Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10171 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
Was it Shell who removed all the chairs from their meeting rooms and got stand-up tables?
Sure you make people attend a 4 hour meeting, but good luck getting them to stay all that time if they have to stand.
I suggest a further wrinkle to this plan. Power the projector with a running machine. That way nobody will have the breath to speak for more than 15 minutes while boring you to death with slides.
It's like Dilbert. When I were but a callow youth, someone introduced me to it and I found them only mildly amusing.
Then I went to work for a US multi-national - and suddenly agreed that Dilbert was incredibly funny.
His first job was working for (pre-CA) Computer Associates. Who definitely had Catbert as their HR director. Which is why he found it funny first.
I think you have forgotten about Grenada. An ex-British colony which suffered a coup by communists.
Don't think so. Again, did the US annex the territory of Grenada? Nope. They set up the old government which held elections and then left.
Notice how the Iraqi government told the Americans to leave, and they did. They then invited them back again later after losing all that territory to ISIS.
I didn't praise US foreign policy in my post, sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. But the point is they aren't doing it to annex territory.
The post below yours reminds me that NATO annexed Kosovo. Which is odd because they... erm... Didn't.
Note how Germany are still happy to have US forces based there, 70 years after they were part of the post-war occupying force. But nobody wants Russian forces there.
Not many countries do. I suppose the Syrian government do - but then they use nerve gas on their own people.
Archtech,
Laughing at Putin is exactly the right response.
Partly because it pisses him off.
Also because he's the one who's deliberately trying to be scary. And he's the one sulking because he was on the losing side of the Cold War. Because his system was both evil and rubbish.
Worrying about the threat Russia may or may not pose is something that's worth doing. Panicking, not so much. We're in NATO, so we're obliged by treaty to protect the Baltic States and Poland. We should either pull out of NATO (or kick them out) and admit we don't want to do that, or we should take our obligations seriously and so deal with the perceived threat.
Putin's problem is that he seems to want Russia to be perceived as a threat (as important) - but then whines pathetically when people do see Russia as a threat. Well ya can't have it both ways. And that's another good reason to laugh at him.
A deception the Germans were still buying (to an extent) even after half a million troops had landed in Normandy. It's scary how many panzer divisions Hitler kept around Calais - given how much damage Rommel could have done with them.
Apparently one of the rubber "tanks" got popped when it was charged by a bull. I like to imagine it taking off and flying round the field, making farting noises...
Putin is also feeling the pressure a bit this election. He'll win of course, non-token opposition isn't tolerated. But he's having to talk about social programs, because people are getting less thrilled with military success - when the economy is in the crapper. The Syrian adventure wasn't even popular to start with. And Putin had to miss a great opportunity to chest-beat about the US killing a hundred-odd Russian mercenaries last month, because that would mean admitting that the Syrian campaign has been so successful that they still require ground troops (something he said wouldn't be needed).
The problem is that Russian government gets about a third of its budget from taxes on oil and gas revenue. And that's down by a hell of a lot, since the heady days of $140 a barrel. Those were the days when they started increasing their defence budget and ordering all these shiny new weapons. Some apparently very impressive. But can they still afford more than a few of them? As you say, their defence budget is lower than the UK's, although of course wages are much lower so it probably goes a lot further.
Pete 2,
Your post makes no sense. Everyone has been living with the threat of nuclear anihilation since the 50s/60s. Russia was able to do that yesterday, and when these new weapons turn up will still be able to do it with the old ones anyway.
The US might spend R&D money on missile defence, but there's no serious program to stop the threat of Russian ICBMs because it's pointless. Deterring North Korea makes sense, they're only capable of building a few warheads a year, and it's probably similar with the rockets (even if they've got the tech to make the nukes small enough to be deliverable).
Making it too expensive for the North Korean's to have a credible threat makes it more likely they'll do a deal to trade their nukes for more trade/aid/attention. That's a few billion well spent. The same calculation was true with Iran. Not with Russia.
You're obviously right about Trump being an arse - but he has to get defence spending through Congress. He'll probably just restrict himself to responding on Twitter.
Archtech,
But that was true already. Russia / the Soviet Union has had the power to "end the world" since the 60s. OK, back them a lot of their bombers might have been shot down, but enough would get through. Since then there have been enough missiles kicking around to do the job. Admittedly some of those needed to be updated, as they've got limited lifespans, but not seriously upgraded. The US does not have a significant missile defence capacity, nor does it have the plans to build one, or the technolocy.
Also, what's this thing with new hypersonic warheads on the new ICBMs. I thought all ICBM warhead were already hypersonic?
Not to mention that in Crimea, Putin has simply copied the US programme
Hmmm. How many countries (or parts of countries) has the US annexed recently? Let me give you a clue, the answer is zero.
Not to mention that this was a supposed ally where Russia had been given military basing rights. The very military bases it used to launch the invasion from in fact. Admittedly Russia got the lease on that base renewed by cutting off Ukraine's gas supplies during the winter - but still...
Whereas you'll find countries round the world clammoring to have US bases. Because having US troops stationed on your soil is protection, whereas having Russian forces based near you is a threat.
I believe the huge airforce thing is true.
They used a bunch of contemporary planes for fliming purposes, becauase they were the same speed as the fighters / bombers.
They had a couple of B17s, because they were the right speed and also because they had lots of gunports that you could mount cameras in. And there was space for equipment and people - and they could be in the middle of the action.
For the ultimate shots though (two fighters closing head-on), a B17 wasn't suitable. As it would be in the way, and crashes are bad.
So they built themselves a gimballed steadycam equivalent. And slung it on a long line dangling from a helicopter above the fighters. With cameran dangling of course...
So he hung there, in mid-air, with a fighter flying straight towards him at several hundred miles an hour. Filming and dangling and swaying and waiting for the pilot to fly round him.
Balls of steel...
Have you considered that there might be a difference between censorship and avoiding having your platform abused?
It's one thing to demand that Twitter should edit all it's posts to be inline with some mushy centre-ground consensus. But nobody is saying that.
It's another to say that they should make an effort to deal with hate speech, death threats and remove links to beheading videos made for terrorist propaganda. That seems totally legitimate.
There's a certain element of censorship in the above, but freedom of speech does not (and should not) give you the right to threaten to kill or rape people anonymously. And given that it's just people being arseholes, it's probably better to take the power to shock away from them by deleting their crap than it is to have the police hunt them down and lock them up for being anonymous cowards.
There's also an element of censorship in stopping ISIS beheading videos. But again, it's something I can live with. I don't see why the victims shouldn't deserve protection. And the aim of posting them is to recruit often vulnerable young people whose lives have gone off the rails to come and be suicide bombers. This isn't done out of love for those people, as it's amazing how people like Osama Bin Laden were happy to allow others to make the ultimate sacrifice on their behalf, while his life was apparently better spent hiding. A lot of the suicide bombers in Iraq and Israel were drugged to stop them having those pesky second thoughts.
I also don't see much threat to freedom of speech from stopping state-sponsored networks disseminating fake news about the place, as if it was being done by real people. We allow Russia Today to broadcast on our highly regulated TV spectrum, so we're not in total censorship mode. But most people don't choose to watch that, as it's often obvious bollocks.
If it disappeared tomorrow, the world would carry on as if it never existed.
jake,
You've sort of negated your own point here, in saying Twitter doesn't matter. I agree that if Twitter disappeared tomorrow, it would make little difference to the sum of human achievement. But I also think that something else would replace it.
Which isn't quite the same thing as saying it's unimportant. In that it fulfills a human desire (at least for some people) - to shout their opinions into the void. Says I, posting pseudonymously on an IT website...
To add to the point above, no information is hidden from you. If you search in the right places it'll come up. The point is that it shouldn't be the top result on a casual Google of somebody's name, if it's a spent conviction.
Hence the law says some complex stuff, in order to try and balance the interests of ex-offenders, their potential future customers, newspapers and so on.
So the law says to the papers, you can keep the old records, and even put them on your website. You just can't write stories now that reference a spent conviction. And to Google that a search on someone's name shouldn't bring that info up automatically, but if you search about that court case, it can come up.
There is no right answer here. This is where politics and legislation get complicated. And Google should have to put up with messy compromises, just like the rest of us do.
6491wm,
No. The article even says that the complainant has tried to sue papers to remove the stuff, and been told by the courts to get stuffed.
Papers are allowed to keep old stuff archived that they published, either on microfiche or even on their websites and searchable. It's all fine and dandy, as it's what they've always done. And people researching into someone's life deeply will find all this stuff.
However those papers aren't allowed to re-publish that stuff. They can't have a front page story that so-and-so was convicted for this thing 30 years ago, but it's OK to keep the old story around.
The right to be forgotten stuff is a result of case law from the European Court of Justice. The argument was between Google's right to just show the stuff that is already there in their searches and the individual's right to privacy. And that information held on them had to be both accurate and up-to-date. By definition a spent conviction isn't. So if that's the first thing that comes up when you search for their name, then Google are breaking data protection regs - as well as invalidating the whole point of governments having a law on spent convictions.
Daggerchild,
I've no problem with Google using algorithms for search. That's fine, it's automatic it mostly works. And then they should have a process to deal with problems caused by their search. They could have cooperated on a process with the EU, but instead decided to be "Kevin the teenager" and moan about it a lot and claim it isn't fair.
I do have a problem when Google lie about what an algorithm is though. When they try and claim it's an automatic and magical process of computerised selection. When in fact it's just a recipe of choices made by Google on how the computer should prioritise. There were even times 5 or 10 years ago when Google were trying to claim that they couldn't manually intervene in how their search results came out. Pure bollocks of the highest order.
So that's all great. However when Google have a trending or a news feature, which has an influence on the stuff people see, and is doing so by selecting winners - at that point, they've changed their business. At that point, they're a publisher. And being a publisher, means that they're responsible for what they publish. It's no longer acceptable to claim that they pulled it after only a few million people had seen it and there'd been complaints. They're no longer a dumb-pipe / aggregator / safe harbour. At that point, they're to blame. And they should be responsible for that.
If algorithms/computers aren't up to that task (and of course we all know they aren't), then they need to employ human editors. And if they don't want to do that, then they should stop pretending to be a news organisation. And let those people who attempt to be responsible for what they publish do that job - and maybe stop trying to steal their revenue stream.
This is Google's choice. Be a good little search engine that sells adverts to go with its searches and just be a boring but highly lucrative company. Or try to be exciting and relevant, and take responsibility for the content they generate. The same is true for Facebook. They become a publisher at the point they're choosing to insert "news" into people's pages to promote ads and stories, rather than just showing the cat videos and pictures of lunches posted by peoples' friends. And they should stand or fall by what they publish.
LDS,
Journalists doing profiles of people will check Google, but they'll also search their own news archives - which of course aren't redacted/corrected. But then journalists are supposed to be trained in things like sub judice and spent convictions.
Big_D,
On your piracy point, I ain't Spartacus. I din't do nuffink copper!
TimR,
Oh I've been suspicious of Google for ages. Used to get regularly downvoted on these pages for being less than enthusiastic about them 5 years ago, when the shine was still on. But they've also done some good and useful stuff. And they are a profit making company after all. So while I expect all companies to stick to the, frankly low bar of, "Don't be Evil" - I'm not all that concerned if they're sometimes a bit morally grubby. That's just life.
The point is that Google allow their products to be used for stuff that's getting pretty close to being "evil". And then make pathetic, whiney excuses for why they they just can't do anything about it. The poor lambs.
Well these poor lambs made $16.7 billion profit last year, on turnover of over $100bn. That argument cuts not ice. They're also not terribly forward when it comes to handing over cash to the taxman. Though a lot of that is perfectly legal, it would be nice if they were a bit less smug and a bit less willing to tap up government all the time to do stuff for them - and a bit less willing to tell us all how great they are.
What they are is arrogant, smug, greedy, whiny and not as great as they think they are at anything other than selling advertising (still over 90% of their turnover and even more of their profits).
They're starting to make 90s Microsoft and 80s IBM look attractive in comparison...
That's what I thought too. But of course they'll only argue that in this case, in others they're just a dumb pipe. Youtube didn't promote a slander against an innocent schoolkid last week who've just been the victim of a high school shooting - oh no sirree Bob!
I'm really starting to hate Google now...
I suspect, from the later paragraphs quoted from the argument, that Google's argument may be a little more subtle.
I suspect they're trying to say that journalists use Google to do searches. Which is definitely true. So if some of their searches are done by journalists, then those searches should be free of restrictions as they're being done "for journalistic purposes". Hence they don't know which searches are done by journos, and which are done by ordinary Joe Public, then by extension, all Google searches should be considered to be for the purposes of journalism.
It's cheeky (if I'm reading it right), but that's what you pay lawyers for after all...
And easy answer would be to allow Google to have a non-EU rule approved mode, that journos could log into. Presumably just using the .com results without the right to be forgotten restrictions?
But then can you trust Google won't "accidentally" reveal that password, so everyone can use it?
We don't know what's happened to justice yet. You've condemned it before the court has even decided what justice will be.
Notice the bloke in question hasn't been able to erase his past. The newspapers were allowed to maintain their archives (and thus the integrity of the historical record) because they're not regarded as actively continuing to publish them. They don't have to delete past articles to satisfy spent convictions. It's just they're not allowed to put them on the front page of tomorrow's issue.
The point in question is whether Google is allowed to. Since every time you do a search on someone, you get all their linked info, however old or out of date.
The reporting restriction seems fair enough. Otherwise Google can just make the case completely pointless by bringing up all the past stuff into the current news. At which point, why do we bother having a system of rehabilitation and spent convictions? Why not just tatoo the information on peoples' foreheads as they're convicted?
There is no definitive right answer here. But one of the real problems is, as usual, fucking Google. Yet again they want to be just a pipe when it comes to publishing fake news, but they want to be journalists when it comes to selling adverts against out of date search results that specifically break the provisions of laws society has created in order to allow criminals a second chance. Google, take some fucking responsibility for your actions!
Rant over.
Select committees have the (theoretical) power to compel attendance - or find you in contempt of Parliament and lock you up. This is not a power they ever use, or even threaten to use. But it is there.
They're also now a lot more independent than they used to be, as the whips have a lot less influence on who gets on them, and who gets to be chairman.
But their power is only in calling and grilling witnesses in public and then writing reports that can make headlines. They can make recommendations, but that's as far as it goes.
Also they're somewhat constrained as to how partisan they can be. In that their report will lose a lot of its "moral force" if a chunk of the committee dissent, and produce a minority report.
It's a reasonable system, in that it gives a non-government controlled way of running enquiries - and looking at the effectiveness of new legislation after a few years. And often when that's done in a non-partisan way, those conclusions will make their way into amendments to that legislation. It also gives a career path to the more "troublesome" or individual types of MP - if they're a bit too maverick to go the PPS, junior minister route. Which improves the diversity of Parliament and allows those with expertise to have influence without having to join the government and thus vote according to the whip.
Hello. EE customer support? How can I help you?
My Venus-patented 5G mobile phone isn't working. I need a replacement.
OK sir. Let me just do a couple of diagnostic checks. Firstly has it been disolved by the sulphuric acid rain?
No.
Has it been crushed by the massive atmospheric pressure?
Nope.
Has it been melted by the ludicrous surface heat?
Nope.
Struck by lightning?
Ah yes, that was it.
I'm sorry sir, that's considered an act of God, and so your insurance policy is void. Goodbye.
I thought NASA didn't want people playing around on the Apollo landing sites, disturbing them?
Not that they own any real estate on the Moon of course. But it would be a bit rude if you were doing it without permission, to launching from NASA's own base. Even if it is on a private rocket.
Also, have they bought a license for that spectrum from Lunar Ofcom? They might be interrupting the Clangers' mobile reception. Worse, it could even be ATC for the soup dragon!
It's been really hard for local councils, in particular, to plan in an era when we've had 300,000 - 500,000 net immigration a year for over a decade. Obviously data from 5 years ago is bugger-all good if you get a disproportionate amount of that immigration to your area. Not so much of a problem if you have an ID card system of course, but we don't. So I think they've decided the needs of government planning are higher than those of historians.
Getting people to fill out the forms is increasingly difficult too.
Of course it doesn't help that other government data might be pants. It was discovered about 5 years ago that HMRC had created one or two million extra National Insurance numbers - basically they had duplicates for some people and were randomly assigning some of their contributions between them. I think it emerged when calculating pension contributions, and people complaining they'd paid in more than the computer said.
Pen-y-gors,
See my (over-long) post above for some reasons why this got changed, other than money. Obviously saving money may have also been a major factor.
But to cut a long post story short, the census was becoming increasingly unreliable. Far fewer people were filling the form in, paritcularly amongst poorer people in temporary/shared occupancy accommodation. And most particularly amongst immigrants, becoming a much larger group in recent years and often concentrated in specific areas.
That was making the census much less useful for its most important job, planning local services, and that use trumps the historical one.
Also the raw census data doesn't get published for 100 years - at least that's how the law always used to be. I believe the last census to go public was 1911. Great if you're a historian, economist or into family history.
In the meantime anonymised data sets will be released in varying levels of detail.
The article's initial premise is wrong. I'm sure that government would like to save money - and that's a driver of what's going on.
But one of the initial reasons that it was thought 2011 would be the last census is that people just weren't filling out the forms. Worse it was the poorest people most unrepresented in the data - and they're the ones who need government services most. There's a particular problem with people in temporary or multi-occupancy accommodation - again likely to be the poorest.
A lot of money was spent on paying people to knock on doors and go round checking this stuff - and we're talking tens of thousands of people here, so actual serious money (even by government standards). Plus the forms then come back hand-written to had to be scanned electronically and lots of it input by hand. Again that costs serious money.
So online makes sense, but again, it's the poorest who're least likely to get spotted.
Another huge problem is people with poor english. Again, likely to be poorer, and more in need of government services. Much less likely to fill out a form, and often not likely to answer the door to government surveyors - or let them in even if they do open up. This is a hugely significant part of the population in some places. Especially ones with high levels of immigration.
This then ties in with my final point. Time. The data gets increasingly out-of-date - so doesn't pick up changes in patterns of population movement.
Take the example of Slough (has all the above problems). They were begging the Labour government for more cash because they had high levels of immigration from both EU and non-EU sources during the last decade. Plus got a lot of the asylum seekers who come through Heathrow (and need much more government support than most immigrants). But their local government grant from the Treasury was based on census data from 2001 - when immigration levels were much lower.
Linking this incident with tightening drone rules may be unfair. But if there's an increasing number of these kind of incidents, then rules will get tightened. The nice thing is that at least we'll have some evidence to go on, as aviation is tightly regulated and makes quite a lot of effort to investigate incidents that don't actually lead to accidents.
If we get a rising number of incidents, despite the existing rules, then it's likely that those rules will be changed. All that may achieve is to ruin sensible peoples' fun while leaving the idiots unaffected, but nobody said legislation had to be good. Just that it had to be passed.
I guess it's not quite so extreme as the emergency stop one may automatically do in a car
What are you talking about? I've seen footage of planes doing emergency stops. Such as this documentary footage of an aerial pigeon hunt (video with sound - safe for work).
I could even send faxes, FAXES!
Now I have a mental image of you standing there, giant fax machine held to your ear, as you chat away on Oxford Street - and a trail of that crappy thermal paper coming out of your machine with a loud humming sound and falling in a puddle, thus becoming even less leglible than it already was.
I HATED fax machines. Even if you managed to get yourself a decent one - it was a cast-iron certainty that the one at the other end would be shit, or have a dirty sensor, so you'd get big black stripes down the middle of the page.
And they all seemed to be stuck on top of filing cabinets, and have a special mode for spitting one page out of the hopper and down the back of the cabinets.
You're using a WP8 device, and you're still falling for this?
Ledswinger,
Falling for what? My device is on WP8 by choice. There's been an upgrade available on it for WP 10 for about 18 months. I just chose not to, as Orlowski (and others) said it was a bit worse - and I barely use apps, so don't need to be up-to-date. I like the simplicity of the Win Pho 8 UI. I'll miss it.
Even where MS abandoned people on WP7 - they still got bug fixes, and 2 point releases (taking them up to 7.5) with quite a lot of the features from Win Pho 8. Leaving millions of users stranded with zero support is what happens in the Android ecosystem.
HMD seem to use close to stock Android and promise updates (though aren't specific). Hence asking people's experiences. The new Nokia 7 is an Android ONE device and promises to keep you on the latest version and with updates for 2 years. That's legally binding under EU and UK consumer laws.
You can keep your bridge...
Does anyone have any experience of the HMD Androids? I'm looking to jump ship from Windows Phone 8 soon. Shame, but the few apps I use are starting to disappear, and the phone's getting a bit battered. 21/2 years old and the battery still gives 2 days though.
Just had a quick look at the HMD / Nokia 6 and 7. Not sure there's a price on the 7 - but it has Android ONE, and they're promising 2 years of updates.
I really liked the satisfying "snap" as you closed the Motorola RAZR at the end of a call. No other clamshell I tried was quite the same, I think the hinge was slightly sprung.
Obviously you had to open it yourself, and it took quote a while to train myself to be able to take it out of my pocket and prise the phone open with my thumb while bringing it up to my ear. So I could answer one-handed with a flourish, while carrying a bag.
A few early attempts at this resulted in the phone opening halfway, and then snapping shut again as I moved my thumb out of the way too quickly, thus hanging up the caller. Sorry.
I did that as well. Had a bright yellow slidey case for my 2210 - I think it was (their names were so rubbish). Anyway the one that was ubiquitous just before the 3310, and a bit bigger.
You pressed a button and the keyboard cover pinged down. Snapped on to replace the front and back covers, and cost about £5 from the local market.
I've always liked a mobile that you could cover the keyboard, so it couldn't be pressed in your pocket. Had a Motorola MicroTac, that Nokia, a Samsung slider and best of all 2 Motorola RAZRs.
The RAZR, best ergonomic phone design ever. Some of the worst software though...
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