Posts by dogged 4790 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2009
Let me fix that for you, jake -
"play on the grandparents' insecurities about the exhausted parents' inability to look after the child."
Parents aren't usually the market for this shit - they're too busy and too tired. "Helpful" grandparents, on the other hand...
charging cables, toilet rolls, cat food, cat litter, the contents of the dishwasher/washing machine, oven doors, remote controls, anything fragile and expensive/dangerous when broken and bloody Duplo, which is not quite the landmine for the unsuspecting bare foot that Lego is but it's close.
From a very early early age, my little monster has savagely disassembled every stuffed toy he's been given. Grandparents still keep giving them, we either hide 'em fast or prepare to clean up a lot of stuffing.
To be fair, there was the "new baby" doll the Mrs got him to prepare him for the imminent arrival of the next monster next month but that was pretty solid plastic and mostly he beats the cat with it.
My guess is that this came from a marketing exec who has either a) no kids or b) a nanny.
it's a business-model difference. MS sell software and Azure services. Google sell you.
Therefore, MS have no downside in strongly supporting end-user privacy features while of course, Google would hurt their own profits by doing so. So, in order to differentiate themselves from Google, MS push user privacy and are prepared to spend money doing so.
I expect David Cameron to make MS illegal over the next week or so.
> So you'd prefert to take the state snooping into everything you do and everything you read and everything you write and everything you look at?
Yeah, I can take direct action against that with OpenPGP and underground networking. I can even disrupt security snooping networks, smash CCTV cameras, flood GCHQ with heavily encrypted random packets for weeks at a time (and organize groups to help me do so) and generally make such snooping into the joke we know it to be.
I can't go build a fucking power station.
In an environment where policies come as a package and they will all lead to disgusting new laws, the duty of the citizen become determining which of those laws he can render useless.
fuck off with your Greens.
We don't know what they'd do but - and this is important - neither do they. The Greens are the BNP for middle-class people. Idiots with no real understanding of systems who have hacked together an agenda out of newspaper headlines. The only real difference is that the newspaper is the Guardian instead of the Daily Mail.
Even in a country where the Monster Raving Loony Party still exists, the Greens are the ultimate in pissed-away protest votes. At least some of David Sutch's policies actually happened.
Your MP is a joke. I say that with some certainty because mine is a joke and in fact an overwhelming majority of MPs are jokes. Bad jokes who exist to turn up sometimes and go into the lobby the whips direct them toward. Sometimes they read out questions or sycophantic congratulations or retarded policy ideas that SPADs have come up with. Mostly they do as they're fucking told or they lose the seat with the only legal smoking bar and the decent salary and the guaranteed fat pension and the endless exploitable expenses.
Your MP is a place-filler either in it for an easy life or an ambitious untrustworthy deceitful piece of venomous shit or a worn-out timeserver with nothing constructive to add. Unless your MP is an Independent and there are statistically so few of those that I can be fairly sure that your MP is not one.
There is no democracy. Our political parties are whores to the highest bidders and will do as their paymasters demand. Whichever you vote for, you will still get the same paymasters, the same actual government.
In this case at least, Russell Brand was right - what use is voting when heads you lose and tails I win?
Ross owns $18 million worth of bitcoins. His lawyer says he got them from trading (and to be fair, it's not like their value doesn't fluctuate) as opposed to the estimate $80million in bitcoins that DPR would have stashed away.
Given his low-key lifestyle, this could be an important plank of the defence. However 18million is enough for a lawyer.
None of which excuses your error - it is used for both Android and iOS development as well as oh, over 90% of the desktop market and a huge amount of servers.
Of course, I understand that you're doing the "stop liking what I don't like" internet win argument in this case being basically a "lol Windows Phone, we want less competition so my preferred platform can be all of the win" thing but being an internet staple doesn't mean it's not stupid. Far from it, in fact.
> .NET? I'd bet there are more apps made for BlackBerry than mobile .NET stuff, given that .NET is only used in the least used mobile OS ever:
I added the emphasis. I'll bet you never heard of Xamarin. Or Mono. It's the only explanation for being so stupendously wrong.
> By moving the transaction to a place without the tax
I can see that working out really well for Tesco! Wait, no I can't.
> Because even 0.35% adds up if you're doing dozens of 100K transactions per day, or per hour.
If you're doing that you are either stock/bond trading - which is exempt, if you bothered to read anything - or you're selling to the public at a low margin in which case you are most certainly passing that cost along because as Tim points out, business doesn't pay tax.
Tim, you say the deadweight cost is lowest on sales taxes such as VAT but look at what happened with the pasty tax? Even Little Gideon was forced to back off, which indicates that the deadweight cost is actually very high. Logically, the only place a deadweight cost is low is where taxpayers have no choice but to choose to make themselves liable for the tax so that'd be things like VAT on essential items (like clothing), Road Tax (or SORN, the mere act of owning a car means you pay tax whether or not you drive it or even if it works) and taxes on heating, light, other utilities.
On those you can stick the rate up as far as you like and rake in the money, except that doing so will actually kill people long term because 20% is very high after all the other tax you pay and you have no choice. If, as the AC above says, it was 0.35% you'd probably have a lot more left than you currently do, not counting the fact of the Chancellor taking less of your actual pay.
It's a big change and I desperately want to find a reason for it to be impractical because if it IS practical then we're just self-harming as a nation by not doing it.
Some day, somebody will do a Party Political Broadcast where they do nothing except "A week in the life" highlighting how much of a normal person's wages are taken in tax. All taxes, not just Income Tax.
And if we don't do something soon, that day will be the first day of the revolution.
> At worst it would cripple the economy as the wealth generators and educated and mobile workers leave for somewhere less hostile.
"Wealth generators"?
Rich people very rarely generate wealth. Big business does not create jobs - on the contrary, it cuts jobs. Small businesses make jobs.
Okay so 1% would raise 1.5 trillion which is all of GDP so clearly 1% is too high.
But I find myself wondering - what happens to GDP when all those other taxes are gone? Do you spend more or less when you seem to have a minimum of 30% more money? When your petrol costs 50p/litre? What happens to to GDP in that situation? Does it fall? I suspect not.
If cash transactions are taxed at on withdrawal/deposit, doesn't that mean your incentive to dodge taxes is now bigger in paying normal tax than by arsing about with cash?
If we (the UK Government/people/etc) now own so much of at least two major banks, couldn't "we" - the same "we" - give everyone a bank account and say "Oh by the way, if your wages get paid into that then they will be taxed at %tiny_but_significant_reduction_on_normal_transaction_tax)" which not only reduces the cost of collection but actually makes UK Plc into a savings bank with astonishing security and only one borrower (HMG)?
I was really looking forward to this article because the idea seemed quite appealing and nobody really had any genuine objections on the record. I hoped Tim would go into detail, throw some facts and figures around and point out the blindingly obvious hole in the logic that I can't seem to find. Instead all we got was "1.5 trillion lol" and that was pretty much it.
A pity.
In a more honest universe, Chris Betz wrote -
"We're sick of red-top IT websites trotting out the same story every month and getting a whole bunch of internet fucktards complaining that we're fixing some bugs and claiming their OS's don't have any bugs which, incidentally, they bloody do.
It's just that some vendors don't bother fixing them or admitting to them. Meaning Apple. Now go hassle Adobe."
> Agile methods work for some situations, particularly where the client / end users don't know or can't describe what it is they actually want up front
I happen to agree that Agile doesn't suit every requirement but you've literally just described every project ever.
Oddly, the single best methodology for an industry which insists on Waterfall - such as defence weapon systems - is TDD because you write tests for all the documented acceptable outcomes and error conditions and then make them pass.
I always hoped it would lead to an end to "project managers" at all but sadly, most employers still reflexively insist on a "project manager" for every project.
The reason for the quotes is that these arseholes never actually manage anything. They're supposed to get information from developers to give to management about timeframes but treat estimates as deadlines in every case. Most have no clue what the project they're managing actually does. One once continually asked me if the unit tests were passing for a project which some other arsehole had decided should be 90% dynamically generated JavaScript (good fucking luck testing that) and didn't shut up until I came up with a set of dummy tests that tested nothing of importance and were all coded specifically to pass.
One used to insist on selecting the technologies and tools we'd use despite the fact that she literally never written a line of code in her life.
And these are not edge cases. These are normal. "Project managers" are parasitic scum but whichever methodology you select, you can guarantee that some cretin further up the food chain will insist that there has to be one.
> Have you ever played rugby?
Every weekend for about half of every year since 1982, yes. A scrum does not run anywhere unless something's gone very badly wrong. A team does. A scrum does not. This basic lack of information is a fine example of the half-baked nature of everything about Scrum.
small note to mod - the ad hom was ad Erik Meijer.
Agile is just decent communication and getting dickwad project managers off your back so that you can actually take time to refactor code instead of just shoving hastily-written deadline-driven "just about good enough" code out into production.
Scrum is what happens when you let people are a) idiots b) Americans* AND c) in marketing get their hands on Agile and it should be burned with fire.
And Unit Tests are not about predicting failure conditions in live! They are about making each unit of code modular and robust
*seriously, nobody involved in the creation of Scrum had ever even seen a game of rugby. "Oh, it's named for the way a scrum runs up the field passing the ball to each other" - the fuck? Shut up and go away.
small mod tweak - fewer ad homs, please
> In the smartphone market, Chinese vendors now comprise three of the top five biggest sellers worldwide, as consumers opt for lower cost devices
Yeah but those are all FoxConn machines. As are most of Samsung's and all of Apple's.
FoxConn won the smartphone wars. Four years ago. All the rest is meaningless.
I would have gone for this picture instead.
You can't copyright something you painted on somebody else's wall.
> If you want to see a group of short changed kickstarters just go look at that poor Star Citizen crowd. Where's their game?
It'll turn up when it's ready. Or it won't. If it doesn't then I'll be mildly irritated but not really surprised (eh, kickstarter...). If it does and it doesn't have stuff they contracted to do as stretch goals (that were met and surpassed) like an offline campaign, I may even go so far as to frown a bit.
We already have a playable dogfight game that I haven't bothered with and there's other stuff that I also don't really care about so it's not like it vanished without trace, which is hopeful.
SC will definitely disappoint some people because some people have insanely unrealistic expectations. It won't disappoint me because I have almost no expectations - I'm just interested to see what Chris Roberts will come up with. He's always done interesting work before.
The difference between this and the Elite:Dangerous experience is that my life is much more mellow and relaxed than an apparently arguable minority/majority (delete depending on your confirmation bias) because I knew in advance that Dave Braben was a massive arse of Piers Morgan proportions and refused to pay him any money.
So I feel a bit sorry for you Flyberius, but don't spare me any concern. I'm absolutely fine.
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