Posts by SolidSquid

The vast majority of benefits doesn't go towards people who are unemployed and still of working age. Based on 2013 numbers, 47% of money spent on benefits goes towards pensions, which is by far the largest portion of benefits payments, with only 6% going towards incapacity benefits and jobseekers allowance. This jumps to 16% if you include housing benefits, but a large part of that cost is from housing shortage in cities and this isn't exclusive to people who are unemployed (people earning under £16k can claim it).

In terms of savings, the estimated cost by DWP for Universal Credit is 12.8bn, which is about 2 1/2 years of jobseeker benefits for the country, or just over a year of combined jobseekers and incapacity. Those savings are going to have to be pretty damn significant for this system to pay for itself in any reasonable time scale

Re: downloaded?

There's two parts to it. The first is whether they were actively encouraging people to download illegally copied material (which they did occasionally do on the home page), which makes them more likely to be liable for things. The second is whether the court understood the technology well enough and whether they were able to provide a detailed break down to the court (the judge may well have considered it irrelevant if he didn't understand it)

Re: Is this a good analogy?

Not really, an impossible to enter house is essentially impossible to build and, as shown with Assange, the police have the option of just camping out until you leave the property. Also a house has a broader range of ways evidence can be discovered and it's possible that someone could be imprisoned there and need rescued (whereas with encryption your never really going to have that "immediate threat to life" angle on needing access)

If you want to use houses as an example, it'd be more accurate to say that they want police to have access to keys for every house in the country but without any public reporting on how often and for what reason the police use those keys

Re: Spurs - In Wales

The "verdict" from the RSPA in that first one seems bizarre. How does hanging a pot rack on the wall and accidentally hitting wiring which wasn't fitted to standard by the builders (ie the experts) highlight that any electrical work in the house needs to be done by experts? Second article even mentions that the husband had made a point of keeping it clear of where he expected the cable to run (because the cables are supposed to run either horizontally or vertically, and these were diagonal and not even consistant)

Re: so he scoffed “a huge handful of ibuprofen and acetaminophen”

I'd thought it was difficult to kill yourself with paracetamol, but that it did large amounts of damage to your digestive tract. A quick google tells me I'm wrong on that, but that it *is* difficult to kill yourself quickly with it. It's your liver that's destroyed by it, it takes 3-5 days for you to die and is incredibly unpleasant since your liver is slowly dying

Generally for longer term storage/out of season use. Also they're generally pretty cheap and work in soups pretty much as well as fresh carrots would

Re: Oh for god's sake...

His previous two claims had time frames which have come and gone, and all three claims have differing causes. So while he's been saying the world was going to end for 40 years he keeps changing his mind on the *why*, which is the scientific bit

Well that's annoying, I apparently missed that button during installation on my tablet. Would have preferred a local account over a cloud sync'd one

Re: Amazon set the precident

Quick look for that case, it sounds like the difference here is that it's being brought under California law rather than federal law. The federal courts were criticised in that case for having weaker protections for employees when doing things like waiting to clock in, which the security checks were classed as the same as

Re: How do the manage the fuel

Since it's early NASA, it's also likely that most of the calculations were done by hand and pre-programmed

Re: Not just any dead animal

In fairness the cows are already being slaughtered for meat, so the leather is essentially a waste product otherwise. These lizards on the other hand are being killed purely for their decorative skin, which some people might find more objectionable

Slightly less tongue in cheek, of the top 6 (since you jump to number 12 after that) we only have definite ways to reduce 1, 2 and 6. Reduction in smoking would reduce #2 by a lot and #6 we don't really know how much it could be impacted since your numbers don't separate type-1 and type-2, only one of which we know how to reduce the chances of.

Surprisingly, stress and smoking both have significant impacts on coronary heart disease, so reducing smoking and reducing stress would help with this a lot (Scotland saw a 10% reduction in CHD after the smoking ban came into place). It can also be caused by diabetes, so reducing that would also reduce CHD. The last primary cause of CHD is cholestorol, which can be caused by diabetese (hence how this can contribute to CHD), smoking (same), lack of exercise, alcohol consumption and obesity.

Diet is also a contributing factor, although there's been questions raised recently on whether this is a direct influence like obesity or alcohol (apparently consumption of cholesterol in foods like eggs is no longer considered to cause increase in the bloodstream as it's broken down during digestion) or whether it's just a case of a bad diet results in obesity and then that's what leads to CHD

Since an increase in exercise would reduce obesity and inherently reduces cholestorol, it would seem to follow that rather than banning fast food or television we should be banning cars so that people have to walk or cycle to work. This would also reduce pollution which would likely reduce issues of lung cancer and lung disease, as well as reducing road traffic accidents, reduce incedents of type 2 diabetes and, since regular exercise can increase endorphins, potentially reduce suicide rates

Oh, and of course there's no reason you have to stick with a single issue which causes deaths at once, so why not deal with guns at the same time as health conditions? It would make your walk to work safer if nothing else

Re: I know I'm in a minority on here

He was convinced there was criminal activity going on and that his superiors were covering it up, meaning the standard procedure for reporting it was broken. The courts have confirmed that at least some of the activity he leaked was criminal too, so he was right at least to some degree.

Considering the abuses Manning had when she released documents and handed herself in though though (the courts ruled that her treatment constituted pre-trial punishment) and the threats from congressmen about having him executed as an enemy combatant (which would bypass the whole "fair trial" thing) would make it seem unlikely he would actually face justice and more face revenge for revealing criminal activity

Oh, and Congress members have confirmed that they've not been provided any evidence, even after requesting it, that lives were put at risk by his leaks. Which is probably because of the fact that the documents were redacted before being released to prevent that kind of thing happening

Re: I'm confused

Technically the bible itself wasn't a contemporary source anyway, it was written decades later (I suspect the earliest book written was where you got the 80 years ago) based on the oral traditions of Christians at the time

Re: Easy Peasy...

Honesly I'd quite like a ruling on this, as it gets pretty murky when you start dealing with things at the remove TPB technically is. If I tell someone about a local guy who sells bootleg DVDs, am I committing a crime by doing so because I'm telling them how to commit a crime? Does it only become a crime to tell them if that person then goes on and buys the DVD, or if I accept money for providing the information?

Re: Evidence.

I've seen people counter comments about how long it would take for starlight to reach us (ie more than 5000 years) as being solved by God creating the universe with the light already en route so it would arrive here on time

Re: Nice

Most likely the teacher either assumed he was just trying to skive off or they needed to submit the work as evidence of them having done their job. Either way, if your son can just work through the coursework independently and finish it early the teacher should be satisfied (if not then they're the power trip kind of teacher which, while rare, does exist and would probably be annoyed regardless of what he did)

Also good on your son for being willing to consider the usefulness of what he's studying while working on it at a fairly young age. Should be good at handling self guided learning in future

Honestly GIMP isn't a great example of a FOSS project, the developers have had issues with the idea of implementing features which people mention are present in Photoshop because they don't like being compared, even if the feature is a good one (single window mode for example), and have made some fairly bizarre changes which make sense in terms of logic but not usability (can't save as a jpeg or png anymore, have to export as one which means you still get the "You haven't saved" warnings)

Krita, MyPaint, Blender and Inkscape have made far more rapid progress towards usability because of their willingness to interact with the users and bring them in for advice (Blender has their movie projects, Krita and MyPaint have a professional illustrator as part of the team to give input on usability)

UK law does actually allow for the laws to be changed retroactively. Whether they should take advantage of that is another issue entirely, but if they can get it through Parliament then it can both criminalise (yes, you can do something legal and then it suddenly becomes illegal after the fact) and de-criminalise past behaviour

Re: how many? @Mr. Coward

In fairness the download page for Mint actually gives a pretty good overview of what the different options are. They're for different desktop managers and for no codec versions for specific regions where there could be licencing issues with the codecs. They also include links for the different desktop managers for people who aren't sure of the difference

And there's only one Ubuntu, it's just that as an open source platform people are able to branch it to create new projects *based* on Ubuntu. Most of those aren't even supported by Canonical, and those that are (I think around 4?) tend to be for specialist environments like education and aren't on the main download page

Re: Be Careful what you wish for.@SolidSquid

True, I thought the additional detail was worth mentioning though

Honestly I didn't see much in the way of anti-English sentiment amongst the pro-Independence crowd. There was some I don't doubt, but mostly when people mentioned England in relation to independence it was to clarify that it wasn't England they didn't like, it's being run by Westminster. There was a lot of complaint about how London media companies covered it too, largely that they seemed to claim existance of a lot of anti-English sentiment without really showing any evidence of it, but except for a few outliers most people didn't have any time for that kind of nonsense

Re: Well...

That our politicians care significantly less about our opinions?

Re: It isn't supposed to make sense

Don't forget about Cruachan up in Scotland, opened in 1965 and was apparently the world's first reversible pumped storage power stations