For future reference, it is usually a typographical error when letters are merely in the wrong order, a letter is omitted or a letter has been substituted with one located near what it should have been on the keyboard. This applies to many languages.
It is now more common for typographical errors to go unnoticed if the result spells another word due to the proliferation of spell-checking features in popular software. Admittedly this is slightly lazy, but the reliance is generally considered acceptable in the context of internet commentary.
Also, I made it once. "Over and over" appears unlikely to be a mistaken belief on your part, is clearly beyond mere exaggeration and therefore I am having difficulty resisting the notion that this was a deliberate falsification. Surely this is a far more serious misdeed?
That's highlights a significant point I was a bit weak on. This story has largely overcome the usual inertia.
The initial police investigation was disinterested, the impression is they didn't want to investigate the media for something like phone hacking on "fair game" targets. But it got pushed enough, and quite a few celebrities can carry a fair bit of credit for this, along with a few politicians (notably John Prescott), a new police investigation was launched and this one just keeps turning over stones and finding things.
Subsequent to Coulson being shown the door parliament turned it's attention to other things but due to the Milly Dowler story (and possibly having knowledge of the Soham and 7/7 investigations) the PM is making statements of concern in Parliament.
And yeah 7/7, that broke not long after I wrote my post. Silly me thinking they couldn't go any lower.
Another update - as regards advertisers Marketing Week is keeping track.
This might be the straw that's very likely going to break the camel's back, but it's been a long running story now. Back in 2005 they were rumbled for hacking into voicemail of aides to the royal family, a good article from a US source, the NYT, here. The tl;dr version of that article is a minor uproar ensues but Newscorp contains it and is more or less successful claiming it as a one-off, rouge scenario, offering up the resignation of Andy Coulson, the editor, though he claims not to have known anything about it of course.
Now Andy Coulson makes the mistake of getting a job - head of communications, think Toby Ziegler in the West Wing - in the Conservatives, who get into government. This, combined with statements made by the private investigator who's decided he's not going down alone, adds enough fuel to get the fire burning again. The Guardian and Channel 4 get digging and out comes a documentary. A handful of celebrities are sniffing around it now, lo and behold Hugh Grant throws gas on the fire by bugging the bugger. All is forgiven Hugh, well played.
Accusations just keep mounting up and the picture is forming pretty solidly of a newsroom where such things were par for the course. An oft-repeated point directed at Coulson I'll paraphrase as "either he knew and he broke the law, or he didn't and he's grossly negligent" (not sure who started that, I think Ian Hislop). Coulson is given the boot.
The shit is flying pretty thick now and it just keeps coming. But it's all the royals, celebs and politicians. There is a sense that whilst it's overstepping the mark considerably, these are all public people and fair game. Milly Dowler, on the other hand, was a child and a tragedy. This is a recent turn in events and very quickly major advertisers have started to step away. I'll applaud Ford for being the first of the big advertisers to drop them, though I'm quite surprised it took so long. I suspect more shuffled away quietly.
News is now coming in that the police investigating the phone hacking have contacted the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the girls killed by the Soham Murderer. This was one of the biggest stories and national tragedies I can remember.
The News of the World really must not be allowed to survive this, it is a stunning failure of ethics, governance and plain decency on a huge scale with substantial evidence. If they can't be brought down for this, they clearly cannot be taken down for anything. Yet it's even proving difficult to remove the editor.
It's interesting to note that the chap quoted considers that roundabouts require spontaneous cooperation. They don't.
A roundabout is a short road. All other roads are turning onto it. When you're on the roundabout, you're on the road and have right of way. The only rule special to a basic roundabout is that there doesn't need to be a sign to say you're not allowed to turn the wrong way. Otherwise it's just a road that's very curved.
Most problems associated with roundabouts aren't the roundabout's doing, they're pre-existing problems that the roundabout has been installed to alleviate.
...then perhaps we'd better not even get started on the quality of the underlying data.
The sole purpose of corporations providing information is to convince the public of something that will benefit the company. From inception to design through data collection, analysis and reporting there is a defined marketing objective and it never involved "let's find out". Yet we treat with less scepticism than reports from an independent academic that at least in theory has survived a thorough peer review - though even that tends to assumes the technical parameters operated were correct. How often do you see reference to, say, questionnaires in the methodology which then goes on to even let you see a copy of the questionnaire?
I need a little context before I decide how sympathetic I'm feeling. The obvious one being how much are they paid? Are they paid for this overtime, or do they get back time in lieu?
60 hour weeks are nothing special for someone on a decent salary. Here in UK, bastion of the 6 weeks holiday and subject to EU working time directive, a lot of people regularly pull 60 hour weeks. I spend half my working days at client's premises doing work that includes me seeing the payroll, I'd wager that just about everyone making £30k ($48k ish) works significant unpaid OT. Once you hit that level you're pretty much paid to get shit done and the salary is basically what you get paid to get that shit done regardless of how long it takes (funny how it almost always goes one way though).
I work in accounting practice, it's audit (busy) season and I've been working 50-60 hours since April. Managers more than that - and often enough I'll drop them an email for when they come back from holiday (BTW, you don't get to book holiday's in spring or summer without good reason) and yet get a quick response, and files will come back reviewed. This is a small practice, a colleague left for a big-4 firm and logged 65 hours regularly - and this was outwith the audit season.
This isn't the best bit. Aside from qualitative appraisals based on the quality of your work, the primary performance measurement is hours logged to time budget. Staff are pressurised to make their budget and managers heavily pressurised for the overall budget, that shit rolls downhill. The budget is usually basically the lower of whatever makes the required profit and 5% less time than it took (or rather, what was logged) last year, which basically means you work whatever insanity but log only the contracted hours. Last week was pretty decent, I worked 10 hours unlogged, almost 30% above what I'm contracted and paid for. I don't like to think about the week before that.
Whoring in the hours to meet actual deadlines imposed by clients with valid reasons is one thing, doing it routinely without charging the hours just so your manager can get good stats and your partner can make more profit by not paying you is another. It's not just the amount of work, it's the stress you still get despite (because of?) the absurdity of it.
The really stupid bit however, is the same shit (albeit smaller scale) happens in winter, which is the dead season. Staff with "real work" will be rushing away while staff without sit bored with some silly made-up task. The firm would actually make the same money by letting us have the time off in leu instead of made-up work, but the performance measurement doesn't work that way.
The system's cost per watt straight-up isn't necessarily useful. What's interesting is the relevant cost per watt of this system, that is the cost over and above that of the regular tinted windows you would otherwise be buying.
Furthermore with "cost per watt" I'm never really clear whether or how much they are counting for the land required. Again there is nil relevant cost with these windows.
As my quote identifies I'm responding to the assertion that a lawyer wouldn't have caught it. However I did later point out that there is an element of common sense given the deal is designed to discourage him from doing what he did, albeit with the caveat that the employer seems to have failed their own intentions by not making that clear.
It was something like a "this agreement also includes stipulations covered in a different document". He couldn't possibly have caught that even with a lawyer reading over his shoulder, without taking a break and doing research and chasing down the additional paperwork (that he wasn't even provided with at the time of signing) that it was binding him to.
Nope, I'm an accountant and reading the "incomprehensible" passage via the CNN link the phrase "...subject to the repurchase and other provisions..." jumps out like a big neon animated diagram with the words "bend over" and a rather uncomfortable-looking arrow.
And I'd be expecting such a term (and specifically the word "repurchase"), even if I had missed it first time though I'd just have read it again until I found the inevitable. The lawyer would certainly have noticed it, though he'd have known it would be there even before he read it. Though it's not like his querying it would have resulted in a change in the contract.
The point of the options is to shift the balance of power to owners from employees. You don't get options like some kind of gift, they're not sending you flowers just because they love you very much. It's all part of the remuneration package designed to retain you and keep you motivated more cheaply and more effectively than through salary. When private equity is involved, retention of key employees is a massive concern. The collection of employees is mostly what they're buying into and employees often do not like even a partial change in ownership.
I'm actually somewhat bemused that the guy thought he could leave after a year and still get options. I mean, really? Do you even need to read the contract(s) to figure out that you're not going to get your complicated bonus if you do exactly what the bonus is intended to discourage you from doing? Frankly I can only assume the employer didn't so much screw Lee as simply screwed up by allowing the whole thing to be opaque, it negated the point of the exercise.
The executives, now they got shafted. But they're big boys and knowing how the game is played at the big boy's table is pretty much the job they were in.
BTW, the vesting thing is probably a tax thing, I'm not familiar with US tax but here in UK it'd likely be to try and trigger the taxable gains over several years in order to maximise the annual capital gains tax exemption.
While the UK does have the very occasional tremor, they're so minor that nothing more than a single roof tile has ever moved*.
Not true. The British Geological Survey issued an alert the day before yesterday, albeit not one of a high-priority "news flash" type since it was a mere 2.7ML. There are usually a couple above 3ML every year. There was a 5.2 magnitude in 2008.
I'm not trying to suggest even the record 6.1ML (or indeed the T5/F2 tornado in 2005) should be something that would cause great concern to a modern nuclear plant (I assume not).
There is an excess of FUD irrationality arising from Fukushima, and I'm generally pro nuclear power here in UK. But I respect that other people might have an informed, rational assessment of the risks involved and still sensibly arrive at a different view. And even the most rational of minds surely cannot help but observe the reminder that shit happens.
Additionally power plants can be placed where air quality matters least (i.e. not in densely populated areas where people and cars are). That might not help significantly with climate change, but the redistribution would make a massive contribution to other air pollution problems. Currently we have great air where few people are and terrible air where lots of people are, which is obviously silly.
Furthermore, power plants can burn any resource a car can run on plus other things. A power plant running on oil might not consume that much less oil per mile driven than a car but the additional resource options can only improve resource allocation efficiency (a power plant would only run on oil if it was the best option).
Shifting demand for energy sources from car combustion engines to power plants also has supply implications. There are many fields that are not economically viable due to the risks of selling oil/gas on the market. Power plants have relatively stable demand and are more interested in stable supply: the risks involved in the marginal oil field become far less when they can secure 10 year contracts with pricing collars before investing capital. The supply chain can also be more efficient when dealing with fewer, larger customers. Plus we cut out the whole petrol/gas delivery costs.
Power plants should also be a little more efficient than they already are when there is greater long term demand. Bigger, more efficient plants, or more plants which should average out to being closer to demand thus less transmission loss. On the other hand perhaps the best sites are already taken so the additional plants would have to be further away, but I suspect they would just make existing plants bigger if that was the case.
I'm tempted to assume the only real problem is the battery. They're made of nasty things and the heaviness impacts efficiency and handling. Despite this efficiency is already a win and there does seem to be quite a lot of research going on. Many people seem to think it also causes a range problem but that will either be solved with fast charging stations or the batteries can be designed to be swappable, perhaps using some kind of leasing system, which should also allow some efficiency savings due to smoothing power plant capacity utilisation (i.e. it's better to swap in batteries that charged overnight rather than recharge during the day).
In short, even if fossils were the only power plant energy source, once critical mass is reached electric cars should solve many problems associated with cars and put a lot of little cuts in climate change and resource scarcity. These two require clean renewable energy, which itself is highly likely to require electric cars.
It's probably worth remembering at this point that the whole debate on powering cars is merely about managing symptoms. The real problem, and the one associated with many others (e.g. roads, accidents, traffic, time wasted non-productive and non-enjoyed) is the need to make a car journey. Nobody seems interested in fundamental solutions like good public transport and living near where you want to be.
So if an employee takes a $20/m payroll deduction and is given a Blackberry + contract which costs $25/m (regular price for Joe Consumer say $40/m), is that being counted?
Some employers (at least here in UK) every year offer employees a list of benefits. Maybe there's a per-year limit, or maybe there's a payroll deduction. Quite often the employer's bulk purchasing power attracts a large discount, quite often the activity has some employer benefit (gym membership), there can be some tax benefits and there can be instances where the employer needs to provide a cheap phone anyway so decide they might aswell let employees top it up to the latest and greatest.
Regardless, as many have said already, this level of expenditure barely counts as small change
It's because perps, except the true psychopaths, are scared shitless of them. Using them doesn't produce actionable evidence, but it weeds out the guilty who know they're guilty and don't feel they can beat a polygraph. Saves a lot of rubber-hose time that way.
Rather than sales I'd suggest some kind of participation in profits. Perhaps x% of profit above $x is divvied up amongst staff in proportion to their salaries + commission for the year.
It should be clear to engineering staff that when they "make a sale" it's appreciated and noted, a slight nudge forward to promotion maybe, but I really don't think it should be a focus for them.
Trust with customers is important, particularly for repeat business. Your engineers have it, your sales staff do not, and your response is to make your engineering staff like your sales staff?
There is similar happening in Scotland, albeit via a different approach - essentially private schools can have their charitable status revoked if they do not pass the "public benefit" test. This is applicable to all charities, though generally interpreted in private schools in relation to the level of fees charged and the proportions of bursaries granted: if high fees mean poor people are effectively excluded from the school, their "public benefit" is not so very "public".
There was quite a push specifically on private schools a few years ago, this is a good, albeit old, article, but the government and charity regulator seem to be backing off quite a bit now, perhaps partly due to change in government and party because the schools have elevated their bursaries in response (some of which is due to receiving more donations for this very reason). Someone who gives politicians a lot of benefit over any doubt might wink and mutter "well played" at this point, but I think that's giving out a lot more credit than due.
In practice what charitable status means is relief from rates, a significant local tax based on property values (private schools here tend to have a lot of prized property). It does also mean relief from corporation tax, that donations qualify for a tax deduction and a few other things, but any decent accountant should be able to engineer a way around those, albeit perhaps with a few ongoing headaches. What I'm saying is compliance certainly is advantageous, but is not mandatory, neither in the legal nor practical sense.
I think this is a much more reasonable approach, though while our poverty gap is pretty bad it's nothing on India's, and we don't have their caste problems either. There's also far less relevance of race here than there seems to be from my media-led impression of the US (we do have it, but it's relatively endemic to certain cities), so tackling racial inequality often comes under the more general banner of anti-poverty.
For what it's worth I audited a private school and, while 1 school does not make for a statistically representative sample, I was a little stunned at how close their bursary system was to what I'd consider an ideal model. They offered everything from long-term loans at base interest rate to fully paying their fees, uniforms, sports equipment, school trips, anything needed for after-school activities and school meals. All of this is done in a manner that avoids the "poor kid with his free meals voucher" embarrassments. Few in the school itself would even know who had bursaries. The pupil acceptance committee certainly didn't.
Bursary award consideration was non-competitive, entirely based on the student (especially any reasons why state school would be unsuited) and the ability of the parents to pay. There was no special extra-hard test to sit or any such thing. Other than the standard entry exam for all students who did not have family at the school, academic, sporting, creative or other ability only mattered if there was some special fund set up due to restriction set by a donor (they could be rather eccentric). Race and so on was completely ignored, with the only exception being that *after* issuing the awards they did do a few numbers with their fingers-crossed.
More or less all major UK government IT projects start as the baby of some politician who's idea of getting things done is to demand it, shove it through then hope it mostly just comes together in the end.
Obviously, this doesn't work for a major IT project which really does have to be properly specced from the beginning. It then fails for all the predictable reasons, but the politician will not abandon it as it would be an admission of failure. There's less fuss to waste another (and another) £20m than confess to having already wasted £100m so it drags on until a new party is elected, which then dumps any progress, pays off the contractor and claims that lessons have been learned.
At which point begins an all-new clusterfuck with all the same failures.
Marketing isn't Apple's only strength, but it is the key strength from which all their others derive.
Their consistency with said polish and refinement is clear evidence. Their products aren't just technically well designed, they're well designed just how their customers want. This isn't some kind of accident.
They have strong design teams because they know how important it is to their market (marketing), those design teams consistently "get it right" because they know what their customers want (marketing). They will have a lot of failures which never make it out (marketing). Apple is a case study of the market-driven company.
The marketing observed by customers is only a small part of marketing.
MS's problem is largely marketing. Apple have defined their market, MS however is "everyone who isn't something else". Apple can start a design project with "this is our customer, this is what he wants". When Apple has to make a decision, their customer profile points the way. MS just has a huge, ill-defined crowd with wildly different requirements all pointing different directions.
All of your points are evidence of marketing failure, bar Xbox which I'm not sure why you brought up (Xbox is a success, particularly a marketing - despite the RRoD - and the billions "lost" was planned investment). I'd even argue bugs bad enough to harm product success are a marketing failure because a more market-driven company would have tested more and wouldn't have risked the damage to their image.
p.s. in case my post seems pro-Apple, they don't appeal to me at all and I have none of their products. But I do appreciate just how well they target their market.
Think about it this way -- to be a successful business owner, you can't just be smart or a hard worker. You have to have some sort of entrepreneurial spark that most people don't have. Every business owner that I've dealt with who is reasonably successful is also a type-A nutjob (mostly meant in a good way...) who works 130 hour weeks and never lets up.
I'm an accountant in private practice, dealing with these guys is my day job. Generally this is my observation, though there's a chicken and egg thing going on.
Being both willing and able to get started is the hardest part, once you've jumped in the deep end there's more motivation than you could possibly want. The type of stress is different though, your home is on the line but you're calling the shots and choosing how to deal with problems. How much of your stress is really due to management? When it's your business, you only deal with assholes to the point that dealing with them is worth the marginal amount money they bring to YOUR bottom line. As an employee, one asshole could cost you your entire job and having dealt with that asshole makes no difference at all to your paycheck.
Insane hours put into your own business just is not the same as the same hours worked as an employee.
- I can't sell. Period.
Only matters in certain industries. My firm for example doesn't advertise and does very little tendering, 99% comes in from a recommendation from existing customers or local bank managers. "Selling" is frowned upon, clients are looking for someone they can trust.
- I'm not your typical "slimy used car salesman" personality that most small business owners tend to be
While it'd be easy for me to think of the 95th percentile slimy successful guys, pretty much all the others rely on good relations with staff, customers and suppliers.
In small business, relationships are everything. Well, everything once cashflow is OK, though your relationship with key suppliers is the difference between a cashflow problem and a crisis.
- I'm not willing to risk my livelihood or work insane hours for something that will probably fail. (Isn't it 90% of small businesses failing within a year still?) What would I fall back on?
The stats are skewed pretty badly. The ones that try to use empirical data count all sorts of aberrations, like new subsidiaries of existing businesses who specifically created a new company to have a stab at a risky venture while containing the losses. I have several clients who set up a company to handle a single deal which either goes through or doesn't happen and either way they fold the company within the year. Much of the time a company is "sold" by company A selling their non-cash assets and trade to another company, then the company is folded which creates the appearance of a failure out of an actual success.
To get around some of the above issues some studies only count companies with employees. Well, all companies require at least one human director so they can't be counting one-man-bands either, a very large share of small companies. I'd wager that they are proportionately more successful too - self-employed contractors are very often little different to employees with varying numbers of part-time jobs. Plus payroll is a very substantial and very inflexible cash outflow.
Generally a "1/3 1/3 1/3" is accepted, being equal chances of success, break-even or losses over the lifetime of the business, with failures heavily skewed towards the early years. Again though the general statistic hides more than it reveals, this article, while old, is quite interesting.
I'm not trying to argue that self-employment isn't risky, but it is more of a possibility than yourself and the many people who share your views think. That said, you do need the means to go a few years with negligible income, though
The flaw in your point is it's not proven he has been cheating and tabloid stories are nothing short of propaganda, it's a character assassination and the media is the weapon of choice.
In the UK, how it works is that the story is the story. Whether he has actually been cheating, eaten someone's hamster or whatever is barely relevant. It's a battle of PR clout.
These stories have very common themes: the male is some kind of famous, the girl is some desperate wannabe famous and is represented by Max Clifford. If the male is at the peak of his celebrity, it's a fair bet that he did not pay his protection money, er I mean is not employing Max Clifford and a PR firm is trying to snag him with a grappling hook in order to drag up their "victim" into the spotlight for fame and/or interview fees.
On the other hand, if the male is in danger of dropping off the radar, it's a fair bet that both he and the "victim" are employed by the same publicist and the whole thing is a ruse to get back into the spotlight. Like when "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" (see that wiki link).
(There are of course stories about females but the story is more varied.)
It's all very well to throw up the "free speech" banners, but I'm not convinced it applies when your speech is all about attacking another person for cheap personal gain and the media operates no journalistic controls at all.
I'm not familiar with programming calculators and whatnot, but I keep finding these stories baffling. Why can't TI just have a hard reset switch that clears writeable memory and reads the OS from ROM?
Or, to save invigilators having to pen the switches, sell an "academic" and "normal" version? This is an obvious route for TI as they can better target price-discrimination against their captive market while still having a model that can face up to competition. I'd assume manufacturing to be virtually identical, a one-button change between batches.
It's only useless against those people who are both aware there is something to look for and interested enough to make at least some effort to find out.
It won't help against pro-lifers who are already actively seeking out and going around harassing people. Other laws exist for dealing with these people.
It will help against some of the more opportunist pro-lifers, not prone to go around harassing people unless it is brought to their attention that there is a potential victim living locally.
It will help against the British tabloid Circus, which involves them hyping up (non-)stories and continually repeating and (re)creating "news" until the story is the story. Lack of identity means much less fuel for the hyperbole.
It will help the mother go about her daily life in a relatively normal fashion, without every single person staring and making comments, because 99% of people have better things to do.
Regardless, this is really a non-story. Injunctions against stating names are quite widely supported in the UK, especially when it is Joe Public and even moreso when a moral dilemma rather than to save some embarrassment caused from repugnant behaviour. The related-ish hot issue in the UK is the super-injunctions, which go so far to ban reporting the existence of an injunction, when we generally consider celebs who markets him/herself as wholesome while having affairs as fair game.
Pretty much all businesses use whatever is necessary for their productivity or whatever essential software they use. Arguing Linux vs Windows vs Mac or whatever is totally irrelevant, the choice of OS for both desktops and servers is dictated by the software that matters. Most small to medium organisations even buy the entire network (server, workstations, cables, support contract, the lot) incidental to acquiring that piece of software, it comes as a bundle.
With small to medium sized organisations - I'm not talking software development, just general - the "IT Department" is invariably one of: owner/manager who buys stuff at Dell and figured out where to plug in the cables; slightly larger organisations will have someone with just enough IT knowledge to deal with a contractor and there's the occasional actual IT department though they deal with contractors a lot too.
With every client I can think of, nearly all use Windows desktops with Windows Server. Invariably, users save Anything That Matters (and much crap that doesn't) to the network drives which are backed up to external drives/tape on rotation. Some have profiles and whatever backed up but usually it's just the network drives.
I find it rare that anything is locked down. Windows update usually runs unrestricted or, occasionally, is completely blocked until an update becomes necessary for their key software, at which point they'll backup everything then fully update and see if it works. Everyone uses an admin account for their station. Sometimes there is a network drive that has restricted access, otherwise there's just the password logins limiting certain users to certain access of their key software. Internet access usually is free other than a standard firewall - the vast majority are well aware that they have a considerable stake in a trusting relationship with their employees with a lot of give and take. Regardless, there's not exactly much scope for illicitly lazing away the day on Facebook in a small office both because you're too busy and anyway the boss is in and out the room all day. I'm not aware of any catastrophe.
The only thing that is crap is the aforementioned network drives are always a mess. Folders of folders full of various versions of files, good luck to anyone else coming in trying to find the final/authorised version of the budgets. To be fair though, the same applies even if they have been printed out, and from experience I certainly do not automatically trust that ring-binder with "Budgets 2011/12" written on the side either - this is, as much as anything, the reason we insist they are signed by the board. This also explains why paper never dies (and the popularity of PDF, lots of people, myself included, export to PDF for final reports).
Windows is torturing users? Gimme a break. Staff press the power button, log in and hit the desktop icons for the key productivity software, MS Office and whatever browser is on there. At home I do pretty much the same thing 99% of the time, just about everything auto-updates these days, the only issue is which video codec pack to get and yeah OK sometimes I'll regret a video card driver update (lets not pretend that's any better on Linux). With the Ubuntu machine, it's pretty much the same other than the descriptions in the updater being really opaque and, well, there's a lot of home-user software that doesn't have a linux version. Otherwise, in terms of ease of use, that Ubuntu box is the shared one my flatmates use and I installed it after the Vista demo ran out. They half-interestedly mentioned they'd wondered why that bar thing had moved to the top of the screen.
What tortures users is slow, bloated software running on old, slow machines. The idea that office staff are fine on these is all fine and well until you realise the version of that key productivity software they are running is specced for machines that were reasonable when purchased up to 3 years ago. Not the very most basic spec from 5+ years ago. Especially when it's running fucking Norton.
Missions creep. Boundaries are pushed. Scope is ever extended. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. A sense of control immediately makes the controller (overly) aware of the weaknesses in their control and hence their need for more. Power fuels the desire for more power. Ownership fuels greed.
To a greater or lesser extent, it applies to most things in life and we're all guilty of it. I'll bet if you went to a store and got a 10% discount, next time you'll be expecting the same discount and secretly hoping for 15%.
A troll with half an interest is often using multiple accounts, maybe some in support, some attacking himself, an easy way to take control of a thread.
Bearing in mind of course... Say 70m PSN users, lets assume that 50% of them had credit cards on there and that the average frequency of credit card fraud generally is once per person every 20 years (no, I couldn't be bothered looking for a real statistic, or using real math).
In the week or so since the breach, the average person would have had an approx 1/(20*52)= 1 in 1040 chance of incurring fraud anyway.
Therefore chances are during that week we could anyway have expected around 1/1040 * (70m * 50%) = 33,654 people who had cards on PSN to have been victims of fraud.
In that context, that website's 2 seems a bit inconclusive, even before considering the reliability of the source material.
Slashdot Mirror
For future reference, it is usually a typographical error when letters are merely in the wrong order, a letter is omitted or a letter has been substituted with one located near what it should have been on the keyboard. This applies to many languages.
It is now more common for typographical errors to go unnoticed if the result spells another word due to the proliferation of spell-checking features in popular software. Admittedly this is slightly lazy, but the reliance is generally considered acceptable in the context of internet commentary.
Also, I made it once. "Over and over" appears unlikely to be a mistaken belief on your part, is clearly beyond mere exaggeration and therefore I am having difficulty resisting the notion that this was a deliberate falsification. Surely this is a far more serious misdeed?
That's highlights a significant point I was a bit weak on. This story has largely overcome the usual inertia.
The initial police investigation was disinterested, the impression is they didn't want to investigate the media for something like phone hacking on "fair game" targets. But it got pushed enough, and quite a few celebrities can carry a fair bit of credit for this, along with a few politicians (notably John Prescott), a new police investigation was launched and this one just keeps turning over stones and finding things.
Subsequent to Coulson being shown the door parliament turned it's attention to other things but due to the Milly Dowler story (and possibly having knowledge of the Soham and 7/7 investigations) the PM is making statements of concern in Parliament.
And yeah 7/7, that broke not long after I wrote my post. Silly me thinking they couldn't go any lower.
Another update - as regards advertisers Marketing Week is keeping track.
This might be the straw that's very likely going to break the camel's back, but it's been a long running story now. Back in 2005 they were rumbled for hacking into voicemail of aides to the royal family, a good article from a US source, the NYT, here. The tl;dr version of that article is a minor uproar ensues but Newscorp contains it and is more or less successful claiming it as a one-off, rouge scenario, offering up the resignation of Andy Coulson, the editor, though he claims not to have known anything about it of course.
Now Andy Coulson makes the mistake of getting a job - head of communications, think Toby Ziegler in the West Wing - in the Conservatives, who get into government. This, combined with statements made by the private investigator who's decided he's not going down alone, adds enough fuel to get the fire burning again. The Guardian and Channel 4 get digging and out comes a documentary. A handful of celebrities are sniffing around it now, lo and behold Hugh Grant throws gas on the fire by bugging the bugger. All is forgiven Hugh, well played.
Accusations just keep mounting up and the picture is forming pretty solidly of a newsroom where such things were par for the course. An oft-repeated point directed at Coulson I'll paraphrase as "either he knew and he broke the law, or he didn't and he's grossly negligent" (not sure who started that, I think Ian Hislop). Coulson is given the boot.
The shit is flying pretty thick now and it just keeps coming. But it's all the royals, celebs and politicians. There is a sense that whilst it's overstepping the mark considerably, these are all public people and fair game. Milly Dowler, on the other hand, was a child and a tragedy. This is a recent turn in events and very quickly major advertisers have started to step away. I'll applaud Ford for being the first of the big advertisers to drop them, though I'm quite surprised it took so long. I suspect more shuffled away quietly.
News is now coming in that the police investigating the phone hacking have contacted the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the girls killed by the Soham Murderer. This was one of the biggest stories and national tragedies I can remember.
The News of the World really must not be allowed to survive this, it is a stunning failure of ethics, governance and plain decency on a huge scale with substantial evidence. If they can't be brought down for this, they clearly cannot be taken down for anything. Yet it's even proving difficult to remove the editor.
It's interesting to note that the chap quoted considers that roundabouts require spontaneous cooperation. They don't.
A roundabout is a short road. All other roads are turning onto it. When you're on the roundabout, you're on the road and have right of way. The only rule special to a basic roundabout is that there doesn't need to be a sign to say you're not allowed to turn the wrong way. Otherwise it's just a road that's very curved.
Most problems associated with roundabouts aren't the roundabout's doing, they're pre-existing problems that the roundabout has been installed to alleviate.
...then perhaps we'd better not even get started on the quality of the underlying data.
The sole purpose of corporations providing information is to convince the public of something that will benefit the company. From inception to design through data collection, analysis and reporting there is a defined marketing objective and it never involved "let's find out". Yet we treat with less scepticism than reports from an independent academic that at least in theory has survived a thorough peer review - though even that tends to assumes the technical parameters operated were correct. How often do you see reference to, say, questionnaires in the methodology which then goes on to even let you see a copy of the questionnaire?
I need a little context before I decide how sympathetic I'm feeling. The obvious one being how much are they paid? Are they paid for this overtime, or do they get back time in lieu?
60 hour weeks are nothing special for someone on a decent salary. Here in UK, bastion of the 6 weeks holiday and subject to EU working time directive, a lot of people regularly pull 60 hour weeks. I spend half my working days at client's premises doing work that includes me seeing the payroll, I'd wager that just about everyone making £30k ($48k ish) works significant unpaid OT. Once you hit that level you're pretty much paid to get shit done and the salary is basically what you get paid to get that shit done regardless of how long it takes (funny how it almost always goes one way though).
I work in accounting practice, it's audit (busy) season and I've been working 50-60 hours since April. Managers more than that - and often enough I'll drop them an email for when they come back from holiday (BTW, you don't get to book holiday's in spring or summer without good reason) and yet get a quick response, and files will come back reviewed. This is a small practice, a colleague left for a big-4 firm and logged 65 hours regularly - and this was outwith the audit season.
This isn't the best bit. Aside from qualitative appraisals based on the quality of your work, the primary performance measurement is hours logged to time budget. Staff are pressurised to make their budget and managers heavily pressurised for the overall budget, that shit rolls downhill. The budget is usually basically the lower of whatever makes the required profit and 5% less time than it took (or rather, what was logged) last year, which basically means you work whatever insanity but log only the contracted hours. Last week was pretty decent, I worked 10 hours unlogged, almost 30% above what I'm contracted and paid for. I don't like to think about the week before that.
Whoring in the hours to meet actual deadlines imposed by clients with valid reasons is one thing, doing it routinely without charging the hours just so your manager can get good stats and your partner can make more profit by not paying you is another. It's not just the amount of work, it's the stress you still get despite (because of?) the absurdity of it.
The really stupid bit however, is the same shit (albeit smaller scale) happens in winter, which is the dead season. Staff with "real work" will be rushing away while staff without sit bored with some silly made-up task. The firm would actually make the same money by letting us have the time off in leu instead of made-up work, but the performance measurement doesn't work that way.
The system's cost per watt straight-up isn't necessarily useful. What's interesting is the relevant cost per watt of this system, that is the cost over and above that of the regular tinted windows you would otherwise be buying.
Furthermore with "cost per watt" I'm never really clear whether or how much they are counting for the land required. Again there is nil relevant cost with these windows.
As my quote identifies I'm responding to the assertion that a lawyer wouldn't have caught it. However I did later point out that there is an element of common sense given the deal is designed to discourage him from doing what he did, albeit with the caveat that the employer seems to have failed their own intentions by not making that clear.
It was something like a "this agreement also includes stipulations covered in a different document". He couldn't possibly have caught that even with a lawyer reading over his shoulder, without taking a break and doing research and chasing down the additional paperwork (that he wasn't even provided with at the time of signing) that it was binding him to.
Nope, I'm an accountant and reading the "incomprehensible" passage via the CNN link the phrase "...subject to the repurchase and other provisions..." jumps out like a big neon animated diagram with the words "bend over" and a rather uncomfortable-looking arrow.
And I'd be expecting such a term (and specifically the word "repurchase"), even if I had missed it first time though I'd just have read it again until I found the inevitable. The lawyer would certainly have noticed it, though he'd have known it would be there even before he read it. Though it's not like his querying it would have resulted in a change in the contract.
The point of the options is to shift the balance of power to owners from employees. You don't get options like some kind of gift, they're not sending you flowers just because they love you very much. It's all part of the remuneration package designed to retain you and keep you motivated more cheaply and more effectively than through salary. When private equity is involved, retention of key employees is a massive concern. The collection of employees is mostly what they're buying into and employees often do not like even a partial change in ownership.
I'm actually somewhat bemused that the guy thought he could leave after a year and still get options. I mean, really? Do you even need to read the contract(s) to figure out that you're not going to get your complicated bonus if you do exactly what the bonus is intended to discourage you from doing? Frankly I can only assume the employer didn't so much screw Lee as simply screwed up by allowing the whole thing to be opaque, it negated the point of the exercise.
The executives, now they got shafted. But they're big boys and knowing how the game is played at the big boy's table is pretty much the job they were in.
BTW, the vesting thing is probably a tax thing, I'm not familiar with US tax but here in UK it'd likely be to try and trigger the taxable gains over several years in order to maximise the annual capital gains tax exemption.
While the UK does have the very occasional tremor, they're so minor that nothing more than a single roof tile has ever moved*.
Not true. The British Geological Survey issued an alert the day before yesterday, albeit not one of a high-priority "news flash" type since it was a mere 2.7ML. There are usually a couple above 3ML every year. There was a 5.2 magnitude in 2008.
I'm not trying to suggest even the record 6.1ML (or indeed the T5/F2 tornado in 2005) should be something that would cause great concern to a modern nuclear plant (I assume not).
There is an excess of FUD irrationality arising from Fukushima, and I'm generally pro nuclear power here in UK. But I respect that other people might have an informed, rational assessment of the risks involved and still sensibly arrive at a different view. And even the most rational of minds surely cannot help but observe the reminder that shit happens.
Additionally power plants can be placed where air quality matters least (i.e. not in densely populated areas where people and cars are). That might not help significantly with climate change, but the redistribution would make a massive contribution to other air pollution problems. Currently we have great air where few people are and terrible air where lots of people are, which is obviously silly.
Furthermore, power plants can burn any resource a car can run on plus other things. A power plant running on oil might not consume that much less oil per mile driven than a car but the additional resource options can only improve resource allocation efficiency (a power plant would only run on oil if it was the best option).
Shifting demand for energy sources from car combustion engines to power plants also has supply implications. There are many fields that are not economically viable due to the risks of selling oil/gas on the market. Power plants have relatively stable demand and are more interested in stable supply: the risks involved in the marginal oil field become far less when they can secure 10 year contracts with pricing collars before investing capital. The supply chain can also be more efficient when dealing with fewer, larger customers. Plus we cut out the whole petrol/gas delivery costs.
Power plants should also be a little more efficient than they already are when there is greater long term demand. Bigger, more efficient plants, or more plants which should average out to being closer to demand thus less transmission loss. On the other hand perhaps the best sites are already taken so the additional plants would have to be further away, but I suspect they would just make existing plants bigger if that was the case.
I'm tempted to assume the only real problem is the battery. They're made of nasty things and the heaviness impacts efficiency and handling. Despite this efficiency is already a win and there does seem to be quite a lot of research going on. Many people seem to think it also causes a range problem but that will either be solved with fast charging stations or the batteries can be designed to be swappable, perhaps using some kind of leasing system, which should also allow some efficiency savings due to smoothing power plant capacity utilisation (i.e. it's better to swap in batteries that charged overnight rather than recharge during the day).
In short, even if fossils were the only power plant energy source, once critical mass is reached electric cars should solve many problems associated with cars and put a lot of little cuts in climate change and resource scarcity. These two require clean renewable energy, which itself is highly likely to require electric cars.
It's probably worth remembering at this point that the whole debate on powering cars is merely about managing symptoms. The real problem, and the one associated with many others (e.g. roads, accidents, traffic, time wasted non-productive and non-enjoyed) is the need to make a car journey. Nobody seems interested in fundamental solutions like good public transport and living near where you want to be.
So if an employee takes a $20/m payroll deduction and is given a Blackberry + contract which costs $25/m (regular price for Joe Consumer say $40/m), is that being counted?
Some employers (at least here in UK) every year offer employees a list of benefits. Maybe there's a per-year limit, or maybe there's a payroll deduction. Quite often the employer's bulk purchasing power attracts a large discount, quite often the activity has some employer benefit (gym membership), there can be some tax benefits and there can be instances where the employer needs to provide a cheap phone anyway so decide they might aswell let employees top it up to the latest and greatest.
Regardless, as many have said already, this level of expenditure barely counts as small change
It's because perps, except the true psychopaths, are scared shitless of them. Using them doesn't produce actionable evidence, but it weeds out the guilty who know they're guilty and don't feel they can beat a polygraph. Saves a lot of rubber-hose time that way.
relevant
Rather than sales I'd suggest some kind of participation in profits. Perhaps x% of profit above $x is divvied up amongst staff in proportion to their salaries + commission for the year.
It should be clear to engineering staff that when they "make a sale" it's appreciated and noted, a slight nudge forward to promotion maybe, but I really don't think it should be a focus for them.
Trust with customers is important, particularly for repeat business. Your engineers have it, your sales staff do not, and your response is to make your engineering staff like your sales staff?
There is similar happening in Scotland, albeit via a different approach - essentially private schools can have their charitable status revoked if they do not pass the "public benefit" test. This is applicable to all charities, though generally interpreted in private schools in relation to the level of fees charged and the proportions of bursaries granted: if high fees mean poor people are effectively excluded from the school, their "public benefit" is not so very "public".
There was quite a push specifically on private schools a few years ago, this is a good, albeit old, article, but the government and charity regulator seem to be backing off quite a bit now, perhaps partly due to change in government and party because the schools have elevated their bursaries in response (some of which is due to receiving more donations for this very reason). Someone who gives politicians a lot of benefit over any doubt might wink and mutter "well played" at this point, but I think that's giving out a lot more credit than due.
In practice what charitable status means is relief from rates, a significant local tax based on property values (private schools here tend to have a lot of prized property). It does also mean relief from corporation tax, that donations qualify for a tax deduction and a few other things, but any decent accountant should be able to engineer a way around those, albeit perhaps with a few ongoing headaches. What I'm saying is compliance certainly is advantageous, but is not mandatory, neither in the legal nor practical sense.
I think this is a much more reasonable approach, though while our poverty gap is pretty bad it's nothing on India's, and we don't have their caste problems either. There's also far less relevance of race here than there seems to be from my media-led impression of the US (we do have it, but it's relatively endemic to certain cities), so tackling racial inequality often comes under the more general banner of anti-poverty.
For what it's worth I audited a private school and, while 1 school does not make for a statistically representative sample, I was a little stunned at how close their bursary system was to what I'd consider an ideal model. They offered everything from long-term loans at base interest rate to fully paying their fees, uniforms, sports equipment, school trips, anything needed for after-school activities and school meals. All of this is done in a manner that avoids the "poor kid with his free meals voucher" embarrassments. Few in the school itself would even know who had bursaries. The pupil acceptance committee certainly didn't.
Bursary award consideration was non-competitive, entirely based on the student (especially any reasons why state school would be unsuited) and the ability of the parents to pay. There was no special extra-hard test to sit or any such thing. Other than the standard entry exam for all students who did not have family at the school, academic, sporting, creative or other ability only mattered if there was some special fund set up due to restriction set by a donor (they could be rather eccentric). Race and so on was completely ignored, with the only exception being that *after* issuing the awards they did do a few numbers with their fingers-crossed.
More or less all major UK government IT projects start as the baby of some politician who's idea of getting things done is to demand it, shove it through then hope it mostly just comes together in the end.
Obviously, this doesn't work for a major IT project which really does have to be properly specced from the beginning. It then fails for all the predictable reasons, but the politician will not abandon it as it would be an admission of failure. There's less fuss to waste another (and another) £20m than confess to having already wasted £100m so it drags on until a new party is elected, which then dumps any progress, pays off the contractor and claims that lessons have been learned.
At which point begins an all-new clusterfuck with all the same failures.
Marketing isn't Apple's only strength, but it is the key strength from which all their others derive.
Their consistency with said polish and refinement is clear evidence. Their products aren't just technically well designed, they're well designed just how their customers want. This isn't some kind of accident.
They have strong design teams because they know how important it is to their market (marketing), those design teams consistently "get it right" because they know what their customers want (marketing). They will have a lot of failures which never make it out (marketing). Apple is a case study of the market-driven company.
The marketing observed by customers is only a small part of marketing.
MS's problem is largely marketing. Apple have defined their market, MS however is "everyone who isn't something else". Apple can start a design project with "this is our customer, this is what he wants". When Apple has to make a decision, their customer profile points the way. MS just has a huge, ill-defined crowd with wildly different requirements all pointing different directions.
All of your points are evidence of marketing failure, bar Xbox which I'm not sure why you brought up (Xbox is a success, particularly a marketing - despite the RRoD - and the billions "lost" was planned investment). I'd even argue bugs bad enough to harm product success are a marketing failure because a more market-driven company would have tested more and wouldn't have risked the damage to their image.
p.s. in case my post seems pro-Apple, they don't appeal to me at all and I have none of their products. But I do appreciate just how well they target their market.
Think about it this way -- to be a successful business owner, you can't just be smart or a hard worker. You have to have some sort of entrepreneurial spark that most people don't have. Every business owner that I've dealt with who is reasonably successful is also a type-A nutjob (mostly meant in a good way...) who works 130 hour weeks and never lets up.
I'm an accountant in private practice, dealing with these guys is my day job. Generally this is my observation, though there's a chicken and egg thing going on.
Being both willing and able to get started is the hardest part, once you've jumped in the deep end there's more motivation than you could possibly want. The type of stress is different though, your home is on the line but you're calling the shots and choosing how to deal with problems. How much of your stress is really due to management? When it's your business, you only deal with assholes to the point that dealing with them is worth the marginal amount money they bring to YOUR bottom line. As an employee, one asshole could cost you your entire job and having dealt with that asshole makes no difference at all to your paycheck.
Insane hours put into your own business just is not the same as the same hours worked as an employee.
- I can't sell. Period.
Only matters in certain industries. My firm for example doesn't advertise and does very little tendering, 99% comes in from a recommendation from existing customers or local bank managers. "Selling" is frowned upon, clients are looking for someone they can trust.
- I'm not your typical "slimy used car salesman" personality that most small business owners tend to be
While it'd be easy for me to think of the 95th percentile slimy successful guys, pretty much all the others rely on good relations with staff, customers and suppliers.
In small business, relationships are everything. Well, everything once cashflow is OK, though your relationship with key suppliers is the difference between a cashflow problem and a crisis.
- I'm not willing to risk my livelihood or work insane hours for something that will probably fail. (Isn't it 90% of small businesses failing within a year still?) What would I fall back on?
The stats are skewed pretty badly. The ones that try to use empirical data count all sorts of aberrations, like new subsidiaries of existing businesses who specifically created a new company to have a stab at a risky venture while containing the losses. I have several clients who set up a company to handle a single deal which either goes through or doesn't happen and either way they fold the company within the year. Much of the time a company is "sold" by company A selling their non-cash assets and trade to another company, then the company is folded which creates the appearance of a failure out of an actual success.
To get around some of the above issues some studies only count companies with employees. Well, all companies require at least one human director so they can't be counting one-man-bands either, a very large share of small companies. I'd wager that they are proportionately more successful too - self-employed contractors are very often little different to employees with varying numbers of part-time jobs. Plus payroll is a very substantial and very inflexible cash outflow.
Generally a "1/3 1/3 1/3" is accepted, being equal chances of success, break-even or losses over the lifetime of the business, with failures heavily skewed towards the early years. Again though the general statistic hides more than it reveals, this article, while old, is quite interesting.
I'm not trying to argue that self-employment isn't risky, but it is more of a possibility than yourself and the many people who share your views think. That said, you do need the means to go a few years with negligible income, though
The flaw in your point is it's not proven he has been cheating and tabloid stories are nothing short of propaganda, it's a character assassination and the media is the weapon of choice.
In the UK, how it works is that the story is the story. Whether he has actually been cheating, eaten someone's hamster or whatever is barely relevant. It's a battle of PR clout.
These stories have very common themes: the male is some kind of famous, the girl is some desperate wannabe famous and is represented by Max Clifford. If the male is at the peak of his celebrity, it's a fair bet that he did not pay his protection money, er I mean is not employing Max Clifford and a PR firm is trying to snag him with a grappling hook in order to drag up their "victim" into the spotlight for fame and/or interview fees.
On the other hand, if the male is in danger of dropping off the radar, it's a fair bet that both he and the "victim" are employed by the same publicist and the whole thing is a ruse to get back into the spotlight. Like when "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" (see that wiki link).
(There are of course stories about females but the story is more varied.)
It's all very well to throw up the "free speech" banners, but I'm not convinced it applies when your speech is all about attacking another person for cheap personal gain and the media operates no journalistic controls at all.
I'm not familiar with programming calculators and whatnot, but I keep finding these stories baffling. Why can't TI just have a hard reset switch that clears writeable memory and reads the OS from ROM?
Or, to save invigilators having to pen the switches, sell an "academic" and "normal" version? This is an obvious route for TI as they can better target price-discrimination against their captive market while still having a model that can face up to competition. I'd assume manufacturing to be virtually identical, a one-button change between batches.
It's only useless against those people who are both aware there is something to look for and interested enough to make at least some effort to find out.
It won't help against pro-lifers who are already actively seeking out and going around harassing people. Other laws exist for dealing with these people.
It will help against some of the more opportunist pro-lifers, not prone to go around harassing people unless it is brought to their attention that there is a potential victim living locally.
It will help against the British tabloid Circus, which involves them hyping up (non-)stories and continually repeating and (re)creating "news" until the story is the story. Lack of identity means much less fuel for the hyperbole.
It will help the mother go about her daily life in a relatively normal fashion, without every single person staring and making comments, because 99% of people have better things to do.
Regardless, this is really a non-story. Injunctions against stating names are quite widely supported in the UK, especially when it is Joe Public and even moreso when a moral dilemma rather than to save some embarrassment caused from repugnant behaviour. The related-ish hot issue in the UK is the super-injunctions, which go so far to ban reporting the existence of an injunction, when we generally consider celebs who markets him/herself as wholesome while having affairs as fair game.
Pretty much all businesses use whatever is necessary for their productivity or whatever essential software they use. Arguing Linux vs Windows vs Mac or whatever is totally irrelevant, the choice of OS for both desktops and servers is dictated by the software that matters. Most small to medium organisations even buy the entire network (server, workstations, cables, support contract, the lot) incidental to acquiring that piece of software, it comes as a bundle.
With small to medium sized organisations - I'm not talking software development, just general - the "IT Department" is invariably one of: owner/manager who buys stuff at Dell and figured out where to plug in the cables; slightly larger organisations will have someone with just enough IT knowledge to deal with a contractor and there's the occasional actual IT department though they deal with contractors a lot too.
With every client I can think of, nearly all use Windows desktops with Windows Server. Invariably, users save Anything That Matters (and much crap that doesn't) to the network drives which are backed up to external drives/tape on rotation. Some have profiles and whatever backed up but usually it's just the network drives.
I find it rare that anything is locked down. Windows update usually runs unrestricted or, occasionally, is completely blocked until an update becomes necessary for their key software, at which point they'll backup everything then fully update and see if it works. Everyone uses an admin account for their station. Sometimes there is a network drive that has restricted access, otherwise there's just the password logins limiting certain users to certain access of their key software. Internet access usually is free other than a standard firewall - the vast majority are well aware that they have a considerable stake in a trusting relationship with their employees with a lot of give and take. Regardless, there's not exactly much scope for illicitly lazing away the day on Facebook in a small office both because you're too busy and anyway the boss is in and out the room all day. I'm not aware of any catastrophe.
The only thing that is crap is the aforementioned network drives are always a mess. Folders of folders full of various versions of files, good luck to anyone else coming in trying to find the final/authorised version of the budgets. To be fair though, the same applies even if they have been printed out, and from experience I certainly do not automatically trust that ring-binder with "Budgets 2011/12" written on the side either - this is, as much as anything, the reason we insist they are signed by the board. This also explains why paper never dies (and the popularity of PDF, lots of people, myself included, export to PDF for final reports).
Windows is torturing users? Gimme a break. Staff press the power button, log in and hit the desktop icons for the key productivity software, MS Office and whatever browser is on there. At home I do pretty much the same thing 99% of the time, just about everything auto-updates these days, the only issue is which video codec pack to get and yeah OK sometimes I'll regret a video card driver update (lets not pretend that's any better on Linux). With the Ubuntu machine, it's pretty much the same other than the descriptions in the updater being really opaque and, well, there's a lot of home-user software that doesn't have a linux version. Otherwise, in terms of ease of use, that Ubuntu box is the shared one my flatmates use and I installed it after the Vista demo ran out. They half-interestedly mentioned they'd wondered why that bar thing had moved to the top of the screen.
What tortures users is slow, bloated software running on old, slow machines. The idea that office staff are fine on these is all fine and well until you realise the version of that key productivity software they are running is specced for machines that were reasonable when purchased up to 3 years ago. Not the very most basic spec from 5+ years ago. Especially when it's running fucking Norton.
This was the plan all along with the union
No it wasn't. It's just how it goes.
Missions creep. Boundaries are pushed. Scope is ever extended. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. A sense of control immediately makes the controller (overly) aware of the weaknesses in their control and hence their need for more. Power fuels the desire for more power. Ownership fuels greed.
To a greater or lesser extent, it applies to most things in life and we're all guilty of it. I'll bet if you went to a store and got a 10% discount, next time you'll be expecting the same discount and secretly hoping for 15%.
A troll with half an interest is often using multiple accounts, maybe some in support, some attacking himself, an easy way to take control of a thread.
He'd notice right away.
Bearing in mind of course... Say 70m PSN users, lets assume that 50% of them had credit cards on there and that the average frequency of credit card fraud generally is once per person every 20 years (no, I couldn't be bothered looking for a real statistic, or using real math).
In the week or so since the breach, the average person would have had an approx 1/(20*52)= 1 in 1040 chance of incurring fraud anyway.
Therefore chances are during that week we could anyway have expected around 1/1040 * (70m * 50%) = 33,654 people who had cards on PSN to have been victims of fraud.
In that context, that website's 2 seems a bit inconclusive, even before considering the reliability of the source material.