Except this isn't just a hobby. These peoples' livelihoods depend on not only having those tractors, but having them up and operational when they're needed. Not 3 weeks later when a JD rep gets out to their farm. Not 3 days later when an authorized mechanic can find the time. Sometimes not even 3 hours later when the guy from a couple miles away gets off his own field and has time to help.
They have to have these machines to have any hope of competing in the modern world. And it doesn't help to buy a different brand of tractor because they all do the same thing. And why wouldn't they.. its essentially free profit for their service depots. The fact that it puts a bunch of small farms out of business doesn't really matter to them -- hell they might even appreciate it since those small farms will likely be bought up by big farms that don't really give a crap about a few hundred dollars here and there for a service call and if they're worried about their tractor being offline for 3 weeks they can afford to just buy a backup = even more profit for JD & friends.
They justify everything that way though. Politicians will forgive damned near anything if they think it might make them a few extra dollars per month. So they go to great lengths and jump through all kinds of weird hurdles for any new law or act to find some improbable-but-not-impossible way that it might add a few hundredths of a percent to the GDP (and happily ignore any ways it could damage the economy, even if those effects are likely to be far greater. Cherry picking data is a staple in this game.)
Am I the only one who finds "populism" a silly choice for a derogatory political term? I mean I know that they're not using the word by its true definition when they call someone a "populist" but still.. you'd think they could have chosen something better than "you're working for the people! You bastard!"
Typically its for apps that are blocked for non-technical reasons. Porn as the GP said (porn is always a big driver of everything digital..) anything that remotely has the scent of piracy attached to it.. things the overlords just don't like because they don't. Etc.
Hell I bought a Humble Android bundle at one point. You had to enable non-store apps just to install those games for some bizarre reason.. Humble couldn't get Google to give them store codes or something.. I don't know/remember the whole situation but I was definitely surprised that turning off security was a recommended solution from an organization like Humble.
And if they went the other way then you'd be bitching that they designed a walled garden and you're not free to do what you want with your device.
As it stands, you have to go through 2 or 3 steps in order to open your phone up to untrusted apps -- and they warn you a time or two along the way that some software may well be malicious.
Google does as much as they can to protect you from yourself, but at the end of the day, having the freedom to do whatever you want implies having the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot. Their only other option is to go Apple's route and just remove your freedom completely (and even then, the first thing a lot of people do is jailbreak it in order to remove Apple's restrictions.)
Or of course you could mean that they should just go ahead and solve the halting problem and other literally impossible tasks in order to magically determine whether any piece of software has malicious intent (including stuff that hasn't been submitted to their store thus disallowing manual human checking.) But I'm gonna go ahead and guess you'll be waiting a long time for that, from any company.
No, the market will always give consumers the absolute least costly approximation of what they want, for the highest possible price they can possibly suck out of them, and anyone who complains just gets ignored because you have a grand total of 2 or 3 options and they all operate under the same principle.
Back in the days before cheap mass transportation, the whole "vote with your dollar" idea worked great. Most markets were a couple hundred customers at best, and losing 10 or 20 was a significant hit to your business. Nowadays markets are tens or hundreds of millions of people wide and losing even a few thousand is barely a statistical anomaly.
We do. Regularly. The problem is the next person in line applying for the job is often just as bad if not worse. And even the occasional time you get a good one in, the system is built around majority rules, so the lone good voice just gets drowned out anyway.
And then of course there's the fact that your idea of "bad" and mine aren't necessarily the same. There's a lot of people that actually want a nanny state (as long as it doesn't affect them, of course.) Lots people get offended just by knowing that somebody on the other side of the city might be having intercourse with a same-sex partner.. and nowadays its all about being paranoid that somewhere in the world there might be a terrorist who will hit your house. Which they discuss with their friends over a few beers before driving home. Because statistically speaking, people are fucking dumb.
I suspect in the realm of at least a decade or two. I think our maximum number qubits they've managed to keep coherent is somewhere around 3 or 4? I hear they've managed to successfully factor the number 15!
Not sure how up to date my info is, but I suspect it'll still be quite a few years before we get the dozens of qubits needed to factor anything remotely useful, never mind being able to do so on a commercial scale. Of course, that's barring some completely unexpected new/different technology or insight that jumps us ahead in a large leap rather than the slow incremental progress we've been making so far. Given how cutting-edge that research is, such a jump isn't impossible by any means but I wouldn't rely on it happening either.
I think most people understand that. Where they usually go off the rails is considering other factors beside simple supply and demand. For starters, supply isn't just one number. There's the whole concept of supply chain. The supply of iPhones isn't limited entirely by a measurement of demand -- it could be limited by for instance a war in the Middle East jacking up the price of oil and thus the price price of the plastic for making the moulded shell. That is, the (relatively) simple supply/price change in oil makes a fairly complex change in supply 3 or 5 or 10 steps down the line.
Never mind if say, North Korea went nuts and decided to bomb a factory in China.. that just happened to be a major iPhone factory. Now the supply drops significantly due to absolutely no change in demand and so on.
Then we get into conversations about monopoly influences, macroeconomic influences, etc. The supply/demand curves you see in your intro to econ course are literally the most simple scenario given a theoretically perfect world. But the real world is nowhere near theoretic perfection and a lot of people (especially "the market fixes all" types) don't make it past that introductory course, so there's a hell of a lot of misinformed folk who somehow don't consider the fact that a full econ course is more than one semester for a damned good reason.
Heh. That just brought to mind a potentially very nefarious purpose for this tech. When a salesdrone or scammer or whoever calls that's paid Truecaller the monies, they push one of your friends' names instead of the real caller's identity. They must be checking their servers for at least each new unidentified caller, if not for every caller (and just recheck the id every time) so there's nothing stopping them from pushing whatever random BS they feel like if they decide to be underhanded about it in order to generate a bit more profit. I mean they gotta be making money somehow and since the end users aren't paying them.. someone else is.
- You spread it around far and wide until people recognize you as this "wrong" name. It is now essentially an identity of yours, in the same way that "lionchild" is an identity of yours, even if its not the real name as given on your birth certificate or drivers license. If people can identify you by a given piece of name (or other information,) then that name is pretty much by definition one of your identities, even if you don't want it to be.
- You don't spread it very far. In which case nobody will care anyway, since this sort of crowdsourcing relies on your friends "voting" on your identity. If you have say 4 friends participating in this system and two of them call you "Lion" and one calls you "Lionchild" and the last one calls you "my ex from highschool".. chances are the fourth one will get ignored (and possibly also the third one depending on how clever their matching algorithms are.)
The problem isn't what Truecaller is, the problem is how they go about it:
- Sudden updates that you aren't expecting. I ran into this as well -- Truecaller kept trying to "update" on my Oneplus, even though it wasn't even installed -- and was requesting all sort of permissions I don't like giving to most apps never mind one that's trying to ninja install itself.
- Using the word "True" in their name automatically raises peoples' hackles. We tend to automatically distrust anyone who feels the need to say "trust me," and that effect is magnified significantly when they're already acting suspicious.
In principle, I don't have a problem with Cyanogen or whoever using third party programs if they believe that they're better than their own.. but they really should have had some sort of information page or something to inform the user what was going on, point to Truecaller's privacy policy, etc rather than just ninjaing it in and the user's first knowledge of it is seeing a suspiciously-named program they've never heard of asking for a suspiciously large amount of permissions.
That's not even the only one they've done this way -- its just the most suspicious-looking one. And all of that is before we even discuss how questionable the policies and practices of Truecaller's owner actually are.
Well that's why they specifically use the term "your browsing history" rather than something more vague like "your data." People care if their porn habits are being spied on in a way that they don't care about any other information that may be shared against their will.
Though as you noted, a lot of people will probably think they're safe if they just clear their browsing history. Not sure that there's anything can be done about that. You can't force people to stop being ignorant.
That said, saying things like "the internet is going to become unusable" is a bit fatalistic. For 99.9% of people, having their information gobbled up and shoved into a database somewhere will result in approximately zero noticeable effect. Sure the ads they see might be a bit better targeted but that's not something you'd really notice unless you did a whole lot of comparison testing and put together some sort of statistics about the type of ads you see vs what other people see. In terms of strict usability, things like net neutrality are far more critical than yet-another-privacy-invasion-database.
As soon as we see elections being cancelled and those in power never having to relinquish it.
Until then, we take things 4 years at a time (well 2 years at a time if you include midterms.) Anything the current politician can do, the next one can potentially undo. Well unless you're Trump. He's had no luck undoing Obama's progress yet.. but then he's only one quarter into 4 years so there's still lots of time to prop up our corporate oppressors.
That would be evidence tampering. There's an open question whether the fifth protects PINs/passcodes, but there's no question that tampering with evidence is illegal.
I'm not sure if you'd get punished more for tampering than you would for being held in contempt (if you failed to provide the PIN after the court tries to compel you.) I suspect the evidence tampering would be worse (and of course if you involve a third party, neutral or otherwise, then they're potentially facing charges as well should it be discovered.)
I'm pretty sure nobody would bother prosecuting that based purely on a single iPhone that has no other evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc) and fishing for a perpetrator based on who happens to have the correct 4 digit PIN. No judge (well, at least no sane judge) would grant a search warrant based only on that.
But of course that's a stupid comparison anyway since nobody's likely to ever be killed by getting hit with an iPhone. The impracticality is beyond comprehension, even if you don't add in the ability to do this without leaving any other form of evidence.
The cop can't compel you to speak, but the court can. Just like the cop can't break into your house without a court order.
The fifth protects you from speaking against yourself, but the court can ask you about anything else and compel you to answer or be held in contempt.
The question is really "does the PIN, by itself, count as incriminating evidence." I personally tend to think that it shouldn't. If you don't want the cops to find incriminating evidence on your phone, then don't store incriminating evidence on your bloody phone. Just like it would be stupid to store stolen goods in your house.
Well its debatable whether an arbitrary 4 digit number counts as "information against yourself," but I think you'd have a hell of a time convincing anyone that you'd forgotten the PIN from your active phone -- especially if they've pulled phone records and shown that you've used it recently, which seems to be the case at least this time.
You're assuming they care about you. They don't. If they're missing one out of their hundred million data points, they won't even give a collective shrug.
You would need to convince a significant number of people to install whatever blocking/polluting app for it to have any effect at all. If anything, being the one polluter in your region would make you stand out just as much as your ID would.
Not to mention humans aren't the only ears around. Dumping advertising signal into the ultrasonic is questionable enough, but continually blasting noise in that range would be annoying as hell for dogs and other creatures that can hear outside of normal human range (maybe it should be PETA suing these asshats?) Just to avoid being added as a single row in a database so large that you aren't even a rounding error.
To be fair, that's not the comparison he was making. He was comparing the difference between swapping an engine vs swapping the wheels against the difference between swapping a laptop hdd vs swapping the motherboard.
In both cases, the car example is more work. Primarily because cars are heavier. But if you have the appropriate tools and knowledge (correct jacks, wrenches, etc) then changing out a car's wheels or even its engine is mostly only a handful of bolts -- not entirely dissimilar to changing out PC parts once you factor out the weight issue.
Of course there's a major difference -- you can fix your engine if you know what you're doing. If your motherboard breaks you're stuck replacing it. Even if you're good with a soldering iron, you're still stick replacing entire components.
Hell, you could potentially even put in an incompatible engine in your car if you're good enough with welding in plates and drilling bolt holes and whatnot to ensure the new engine doesn't rip everything apart. In comparison, there's absolutely no way you could say repin your Intel motherboard to accept an AMD CPU. No matter how smart or careful or well-equipped you are, that's just not really possible.
That may all be true, but its not really the point I was getting at. If you're regularly only working 30 hours and expecting to be paid for 40, whether that's actually 40 @ hourly rate, or its a 40 hour equivalent salary, then you shouldn't be surprised if you get disciplined.
That's not how "salary" works anywhere I've seen. "Salary" tends to be interpreted as shorthand for "8hr of hourly work," which is somewhat backed up by the way overtime and other such laws are written.
And at the very least, if you have 25% of your day available to work on personal projects, then your employer should probably be assigning you more tasks rather than just getting bitchy (well, assuming you aren't falling behind in your work due to that 25% wasted time of course. If your personal projects are detracting from your actual work then you definitely have a problem and your employer is right to discipline you.)
Unfortunately there are a lot of shitty employers out there. There was a while at my company where if I was done all my work for the week, they'd expect me to just start on something else. But at the same time they strongly discouraged any sort of initiative because they were constantly worried that it would break things (and not entirely without reason.. we had some shitty QA practices back then.)
Things have improved since then but there was a few months where I was intentionally having to be slow with my work because getting things done ahead of schedule led to a bit of a catch-22 issue where I was bitched at both for doing nothing or for doing anything not assigned to me.
Slashdot Mirror
And they'll buy it, or not.
Except this isn't just a hobby. These peoples' livelihoods depend on not only having those tractors, but having them up and operational when they're needed. Not 3 weeks later when a JD rep gets out to their farm. Not 3 days later when an authorized mechanic can find the time. Sometimes not even 3 hours later when the guy from a couple miles away gets off his own field and has time to help.
They have to have these machines to have any hope of competing in the modern world. And it doesn't help to buy a different brand of tractor because they all do the same thing. And why wouldn't they.. its essentially free profit for their service depots. The fact that it puts a bunch of small farms out of business doesn't really matter to them -- hell they might even appreciate it since those small farms will likely be bought up by big farms that don't really give a crap about a few hundred dollars here and there for a service call and if they're worried about their tractor being offline for 3 weeks they can afford to just buy a backup = even more profit for JD & friends.
They justify everything that way though. Politicians will forgive damned near anything if they think it might make them a few extra dollars per month. So they go to great lengths and jump through all kinds of weird hurdles for any new law or act to find some improbable-but-not-impossible way that it might add a few hundredths of a percent to the GDP (and happily ignore any ways it could damage the economy, even if those effects are likely to be far greater. Cherry picking data is a staple in this game.)
Am I the only one who finds "populism" a silly choice for a derogatory political term? I mean I know that they're not using the word by its true definition when they call someone a "populist" but still.. you'd think they could have chosen something better than "you're working for the people! You bastard!"
Typically its for apps that are blocked for non-technical reasons. Porn as the GP said (porn is always a big driver of everything digital..) anything that remotely has the scent of piracy attached to it.. things the overlords just don't like because they don't. Etc.
Hell I bought a Humble Android bundle at one point. You had to enable non-store apps just to install those games for some bizarre reason.. Humble couldn't get Google to give them store codes or something.. I don't know/remember the whole situation but I was definitely surprised that turning off security was a recommended solution from an organization like Humble.
And if they went the other way then you'd be bitching that they designed a walled garden and you're not free to do what you want with your device.
As it stands, you have to go through 2 or 3 steps in order to open your phone up to untrusted apps -- and they warn you a time or two along the way that some software may well be malicious.
Google does as much as they can to protect you from yourself, but at the end of the day, having the freedom to do whatever you want implies having the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot. Their only other option is to go Apple's route and just remove your freedom completely (and even then, the first thing a lot of people do is jailbreak it in order to remove Apple's restrictions.)
Or of course you could mean that they should just go ahead and solve the halting problem and other literally impossible tasks in order to magically determine whether any piece of software has malicious intent (including stuff that hasn't been submitted to their store thus disallowing manual human checking.) But I'm gonna go ahead and guess you'll be waiting a long time for that, from any company.
No, the market will always give consumers the absolute least costly approximation of what they want, for the highest possible price they can possibly suck out of them, and anyone who complains just gets ignored because you have a grand total of 2 or 3 options and they all operate under the same principle.
Back in the days before cheap mass transportation, the whole "vote with your dollar" idea worked great. Most markets were a couple hundred customers at best, and losing 10 or 20 was a significant hit to your business. Nowadays markets are tens or hundreds of millions of people wide and losing even a few thousand is barely a statistical anomaly.
We do. Regularly. The problem is the next person in line applying for the job is often just as bad if not worse. And even the occasional time you get a good one in, the system is built around majority rules, so the lone good voice just gets drowned out anyway.
And then of course there's the fact that your idea of "bad" and mine aren't necessarily the same. There's a lot of people that actually want a nanny state (as long as it doesn't affect them, of course.) Lots people get offended just by knowing that somebody on the other side of the city might be having intercourse with a same-sex partner.. and nowadays its all about being paranoid that somewhere in the world there might be a terrorist who will hit your house. Which they discuss with their friends over a few beers before driving home. Because statistically speaking, people are fucking dumb.
I suspect in the realm of at least a decade or two. I think our maximum number qubits they've managed to keep coherent is somewhere around 3 or 4? I hear they've managed to successfully factor the number 15!
Not sure how up to date my info is, but I suspect it'll still be quite a few years before we get the dozens of qubits needed to factor anything remotely useful, never mind being able to do so on a commercial scale. Of course, that's barring some completely unexpected new/different technology or insight that jumps us ahead in a large leap rather than the slow incremental progress we've been making so far. Given how cutting-edge that research is, such a jump isn't impossible by any means but I wouldn't rely on it happening either.
I think most people understand that. Where they usually go off the rails is considering other factors beside simple supply and demand. For starters, supply isn't just one number. There's the whole concept of supply chain. The supply of iPhones isn't limited entirely by a measurement of demand -- it could be limited by for instance a war in the Middle East jacking up the price of oil and thus the price price of the plastic for making the moulded shell. That is, the (relatively) simple supply/price change in oil makes a fairly complex change in supply 3 or 5 or 10 steps down the line.
Never mind if say, North Korea went nuts and decided to bomb a factory in China.. that just happened to be a major iPhone factory. Now the supply drops significantly due to absolutely no change in demand and so on.
Then we get into conversations about monopoly influences, macroeconomic influences, etc. The supply/demand curves you see in your intro to econ course are literally the most simple scenario given a theoretically perfect world. But the real world is nowhere near theoretic perfection and a lot of people (especially "the market fixes all" types) don't make it past that introductory course, so there's a hell of a lot of misinformed folk who somehow don't consider the fact that a full econ course is more than one semester for a damned good reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Of course, ClF3 is significantly harder to get than O2 but you know.. Its possible.
Heh. That just brought to mind a potentially very nefarious purpose for this tech. When a salesdrone or scammer or whoever calls that's paid Truecaller the monies, they push one of your friends' names instead of the real caller's identity. They must be checking their servers for at least each new unidentified caller, if not for every caller (and just recheck the id every time) so there's nothing stopping them from pushing whatever random BS they feel like if they decide to be underhanded about it in order to generate a bit more profit. I mean they gotta be making money somehow and since the end users aren't paying them.. someone else is.
That's definitely better for not spamming the ultrasonic frequencies and annoying dogs everywhere, but this:
If enough people
is still a massive flaw in your design.
Two outcomes here:
- You spread it around far and wide until people recognize you as this "wrong" name. It is now essentially an identity of yours, in the same way that "lionchild" is an identity of yours, even if its not the real name as given on your birth certificate or drivers license. If people can identify you by a given piece of name (or other information,) then that name is pretty much by definition one of your identities, even if you don't want it to be.
- You don't spread it very far. In which case nobody will care anyway, since this sort of crowdsourcing relies on your friends "voting" on your identity. If you have say 4 friends participating in this system and two of them call you "Lion" and one calls you "Lionchild" and the last one calls you "my ex from highschool".. chances are the fourth one will get ignored (and possibly also the third one depending on how clever their matching algorithms are.)
The problem isn't what Truecaller is, the problem is how they go about it:
- Sudden updates that you aren't expecting. I ran into this as well -- Truecaller kept trying to "update" on my Oneplus, even though it wasn't even installed -- and was requesting all sort of permissions I don't like giving to most apps never mind one that's trying to ninja install itself.
- Using the word "True" in their name automatically raises peoples' hackles. We tend to automatically distrust anyone who feels the need to say "trust me," and that effect is magnified significantly when they're already acting suspicious.
In principle, I don't have a problem with Cyanogen or whoever using third party programs if they believe that they're better than their own.. but they really should have had some sort of information page or something to inform the user what was going on, point to Truecaller's privacy policy, etc rather than just ninjaing it in and the user's first knowledge of it is seeing a suspiciously-named program they've never heard of asking for a suspiciously large amount of permissions.
That's not even the only one they've done this way -- its just the most suspicious-looking one. And all of that is before we even discuss how questionable the policies and practices of Truecaller's owner actually are.
Well that's why they specifically use the term "your browsing history" rather than something more vague like "your data." People care if their porn habits are being spied on in a way that they don't care about any other information that may be shared against their will.
Though as you noted, a lot of people will probably think they're safe if they just clear their browsing history. Not sure that there's anything can be done about that. You can't force people to stop being ignorant.
That said, saying things like "the internet is going to become unusable" is a bit fatalistic. For 99.9% of people, having their information gobbled up and shoved into a database somewhere will result in approximately zero noticeable effect. Sure the ads they see might be a bit better targeted but that's not something you'd really notice unless you did a whole lot of comparison testing and put together some sort of statistics about the type of ads you see vs what other people see. In terms of strict usability, things like net neutrality are far more critical than yet-another-privacy-invasion-database.
As soon as we see elections being cancelled and those in power never having to relinquish it.
Until then, we take things 4 years at a time (well 2 years at a time if you include midterms.) Anything the current politician can do, the next one can potentially undo. Well unless you're Trump. He's had no luck undoing Obama's progress yet.. but then he's only one quarter into 4 years so there's still lots of time to prop up our corporate oppressors.
That would be evidence tampering. There's an open question whether the fifth protects PINs/passcodes, but there's no question that tampering with evidence is illegal.
I'm not sure if you'd get punished more for tampering than you would for being held in contempt (if you failed to provide the PIN after the court tries to compel you.) I suspect the evidence tampering would be worse (and of course if you involve a third party, neutral or otherwise, then they're potentially facing charges as well should it be discovered.)
I'm pretty sure nobody would bother prosecuting that based purely on a single iPhone that has no other evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc) and fishing for a perpetrator based on who happens to have the correct 4 digit PIN. No judge (well, at least no sane judge) would grant a search warrant based only on that.
But of course that's a stupid comparison anyway since nobody's likely to ever be killed by getting hit with an iPhone. The impracticality is beyond comprehension, even if you don't add in the ability to do this without leaving any other form of evidence.
The cop can't compel you to speak, but the court can. Just like the cop can't break into your house without a court order.
The fifth protects you from speaking against yourself, but the court can ask you about anything else and compel you to answer or be held in contempt.
The question is really "does the PIN, by itself, count as incriminating evidence." I personally tend to think that it shouldn't. If you don't want the cops to find incriminating evidence on your phone, then don't store incriminating evidence on your bloody phone. Just like it would be stupid to store stolen goods in your house.
Well its debatable whether an arbitrary 4 digit number counts as "information against yourself," but I think you'd have a hell of a time convincing anyone that you'd forgotten the PIN from your active phone -- especially if they've pulled phone records and shown that you've used it recently, which seems to be the case at least this time.
You're assuming they care about you. They don't. If they're missing one out of their hundred million data points, they won't even give a collective shrug.
You would need to convince a significant number of people to install whatever blocking/polluting app for it to have any effect at all. If anything, being the one polluter in your region would make you stand out just as much as your ID would.
Not to mention humans aren't the only ears around. Dumping advertising signal into the ultrasonic is questionable enough, but continually blasting noise in that range would be annoying as hell for dogs and other creatures that can hear outside of normal human range (maybe it should be PETA suing these asshats?) Just to avoid being added as a single row in a database so large that you aren't even a rounding error.
Yay for improperly closing my tags! And failing to hit preview, of course..
To be fair, that's not the comparison he was making. He was comparing the difference between swapping an engine vs swapping the wheels against the difference between swapping a laptop hdd vs swapping the motherboard.
In both cases, the car example is more work. Primarily because cars are heavier. But if you have the appropriate tools and knowledge (correct jacks, wrenches, etc) then changing out a car's wheels or even its engine is mostly only a handful of bolts -- not entirely dissimilar to changing out PC parts once you factor out the weight issue.
Of course there's a major difference -- you can fix your engine if you know what you're doing. If your motherboard breaks you're stuck replacing it. Even if you're good with a soldering iron, you're still stick replacing entire components.
Hell, you could potentially even put in an incompatible engine in your car if you're good enough with welding in plates and drilling bolt holes and whatnot to ensure the new engine doesn't rip everything apart. In comparison, there's absolutely no way you could say repin your Intel motherboard to accept an AMD CPU. No matter how smart or careful or well-equipped you are, that's just not really possible.
That may all be true, but its not really the point I was getting at. If you're regularly only working 30 hours and expecting to be paid for 40, whether that's actually 40 @ hourly rate, or its a 40 hour equivalent salary, then you shouldn't be surprised if you get disciplined.
That's not how "salary" works anywhere I've seen. "Salary" tends to be interpreted as shorthand for "8hr of hourly work," which is somewhat backed up by the way overtime and other such laws are written.
And at the very least, if you have 25% of your day available to work on personal projects, then your employer should probably be assigning you more tasks rather than just getting bitchy (well, assuming you aren't falling behind in your work due to that 25% wasted time of course. If your personal projects are detracting from your actual work then you definitely have a problem and your employer is right to discipline you.)
Unfortunately there are a lot of shitty employers out there. There was a while at my company where if I was done all my work for the week, they'd expect me to just start on something else. But at the same time they strongly discouraged any sort of initiative because they were constantly worried that it would break things (and not entirely without reason.. we had some shitty QA practices back then.)
Things have improved since then but there was a few months where I was intentionally having to be slow with my work because getting things done ahead of schedule led to a bit of a catch-22 issue where I was bitched at both for doing nothing or for doing anything not assigned to me.