I'm discussing THOUSANDS of individual purchases, from all kinds of manufacturers, dozens of different resellers, at all kinds of levels (everything from servers to storage arrays, desktops, hard drive purchases) bought over nearly a decade.
I've been at my current workplace for 4 years. In that time EVERY SINGLE Seagate-branded drive has failed - dozens and dozens of them. In RAID arrays, in servers (15K SAS etc.), in NAS, in desktops, in clients.
Replacing with WD as we go - and repurposing old WDs they already had to serve in the Seagate's places - I've had precisely one WD failure. And we think that took a whack because it hit the floor.
Seagate drives honestly are shocking in their build quality.
I don't even go mad - I store no video, I don't even OWN any music, my family photos take up about a gig.
But things like virtual machines, programming environments, and even installing, say, 10% of my Steam games fills my hard drives up ludicrously fast.
Compare and contrast to my workplace - where we have about 20-30Gb for each user at maximum and about 10% of that is used. 600+ users, 12Tb of active storage (not counting reserved space, backup, replication, etc.).
It very much depends on what you want to do, but my Steam library could easily hit 300-400Gb on its own. If anyone else used the laptop but me you could likely have each user doing that.
Then things like virtual machines etc. can whack it up enormously.
If you're not a gamer, a video-hoarder, a photographer, a content-creator, a developer, etc. then, sure, you can cope on less space.
Personally, I'm just glad my laptop has two drive bays.
Which will be so diluted by the time they touch anything, you wouldn't be able to tell above background radiation.
Average depth of the ocean: 3,700m
Therefore 1 tonne of radioactive material, in 1 square kilometre of ocean gives you:
1000 kg in 3,700,000,000 m^3
= 1kg in 3,700,000 m^3
= 2.7 x 10^-7 kg/m^3
Which is much less than the amount of gold in the ocean (on the order of one gram of gold for every 100 million metric tons = 1 x 10^-8 kg/m^3). Or, indeed, uranium. In fact, we've looked seriously into extracting uranium FROM seawater. (I'm not suggesting that's sensible, or the same kind of uranium, etc.).
Now, there are density issues, sinking, etc. to take into account but pretty much it's safer to drop Chernobyl's core into the ocean by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE than to allow it to go nuclear on land.
Plus, if you do it early enough, you don't have to worry about it going critical at all because a billion tons of water absorbs a lot of radiation and waste heat and pretty much brings all such reactions to a grinding halt.
There's a reason that nuclear power is primarily used in power plants, and then in submarines. It's a pretty safe way to contain such things, much safer than in the air.
I always said that nuke plants should be in the sea.
That way, if they are attacked, or if anything goes wrong, you can just dump the whole thing into the ocean.
Which, pretty much, is an incredibly safe way to deal with it. Sure... a surrounding... what? 50m? 100m of water won't be good for you, but site it far enough away from land and it's a fabulous, and free, safety screen.
This is just a mini reactor, but there's no reason you couldn't build an oil-rig of any size, within territorial waters, stick a plant on it, run a cable to it, and dump it into the ocean quite safely if something happened (very rare).
1 billion cubic metres of saltwater tend to be quite handy when in need of a radiation shield and/or additional cooling.
Nope... operating systems were still being attacked by Firewire devices in this manner into 2014 and beyond (Finfisher).
I'm unable to source any such similar attack purely over USB... there's a handful of modern ones using Thunderbolt connectors (which expose the PCIe interfaces) via USB but that's not the same.
Gimme 300KW of directed energy from a gasoline-powered turbine, and I'd stop a car no problem at all.
But this is just stupid.
"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."
Sigh. Press button. Stinger drops in road. Problem solved without lots of stupid and dangerous ideas.
And anything the military might want to attack that's not just a commercial car? Yeah, they'll shield the relevant parts against this from the first time you use it.
Sometimes I really wonder just how much money is thrown away to try having something someone saw on Star Trek, rather than just taking the more obvious solution.
They are preventing a small child (not toddler, he can't toddle, having never been conscious in his life), in a vegetative state, from being kept permanently in that vegetative state, after two years of legal wranglings with the parents, where NO OTHER REPUTABLE DOCTOR in the world has been able to suggest anything but palliative care (one tried, was thrown out of court for being an absolute quack - heard much of him recently?), and who has been on life-support his entire life, FOR FREE, WITHOUT CHARGE, EVER. Taken to court, the Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Supreme Court, and ALL said "Nope, he has no chance of a life, we need to end his life-support" despite multiple appeals.
Being held in a hospital ON LIFE SUPPORT that fucking morons are trying to storm to "free" the child, against the parent's wishes and legal orders, disturbing other patients (including children and parents in worse situations), harassing and threatening medical staff (who are nothing to do with it) and generally running up the fucking costs to the taxpayer.
P.S. Learn your fucking country's procedures. NOT ONE GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE has any say whatsoever in if the child is treated or not (without life-long, free and constant permanent treatment the child dies, with it he merely never gains consciousness, and there's not a reputable doctor in the world that disagrees). The courts have decided. Many of them. Several times. More times than even people who seek legal euthanasia in another country require.
So... BOLLOCKS to your spin. Because it's utter shite and keeping a boy who could be in constant pain and suffering alive to keep his parents happy, at ENORMOUS medical, policing and legal cost... FOR FREE. He's vegetative. Brain-dead. Never seen the light of day. A brain destroyed from birth by a neurological condition that's entirely untreatable and will only worsen. And an army of doctors kept him alive by default without question for two years while the legal wranglings go on, and they may be ordered by a court of law to "cease treatment" (i.e allow him to die naturally, rather than sustain him artificially for his entire life).
It's almost like it has nothing to do with expense, but what's right for the boy, isn't it?
P.S. Look up the Bambino Jesu hospital the parents want to send him to. It's a fucking Vatican-funded profit center, scam-host and shithole.
Before you comment on that as a statement against the NHS, go work in one of their hospitals and see the doctors and nurses crying and fighting all day to save the child, and then being threatened, attacked and harassed in their own homes for doing so (My girlfriend worked in Great Ormond Street... same thing, about six months ago, similar case, the people "protesting" were fucking cunts just out to spoil for a fight, and even the parents were pleading them to go away. I think the child's name in that instance was Charlie Gard or similar?).
Solution: Don't be an arse and use emergency services in non-emergencies.
P.S. Literally NEVER known anyone to be charged for their services. Ever. Unless it's 100% abusive (example in the news... one woman called 5000 times in a year, and they still only fined her for that very last time).
Emergency services don't fucking charge you, so long as you don't call them unless it's a fucking emergency. Welcome to civilisation. And, yes, "Sorry, I was sure I could smell gas" is an emergency.
Honestly... what stupidity. And in the circumstances described where it's obvious abuse... fucking right they fine you. But it's extraordinarily rare, and they don't just do it for being a concerned citizen.
And the existing legislation (Data Protection Act) specifically did not cover:
- Anything non-electronically stored. - Anything with implied or general consent (i.e. a parent signing "you may store records on our child" without us having to list every god-damn thing we store down to the letter... now we require "explicit" and "specific" consent for everything) - Destruction of data upon request.
That's three entire processes running into THOUSANDS of records over decades of children, right down to digging through the paper archives.
Not to mention the million-and-one exceptions that are no longer, uses that aren't valid without explicit consent, differentiation in handling and consent between "very private" and just personal data, and extreme amounts of "this is the data we hold, please verify it's correct AND renew our permission to keep it", which wasn't required except on demand.
GDPR is a whole different ball game to anything that came before it.
With personal liability if it goes to court.
Which means, yes, you can get a teacher convicted and fined because they took a class register home with just a list of names and lost it. Personally. As well as the business that "allowed" that to happen.
P.S. How many people work in a school that require access to such data for their jobs, but which come under GDPR? All of them. Meaning whole-staff training. Whole-staff education. Whole-staff monitoring. Whole-staff sanctioning. And whole-staff co-operating when a data request come in.
It's not just "Ah, look, they've changed the law slightly." GDPR is serious. It's stopped ICANN in its tracks with regards its WHOIS database (despite being in the US!). It's playing havoc with every cloud and service provider. And it's literally every other line in my LinkedIn feed - from articles, seminars, lawyers, training, professionals making queries, etc.
Hey. Did you know? We can't even email former pupils now. Not without their explicit consent. And... how do you get their explicit consent? Guess what? You can't send them an email to ask. Goodbye alumni services for this generation, maybe next year's kids will have to sign an explicit form on entry/exit which specifically mentions use for alumni purposes, and we'll be allowed to retain those records for more than the statutory period.
Literally, job agencies, sales companies, anyone who deals in email at all. They can't legally send a first-message without explicit consent. And that message can't even be to seek consent. Technically, it should mean the death of spam. What it means realistically is that cold-calling is dead in the water and some companies won't be able to generate sales at all.
Gosh. Having a critical healthcare service paid for by a centralised system that everyone pays into proportionally to their income from their tax, rather than work on a for-profit basis.
It's almost like someone thought about it.
Sure as hell wouldn't want a privatised police force, or fire brigade, or coastguard ("Excuse me, sir, did you pay your dinghy-rescue fees this month? No? Oh, sorry, you'll just have to drown I'm afraid, or we can charge you the Premium Non-Member Emergency Rescue Rate if you just sign here...").
Seriously, America, you're having the piss taken out of you by EVERY ONE of your healthcare-related companies (from insurance to manufacturer to hospitals to research labs) because it's just about money.
It has nothing to do with them collecting "so much data".
Literally, if you store somebody's name, you come under GDPR legislation.
GDPR is a huge change / consolidation of existing case law in data protection and has massive implications for EVERYONE. Fact is, a 13-year-old could never consent to their personal data being used anyway - only if someone did it on their behalf. It was just assumed that nobody would bother.
(For instance, in the UK, age of "legal consent" for contracts is 16 - gosh where have I seen that number before - but age of criminal responsibility can be as low as 10. But you're not committing a crime by breaking an end user licence agreement, it's a civil act).
GDPR is a kick-up-the-arse to all the places that made assumptions, hoped nobody would notice, or which didn't think they were required to do things like keep my details secret. Any details. All details. Every detail. Data Protection Act has been quite clear, but people assumed things about it that case-law has never supported.
Encode the established case-law into codified law and you get GDPR. Which says that no child can give a company legal permission to disseminate their phone number, photographs or age without explicit consent (and parental consent).
I work IT in a school when the kids are as young as 5. Imagine the shite that I now have to deal with.
"Leading" in terms of expenditure? Shocking that, when that's exactly what we're pointing out - it's easy to spend more when you're charging twice as much.
P.S. China and then Europe are not significantly behind the US in terms of spending in those areas. But we don't have a healthcare system predicated on charging the patient.
Honestly... give it up. You're trying to conflate so many issues into one to make your America great, rather than do the sensible thing and say "Yeah, paying for healthcare sucks, but we have other advantages".
P.S. For all that research, you're 31st on the list for life expectancy (not helped by going into battle on a regular basis, I hasten to add). Below South Korea, Slovenia, most of Europe, etc.
If you're talking about 13" "laptops" then they are dumb to have widescreen.
15" is... pfft.. maybe acceptable. But 15" was small even under 4:3.
17" or higher or just forget about it, especially with modern stupendous resolutions.
The first ever ThinkPad had roughly a 10" screen. At 4:3 that gives you the same height as a 12.2" widescreen. Pathetic. But then that was the 90's and those things were new and expensive.
Selling something not-much-bigger nowadays is a con. Just advertise it as a tablet and have done with it.
Yes, I have a 17" widescreen laptop. Yes, I watch movies on it. Yes, I take it on planes and carry it around with me (have done for the last 10 years). No, it's not a big deal. But squinting at anything smaller is a complete waste of time.
You may charge $10 per month's dose as patent licensing - and reasonable manufacturing costs (which will be in competition with everyone else licensing the same medicine) - for 10 years upon discovery.
Now what you'll do is hope to sell enough diagnosis equipment that more people will go on your pill, separate R&D and manufacturing, and research the treatment to hundreds of different ailments rather than just pour all your money into one.
"Personal time can be used for vacation or sick leave."
I stand by my original statement.
Sick leave should NEVER come out of any personal allocation. It's not through choice.
That's 6 weeks of holidays, not including bank holidays, etc. and not including sick-leave. And aside from the actual number of weeks, that's pretty standard across the board. But nobody is even allowed to be working full-time and only get 10 days holiday, I'm fairly sure. Things like the Working Time Directive put a stop to that even being legal, let alone accepted by people:
In general the Working Time Regulations provide rights to:
- a limit of an average 48 hours a week on the hours a worker can be required to work, though individuals may choose to work longer by "opting out" - paid annual leave of 5.6 weeks' a year - 11 consecutive hours' rest in any 24-hour period - a 20-minute rest break if the working day is longer than six hours - one day off each week - a limit on the normal working hours of night workers to an average eight hours in any 24-hour period, and an entitlement for night workers to receive regular health assessments.
Seriously. That's the LEGAL MINIMUM YOU CAN GIVE in the UK.
You really need to spend more time in your European businesses. I get 30 days holiday a year. Pretty much everyone I know gets at least 20, even gardeners, janitors/cleaners, drivers, etc.
I can only speak for UK and Italy, but I don't know a single working person who doesn't have time off and money enough to run a car, a house and travel. They may piss it away or not be able to find an affordable house near their workplace, but that's supply-and-demand given limited urban building, nothing to do with how much they earn.
The house-size has NOTHING to do with how much you earn... have you SEEN how expensive our houses are per square foot? Much more than anything in the US. That's because there's less of them and we don't have the luxury of space, in general. I couldn't afford a Central London apartment in a million years but neither could I afford one in New York.
I'd actually argue that if you live in a 10x10 room, you are equally to be wealthy, if you're in a city. There are single-room apartments going for nearly a million pounds ($1.4m) in areas of London that you will have heard of. But Greater London, 9 million people live there, and I have bought two houses in there at various points in my life.
I have a friend who paid STUPENDOUS amounts of money for a tiny apartment in Notting Hill. Five miles away, 3-bed houses are available to people on half his wage.
You even contradict yourself. If you depend on the government to pay for education, HEALTHCARE, etc. you're not wealthy. Not necessarily true. But that's because that's what our higher-taxes pay for. The rich AND the poor pay to provide healthcare to both. You can pay MORE to a private institution if you don't think the standard care is enough, but you can consume as much of the standard care as you need for as long as you need. Made bankrupt tomorrow? You still get all those expensive cancer drugs until the day you die.
I've never paid a penny for education, and I have a university degree. "College funds" are for the wealthy only, because nobody else needs them. Paying your way through university is basically "living alone for the first time", everything else is covered by a government loan that you basically NEVER pay back in any significant fashion but drip-feed back while you're earning money in later life. Oh, and if you are suddenly out of work or earning below a threshold for any reason... you don't have to make a single payment on it whatsoever.
I've never paid a penny for healthcare in my life, and I'm 38. Nor has ANYONE that I know. Because you don't need to pay for it when it's just given to you, unless you have something really seriously expensive that the NHS won't cover (which is almost nothing - 40 years of cancer care? Yep, free. You don't even need to fill out any paperwork) I pay my tax to pay for that, and collectively my fellow human beings pay for me too. Same way I don't pay "per crime committed against me" but fund a police force, a fire department, waste collection, etc.... collectively with my fellow human beings who also benefit from it. That's what tax is for. Otherwise the rich people would have their own private police forces, and the poor would live in anarchy.
I think you need to actually spend more time in Europe. Possibly over in Eastern Europe they might be poor, but that's doubtful. To be honest, the Polish etc. have a fabulous reputation for being hard-workers, sending money home and sustaining their families. Some of the Polish houses I've seen are extraordinary, built by ordinary people for their families. Countries in Western Europe may have rural areas (like any country has). You're just not comparing like-for-like.
But America is the only place I've been to where you can't exist without money.
P.S. "If *YOU'RE* dependent on government for educating your children *YOU'RE* not wealthy" - I rather be dependent on a government for educating my kids if they learn to spell properly along the way and get the ability to conduct some impartial empirical research on opinions they form in their life.
Honestly... you couldn't pay me enough to go live in the US compared to Europe. If wealth was our goal, maybe we'd be like the US. Thank fuck that it's not.
"An annual survey of of employee benefits conducted by the US government shows that, in 2017, nearly half of the people in the top 25% of earners received at least 10 days of paid vacation."
Seriously? Your country is very broken.
I've just had to go look up my contract for my workplace, a place which is considered very harsh on time off, driving for results, after-hours working and getting every drop out of employees, even on weekends if they can convince people to come in.
Yep... click-to-play was in the default Opera install since... god knows... 2009 or something ludicrous.
We STILL haven't properly replicated it, even with all kinds of extensions and plug-ins.
Life on the web was so much quieter and less disruptive with that browser. Such a shame all its "successors" are just poor Chrome-clones with none of the features that even a 15-year-old browser had.
Yes, and it's hard to nail down the stats for the US.
I read everything from 0.1% to 5% and at those margins of error anything could be true.
But even 1% isn't insignificant. However, if a company owns 10% of the world market, it makes me wonder why you'd want to exclude them without some incredibly good reason. For example, all the US's European allies are quite happy using their kit.
It seems to me to be nothing more than hyperbole, while they're using Cisco electronics and Chinese-built Apple devices, etc. etc. and it just builds on the "made in US" rhetoric more than it's actually a sensible thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure.
But I literally don't have music. Because I don't listen to it.
If I hear it, fine. But I don't purchase, "steal", stream or store it.
I think I "own" a single music track, and that was purchased for something to do with work.
I'm discussing THOUSANDS of individual purchases, from all kinds of manufacturers, dozens of different resellers, at all kinds of levels (everything from servers to storage arrays, desktops, hard drive purchases) bought over nearly a decade.
Seriously?
Have you people never heard of Snipping Tool?
Bundled with Windows since at least 7.
Takes screenshots, partial screenshots, saves as PNG, allows you to draw over them, emails, puts in clipboard.
It's probably one of the best features of the default Windows installs, as sad as that is.
Anecdotal evidence:
I've been at my current workplace for 4 years. In that time EVERY SINGLE Seagate-branded drive has failed - dozens and dozens of them. In RAID arrays, in servers (15K SAS etc.), in NAS, in desktops, in clients.
Replacing with WD as we go - and repurposing old WDs they already had to serve in the Seagate's places - I've had precisely one WD failure. And we think that took a whack because it hit the floor.
Seagate drives honestly are shocking in their build quality.
My laptop has 2 x 1Tb drives.
Both are full.
I don't even go mad - I store no video, I don't even OWN any music, my family photos take up about a gig.
But things like virtual machines, programming environments, and even installing, say, 10% of my Steam games fills my hard drives up ludicrously fast.
Compare and contrast to my workplace - where we have about 20-30Gb for each user at maximum and about 10% of that is used. 600+ users, 12Tb of active storage (not counting reserved space, backup, replication, etc.).
It very much depends on what you want to do, but my Steam library could easily hit 300-400Gb on its own. If anyone else used the laptop but me you could likely have each user doing that.
Then things like virtual machines etc. can whack it up enormously.
If you're not a gamer, a video-hoarder, a photographer, a content-creator, a developer, etc. then, sure, you can cope on less space.
Personally, I'm just glad my laptop has two drive bays.
Which will be so diluted by the time they touch anything, you wouldn't be able to tell above background radiation.
Average depth of the ocean:
3,700m
Therefore 1 tonne of radioactive material, in 1 square kilometre of ocean gives you:
1000 kg in 3,700,000,000 m^3
= 1kg in 3,700,000 m^3
= 2.7 x 10^-7 kg/m^3
Which is much less than the amount of gold in the ocean (on the order of one gram of gold for every 100 million metric tons = 1 x 10^-8 kg/m^3). Or, indeed, uranium. In fact, we've looked seriously into extracting uranium FROM seawater. (I'm not suggesting that's sensible, or the same kind of uranium, etc.).
Now, there are density issues, sinking, etc. to take into account but pretty much it's safer to drop Chernobyl's core into the ocean by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE than to allow it to go nuclear on land.
Plus, if you do it early enough, you don't have to worry about it going critical at all because a billion tons of water absorbs a lot of radiation and waste heat and pretty much brings all such reactions to a grinding halt.
There's a reason that nuclear power is primarily used in power plants, and then in submarines. It's a pretty safe way to contain such things, much safer than in the air.
I always said that nuke plants should be in the sea.
That way, if they are attacked, or if anything goes wrong, you can just dump the whole thing into the ocean.
Which, pretty much, is an incredibly safe way to deal with it. Sure... a surrounding... what? 50m? 100m of water won't be good for you, but site it far enough away from land and it's a fabulous, and free, safety screen.
This is just a mini reactor, but there's no reason you couldn't build an oil-rig of any size, within territorial waters, stick a plant on it, run a cable to it, and dump it into the ocean quite safely if something happened (very rare).
1 billion cubic metres of saltwater tend to be quite handy when in need of a radiation shield and/or additional cooling.
Nope... operating systems were still being attacked by Firewire devices in this manner into 2014 and beyond (Finfisher).
I'm unable to source any such similar attack purely over USB... there's a handful of modern ones using Thunderbolt connectors (which expose the PCIe interfaces) via USB but that's not the same.
Shame that Firewire is using a protocol that's fundamentally insecure, isn't it? Arbitrary DMA was always a bad idea.
Gimme 300KW of directed energy from a gasoline-powered turbine, and I'd stop a car no problem at all.
But this is just stupid.
"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."
Sigh. Press button. Stinger drops in road. Problem solved without lots of stupid and dangerous ideas.
And anything the military might want to attack that's not just a commercial car? Yeah, they'll shield the relevant parts against this from the first time you use it.
Sometimes I really wonder just how much money is thrown away to try having something someone saw on Star Trek, rather than just taking the more obvious solution.
Hey, nice spin.
They are preventing a small child (not toddler, he can't toddle, having never been conscious in his life), in a vegetative state, from being kept permanently in that vegetative state, after two years of legal wranglings with the parents, where NO OTHER REPUTABLE DOCTOR in the world has been able to suggest anything but palliative care (one tried, was thrown out of court for being an absolute quack - heard much of him recently?), and who has been on life-support his entire life, FOR FREE, WITHOUT CHARGE, EVER. Taken to court, the Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Supreme Court, and ALL said "Nope, he has no chance of a life, we need to end his life-support" despite multiple appeals.
Being held in a hospital ON LIFE SUPPORT that fucking morons are trying to storm to "free" the child, against the parent's wishes and legal orders, disturbing other patients (including children and parents in worse situations), harassing and threatening medical staff (who are nothing to do with it) and generally running up the fucking costs to the taxpayer.
P.S. Learn your fucking country's procedures. NOT ONE GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE has any say whatsoever in if the child is treated or not (without life-long, free and constant permanent treatment the child dies, with it he merely never gains consciousness, and there's not a reputable doctor in the world that disagrees). The courts have decided. Many of them. Several times. More times than even people who seek legal euthanasia in another country require.
So... BOLLOCKS to your spin. Because it's utter shite and keeping a boy who could be in constant pain and suffering alive to keep his parents happy, at ENORMOUS medical, policing and legal cost... FOR FREE. He's vegetative. Brain-dead. Never seen the light of day. A brain destroyed from birth by a neurological condition that's entirely untreatable and will only worsen. And an army of doctors kept him alive by default without question for two years while the legal wranglings go on, and they may be ordered by a court of law to "cease treatment" (i.e allow him to die naturally, rather than sustain him artificially for his entire life).
It's almost like it has nothing to do with expense, but what's right for the boy, isn't it?
P.S. Look up the Bambino Jesu hospital the parents want to send him to. It's a fucking Vatican-funded profit center, scam-host and shithole.
Before you comment on that as a statement against the NHS, go work in one of their hospitals and see the doctors and nurses crying and fighting all day to save the child, and then being threatened, attacked and harassed in their own homes for doing so (My girlfriend worked in Great Ormond Street... same thing, about six months ago, similar case, the people "protesting" were fucking cunts just out to spoil for a fight, and even the parents were pleading them to go away. I think the child's name in that instance was Charlie Gard or similar?).
Solution: Don't be an arse and use emergency services in non-emergencies.
P.S. Literally NEVER known anyone to be charged for their services. Ever. Unless it's 100% abusive (example in the news... one woman called 5000 times in a year, and they still only fined her for that very last time).
Emergency services don't fucking charge you, so long as you don't call them unless it's a fucking emergency. Welcome to civilisation. And, yes, "Sorry, I was sure I could smell gas" is an emergency.
Honestly... what stupidity. And in the circumstances described where it's obvious abuse... fucking right they fine you. But it's extraordinarily rare, and they don't just do it for being a concerned citizen.
I'm sorry, what?
Conflict of interest has nothing to do with it.
And the existing legislation (Data Protection Act) specifically did not cover:
- Anything non-electronically stored.
- Anything with implied or general consent (i.e. a parent signing "you may store records on our child" without us having to list every god-damn thing we store down to the letter... now we require "explicit" and "specific" consent for everything)
- Destruction of data upon request.
That's three entire processes running into THOUSANDS of records over decades of children, right down to digging through the paper archives.
Not to mention the million-and-one exceptions that are no longer, uses that aren't valid without explicit consent, differentiation in handling and consent between "very private" and just personal data, and extreme amounts of "this is the data we hold, please verify it's correct AND renew our permission to keep it", which wasn't required except on demand.
GDPR is a whole different ball game to anything that came before it.
With personal liability if it goes to court.
Which means, yes, you can get a teacher convicted and fined because they took a class register home with just a list of names and lost it. Personally. As well as the business that "allowed" that to happen.
P.S. How many people work in a school that require access to such data for their jobs, but which come under GDPR? All of them. Meaning whole-staff training. Whole-staff education. Whole-staff monitoring. Whole-staff sanctioning. And whole-staff co-operating when a data request come in.
It's not just "Ah, look, they've changed the law slightly." GDPR is serious. It's stopped ICANN in its tracks with regards its WHOIS database (despite being in the US!). It's playing havoc with every cloud and service provider. And it's literally every other line in my LinkedIn feed - from articles, seminars, lawyers, training, professionals making queries, etc.
Hey. Did you know? We can't even email former pupils now. Not without their explicit consent. And... how do you get their explicit consent? Guess what? You can't send them an email to ask. Goodbye alumni services for this generation, maybe next year's kids will have to sign an explicit form on entry/exit which specifically mentions use for alumni purposes, and we'll be allowed to retain those records for more than the statutory period.
Literally, job agencies, sales companies, anyone who deals in email at all. They can't legally send a first-message without explicit consent. And that message can't even be to seek consent. Technically, it should mean the death of spam. What it means realistically is that cold-calling is dead in the water and some companies won't be able to generate sales at all.
Still sound like "just audit your processes"?
Gosh. Having a critical healthcare service paid for by a centralised system that everyone pays into proportionally to their income from their tax, rather than work on a for-profit basis.
It's almost like someone thought about it.
Sure as hell wouldn't want a privatised police force, or fire brigade, or coastguard ("Excuse me, sir, did you pay your dinghy-rescue fees this month? No? Oh, sorry, you'll just have to drown I'm afraid, or we can charge you the Premium Non-Member Emergency Rescue Rate if you just sign here...").
Seriously, America, you're having the piss taken out of you by EVERY ONE of your healthcare-related companies (from insurance to manufacturer to hospitals to research labs) because it's just about money.
It has nothing to do with them collecting "so much data".
Literally, if you store somebody's name, you come under GDPR legislation.
GDPR is a huge change / consolidation of existing case law in data protection and has massive implications for EVERYONE. Fact is, a 13-year-old could never consent to their personal data being used anyway - only if someone did it on their behalf. It was just assumed that nobody would bother.
(For instance, in the UK, age of "legal consent" for contracts is 16 - gosh where have I seen that number before - but age of criminal responsibility can be as low as 10. But you're not committing a crime by breaking an end user licence agreement, it's a civil act).
GDPR is a kick-up-the-arse to all the places that made assumptions, hoped nobody would notice, or which didn't think they were required to do things like keep my details secret. Any details. All details. Every detail. Data Protection Act has been quite clear, but people assumed things about it that case-law has never supported.
Encode the established case-law into codified law and you get GDPR. Which says that no child can give a company legal permission to disseminate their phone number, photographs or age without explicit consent (and parental consent).
I work IT in a school when the kids are as young as 5. Imagine the shite that I now have to deal with.
"Leading" in terms of expenditure? Shocking that, when that's exactly what we're pointing out - it's easy to spend more when you're charging twice as much.
P.S. China and then Europe are not significantly behind the US in terms of spending in those areas. But we don't have a healthcare system predicated on charging the patient.
Honestly... give it up. You're trying to conflate so many issues into one to make your America great, rather than do the sensible thing and say "Yeah, paying for healthcare sucks, but we have other advantages".
P.S. For all that research, you're 31st on the list for life expectancy (not helped by going into battle on a regular basis, I hasten to add). Below South Korea, Slovenia, most of Europe, etc.
Yes.
If you're talking about 13" "laptops" then they are dumb to have widescreen.
15" is... pfft.. maybe acceptable. But 15" was small even under 4:3.
17" or higher or just forget about it, especially with modern stupendous resolutions.
The first ever ThinkPad had roughly a 10" screen. At 4:3 that gives you the same height as a 12.2" widescreen. Pathetic. But then that was the 90's and those things were new and expensive.
Selling something not-much-bigger nowadays is a con. Just advertise it as a tablet and have done with it.
Yes, I have a 17" widescreen laptop. Yes, I watch movies on it. Yes, I take it on planes and carry it around with me (have done for the last 10 years). No, it's not a big deal. But squinting at anything smaller is a complete waste of time.
Here's an idea.
You may charge $10 per month's dose as patent licensing - and reasonable manufacturing costs (which will be in competition with everyone else licensing the same medicine) - for 10 years upon discovery.
Now what you'll do is hope to sell enough diagnosis equipment that more people will go on your pill, separate R&D and manufacturing, and research the treatment to hundreds of different ailments rather than just pour all your money into one.
Dear America,
Fix your fucking healthcare system.
Sincerely,
The civilised world.
"Personal time can be used for vacation or sick leave."
I stand by my original statement.
Sick leave should NEVER come out of any personal allocation. It's not through choice.
That's 6 weeks of holidays, not including bank holidays, etc. and not including sick-leave. And aside from the actual number of weeks, that's pretty standard across the board. But nobody is even allowed to be working full-time and only get 10 days holiday, I'm fairly sure. Things like the Working Time Directive put a stop to that even being legal, let alone accepted by people:
In general the Working Time Regulations provide rights to:
- a limit of an average 48 hours a week on the hours a worker can be required to work, though individuals may choose to work longer by "opting out"
- paid annual leave of 5.6 weeks' a year
- 11 consecutive hours' rest in any 24-hour period
- a 20-minute rest break if the working day is longer than six hours
- one day off each week
- a limit on the normal working hours of night workers to an average eight hours in any 24-hour period, and an entitlement for night workers to receive regular health assessments.
Seriously. That's the LEGAL MINIMUM YOU CAN GIVE in the UK.
Ha.
You really need to spend more time in your European businesses. I get 30 days holiday a year. Pretty much everyone I know gets at least 20, even gardeners, janitors/cleaners, drivers, etc.
I can only speak for UK and Italy, but I don't know a single working person who doesn't have time off and money enough to run a car, a house and travel. They may piss it away or not be able to find an affordable house near their workplace, but that's supply-and-demand given limited urban building, nothing to do with how much they earn.
The house-size has NOTHING to do with how much you earn... have you SEEN how expensive our houses are per square foot? Much more than anything in the US. That's because there's less of them and we don't have the luxury of space, in general. I couldn't afford a Central London apartment in a million years but neither could I afford one in New York.
I'd actually argue that if you live in a 10x10 room, you are equally to be wealthy, if you're in a city. There are single-room apartments going for nearly a million pounds ($1.4m) in areas of London that you will have heard of. But Greater London, 9 million people live there, and I have bought two houses in there at various points in my life.
I have a friend who paid STUPENDOUS amounts of money for a tiny apartment in Notting Hill. Five miles away, 3-bed houses are available to people on half his wage.
You even contradict yourself. If you depend on the government to pay for education, HEALTHCARE, etc. you're not wealthy. Not necessarily true. But that's because that's what our higher-taxes pay for. The rich AND the poor pay to provide healthcare to both. You can pay MORE to a private institution if you don't think the standard care is enough, but you can consume as much of the standard care as you need for as long as you need. Made bankrupt tomorrow? You still get all those expensive cancer drugs until the day you die.
I've never paid a penny for education, and I have a university degree. "College funds" are for the wealthy only, because nobody else needs them. Paying your way through university is basically "living alone for the first time", everything else is covered by a government loan that you basically NEVER pay back in any significant fashion but drip-feed back while you're earning money in later life. Oh, and if you are suddenly out of work or earning below a threshold for any reason... you don't have to make a single payment on it whatsoever.
I've never paid a penny for healthcare in my life, and I'm 38. Nor has ANYONE that I know. Because you don't need to pay for it when it's just given to you, unless you have something really seriously expensive that the NHS won't cover (which is almost nothing - 40 years of cancer care? Yep, free. You don't even need to fill out any paperwork) I pay my tax to pay for that, and collectively my fellow human beings pay for me too. Same way I don't pay "per crime committed against me" but fund a police force, a fire department, waste collection, etc.... collectively with my fellow human beings who also benefit from it. That's what tax is for. Otherwise the rich people would have their own private police forces, and the poor would live in anarchy.
I think you need to actually spend more time in Europe. Possibly over in Eastern Europe they might be poor, but that's doubtful. To be honest, the Polish etc. have a fabulous reputation for being hard-workers, sending money home and sustaining their families. Some of the Polish houses I've seen are extraordinary, built by ordinary people for their families. Countries in Western Europe may have rural areas (like any country has). You're just not comparing like-for-like.
But America is the only place I've been to where you can't exist without money.
P.S. "If *YOU'RE* dependent on government for educating your children *YOU'RE* not wealthy" - I rather be dependent on a government for educating my kids if they learn to spell properly along the way and get the ability to conduct some impartial empirical research on opinions they form in their life.
Honestly... you couldn't pay me enough to go live in the US compared to Europe. If wealth was our goal, maybe we'd be like the US. Thank fuck that it's not.
"An annual survey of of employee benefits conducted by the US government shows that, in 2017, nearly half of the people in the top 25% of earners received at least 10 days of paid vacation."
Seriously? Your country is very broken.
I've just had to go look up my contract for my workplace, a place which is considered very harsh on time off, driving for results, after-hours working and getting every drop out of employees, even on weekends if they can convince people to come in.
Six weeks, guys. That's 30 working days.
Most of the UK's power infrastructure is above ground.
They get just the same, if not worse, weather as Germany.
We don't have these problems.
It's not nothing to do with under/overground, it's to do with designing and maintaining the system properly.
Yep... click-to-play was in the default Opera install since... god knows... 2009 or something ludicrous.
We STILL haven't properly replicated it, even with all kinds of extensions and plug-ins.
Life on the web was so much quieter and less disruptive with that browser. Such a shame all its "successors" are just poor Chrome-clones with none of the features that even a 15-year-old browser had.
Yes, and it's hard to nail down the stats for the US.
I read everything from 0.1% to 5% and at those margins of error anything could be true.
But even 1% isn't insignificant. However, if a company owns 10% of the world market, it makes me wonder why you'd want to exclude them without some incredibly good reason. For example, all the US's European allies are quite happy using their kit.
It seems to me to be nothing more than hyperbole, while they're using Cisco electronics and Chinese-built Apple devices, etc. etc. and it just builds on the "made in US" rhetoric more than it's actually a sensible thing to do.