Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It was just common sense to have more control over the systems on which you relied. You don't start locking your front door for the first time just because w ell-known burglar has moved into the neighbourhood. If you've had any sense of security you'll always have locked up at night or when you left the house.
"no matter how well-meaning it may be when it is created "
Even that depends on what's meant by "well-meaning". These laws* are nothing more than a means to enable law enforcement to avoid due process of law. I don't see that as well-meaning at all. Due process, remember, is there to protect the innocent. The claimed reasons are not well-meant at all; they're just excuses to provide short cuts.
* We have an epidemic of mobile phone thefts. Something must be done. Legislating to permit warrant-less searches of premises for stolen phones is something, therefore HMG believes it must be done. If that one passes then providing the police "suspect" your premises might contain a stolen mobile phone they can just roll up and demand entrance - and maybe break in if they feel like it. For stolen goods of any nature and value, terrorist arms and exploaives, illegal drugs or anything else a warrant has been needed as a basic protection of English rights since 1215 - an increase of mobile phone thefts and 810 years of precedent can be overturned.
They still prefer you to use the subscription. They probably have to provide s free option for PR purposes so they have that box ticked but in such a way that if you seriously want to use it then the subscription is your only real (MS) alternative.
I can't help feeling that the ideal solution would have been to have a real consultant on their side. Not somebody who's going to sell them a product, undertake installation, integration, training or anything like that. Just somebody who would, for the duration, provide the in-house expertise they were lacking, act as a devil's advocate. The sort of freelance person that HMRC has been working so hard to drive out of the UK economy
"The benefits of free storage, searchability, immense security, outweigh the small loss in privacy - to me at least."
I've never subscribed to the idea of storing email on somebody else's computer. It has to pass through it, true, and if it's being scanned not storing it online won't help. The solution is two step. First move to download what you've got. Secondly, get your own domain and get an independent company to host it for you. If you're not happy with the service you can move it to a different hosting company. It's a bother to get everyone you deal with to switch addresses. I don't know about gmail - I stopped using them years ago - but Houtmailive will forward your email; if gmail also do that then the remaining traffic can be forwarded through to your new provider.
" if you live in the place known for 'x', then voting for something else is liable to be a waste of time (not always, but quite often)."
In both countries the status quo is maintained by the self-fulfilling prophecies of the number of people who can't be bothered voting because it would be wasted. If they did vote they might find it wasn't wasted at all.
That depends on what's meant by "you". If it's the company it's probably true. If it's just senior manglement it isn't. Manglement could find out themselves but it would involve believing what oiks on a lower pay grade say. By adding a fee the consultant adds value because he's so much more expensive than the workers so must be right.
"See for an example the article Melting Glaciers Revealing Ancient Tree Stumps from a Warmer Period that describes that a complete forest was covered by a glacier. "
Thanks. The linked article is in Icelandic but Google Translate helps. It seems to be a follow-up to an earlier article which I'll try to find. I'd guess the glacier was a fairly immobile sheet of ice so that it preserved the trees in situ much as peat does. I'm not familiar with Icelandic palaeoecology but I find it interesting that 3000 years ago is about the time the Late Bronze age across a swathe of N Ireland came to a juddering halt.
As to your second point the 23 years seems to indicate that the figure was taken from the Nature article I linked a couple of times in this thread. There are a few of points to note about that: firstly that it refers only to mountain glaciers, not ice sheets, secondly that it was sufficient to raise sea levels by about 18mm and thirdly the rate of loss was accelerating. In that context think what "This means that the uncertainty of the estimated volume of glacial ice, not the volume itself but the uncertainty of the volume, is five times the calculated change in the last 23 years" really means.
The uncertainty is going to be a smallish fraction of the overall volume. In itself it's equivalent to 10cm rise of sea-level so that the potential rise is very much greater. Far from saying it's not as bad as it sounds, it's saying that the potential rise is very large indeed. It's also well to remember that a rise in sea-level will set off a lot of erosion on vulnerable coasts. Parts of, say, the East Anglian coast already have problems with coastal erosion; a 1 metre rise could be quite devastating.
"many of them are melting. And what do they reveal? Tree stumps from the vegetation that used to grow there."
I'm curious as to where that has been observed.. Glaciers generally shove everything in front of them and pile it up in moraines. It seems more likely that they'd deposit trees which fell onto the surface from surrounding hillsides, as they do with dead climbers and Bronze Age travellers.
Customer service starts from the moment you go there* and if it's a nightmare to get in, a nightmare to get round the store to find what you want, a nightmare to queue to pay, a nightmare to get your purchases to your car and a final one to leave it doesn't matter how good they are at taking back goods are providing replacement parts: they've already failed at customer service multiple times by making the initial purchase a thoroughly unpleasant experience and not one to be repeated to sample the excellent aftersales service.
It may well be that things have improved beyond recognition but once one becomes an ex-customer because of past experience how does one get to discover that?
* Something businesses forget when they site their premises on car parks operated by parking vultures.
Yup, however clever you may think you are with data it's to no avail if you're no good at experimental design and fail to vollect the critical data. Tesco may well know when I last used one of their cards, about quarter of a century ago but they'll have no idea as why I never used it again unless they correlate it with the date on which they let a parking vulture firm take over their car park.
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