Posts by Hollerith 1 902 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
HR are always good at stripping out the heart of anything. What matters in a thank you is that it is personal, truly meant, and that someone took a bit of effort to do something. Colleagues and managers I've worked with who have gone to the trouble of thanking me --and my own line manager -- for what I've done is golden. 'Official' systems of recignition have been introduced and pulled, introduced and pulled, until we wave them by pretty cynically.
I noticed a stroy in Information Age about a big American insurer in the UK gettign together with a telco to monitor cars and feedback the second-by-second info for insurance purposes. Presumably if you prove, second-by-second, that you are an uber-safe driver, you won't get hammered at renewal time. Or otherwise. I am not sure I want my car so hooked in that financial decisions are made for me by people who do not have my interests at heart (which would be everyone except me).
MLF personally is very courageous. She was in a bad accident some time ago and I don't think peoiple knew how badly she was injured. I happened to run into her (we are total strangers) in a medical setting and I couldn't believe she was alive, let alone (barely) walking. That kind of grim determination to be mobile again was impressive, so I hope her doggedness will be part of what she is bringing to the Lords, as well as a very rare hands-on experience in actual web stuff (in that House).
I suspect the package was opened to find DVDs of an operating system, some Excel files, ABBA, whatever. Someone grabbed DVDs and shoved them in the jiffy-bag, and who knows? Maybe tried to dance to the video. Or threw them out. Or realised that they had screwed up big-time and quietly dumped them in a rubblish bin on the way home one night.
OK. I did a quick mental survey of what I own that comes from the USA and it turned out mostly to be software. And less and less of it as time passes. An interesting exercise. The 'fun' stuff, such as movies etc, I would not class as essentials. If I didn't have them, I'd still get along fine. So, yeah, it's possible to live a consumer life without the USA. Who knew.
Lobbying has become so huge becasue...it doesn't work? It just makes those companies doing the lobbying feel better? No one leans on agencies or committees? Despite the millions paid for influence, doing favours, etc, lobbying isn't effective?
Oh look, unicorns gambolling past my window...
Men wearing higher heels in 1600s and 1700s were telling the world (1) they did not need to walk far 920 they did not need to work. Gentlemen wore heels.
Woemn wear heels partly to show they are vulnerable: being weaker is part of the concept of femininity. Most 'sexy' outfits emphasise this. One of the reasons women were hobbled for had their feet bound was to make them helpless.
When I'm looking to buy something online, and find the shop I'm dealing with is forcing me to register in order to buy, I see if a competitor will sell without the registration process. I then stick with that one and blacklist the forced-to-register site, and if I am feeling in the mood, I email the latter to say 'this is why you did not get my business'. I like to use vendor websites rather than Amazon if i can, sort of like supporting the independent little shops, but if I have to register, I figure I have no reason to add to my pain and go back to Amazon or a similar site I have had to register with. Of course, that's why they like you to register.
I also make a point of deleting any special offers that come from a forced-to-register site. It just encourages them.
Finally, I often take the grmpy pleasure of registering each and every time on certain sites, such as ticket sales sites. I have one concert hall that now sends me about 12 advanced programmes via snailmail. Thir money down the drain, and I never have to worry about remembering my login.
If you need to have had a relevant experience before being able to speak about it, then lots of subjects will be herewith dropped, e.g. gay marriage by straight people, how to run a school by non-teachers, etc. On the other hand, you would have to bow to those with experience speaking within their field, e.g. bank executives deciding CEO bonuses.
Last time I checked the USA, teachers and firemen paid with their lives to do their jobs. Can't remember the last time a bank CEO sacrificed himself to save the helpless. If my taxes are going to be used to help someone, I know I'd prefer them not to go to executives of financial services, but to the teachers and the guys repairing the roads in sub-zero weather and the food inspectors and the firemen. The ones who make our everyday world better.
I back up along the lines of most people here, in multiple versions, then swap with my sister: I hold a copy of all her data on some drives, she holds mine on a coupl eof hers. We sync when we feel we need to.
We both might get hit with fire or flood, but life is loss. If a disaster that big hits us, I won't be worrying about my music collection or photos.
GS did a major fiddle to slide the Greeks into the EU. Now we taxpayers (or the German ones) get to pay for GS helping to shoehorn Greece into the Union when it was plain to a parakeet that they did not have the financials to meet the demands and standards. Same sort of mentality: sure we can help you work that...
Not only did she write the first algorithm and fix the first bug, she grasped the implications of the machine and what, in effect, it could transform. To combine the practical and the visionary to that extent when the only 'computer' in existence was made of wood and cast iron is a not unimpressive feat of mental super-ability.
...a victim of self-regarding civil servants or charity colleagues who have decided for me how outrageous an anti-gay opinion made in my (gay) presence is. The remarks made by this chap seem not filled with hatred or violence. Obviously I don't agree with him, but he has every right to say this, in his private life in a social setting, online or not. I would be appalled if a colleague were punished so monstrously for such mild remarks in my own organisation. Come on, guys: get some perspective.
And your proof is...? There's another story suggested that, as soon as humans started roaming out to new territories, they began bumping into other similarly-roaming groups and the 'us' and 'them' kicked in, and all forms of violence ensured, from rape to mass murder.
Or: that the threat of small groups of humans dying out for lack of sufficient young made the killing of rival males in anothe group and the raping/enslaving of their females a popular activity, when groups met. All the age-old cults of fertility and the wish for a 'quiver-full' stems from this fear of local-group extinction, and this fear justified violence.
Or none of the above. Who knows, until we come across evidence?
It was cool and cutting-edge int he old days, but finally got too expensive and the kit they wee selling was always one behind the latest thing. They sold confidence: the staff seemed to know what they were talking about when punters were exploring the new world of PCs and laptops. I liked them a lot, slowly stopped going and frankly am surprised they lasted this long. Feel badly for the staff, but can't help feel that anyone good jumped ship ages ago.
I spent a year of my life helping to set up Directgov, and I thought their approach, way back when, was good: an easy-to-navigate site with really useful and helpful information. It more or less stayed that way, but obviously tidying up and trimming something ood, and perhaps easing in some better functionality, is not nearly as sexy as building a shiny new toy.
The cost of Directgov is, however, easy to understand: I was in a team of about 20, of which a quarter were contactors (incl myself) and we did the work while the others booked endless vacations, searched for funny audio tracks on the web, had tea break, etc. It was my first time working for a Govt dept and I was astounded and the barefacery of it. So: cost of staff + cost of workers = £gazillion.
The Supreme Court gave corporations the rights of persons when it comes to speech, so wouldn't it be nice if corporations also exercised other human behaviour, such as not doing something for money when it encourages a moral wrong. Up till now, companies have said that their duties to their shareholders requires them to target every possible market, even if that means they support corruption and cover their metaphorical hands with blood (metaphorical and real). Thanks to the Supreme Court, companies can surely now say 'no, we won't deal with such regimes--it's repulsive to expect us to; no amount of money is worth the suffering we will be supporting and, indeed, risking.'
And now I laugh.
Commerce isn't the enemy -- not respecting the generosity of the creator by dishonouring the clear intent of his licence is the enemy, as is profiting from someone else's work without acknowledgement or payment. It's the mentality 'everyone help me, and I'll help myself' that is the enemy.
We in the rest of the world enjoy watching the USA plummet from its short-lived imperium top-spot, as it's hard to admire a country that kills without risk and meddles for money for its own rich, not moral values. As for the Confederacy: ah, that States'-Rights dedication to protecting and expanding slavery was perhaps not the finest thing the USA ever did in the world. But now the Chinese are quietly buying up resources and political favours all over the world and I no longer pay much attention to the implosion that is the USA. Bye-bye, and thanks for Disney World.
Goldman Sachs is a voracious, litigious company that eats its young. To steal from them is to steal from the Mafia. The guy lifted code that he must have known was not 'open source': he did or should have known the licences he was working on and remembered all the confidentiality/proprietory agreements he signed when he joined. In any case, it is always best to assume that the company owns everything you create that cannot be clearly demonstrated to be common or standard throughout the world. GS are, I'm sure, keeping this pot on the boil because they want to make sure we see this guy's tarred and gibbeted body swaying in the wind, as a discouragement to others.
When I first heard of this story, I asked a handful of 'average punter' friends. Only one understood my question about JavaScript, and said he lef tit on 'to get all the goodies'. The rest had zero clue. Some said they liked the ads they saw and wouldn't want to lose them. Some of those regularly send me amusing links or docs that I never open, having learned early on that their 'I trust the sender' means 'he seems nice'. So I can well believe that 90%+ average users are JavaScript-enabled.
And what would you put in the legal system's place? Arbitration? Decree by President? Chain-saws in the city streets? Our legal system might deliver imperfect justice, but in comparison to the system we could have (check out courts and judges in Belarus or PR China), I'll take ours any day.
Lawyers make money because people are litigious. Lawyers did not dream up the Samsung/Apple war: they are the hired guns. I get a little bored with the lawyers-are-sharks' line. Every lawyer I know is honest, competent and conscientious, and aware that they serve a higher justice as well as their clients. Of course there are sleazoids, as there are within every profession, but lawyers are to bloody-minded people as referees are to boxing. They enable these fights to be played by the rights, transparently, in the full view of society. Because it is a specialist skill requiring much learning and experience, they get paid accordingly. I have no trouble with that.
Too often the human race is all too simian: brutish, cruel, thinking only of stuffing ourselves and fighting for territory or a higher rung on the ladder, superstitious, eager to be stupid, and I think: let us die out. And then we reach delicately across vast empty spaces to turn and drop our frail little constructed bits of metal onto a place that, to our eyes, is a small dot in the night sky, and I think how wonderful, how marvellous our brains are, how glorious is rationality and curiosity. Much can be forgiven such a species.
I have to say, as a card-carding feminist, I agree that this statement was ridiculous. Chaps wore knickers for support and modesty, and this style was suitable for someone wearing hose (leggings), the standard apparel in those days.
But it is an amazing discovery, as ordinary clothes are hard to find, and now we know more about the past and its underwear. Always cool, and appropriate for El Reg because we like interesting information. And, of course, because most of you are blokes.
...and, speaking as gay myself, it i always nice to hear that someone thinks equality is important, but... I would be rather more keen if they addressed intellectual property rights first. I feel a greater risk with Google wanting to steal every piece of creative work not nailed down than I do the prospect of not being able to work in Singapore.
Not that I am ungrateful, but let's not get distracted.
Why is 'creative' a special category? Does it cover only writing and poetry and music and visual arts? Trademarks? Does it cover film? Does it cover design? Such as technical design? Source code?
The commodification of creativity might be the curse of capitalism, but if other inventions of the mind can be 'owned', why not a painting or a piece of music or a short story or an article? Why is it that these must be free? Why is 'ownership' so odious for these and not for brand names?
Worth checking to see why the concept of copyright protection was invented in the first place. It's easy to condemn someone else to give their all for free -- just so long as YOU don't work for free.
Yes, I got paid. A pittance. We are more or less on minimum wage. The cut we took was about 5%, and it was out of money they otherwise would not have received. So 95% of something is better than 0.
Someone has to do the work, and the team I had the honour to work with put in long and thankless hours to make sure we accounted for every penny. Authors were, in fact, grateful for this: they had no way of collecting money owed to them from libraries, European countries etc., and their publishers or agents weren't going to do this for them (or would have taken a massive % for it).
I am a published author myself and, although I never saw money through the agency I worked for, I would have been happy to have them ferreting out sources of revenue unknown to me and paying it to me regularly. Authors earn so little, and everybody is ready to steal, 'borrow', 'fair use' or otherwise releive them of the one source of income they have. A collecting agency is the least of their worries.
I once working for a licencing and collecting society. We collected the photocopying, library lending and other copyright fees for writers from the UK and Europe (and other places around the world) and paid the writers. For some less-famous, older or niche writers, this was often the only income they got.
My job was to find the owners of the money. The internet was still new, but I used that and libraries and voting records and phone books and you-name-it to identify authors, get their current addresses, and pay them. It was mostly correcting a wrong name on the original record or making sure the right Smith was identified. We handled half a million pounds of fee back then and there was only me to do this research, and my clean-up rate was good.
So I know that it is not impossible to pay people what they deserve for their creative work. In today's more far-reaching internet, almost nobody can stay hidden for long. It just takes the will to find them and one salary. Any claim that it is 'too hard' to find an author (or photographer or composer) and therefore all their work can be given to private corporations for their own profit, or can be used by anyone with impunity, is mendacious rubbish.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
