Strangely, my "next" position was a one-day trial at a huge private school.
Six guys, didn't manage to do as much in the entire day as I would have done in my pre-morning checks. It was embarrassing. Tickets months out of date and lots of fobbing off. Couldn't even be arsed to leave their rooms which had a pathetic absence of tools or useful machines (sure, quad-screens looks cool... what the fuck were you using them for?).
I'm sure that the average worker doesn't do as much as I do, and I can name dozens of people who work ten times harder than I do (not claiming that they get 10 times the results, but it's not for want of trying), and I don't expect for a second to get 8 constant hours of 100% productive work out of people. But there's doing a job, and pissing away your time.
This guy is either the only one working, or he's pissing away his time. I suspect that 4 programmers is major overkill.
If you hire M(CSE)onkeys, and pay peanuts, then you get a system equivalent to monkey-shit. I've always known this.
Have a job lined up for next year. Same size school, same size problems, same size IT "department". Taking over from the ONE guy who brought in at great cost to rescue them and document their network as a side-job, when their previous ONE guy was a lounger and did fuck all and didn't backup their systems (and they never realised until a server crashed).
The ratio is not unusual even if most small businesses can't find people who can do that. I don't expect some small office to have the best IT guy in the world. It would be a waste. But when you're talking a multi-million pound business, you either hire well or hire lots. And this guy sounds like he's in the "lots" category.
I work in inner-city schools. My last job was for independent (private) schools.
We had 380 kids, 50 staff, 50 desktops, 50 laptops, 50 netbooks, 50 tablets. We tied it all in on site, with VoIP phones, structured cabling and also wireless, dozens of apps (some dating back decades), dozens of printers, access control, CCTV, even the boilers were computer-controlled. Every classroom was kitted out with projector, whiteboard, phone, laptop point, printer, and a few bits of miscellany. It was all wired back to 6 servers, and we offloaded quite a lot of external stuff like email to Google Apps.
There was me. Just me. And an independent audit recommend we get someone else to help me but it was going to be just an apprentice.
The computer systems ran everything, including a bunch of legally required systems and the finance (several million pounds a year just in school fees, for instance). Building projects happened every Summer and generally added several rooms and meant recabling large parts of the building every six months or so.
Outside contracting was limited to cable running (not even crimping, etc.) and third-line support. We had a helpdesk ticketing system, regular computer-based exams that affected the children's education if they weren't run properly, an MIS that held stupidly critical information and was in use by the staff every moment of every day.
And, I'd like to reiterate, there was just me. Now, I left because of overburden but that was after 5 years of all the above running quite happily and only THEN (after a staff change) did they try to pile duties like managing the boiler control systems (what the hell do I know about gas boilers the size of a room?), overriding all my freedoms and choices (ordered a VoIP phone - normally £100 and next-day delivery.... six months later, the order still hadn't even gone through the system) and expecting decisions-by-committee where the committees still wouldn't exist six months later.
As such, I left not because of the IT workload but because of the management bullshit that suddenly appeared above me and stopped me doing my job. Several others left with me, and the number of constructive dismissal claims went through the roof.
And you're sitting there with 4 programmers and 2 "general" IT staff on something that I would consider - at best - equivalent, and moaning? My sympathy isn't with you. I made more than 100 customisations to a single process on a single machine, running more than 25 separate major functions which was so funny that I used to label them (e.g. "Fax-to-email server", "Intranet server", etc.) on the side of the machine and I ran out of room on a tower case. Hell, just the copy of Hylafax I was always scared to upgrade because it had so many home-brew patches and configuration quirks that it took a long time to do so from the bare source.
Multiply that up by the various other servers, failovers, etc. and I did more programming on them than I did any other kind of tech support. One of them even had some electronic relay control boards that I had to design and build myself, controlled by that same machine and even controllable remotely via authenticated SMS message (heavily patched gammu installation).
So in terms of your people ratios, I have little sympathy. And you have a LOT of programmers to make your life easier. I spent most of my time chasing external tech support for stupid unresolvable issues in binary software that they refused to update/support. Things like hard-coding the version of Flash required but not being able to recognise two-digit major numbers (e.g. Flash 10), the company going bust 10 years ago, but the software being "vital" to the school's curriculum. Things like software running under Windows 95 "everyone is local admin" conditions but having to deployed in the two IT suites and various standalone and staff laptop machines such that children could run it unsupervised.
Couple in heavy web filtering, huge legal requirements (all staff machines
I'd like to think that if you ever got to the point where you were in front of something that would accept a password to launch a nuclear strike, and you WEREN'T one of the people authorised to know the passwords, it's game over anyway.
The only thing that device can do is send an electrical signal to something - if you've got that far, especially in the era mentioned - chances are you just insert that signal directly without having to worry about the Password? prompt anyway.
The questions I have are - was the password a variable-length entry? Because if you just typed in 7 zeros and pressed Enter, would it accept it?
And, what did that password actually DO? What did it activate? What systems did it energise? What kind of hardware was behind it? Where was it stored?
That's infinitely more important than what the damn password is.
Hell, given that Slashdot are now printing articles that basically derive from questions asked on QI some years ago, I'd like to bring up another: the UK's equivalent was to have the prime minister's chauffeur stop his car, dial a phone number and ask the operator to reverse the charges, to call the hotline that would give the prime minister the chance to verbally authorise retaliation in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike.
By comparison, 00000000 is positively forward-thinking.
Is it just me that thinks that, when aiming at kids, BASIC still probably is the easiest language to understand (if not the most rigorous)?
The first example is just HORRENDOUS anyway - boilerplater and ternary crap getting in the way. The second is simplified using specific language facilities and objects.
So what would have been wrong with a BASIC-like:
FOR EACH USER IN USERS
SENDMESSAGE(USER, "Happy Birthday") NEXT USER
As I get older, I believe more and more than the creators of BASIC knew what they were doing, and make something kids and beginners could understand quickly even if it wasn't perfect.
You can pay a transaction fee to speed your transaction. It's assumed that when all the coins are mined, people will make money from this transaction fee instead.
But all coins aren't mined yet, so there's still a once-in-a-year/decade/whatever chance that you'll generate a whole coin, so people won't stop mining for a while yet. And a whole coin is worth several thousand at the moment. It won't be "profitable" but people will still be mining on the off-chance of a windfall, I suspect.
Select the hardware, look at the cost (just underneath it), see how many actually make a profit (in blue on the right) after a few months, how many after an entire year, and how many never make one (profit in red and bracketed).
Quite a lot of the companies have NOTHING on there that generates profit at all (including the new USB ASIC miners, for instance, as I said).
The ones that do make a profit, you need a few thousand of dollars investment, hope the difficulty doesn't go up, and you might make a few hundred dollars for 6 months until they start to make a loss. The ones that make thousands of dollars cost over $10,000 in the first place.
And next year, you will be worse off again.
Not saying you can't make profit. Saying that when you take into account the hassle, the cost, the difficulty changes, and the risk, you'll be lucky to make more than your bank would have given you for the same amount of cash in a savings account. And at least that doesn't "devalue" over time.
From what I see on the various online calculators for these sorts of things, the kind of ASICs you could afford are no longer profitable even now. You make a net loss on electricity even on the cheap, low-power USB device. You have to spend about $2000-3000 on a dedicated machine with dozens of ASICs in order to actually make any profit.
And when you project into the future for the difficulty changes, etc., you'll find they are barely profitable for a year or two.
CPU mining is worthless. Even with a whole bunch of computers running "for free", you won't make any money out of it.
GPU mining is uneconomical but you might make a few bitcoins before the difficulty changes again.
ASIC mining isn't really subject to the article's malicious use scenario, but even then in another couple of years you won't be able to make money.
The problem is that there's little where else go go. We're reaching the top of the curve for bitcoin mining, long before all the possible coins are "found".
This is one of the reasons that Bitcoin has seen massive jumps in price since the ASIC generation turned out to just kill off the predecessors, not actually make a bucket-load of profit.
Not really. I can pump 200+ hours into a game, easy, and I don't need much in the way of "reward".
Basically, the problem was that I was TRYING to get into the game. But I was so distracted by so many side-missions, skippable crap that wouldn't let me replay it when I skipped it by accident (the guards speaking, etc.), so much "open-world" without actually having any idea what I should be focusing on, and so many things to be careful of in the meantime (stray click when throwing your crap out of your inventory and you bash a guard over the head who was wandering the map and end up in prison).
The time I sat and spent 20 minutes following the tutorials and forging weapons, the guys instructions were constantly talked over (and even subtitles interrupted) by his daughter talking crap. And when I did it, I was rewarded with worse equipment than I'd picked up in the first ten minutes of playing almost half-an-hour before.
Then you have ten options, you choose one, pursue it, and end up with ten more options but no more information on how to pursue them, and go on wild goose chases for an hour trying to do a mission that YOU CAN'T.
There's open-world. There's structured play. And there's just throwing a billion conflicting missions with not enough information into a vast world and calling it a game.
Agreed... it's even both to both handhold AND let people explore and still fuck up the game experience by doing so:
Just bought Skyrim because everyone's always on about how great a game it is and I could get it for free by selling some accumulated Steam junk. Should be good enough to play now, given that I bought all the DLC and it's been patched for ages, etc.
My impression of my first gameplay is:
Okay. Let me move around. No seriously. Just let me stand up then. Or do something. Fine. Cutscene. Cutscene. Cutscene. I'll sit here like an idiot as I head towards certain death. (Cue five minutes in the options trying to turn the audio volume up or the subtitles on at least). Ah, great, I can finally move. Oh. All of six feet until then I'm put on the execution block. Fabulous. Cutscene. Cutscene. Miraculous rescue that I played no part in despite sitting behind a guard with three other prisoners who wanted to escape, with the physical ability to strangle him, for the last 10 minutes.
Right, okay, dragon chasing us, let's run. Apart from that guy, apparently. Who just waits while I catch him up. Wonder how long I can wait until he does something. Oh. Forever, apparently. Right fine. Run 100 yards. Wait for him to talk. Run 100 yards. Wait. Run 100 yards. Wait. And now he's behind me and won't move. Fabulous. Fuck it, I'll just wander off. Trip over an arrow. I kid you not. Repeatedly. Can't get off the damn thing. Eventually manage to stand up without falling over. Run to the next bit of the village.
Okay, somehow he's mysteriously caught me up. Right, grabbed a weapon, have a quick fight (which consisted of pressing the mouse button three times), raid the body, chase up a tower. No. Blocked. Wander around for several minutes. Now I have to go back outside, apparently, because so many people were talking I couldn't work it out. Quick fight. Now back into the 100m relay race again.
Into some caves. Two or three fights. Pick up EVERY object known to man while people talk to me like there's nothing wrong with carrying 20 baskets and 15 buckets along with a ton of armour. Finally get weighed down, dump it all on the floor and kit myself up with proper weapons. Lockpick everything in sight and take anything I don't already have. Follow guy who's been waiting patiently and silently for me to catch him up. Kill bear because I'll be fucked if I'm sneaking past something that big (two clicks from a safe distance). Take bear pelt and claws as souvenir. 100m relay for another minute or so, where he gets lost and keeps running backwards and saying things to me while I'm out of earshot (probably important, but nothing I could do about it). Ignore him and carry on regardless. Bang, he teleports in front of me after a while.
Run along road with him. Kill wolf. Ignore everything he says because it's too much chatter to wait for and nothing much else is happening. Accompany him even though he wanted me to split up. A minute later, he's "so glad" we didn't split up. Fabulous. Several miles of the 100m relay again. Get to a town. Sodding tons of people, everyone wants to talk to me. Spend 20 minutes working for a blacksmith while his daughter bugs the crap out of me. End up being rewarded with a worse weapon than I'd just sold him ten minutes before. Cheap bastard. Find the bloke in a house, steal all his food and kill his friend (who got angry when I stole his food). He does nothing, neither does his wife who I slaughtered him in front of (and stole his boots), who just says how terrible it is that he's dead.
Wander into everyone's homes late at night and they don't say a word. Resist temptation to steal all their furniture (which is apparently quite possible). Try to chat one of the women up but apparently her vocabulary descends into a single line over time. Break into random houses and steal all their food, then sell it to the blacksmith. Find the map, find the big town people keep hinting towards, run in straight line to it (through rivers and over mountains because it's quicke
Nothing trumps basic consumer law and contract fairness.
Too many people forget this.
The EULA's can say what they like. If it's deemed unreasonable, especially if it's one-sided, courts will just ignore those portions of it.
I think commenting your own opinion on a product/service you used can't really ever be deemed unreasonable until it becomes harassment, and that's relatively easy to determine and prose cute for.
Fact is, all this company have done is said they'll sue their own customers unless they never have a problem and/or never tell anyone about it. It's a perfect way to lose customers.
They can claim anything they like, but that doesn't mean that a court will back them - especially not when they breached the contract themselves first (thus making all the other party's obligations under that contract null and void).
Just because someone says "But you signed/agreed to this", it doesn't mean that you are bound by it. It's a complete fallacy. It just means that you have to prove it's unreasonable rather than, in the case of not signing it, do nothing.
There was a lot of cases about whether automatic "if you park here, you are agreeing to pay a £100 'fine'" signs put up by private landowners. Loads of people ignored them and paid fines. And then courts said that it was unreasonable and not legal. And now those landowners are having to pay all that money (and expenses) back.
A contract has to be fair and reasonable, or it's not a contract at all. And yet you can still be held by your side of the contract (e.g. providing the damn service you were required to) while having all your provisos (e.g. NDA's or termination clauses) rendered void. It all depends on the balance of contract law.
But, honestly, don't agree to such things in the first place (this person says they didn't, for instance), and don't let people get away with such things when they can't keep their own side of the agreement.
Spending money on cosmetic surgery, and the amount of money you literally PISS AWAY into insurers and intermediaries is the cause of your problem.
You're not spending money on making people better. You're spending money on keeping huge pharmaceutical companies in their monopoly on ineffective treatments.
How much do you think it *really* costs to diagnose and treat a broken leg? Now find out how much your insurers pay (who aren't "insuring", because they only charge you for your own personal expense, at great "middle-man" profit).
Stop pissing about, through out this "private" medical practice with insurers and so many middle-men, and put in place a national health service who offer any treatment that is effective and extends life / quality of life, which everyone contributes to from taxation, and everything else you pay for out of your own pocket.
You'll pay less tax. You'll never pay health insurance again unless you want to for something cosmetic. And you'll be healthier.
Come join the rest of the fucking first- and third-world.
I've thought the same of many "classics". In fact, I stopped trying to read the classics that everyone says "I MUST read" because they always turned out shite. I stuck to the famous authors (Dickens, etc.), and the popular books, and was a hell of a lot happier.
Sorry, but even Shakespeare - it's a load of shite. It may have been ground-breaking in its day, but it's almost impossible to read in context nowadays and not that fulfilling even once you have. Why we still teach kids it, I have no idea.
The worst I ever read, though, was The Demolished Man, the first ever Hugo Award winner. God, it was awful.
I get that some books, like some of the H.G.Wells, are just dated and mired in the politics of the times, but there's a world of difference between being out of your time and being god-damn atrocious. I can handle reading a book and thinking "I'm just not interested in what they are saying", "I don't get the historical context", "I'm just bored even if it's good writing".
What I can't handle is being forced to read utter shite because it's "a classic" or by a famous author. I tell you now, every "famous" author has at least one steaming pile of turd behind them somewhere, and I refuse to seek it out and read it just to say that I've read all their books. And lots of the famous authors wrote nothing but crap.
It's a matter of personal taste, of course, but it's the same with everything - art, music, literature. Some of it is by a famous artist and utter shite. Some famous artists are entirely utter shite.
We could argue about it until the cows come home.
(P.S. Every time someone has ever told me "You HAVE to read that", it's been utter shite... I'm assuming that's just me).
If suspicious, the tax authorities will monitor your expenses and the money going in and out of your account. This includes not just the cash the bank sees, but also the amount you earn versus the car you have, the house you own, the food you eat, etc.
BitCoin on its own does not stop (or encourage) this sort of behaviour. Hell, just doing business in a foreign country or running a shell company, you can do the same quite easily for a LONG time and avoid detection. There are stories of people living off the sale of their parent's homes in other countries for DECADES before the authorities realised they should have been paying tax on it.
But when the question of "How did you manage to pay for this" does come up, it doesn't matter what the answer is. All they want to know is "Did you pay tax?". So long as you paid the tax on it, like anything else, even if you sold your house or your car suddenly become worth £100,000 as a collector's item, then it's legit.
Sure, there will be idiots that think it's "free money" and the government can't touch them but the law says otherwise. Anything you have that can gain in value - that's taxable if it gains enough value. And the tax authorities will find it like they find anything else. By what you spend, where you go, what you do, and who dobs you in.
I don't see what's "special" in this, and people have this habit with Bitcoin - suddenly ordinary things fly out of the window or are forgotten about when you mention it.
I'm pretty sure they'll get that dickhead-pirate-whatever-his-name-is on tax evasion too (a bit like Al Capone, by all accounts, but it's better than nothing). It won't take years, I bet it's already been done by someone in, say, the City of London (the finance district), and they either paid up when caught or got a slap on the wrist for it.
I put £20 into Bitcoin a few months ago. Bought a shed load of Humble Bundles for myself and friends. It's now worth £100.
That's not a bad thing at all, though it's not a mass market thing it proves that it can just be "used" like Paypal or any other type of money exchange.
It's a question of customer service. If you make me pay for a bag, by removing the free alternatives and selling your own, then I'll avoid your store if I can.
You know why? Any large supermarket recycles or throws about tons of empty cardboard boxes every month. You could stack them by the door, let me take them conveniently from where I have to pack my purchase into a trolley / basket, and they'd get re-used (much better than recycling).
There are some shops that do this (shout-out to Trago Mills). They don't charge for boxes, they do for bags. They have lots of boxes just sitting there. And they have done for years. When I was a kid, supermarkets all did this. Now they don't. The ones that do are the rare exceptions. Probably some crappy health-and-safety or even recycling-backhander in play. Fact is that I'd rather take a used, strong, perfectly-sized cardboard box from a pile than do anything with bags at all.
If I go into your shop and buy things, I need to take them out of your shop. If you're going to make me pay to take them out, I'll buy less. Just "to make a statement", nothing to do with the money.
And if you're really insistent, I have a very bad memory so never remember to bring my "own" bags (which you expect me to have paid for at some point), so what I'll do is roll the trolley out into the car park, empty it into the car, and take it out at home. No bag for you, more hassle for me. I could buy my own "trolley", like some old British women do, but why would I? I don't want to spend money to help me spend money.
All of which means I won't come to your shop for small purchases and other times. Shopping trolleys were invented in order to make sure people could carry enough goods home that they didn't have to worry about what they bought and hence they would buy more. If I have to think about how many bags I have and where they are and whether I have to grab them in the morning to do a shop after work, etc. then I'm not going to go elsewhere.
I've done this recently after the last supermarket in the area moved to a "coin deposit" trolley system. I rarely carry cash, and when I have it I won't remember to bring change on my shopping trip. And I probably don't have a pound coin even when I do have a pound in change. So it's just an inconvenience.
As far as I'm concerned it's like DRM. You're getting in my way as an honest customer in order to fight against some mythical trolley thieves that you'd be better off just putting a security guard on the exit from the car park to stop.
I've been back to that shop once since. I took a basket because I didn't have a pound coin on me and had forgotten about the new system. I bought a handful of things, then my arms got tired, so I paid and put it straight back into the car and drove off. Haven't been back.
It has nothing to do with money, ecology or the environment. If you're going to inconvenience me, you're not providing proper customer service. There are ways out that are really simple and tie in very nicely with the way you run your business and dispose of packaging yourself.
But you choose to inconvenience me, and force me to pre-plan all shopping trips (which works against you, I spend more when I have no idea what I have in my fridge, have lots of strong bags, etc.). I've got the message. I'll shop elsewhere.
Get this: I'd rather go elsewhere if you charge me for bags and provide no alternatives. Even with a car. Even with 100GBP weekly shopping trips. Even with strong arms and no disabilities. Is that worth the pence you save by charging me for bags, recycling your boxes, or not having a trolley wander off?
P.S. After a month of the new system, your trolleys now allow you to remove the pound coin without needing to replace it in the lines of trolleys because the internal mechanisms are so weakened (presumably through sheer wear or forcible removal)... lots of money well spent there on pissing me off.
"absolutely kickass SQA and Hardware person, networking, you name it"
"I have the skills and the aptitude to absorb and adapt to any new situations and languages way beyond what any of my college age brethren might have."
"a perfectly good resume" (just sounds so snarky)
and critically: "someone requiring to work remotely"
Get off your high horse, write a plain CV/resume (omit your age if you really feel you need to) and apply for "normal" jobs, not telecommuting jobs.
Who wants to hire a blow-his-own-trumpet, big-head, nearly-retired, remote worker? Nobody.
That said, as you get older your skills mean less. If you have 20 years or 30 years experience, which is "better"? There's not much to choose between them. If you had nothing versus even 1 year's experience it makes a big difference. Hence as you age, your experience means less. It's almost a bell curve, in fact. After a while you "know" so much that you have to be retrained to do things "our" way.
And the job market is tough no matter what your age or experience. Many places can't afford people at all, let alone top-end salary highly-experienced people. That said, I've never paid attention to "the market" and always just applied for things I like and never had a problem finding work (in fact, the opposite... I'm currently holding off applying for permanent jobs, after resigning from my job of 5 years, in order to be ready for a good place that are determined to hire me and have offers coming in from all sorts of places).
Also, in my experience, if you're good the work finds you. I'm socially inept but this networking thing really gets you work like nothing else. I spent 10+ years just going from client to client based on word of mouth and NOTHING else. I'm not "the best", by far, but I'm good at what I do and learn quick on what I don't.
You're willing to adapt and learn, so do so. With the recruitment process as well as the types of jobs you go for. Apply for damn near anything in your area of expertise and stop being so picky about YOUR requirements. If you were so good, the jobs would be finding you, not the other way around.
Honestly, you're just like everyone else looking for work. You can either put in the graft and find the job you want by spending MONTHS looking for it, or you can drift from job to unemployment to job as and when something comes up that "suits" you.
Refusing medical treatment is an entirely different category to dying. You're going to die anyway. You're just refusing to have people help you. And in many cases that can be overridden against your wishes.
This is entirely different to someone who, without medical help, will just be in even more pain for approximately the same length of time, and still not die.
Assisted suicide is something you can tell people to do when you're mentally competent, for them to carry out when you're NOT mentally competent or otherwise unable. Why this should be at all controversial I've never understood, so long as people follow some kind of checking procedure.
And blaming someone for not paying for hospice care? All the hospice care in the world can't do anything for some conditions. It just means it costs more to die in pain.
For future reference for any court: If I'm in extreme pain or suffering, I will happily authorise a member of my family to terminate my life by withholding of any and all medical procedures AND, if possible, by termination of my life. The only "authorisation" you need is asking me the question and getting something that it can be reasonably construed as a Yes in front of two doctors or notaries.
Fuck spending even an hour of my life knowing I want to die quicker and not being able to and being kept alive against my wishes. I'll hold my fucking breath and hyperventilate, give myself a heart attack, or whatever I can do.
Suicide is for the people who can do it (and, I agree, is pretty dumb in 99% of circumstances and the 1% are premature).
Euthanasia is for people who can't do it themselves.
What possible positive is there in keeping someone who is GOING to die, soon, alive at great medical expense (financial expense is neither here nor there), in enormous suffering, who actually WOULD PREFER to die? There's none. Nothing. Whatsoever. It's not good for the patient, not good for the family, not good for the medical staff, not good for the government, not good for humanity.
And we don't choose when we're born, which is why it doesn't have much dignity. But within seconds we're swaddled and given it. Why should we have to endure indignity when we die if we can choose not to?
Sorry - I'm going to die of a heart attack, die by violence, die in my sleep, die by suicide or die by euthanasia. Not much else is ever going to get me, because like fuck would I let myself or my family or even the nurses be put through that.
It's not specific enough, and it's not directly threatening. He's not saying he'll actually kill anyone, he's saying that he wishes you have a painful death when you die. Above and beyond that, he's a comic effectively.
"Why don't you just fuck off and die?" is not, per se, a threat. It's rude, abusive, obviously hostile, but not a threat. Hell, by that yardstick, just about everything said on TV is not only potentially liable, but you could have actors sue for it because it's been said to them (even as part of the acting). No.
My mother has said a billion times worse to me. And, to be honest, he's got a point. Why is state-sponsored torture okay?
Hint: Countries that practice *actual* torture, rather than indirect torture, don't get a say. Sorry, America.
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Strangely, my "next" position was a one-day trial at a huge private school.
Six guys, didn't manage to do as much in the entire day as I would have done in my pre-morning checks. It was embarrassing. Tickets months out of date and lots of fobbing off. Couldn't even be arsed to leave their rooms which had a pathetic absence of tools or useful machines (sure, quad-screens looks cool... what the fuck were you using them for?).
I'm sure that the average worker doesn't do as much as I do, and I can name dozens of people who work ten times harder than I do (not claiming that they get 10 times the results, but it's not for want of trying), and I don't expect for a second to get 8 constant hours of 100% productive work out of people. But there's doing a job, and pissing away your time.
This guy is either the only one working, or he's pissing away his time. I suspect that 4 programmers is major overkill.
If you hire M(CSE)onkeys, and pay peanuts, then you get a system equivalent to monkey-shit. I've always known this.
Have a job lined up for next year. Same size school, same size problems, same size IT "department". Taking over from the ONE guy who brought in at great cost to rescue them and document their network as a side-job, when their previous ONE guy was a lounger and did fuck all and didn't backup their systems (and they never realised until a server crashed).
The ratio is not unusual even if most small businesses can't find people who can do that. I don't expect some small office to have the best IT guy in the world. It would be a waste. But when you're talking a multi-million pound business, you either hire well or hire lots. And this guy sounds like he's in the "lots" category.
I work in inner-city schools. My last job was for independent (private) schools.
We had 380 kids, 50 staff, 50 desktops, 50 laptops, 50 netbooks, 50 tablets. We tied it all in on site, with VoIP phones, structured cabling and also wireless, dozens of apps (some dating back decades), dozens of printers, access control, CCTV, even the boilers were computer-controlled. Every classroom was kitted out with projector, whiteboard, phone, laptop point, printer, and a few bits of miscellany. It was all wired back to 6 servers, and we offloaded quite a lot of external stuff like email to Google Apps.
There was me. Just me. And an independent audit recommend we get someone else to help me but it was going to be just an apprentice.
The computer systems ran everything, including a bunch of legally required systems and the finance (several million pounds a year just in school fees, for instance). Building projects happened every Summer and generally added several rooms and meant recabling large parts of the building every six months or so.
Outside contracting was limited to cable running (not even crimping, etc.) and third-line support. We had a helpdesk ticketing system, regular computer-based exams that affected the children's education if they weren't run properly, an MIS that held stupidly critical information and was in use by the staff every moment of every day.
And, I'd like to reiterate, there was just me. Now, I left because of overburden but that was after 5 years of all the above running quite happily and only THEN (after a staff change) did they try to pile duties like managing the boiler control systems (what the hell do I know about gas boilers the size of a room?), overriding all my freedoms and choices (ordered a VoIP phone - normally £100 and next-day delivery.... six months later, the order still hadn't even gone through the system) and expecting decisions-by-committee where the committees still wouldn't exist six months later.
As such, I left not because of the IT workload but because of the management bullshit that suddenly appeared above me and stopped me doing my job. Several others left with me, and the number of constructive dismissal claims went through the roof.
And you're sitting there with 4 programmers and 2 "general" IT staff on something that I would consider - at best - equivalent, and moaning? My sympathy isn't with you. I made more than 100 customisations to a single process on a single machine, running more than 25 separate major functions which was so funny that I used to label them (e.g. "Fax-to-email server", "Intranet server", etc.) on the side of the machine and I ran out of room on a tower case. Hell, just the copy of Hylafax I was always scared to upgrade because it had so many home-brew patches and configuration quirks that it took a long time to do so from the bare source.
Multiply that up by the various other servers, failovers, etc. and I did more programming on them than I did any other kind of tech support. One of them even had some electronic relay control boards that I had to design and build myself, controlled by that same machine and even controllable remotely via authenticated SMS message (heavily patched gammu installation).
So in terms of your people ratios, I have little sympathy. And you have a LOT of programmers to make your life easier. I spent most of my time chasing external tech support for stupid unresolvable issues in binary software that they refused to update/support. Things like hard-coding the version of Flash required but not being able to recognise two-digit major numbers (e.g. Flash 10), the company going bust 10 years ago, but the software being "vital" to the school's curriculum. Things like software running under Windows 95 "everyone is local admin" conditions but having to deployed in the two IT suites and various standalone and staff laptop machines such that children could run it unsupervised.
Couple in heavy web filtering, huge legal requirements (all staff machines
But if 1/3 of those zombie went active hunting for uninfected every day, they could wipe out the survivors in a matter of days.
A password is something that, almost by definition, should be hard to guess, have no relation to the user, and be difficult to "shoulder-surf".
As such, the very definition of a password means that they are hard for THAT PERSON to generate, and hard to remember.
This really needs any kind of study or discussion?
I haven't read TFA but:
I'd like to think that if you ever got to the point where you were in front of something that would accept a password to launch a nuclear strike, and you WEREN'T one of the people authorised to know the passwords, it's game over anyway.
The only thing that device can do is send an electrical signal to something - if you've got that far, especially in the era mentioned - chances are you just insert that signal directly without having to worry about the Password? prompt anyway.
The questions I have are - was the password a variable-length entry? Because if you just typed in 7 zeros and pressed Enter, would it accept it?
And, what did that password actually DO? What did it activate? What systems did it energise? What kind of hardware was behind it? Where was it stored?
That's infinitely more important than what the damn password is.
Hell, given that Slashdot are now printing articles that basically derive from questions asked on QI some years ago, I'd like to bring up another: the UK's equivalent was to have the prime minister's chauffeur stop his car, dial a phone number and ask the operator to reverse the charges, to call the hotline that would give the prime minister the chance to verbally authorise retaliation in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike.
By comparison, 00000000 is positively forward-thinking.
Is it just me that thinks that, when aiming at kids, BASIC still probably is the easiest language to understand (if not the most rigorous)?
The first example is just HORRENDOUS anyway - boilerplater and ternary crap getting in the way. The second is simplified using specific language facilities and objects.
So what would have been wrong with a BASIC-like:
FOR EACH USER IN USERS
SENDMESSAGE(USER, "Happy Birthday")
NEXT USER
As I get older, I believe more and more than the creators of BASIC knew what they were doing, and make something kids and beginners could understand quickly even if it wasn't perfect.
You can pay a transaction fee to speed your transaction. It's assumed that when all the coins are mined, people will make money from this transaction fee instead.
But all coins aren't mined yet, so there's still a once-in-a-year/decade/whatever chance that you'll generate a whole coin, so people won't stop mining for a while yet. And a whole coin is worth several thousand at the moment. It won't be "profitable" but people will still be mining on the off-chance of a windfall, I suspect.
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/
Select the hardware, look at the cost (just underneath it), see how many actually make a profit (in blue on the right) after a few months, how many after an entire year, and how many never make one (profit in red and bracketed).
Quite a lot of the companies have NOTHING on there that generates profit at all (including the new USB ASIC miners, for instance, as I said).
The ones that do make a profit, you need a few thousand of dollars investment, hope the difficulty doesn't go up, and you might make a few hundred dollars for 6 months until they start to make a loss. The ones that make thousands of dollars cost over $10,000 in the first place.
And next year, you will be worse off again.
Not saying you can't make profit. Saying that when you take into account the hassle, the cost, the difficulty changes, and the risk, you'll be lucky to make more than your bank would have given you for the same amount of cash in a savings account. And at least that doesn't "devalue" over time.
From what I see on the various online calculators for these sorts of things, the kind of ASICs you could afford are no longer profitable even now. You make a net loss on electricity even on the cheap, low-power USB device. You have to spend about $2000-3000 on a dedicated machine with dozens of ASICs in order to actually make any profit.
And when you project into the future for the difficulty changes, etc., you'll find they are barely profitable for a year or two.
CPU mining is worthless. Even with a whole bunch of computers running "for free", you won't make any money out of it.
GPU mining is uneconomical but you might make a few bitcoins before the difficulty changes again.
ASIC mining isn't really subject to the article's malicious use scenario, but even then in another couple of years you won't be able to make money.
The problem is that there's little where else go go. We're reaching the top of the curve for bitcoin mining, long before all the possible coins are "found".
This is one of the reasons that Bitcoin has seen massive jumps in price since the ASIC generation turned out to just kill off the predecessors, not actually make a bucket-load of profit.
Not really. I can pump 200+ hours into a game, easy, and I don't need much in the way of "reward".
Basically, the problem was that I was TRYING to get into the game. But I was so distracted by so many side-missions, skippable crap that wouldn't let me replay it when I skipped it by accident (the guards speaking, etc.), so much "open-world" without actually having any idea what I should be focusing on, and so many things to be careful of in the meantime (stray click when throwing your crap out of your inventory and you bash a guard over the head who was wandering the map and end up in prison).
The time I sat and spent 20 minutes following the tutorials and forging weapons, the guys instructions were constantly talked over (and even subtitles interrupted) by his daughter talking crap. And when I did it, I was rewarded with worse equipment than I'd picked up in the first ten minutes of playing almost half-an-hour before.
Then you have ten options, you choose one, pursue it, and end up with ten more options but no more information on how to pursue them, and go on wild goose chases for an hour trying to do a mission that YOU CAN'T.
There's open-world. There's structured play. And there's just throwing a billion conflicting missions with not enough information into a vast world and calling it a game.
Agreed... it's even both to both handhold AND let people explore and still fuck up the game experience by doing so:
Just bought Skyrim because everyone's always on about how great a game it is and I could get it for free by selling some accumulated Steam junk. Should be good enough to play now, given that I bought all the DLC and it's been patched for ages, etc.
My impression of my first gameplay is:
Okay. Let me move around. No seriously. Just let me stand up then. Or do something. Fine. Cutscene. Cutscene. Cutscene. I'll sit here like an idiot as I head towards certain death. (Cue five minutes in the options trying to turn the audio volume up or the subtitles on at least). Ah, great, I can finally move. Oh. All of six feet until then I'm put on the execution block. Fabulous. Cutscene. Cutscene. Miraculous rescue that I played no part in despite sitting behind a guard with three other prisoners who wanted to escape, with the physical ability to strangle him, for the last 10 minutes.
Right, okay, dragon chasing us, let's run. Apart from that guy, apparently. Who just waits while I catch him up. Wonder how long I can wait until he does something. Oh. Forever, apparently. Right fine. Run 100 yards. Wait for him to talk. Run 100 yards. Wait. Run 100 yards. Wait. And now he's behind me and won't move. Fabulous. Fuck it, I'll just wander off. Trip over an arrow. I kid you not. Repeatedly. Can't get off the damn thing. Eventually manage to stand up without falling over. Run to the next bit of the village.
Okay, somehow he's mysteriously caught me up. Right, grabbed a weapon, have a quick fight (which consisted of pressing the mouse button three times), raid the body, chase up a tower. No. Blocked. Wander around for several minutes. Now I have to go back outside, apparently, because so many people were talking I couldn't work it out. Quick fight. Now back into the 100m relay race again.
Into some caves. Two or three fights. Pick up EVERY object known to man while people talk to me like there's nothing wrong with carrying 20 baskets and 15 buckets along with a ton of armour. Finally get weighed down, dump it all on the floor and kit myself up with proper weapons. Lockpick everything in sight and take anything I don't already have. Follow guy who's been waiting patiently and silently for me to catch him up. Kill bear because I'll be fucked if I'm sneaking past something that big (two clicks from a safe distance). Take bear pelt and claws as souvenir. 100m relay for another minute or so, where he gets lost and keeps running backwards and saying things to me while I'm out of earshot (probably important, but nothing I could do about it). Ignore him and carry on regardless. Bang, he teleports in front of me after a while.
Run along road with him. Kill wolf. Ignore everything he says because it's too much chatter to wait for and nothing much else is happening. Accompany him even though he wanted me to split up. A minute later, he's "so glad" we didn't split up. Fabulous. Several miles of the 100m relay again. Get to a town. Sodding tons of people, everyone wants to talk to me. Spend 20 minutes working for a blacksmith while his daughter bugs the crap out of me. End up being rewarded with a worse weapon than I'd just sold him ten minutes before. Cheap bastard. Find the bloke in a house, steal all his food and kill his friend (who got angry when I stole his food). He does nothing, neither does his wife who I slaughtered him in front of (and stole his boots), who just says how terrible it is that he's dead.
Wander into everyone's homes late at night and they don't say a word. Resist temptation to steal all their furniture (which is apparently quite possible). Try to chat one of the women up but apparently her vocabulary descends into a single line over time. Break into random houses and steal all their food, then sell it to the blacksmith. Find the map, find the big town people keep hinting towards, run in straight line to it (through rivers and over mountains because it's quicke
Nothing trumps basic consumer law and contract fairness.
Too many people forget this.
The EULA's can say what they like. If it's deemed unreasonable, especially if it's one-sided, courts will just ignore those portions of it.
I think commenting your own opinion on a product/service you used can't really ever be deemed unreasonable until it becomes harassment, and that's relatively easy to determine and prose cute for.
Fact is, all this company have done is said they'll sue their own customers unless they never have a problem and/or never tell anyone about it. It's a perfect way to lose customers.
They can claim anything they like, but that doesn't mean that a court will back them - especially not when they breached the contract themselves first (thus making all the other party's obligations under that contract null and void).
Just because someone says "But you signed/agreed to this", it doesn't mean that you are bound by it. It's a complete fallacy. It just means that you have to prove it's unreasonable rather than, in the case of not signing it, do nothing.
There was a lot of cases about whether automatic "if you park here, you are agreeing to pay a £100 'fine'" signs put up by private landowners. Loads of people ignored them and paid fines. And then courts said that it was unreasonable and not legal. And now those landowners are having to pay all that money (and expenses) back.
A contract has to be fair and reasonable, or it's not a contract at all. And yet you can still be held by your side of the contract (e.g. providing the damn service you were required to) while having all your provisos (e.g. NDA's or termination clauses) rendered void. It all depends on the balance of contract law.
But, honestly, don't agree to such things in the first place (this person says they didn't, for instance), and don't let people get away with such things when they can't keep their own side of the agreement.
Spending money on cosmetic surgery, and the amount of money you literally PISS AWAY into insurers and intermediaries is the cause of your problem.
You're not spending money on making people better. You're spending money on keeping huge pharmaceutical companies in their monopoly on ineffective treatments.
How much do you think it *really* costs to diagnose and treat a broken leg? Now find out how much your insurers pay (who aren't "insuring", because they only charge you for your own personal expense, at great "middle-man" profit).
Stop pissing about, through out this "private" medical practice with insurers and so many middle-men, and put in place a national health service who offer any treatment that is effective and extends life / quality of life, which everyone contributes to from taxation, and everything else you pay for out of your own pocket.
You'll pay less tax. You'll never pay health insurance again unless you want to for something cosmetic. And you'll be healthier.
Come join the rest of the fucking first- and third-world.
Keep your people healthy and they'll live longer, work longer and pay more tax.
What kind of idiot hasn't realised this yet? (obviously, America)
I've thought the same of many "classics". In fact, I stopped trying to read the classics that everyone says "I MUST read" because they always turned out shite. I stuck to the famous authors (Dickens, etc.), and the popular books, and was a hell of a lot happier.
Sorry, but even Shakespeare - it's a load of shite. It may have been ground-breaking in its day, but it's almost impossible to read in context nowadays and not that fulfilling even once you have. Why we still teach kids it, I have no idea.
The worst I ever read, though, was The Demolished Man, the first ever Hugo Award winner. God, it was awful.
I get that some books, like some of the H.G.Wells, are just dated and mired in the politics of the times, but there's a world of difference between being out of your time and being god-damn atrocious. I can handle reading a book and thinking "I'm just not interested in what they are saying", "I don't get the historical context", "I'm just bored even if it's good writing".
What I can't handle is being forced to read utter shite because it's "a classic" or by a famous author. I tell you now, every "famous" author has at least one steaming pile of turd behind them somewhere, and I refuse to seek it out and read it just to say that I've read all their books. And lots of the famous authors wrote nothing but crap.
It's a matter of personal taste, of course, but it's the same with everything - art, music, literature. Some of it is by a famous artist and utter shite. Some famous artists are entirely utter shite.
We could argue about it until the cows come home.
(P.S. Every time someone has ever told me "You HAVE to read that", it's been utter shite... I'm assuming that's just me).
Why? It's the same as anything else.
If suspicious, the tax authorities will monitor your expenses and the money going in and out of your account. This includes not just the cash the bank sees, but also the amount you earn versus the car you have, the house you own, the food you eat, etc.
BitCoin on its own does not stop (or encourage) this sort of behaviour. Hell, just doing business in a foreign country or running a shell company, you can do the same quite easily for a LONG time and avoid detection. There are stories of people living off the sale of their parent's homes in other countries for DECADES before the authorities realised they should have been paying tax on it.
But when the question of "How did you manage to pay for this" does come up, it doesn't matter what the answer is. All they want to know is "Did you pay tax?". So long as you paid the tax on it, like anything else, even if you sold your house or your car suddenly become worth £100,000 as a collector's item, then it's legit.
Sure, there will be idiots that think it's "free money" and the government can't touch them but the law says otherwise. Anything you have that can gain in value - that's taxable if it gains enough value. And the tax authorities will find it like they find anything else. By what you spend, where you go, what you do, and who dobs you in.
I don't see what's "special" in this, and people have this habit with Bitcoin - suddenly ordinary things fly out of the window or are forgotten about when you mention it.
I'm pretty sure they'll get that dickhead-pirate-whatever-his-name-is on tax evasion too (a bit like Al Capone, by all accounts, but it's better than nothing). It won't take years, I bet it's already been done by someone in, say, the City of London (the finance district), and they either paid up when caught or got a slap on the wrist for it.
Humble Bundles.
I put £20 into Bitcoin a few months ago. Bought a shed load of Humble Bundles for myself and friends. It's now worth £100.
That's not a bad thing at all, though it's not a mass market thing it proves that it can just be "used" like Paypal or any other type of money exchange.
Damn lameness filter decided there was something it didn't like. Edited ten times to get rid of symbols and abbreviations, still flipped out.
So I changed it from Plain Old Text to HTML and that's the result up there, stripped of all my nice line returns...
Again, good customer service... the lameness filter is easily bypassed and in doing so makes my post look like shit.
It's a question of customer service. If you make me pay for a bag, by removing the free alternatives and selling your own, then I'll avoid your store if I can. You know why? Any large supermarket recycles or throws about tons of empty cardboard boxes every month. You could stack them by the door, let me take them conveniently from where I have to pack my purchase into a trolley / basket, and they'd get re-used (much better than recycling). There are some shops that do this (shout-out to Trago Mills). They don't charge for boxes, they do for bags. They have lots of boxes just sitting there. And they have done for years. When I was a kid, supermarkets all did this. Now they don't. The ones that do are the rare exceptions. Probably some crappy health-and-safety or even recycling-backhander in play. Fact is that I'd rather take a used, strong, perfectly-sized cardboard box from a pile than do anything with bags at all. If I go into your shop and buy things, I need to take them out of your shop. If you're going to make me pay to take them out, I'll buy less. Just "to make a statement", nothing to do with the money. And if you're really insistent, I have a very bad memory so never remember to bring my "own" bags (which you expect me to have paid for at some point), so what I'll do is roll the trolley out into the car park, empty it into the car, and take it out at home. No bag for you, more hassle for me. I could buy my own "trolley", like some old British women do, but why would I? I don't want to spend money to help me spend money. All of which means I won't come to your shop for small purchases and other times. Shopping trolleys were invented in order to make sure people could carry enough goods home that they didn't have to worry about what they bought and hence they would buy more. If I have to think about how many bags I have and where they are and whether I have to grab them in the morning to do a shop after work, etc. then I'm not going to go elsewhere. I've done this recently after the last supermarket in the area moved to a "coin deposit" trolley system. I rarely carry cash, and when I have it I won't remember to bring change on my shopping trip. And I probably don't have a pound coin even when I do have a pound in change. So it's just an inconvenience. As far as I'm concerned it's like DRM. You're getting in my way as an honest customer in order to fight against some mythical trolley thieves that you'd be better off just putting a security guard on the exit from the car park to stop. I've been back to that shop once since. I took a basket because I didn't have a pound coin on me and had forgotten about the new system. I bought a handful of things, then my arms got tired, so I paid and put it straight back into the car and drove off. Haven't been back. It has nothing to do with money, ecology or the environment. If you're going to inconvenience me, you're not providing proper customer service. There are ways out that are really simple and tie in very nicely with the way you run your business and dispose of packaging yourself. But you choose to inconvenience me, and force me to pre-plan all shopping trips (which works against you, I spend more when I have no idea what I have in my fridge, have lots of strong bags, etc.). I've got the message. I'll shop elsewhere. Get this: I'd rather go elsewhere if you charge me for bags and provide no alternatives. Even with a car. Even with 100GBP weekly shopping trips. Even with strong arms and no disabilities. Is that worth the pence you save by charging me for bags, recycling your boxes, or not having a trolley wander off? P.S. After a month of the new system, your trolleys now allow you to remove the pound coin without needing to replace it in the lines of trolleys because the internal mechanisms are so weakened (presumably through sheer wear or forcible removal)... lots of money well spent there on pissing me off.
Why wouldn't I hire you?
"absolutely kickass SQA and Hardware person, networking, you name it"
"I have the skills and the aptitude to absorb and adapt to any new situations and languages way beyond what any of my college age brethren might have."
"a perfectly good resume" (just sounds so snarky)
and critically: "someone requiring to work remotely"
Get off your high horse, write a plain CV/resume (omit your age if you really feel you need to) and apply for "normal" jobs, not telecommuting jobs.
Who wants to hire a blow-his-own-trumpet, big-head, nearly-retired, remote worker? Nobody.
That said, as you get older your skills mean less. If you have 20 years or 30 years experience, which is "better"? There's not much to choose between them. If you had nothing versus even 1 year's experience it makes a big difference. Hence as you age, your experience means less. It's almost a bell curve, in fact. After a while you "know" so much that you have to be retrained to do things "our" way.
And the job market is tough no matter what your age or experience. Many places can't afford people at all, let alone top-end salary highly-experienced people. That said, I've never paid attention to "the market" and always just applied for things I like and never had a problem finding work (in fact, the opposite... I'm currently holding off applying for permanent jobs, after resigning from my job of 5 years, in order to be ready for a good place that are determined to hire me and have offers coming in from all sorts of places).
Also, in my experience, if you're good the work finds you. I'm socially inept but this networking thing really gets you work like nothing else. I spent 10+ years just going from client to client based on word of mouth and NOTHING else. I'm not "the best", by far, but I'm good at what I do and learn quick on what I don't.
You're willing to adapt and learn, so do so. With the recruitment process as well as the types of jobs you go for. Apply for damn near anything in your area of expertise and stop being so picky about YOUR requirements. If you were so good, the jobs would be finding you, not the other way around.
Honestly, you're just like everyone else looking for work. You can either put in the graft and find the job you want by spending MONTHS looking for it, or you can drift from job to unemployment to job as and when something comes up that "suits" you.
Fine. That's your choice.
Now what about those people who disagree with you? Don't they get an opinion and a course of action they can follow too?
Yeah. And we didn't land on the Moon either.
(You nutter)
Refusing medical treatment is an entirely different category to dying. You're going to die anyway. You're just refusing to have people help you. And in many cases that can be overridden against your wishes.
This is entirely different to someone who, without medical help, will just be in even more pain for approximately the same length of time, and still not die.
Assisted suicide is something you can tell people to do when you're mentally competent, for them to carry out when you're NOT mentally competent or otherwise unable. Why this should be at all controversial I've never understood, so long as people follow some kind of checking procedure.
And blaming someone for not paying for hospice care? All the hospice care in the world can't do anything for some conditions. It just means it costs more to die in pain.
For future reference for any court: If I'm in extreme pain or suffering, I will happily authorise a member of my family to terminate my life by withholding of any and all medical procedures AND, if possible, by termination of my life. The only "authorisation" you need is asking me the question and getting something that it can be reasonably construed as a Yes in front of two doctors or notaries.
Fuck spending even an hour of my life knowing I want to die quicker and not being able to and being kept alive against my wishes. I'll hold my fucking breath and hyperventilate, give myself a heart attack, or whatever I can do.
Suicide is for the people who can do it (and, I agree, is pretty dumb in 99% of circumstances and the 1% are premature).
Euthanasia is for people who can't do it themselves.
What possible positive is there in keeping someone who is GOING to die, soon, alive at great medical expense (financial expense is neither here nor there), in enormous suffering, who actually WOULD PREFER to die? There's none. Nothing. Whatsoever. It's not good for the patient, not good for the family, not good for the medical staff, not good for the government, not good for humanity.
And we don't choose when we're born, which is why it doesn't have much dignity. But within seconds we're swaddled and given it. Why should we have to endure indignity when we die if we can choose not to?
Sorry - I'm going to die of a heart attack, die by violence, die in my sleep, die by suicide or die by euthanasia. Not much else is ever going to get me, because like fuck would I let myself or my family or even the nurses be put through that.
Not really.
It's not specific enough, and it's not directly threatening. He's not saying he'll actually kill anyone, he's saying that he wishes you have a painful death when you die. Above and beyond that, he's a comic effectively.
"Why don't you just fuck off and die?" is not, per se, a threat. It's rude, abusive, obviously hostile, but not a threat. Hell, by that yardstick, just about everything said on TV is not only potentially liable, but you could have actors sue for it because it's been said to them (even as part of the acting). No.
My mother has said a billion times worse to me. And, to be honest, he's got a point. Why is state-sponsored torture okay?
Hint: Countries that practice *actual* torture, rather than indirect torture, don't get a say. Sorry, America.
Great. Get back to me in 40 years when they're standard and affordable.
I'll be retired by then. And have paid off my house at least once.
This is my point - good idea. Still not ready.