called. So, like a student come exam time, Samsung can either try prepping for all of them poorly, or a couple of them well in the hope those are the chosen ones. Apple knows this, so it's just trying to improve its position.
I've been involved in a few cases in Blighty, and the golden rule is to never, ever, piss off the person at the front wearing the wig (in US terms, in the black robe with the hammer). I am surprised either side would be willing to risk doing just that, but both of them have. Bizarre.
@Steen Hive
Just a small point, extradition is not the same thing as repatriation. I have no idea about the legal impact of either on Swedish or other international law, nor would I draw conclusions on how things would work under one or under the other, but they are very different things.
Whereas I just gave up buying DVDs (and don't pirate either) because:
a) the mindless pap they try and sell does not interest me; and
b) I got annoyed sitting through the bloody copyright messages at the start of each darn disk.
Last DVD bought in 2006, last CD before that. Never pirated a film/music.
Mind you, I am very old.
"Can't they play a tune you can whistle?"
@AC
Fees. That is all. Performance is not matched to reward, funds are removed via a bid-offer spread, and a proportion taken from every contribution. Even with your SIPP you will be hit by some Financial Services fees, sorry, it's as much of life as death and taxes.
It's not just the investment fees either. When your SIPP (or my pension) ends, have you seen the annuity rates you will get? I will not get back what I paid in, unless I live to be around 173.
I agree with the sentiment, but a pension is more of a tax stalling than tax avoidance. When you come to cash it in, you'll have it down as income and hand a proportion of it over to whoever is at No 11 Downing Street.
I think there is an issue that whilst as a pension contributor I do vicariously own bits of companies, I cannot ring up my pension fund manager and demand he sell GOOG because they don't pay enough tax. He's too busy making sure my pension shrinks in real terms every year to do that.
It was about National Service for the young, and something like this.
Contrast:
Do you think there is insufficient discipline amongst the young?
Do you think the army provides structure and discipline?
Do you think more discipline would be a Good Thing?
Do you agree with National Service?
with
Do you think there is a lot of violence amongst the young?
Do you think they should have access to guns and knives?
Do you agree with National Service?
etc etc
Doug is on the money (I know nothing about Tea Partiers though, being a Brit)
I don't have the stats to hand, but in the aftermath of 9/11 IIRC more extra people died because they chose to go by road over the six months after it, than died in the 9/11 atrocity.
Humans are an odd bunch that don't really understand risk.
I think the thing is that it's not so much they have been effective, it's that they are always looking for the last terrorist attack, not the next. "No shoes, no underwear, no liquid..."
If it is so good, why have these terrorists not been stopped more often?
Or just decided to cut the middle man out and walk into an airport en-masse with suitcase bombs and detonate them all. Airport goes down for months, thousands of deaths, lots of publicity, total avoidance of any security theatre anyone could throw at them. Here in London the Tube has not been hit since 7/7, there is no extra security that I can detect.
I'll stop typing now.
You forget that most people are honest. The standard internal flight idiocy of having the baggage return outside security by the exit (Atlanta I think does this) shows that. Anyone could walk in, grab a bag on the conveyor, and walk out. Sure, most of the time you'll get dirty underwear, but you may hit the jackpot once. I digress.
There is more of a risk having your bags unzipped so TSA can open them at will once out of sight than the theatre up front. Are we really to say that a minimum wage secure side person would not be able to slip through and plant explosives/drugs in any open bag? If it's so easy to make a bomb from household chemicals, cleaning fluid the like, used by, er cleaners, in the airport - there's your weakest link, surely. Or even, all those open bags, does nobody, ever, have a rummage and nick some aftershave or something? I mentioned my SSS fiasco some time back, I think it was due to being stopped once on the way in to be asked "has anyone interfered with your luggage" and me saying "well, it's had to be unlocked and out of my sight for the past 15 hours, so I have no idea." Which did not go down very well at all.
I fear The Powers that Be prefer you to be scared and grateful than thinking.
I know that this has not been hammered out yet, but I was looking at the titanium launch rod and I remembered that with PARIS some ice formed on the wing binding it to the control box. Is there going to be a similar issue here, where ice could form between the loops on Vulture 2 and the titanium rod?
If that were to happen, would the proposed rocket motor break them easily so as not to significantly affect its performance?
Will the low temperature grease you used on the release mechanism last time work its magic in these circumstances?
If this has been discussed already, just ignore me. Or, if I am just being an idiot ignore me too.
My understanding from the MS blogs is that there are no "system builder" licences now. You are either "upgrading" from Vista/7/XP or you are an OEM following the rules in this article. This muddies the water further as I don't know if this OEM-style licence could be obtained by buying (e.g.) a hard drive plus OEM licence.
My issue with all this is that should I "upgrade" to 8 and my hard drive die, which is an entirely probable event, how do I rebuild Windows 8? Do I have to reinstall 7, then reactivate it, then install 8 and activate that? What happens when I decide to upgrade my machine big-style, and replace the Mobo, graphics, RAM etc – how do I install 8 on the new thing? I cannot buy a "system builder" licence to lob in a DVD and install it, I assume I must go via the "upgrade" path then call MS to explain why it's on new hardware. That takes ages.
The OEM path described in the article makes it look as if there will be no "hardware plus OEM" licence sales, thereby killing a rather obscure, but still numerous and profitable, market – the home system builders.
@davnel
I am no fan of the SEC, but this statement is, ahem, rubbish. The SEC does not compel any company to list, it just regulates them once they deal in traded securities (if "makes them tick some boxes and shout at them when the SEC fails" is regulation). The company's owners/exec decides when and if to list.
If it forces firms to list, then why are the following in private hands...
Mars ($30bn revenue)
Bechtel ($27.9bn revenue)
Toys-R-Us (13.86bn revenue)
@Elmer
I love "since records began" trivia. my favourite was the whale in the Thames near central London - the first seen since records began in 1913. Who in 1913 thought they would keep a log of not seeing whales in the Thames? Was it an easy job until 1996, with entries such as "no whales seen today" or "abandoned car tyre caused false alarm" etc. etc.
Anyhow - back to the topic in hand....
It's not just that.
having two "desktops" is painful. Just as an example I thought I'd try out the Finance "metro app" so that involved me copying and pasting some old ticker symbols from a spreadsheet type thing. I can't readily alt-tab between Metro apps and Desktop Apps, so witness much mouse furtling, (going "start" then "desktop"). Just like you are trying to say there is no need for - note this was on a one-screen laptop. More than one screen gives its own issues.
As mentioned in the article - try using a virtual machine or a remote connection for this stuff, the Windows key opens the wrong bloody start menu.
Having two IE versions (double up for 64-bit) is tricksy too. Download a file in Metro, flip to Desktop to find the file (via start, wtf? why can't I just minimise it?) and, I'd lost the file. Without thinking, and because there's an "e" on the taskbar, I hit that. new IE opens, unrelated to Metro one. Now I feel lost and confused.
Today I have had cricinfo open in an IE window on my 7 machine. As I work I can see the depressing score rendered from the title bar of the window in the little taskbar thing whilst all my real work is full screen across a couple of monitors. In 8, not a hope. it shows a little square "e". So to check the score I have to go to IE in full, not just a glimpse down (I am sure there are work related similar things like this).
Why do all the Metro apps use so much screen real estate to the left, and all the info crammed off-screen to the right, and it won't even show on a monitor to the right. So I have to scroll to see the content. Cool and easy on a phone, but a nightmare with a keyboard (remember, I am meant to use keys, like you said). It's not productive.
Office 13 has serious interface issues too, making everything white is harder to see what the content is because the interface SCREAMS at me. Stupid animations (see Thurrott on Word) are annoying. Icons are too big and too intrusive. it's desinged for fingers the size of badly bruised cumberland sausage, not a mouse pointer.
Outlook, the "premier" mail/calendar application cannot show unopened messages waiting in metro, which seems to be because it's not a "Metro" application. No, i have to use the mail app connected to exchange to do that. So more duplication, and I am meant to pay for an application that lacks the functionality of the free one? The reason - Metro. It's a different place, and designed for touch.
To shut down I could spend some time on Google to find out how to add a button to the desktop, or I could reset the popwer switch to "shut down" (still can't have it set to restart AND to shutdown though, as there is one button there), or I could find one pixel on the right, (which is bloody difficult with another monitor to the right) to find a charm to click on a link to find shutdown/restart. Everything takes more clicks and more head scratching.
7 start menu has a cool feature of hovering over an application shows the recent documents. I use it all the time. It remembers my recent applications too. During a month I use different ones, so it changes. In 8 I have to pin to them to the taskbar. In 7 it just happened. More time faffing around, eating up taskbar real estate. (I do like the way the recent documents pop up on the pinned applications, but why do I need to do that?)
I can handle the flat, bland look of it. I can handle the idea of removing the start menu, I can even handle idea of Metro. I just feel that as a desktop user I've been put to the back of the useabilty queue as Microsoft chases some mobile dream.
Unless, of course, Balmer wants to give me a free 1440 line touch monitor with my Win8 licence.
Oh, I feel better for getting that off my chest.
Politeness does not help if you are not American.
For me it starts long before I even get to TSA. Every time since about 2007 that I have travelled in or from the US I have had the dubious pleasure of "SSSS" being stamped on my boarding card. When I asked why I was told "it's random". If only I had six numbers from the lottery with such regularity. For those left to have the pleasure, "SSSS" is shorthand for "mandatory crevice search" (well, not quite, I think it means "non-US person, so make sure you rough him up a bit"). The randomness of it was confirmed on my last trip when I looked in the "special" line to see me and a bunch of Mexicans, two Asians, and another European. Hmmm, entirely random.
Of course once branded one has to give everything to TSA, who usually force you to turn away from your belongings whilst you are turned over. Turning around to make sure nobody has just lifted your wallet/laptop/whatever gets a severe reprimand. After eight successive SSSS experiences I opted to put the lot in the hold, and had nothing but my passport and a newspaper. That precipitated long and laborious conversations about where my bags where, essentially calling me a liar for not having hand baggage. Explaining "it's because this happens every time" didn't go down too well. After that, I have refused to fly to, or visit, the US again. Not that the US will care about that, but it hardly makes it Land of the Free.
Isn't the problem that Auntie Beeb is for some bizarre reason chasing ratings? As a result we end up with derivative "safe" stuff, as we have had for years.
To deal with worldwide - sell an overseas licence, make it cheap-ish. No number, no iPlayer. UK licences give the full Monty (and something like 20 devices per licence), overseas limited to what the beeb can show there.
Next, start on a series of one-off TV plays. A bit like the Radio 4 equivalent. Each one should NOT have a recognised writer or have "stars" in it. Run one each week, on BBC2 or BBC4. You will have lots, and I mean lots, of dross, but what's needed is an Abigail's Party amongst it all to make the difference. If one is well written, well acted, and has potential, then syndicate it. Or get the team back to dream up an equally clever series.
We have not moved on since the 1990's when it would be "oh, just put David Jason in it". The BBC is in a unique position to make programming that is "edgy" but it is far too conservative, and desperate to hit the lowest common denominator. Sadly it seems to be Channel 4 that does more of that. That is what the BBC should be about, relatively risk free ambitious TV that cannot be done commercially. Endlessly copying some x-factor crap is useless (yes, I know, not contemporary drama). Trying to remake Morse 100 different ways is stupid.
Us rural hillbillies could demand the same for things you require, such as water, food, that sort of stuff. You see, we grow it here and collect it here, but pay the same as you in the supermarket despite it being cheaper for us just to get it from the field/out of the sky/local reservoir. No, we share all that with you and pay more as a consequence.
That's the point of price equalisation, you win on some, you lose on some.
...and I don't even live in Wales.
I see the point of this, but there are a couple/few things you can’t measure:
1) The sheer pain iPad users will go through to use the shiny in corporate environments. Witness the Good app, which has the most ironic name of any software. It’s a pain, and simply does not work very well. Blackberry Server (at least from the handset point of view) Just Works. As a bonus you can access the corporate address book too (which our version of Good does not allow, other versions may). Rather than throw the iPad away in annoyance, they put up with it and more people want them. We’re nearly at 50%BB 50%idevice/android for mobile e-mail. BB falls as every individual contract is renewed, pretty much. It works,, but it's not cool.
2) Not many people use anywhere near all Excel does. “SUM” and if you are lucky “VLOOKUP”. But your point about actually using it on an iPad is correct.
3) An aside but both PowerPoint and Keynote should have been killed at birth. Both of them, (and that Prezzi thing) have been stifling good presenters for years.
4) All of our iPad users also have a laptop/desktop and a phone (usually an iPhone or similar). The iPad saves no weight, it is something else to carry. And look cool on the train with.
It’s all in “the cool” as long as people feel good using them, they will find an excuse to use them.
I commute Brum to London 3-4 times a week. I have a pass, as it works out cheapest when you can't predict which train you'll be on. Are you sitting down? Cost per month is still over £1,400 for first class. Without one it would be nearly that a week.
I agree, it's worth the extra for sake of having a seat with a decent table, no crowding, food (usually passable, breakfast is consistently good), and a large gin on the way home. But still, £1,400 a MONTH! At least my firm gets the tab, even if they expect me to be on the vpn while on the train.
Are they not exactly the same plot - as in Independence Day is the HG Wells book set in the US but with the twist of a computer virus and not a cold virus doing for the aliens?
Mind you, so is Mars Attacks. Perhaps we should just do a list of "films with the plot of War of the Worlds"
Of the three, Mars Attacks wins purely because it does not take itself seriously, and mercilessly kills A list actors left right and centre.
Please let's stop the silly "i" mania at the end.
From "dictionary dot com" which knows a bit about words:
[The plural is] Viruses. It is not viri, or (worse) virii. True, the word comes directly from Latin, but not all Latin words ending in -us have -i as their plural. Besides, viri is the Latin word for 'men' (plural of vir, 'man', the root of English virile). There is in fact no written attestation of a Latin plural of virus. The convention for forming the plural of Latin words in English is to use the Latin plural form, or, if Latin does not actually have a plural form for the word, to form the plural in the normal manner used for other English words. Virus is a second declension noun ending in -us. However, it is one of the few such nouns that has no plural in Latin. It occurs only in the singular. So, just as with ignoramus, one forms its English plural by appending -es.
The main irritation is that they don't supply the length of flex that can sit between the wall socket bit and the white transformer bit that comes standard with a MacBook. Using the Macbook one has significantly increased my "user experience" of the iPad (I can sit on the sofa now while it charges).
That's really useful, and given the cost of an iPad smacks of penny pinching not to lob one in the box; it's not as if it required a redesign for the tablet, it's the same fitting as the plug already there. Just a useful addition.
Much as it pains me to say it, but the 2011 accounts confirm directors not getting a cash bonus or payrise this year:
"The Executive Directors asked to keep their 2012 remuneration unchanged from 2011 levels and therefore the salaries at Executive and Divisional Director level have been frozen for 2012."
Mind you, it's pretty easy not to take a payrise when you are on £380k basic, plus £165k in shares plus pension contributions of £19k (p74 2011 accounts) isn't it, Paul Pindar (highest paid director)?
I must confess that surprised me, as they earn less each year than Bob Diamond does each month (roughly £1M a month there), even impoverished Wayne Rooney et al do better than that. That's not a defence of ridiculous pay. I think the xkcd on money sums it up quite well; the differentials between directors and those that actually make the company do stuff.
It's tough at the top (but you have to be hard as bloody nails at the bottom).
I tend not to tip on the bill, but give folding stuff to the guy/girl who served me. Mr Z may have done the same and the waiter(ess) not said anything.
The reason for this is simple - in Pizza Express the other month I asked the girl what happens to tips on the bill, she told me they were subject to a 30% "handling fee" on behalf of her employer, then split amongst all staff. Now, the latter is good, the guys in the kitchen never get a cash tip, the former poor and rampant exploitation (assuming she was telling the truth).
Also - it's a gratuity, not giving one is not illegal. If you want more add it to the price of a meal and pay your staff a decent amount.
Now I am going to have a shower having seemingly defended that man. I feel dirty.
Much as I hate to reference other sites, there is a site, which is formed of the word "win" and then the Latin for "above" and then "site" where the owner has done just that - or at least a series of pages of changes. I cannot vouch for their "noticableness" or otherwise, and the owner is often described as being no more than a shill.
I'm not trying to defend MS here, but all the ranting seems to be about the replacement for the "start" menu, which is the tiled Metro screen. On that run "apps" which are the full screen only things. These are not the applications you know such as Excel, or Word or whatever.
If you ignore all that guff then windows is still there, you can run "applications" such as excel next to word next to access on several monitors, just like you used to. Sadly MS has pushed the rather crappy Metro bit as being Windows, or people have not really read what MS has said.
It's a bit like saying MacOS X Lion has no start button. I've got to go into this crappy launch pad over several screens of icons to find the one for the app I want to launch, and it will only show me one on the screen at a time once I load it. (don't use Linux, no idea what that looks like) Nobody seems to be moaning there - it's all perception, and there MS has screwed up really big time.
IIRC it's called the blue pencil test (or doctrine).
If you can strike the offending part and leave the rest of the contract valid, it still stands. if the offending part cannot be struck without destroying the contract, then (subject to another legal remedy) it's voided. But it has been 21 years since I studied this stuff, and I too am not a lawyer.
"However, the council is reaping other benefits from BYOD, such as office space rationalisation, including a reduction in the number of desks it provides, the introduction of hotdesking, and flexible working."
Genuine question - how is this in any way coupled to BYOD? We've had hot desks, hotelling and whatever for years, no BYOD (oddly not for management, for whom a permanent desk, in a nice office, to themselves, aids their productivity, but somehow reduces mine).
Unless, of course BYOD extends to "provide your own office furniture"
Yes, and no.
There is no real reason to suppose that RNA was the first replicator - it could have been the millionth generation one. The problem is, all the prior ones, if they existed, were not as "good" and have been gobbled up.
The best analogy I've seen is a dry stone arch. It looks impossible to make, as it self-supports on the keystone (which mimics the idea of Irreducible Complexity) . But if you know there was scaffold there to make it which was later removed, you can see how it was made, even if the scaffold is no longer there.
Now, what was the scaffold made of...?
This disturbs me. Why were the police so eager to arrest this lad (I am unsure of the charge) but seem incapable when my parents called to say they had just been burgled (burglarized for our US readers) and the felon was running down the road. it took three weeks for someone to come out and say "have a crime reference number, we'll never catch him."
Does this mean the police are keen to deal with things that may be civil rather than criminal? Or keen to deal with things where there may be some TV time or a rich/famous victim?
This point cannot be over emphasised. We have the ability and the systems to do this, with some form of control, to make sure only reasonable and necessary snooping is done. I have yet to see a justification for the change.
The risks of the status quo is that the warrant granter just rubber stamps meaning there is no control - but (s)he would be in hot water should the request, in actual fact, be ultra-vires.
The risks of the new system would be that it is abused, or there would be fishing expeditions against, say, troublesome privacy activists, or even that some scroat in the outsouricng company would just decide to have a look at what <insert celebrity/fit chick on the bus> has been up to.
This is a dangerous slippery slope, and I hoped it had died a death with the last Government.
As "no pressure" is one atmosphere different from sea level- I doubt it would be a problem. Omega also supplied the watches to the Apollo crew - so they have done a few hours in a near vacuum, hot, cold, hot cold etc. AFAIK they all still work, 40 odd years on.
Lewis has already picked up on the single most useful feature of the Seamaster (not the Helium release valve, I have no idea who uses that) but the strap expansion.
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