Whoa there. Outsourcing had nothing to do with the UK auto industry failures, if anything there wasn't enough. It collapsed because we made shit cars, had shit manufacturing processes, especially shit management and negligible government support.
The highly successful, foreign-owned car assembly plants in UK are highly successful because the foreign companies invested a ton of money on R not just on the actual cars but how to make them. For that we have, IIRC, Nissan to thank. The British auto industry was globally written off but Nissan spent the money and turned out one of the most productive plants in the world.
Of course it should have been Honda, who had hopes of doing similar with Rover decades prior, but a combination of government and British Aerospace left them with their fingers burnt.
BTW the workers aren't now on the cheap. The good plants take the best workers, train and pay them well. It's all about productivity.
Firstly, the sample refers to Hunch users only. This is not a general population sample and should not be applied to the general population. While they failed to spell out the implications of this important bit of context, Hunch did at least disclose prominently that the survey was of Hunch users, unlike PC Mag which seemed to reluctantly mention it once. The Slashdot summary however ignores it completely and thus implies reference to the general population.
Almost a quarter of those who actually responded described themselves as neither PC or Mac. The sample is stratified and the terms "PC user" and "Mac user" no longer exist, you only have the (markedly different) categories of "self-described PC people", "self-described Mac people" and "neither". To their credit TFA not only discloses this, in the header no less, but makes it a theme of the infographic. PC Mag seems to mention it once then forget. The Slashdot summary, however, appears not to have even noticed that there is any distinction:
52% of respondents were self-described PC (Windows) people, 25% were Mac users and 23% were neither
These aren't relevant to each other, it's like a random collection of figures that add to 100% by coincidence. Or... Hmm. Subby appears to be promoting a Pro-Mac bias but perhaps this is really a subtle dig, intentionally implying the terms "Mac users" and "self-described Mac people" are one and the same? Have I had my own humour fail and underestimated the summary?
There's some rather odd statistical presentation. For example "PC people are 33% more likely than Mac people to say that two random people are more different than alike". 33% looks like a big difference, but "more likely" is relative and says nothing about significance: the same figure is arrived at when 8 of the 202k PC people say that and only 3 of the 97k Mac people do (0.000040% is 33% more than 0.000026%). Why have they not simply said the full result, the almost ubiquitous way to present the result of a binary question? Any time you see statistics presented this way alarm bells should ring because it's a great way to grossly over-emphasise trivial things.
Noted that there is no control group, no attempt to compare survey results with statistics of the general population simply in order to gauge reliability. This is despite the generally accepted view that questionnaires are utter horse shit and anyway Hunch isn't exactly a reliable scientific source.
With the Hunch infographic, none of the above matters because the whole thing is presented as slightly tongue-in-cheek entertainment. Unlike PC Mag or the Slashdot summary which appears to take it quite seriously.
I didn't quite get the Google demonstration on their destruction of a drive. First they wipe it, verify it's wiped, bend the plates, and then shred it? Why? It would save a lot of time and manpower to just shred them.
Shredding requires extremely noisy machinery and therefore it would not be practical to hold it in the most secure area where the drives are kept. The shredding is probably a redundant step, partially to catch any screwups and partially just to allow customers to tick off the "shreds drive" requirement box.
I'd expect the scrap would also be worth a lot more, just having run it through a fragmenter can double the value per ton.
If you thermite your drives I'd assume you'll end up with a not-so-nice chunk of all the drive materials melted together. Shredding the drives like in the Google video is essentially putting it through a fragmenter, stage 1 of standard recycling processing. Magnets can then be used to separate out the ferrous metals, and so on.
3 broad categories of employer (with the usual pros and cons of stereotyping):
1. The Screw gradually steps up responsibilities and workload without corresponding increase in pay & conditions. Key here is the gradual stepping up which is never individually enough to warrant being called - or pay increased as - a promotion, however each year you can compare to the previous one and realise you're doing a lot more for little extra money. "Turning the screw" tends to be more common with smaller businesses, you'll notice a corporate culture against disclosing pay with colleagues and it's probably a faux pas to raise pay with management, even at appraisals. Here you get promoted by leaving and joining a new company every few years, starting off the new job at about par (similar responsibilities, much better pay) before they start turning the screw.
2. The Slave-Driver ridiculously overworks staff without paid overtime, or even TOIL, incentivised with the promise of fast promotion. Promotions are incremental and usually not much of a pay bump, though they might look bigger when they forget to mention it includes the annual inflation increase. Actual performance doesn't matter so much, just whore yourself and you'll keep being promoted until you are over-promoted to the point that your undeniable incompetence is such a risk to others that they make your life hell until you quit. More common with large companies where HR is the friend that leaves you wondering who needs enemies; beware job adverts highlighting 'career opportunities'. Trying to find a new job elsewhere isn't really a promotion route, it's a horizontal move if looking for a type of work or conditions better suited to your personally (i.e. you're over-promoted or you realise there's more to life than these bastards).
3. Yes, there are actually some employers who increase pay and give promotions as and when deserved... Or would like to, anyway. Such employers are looking long term, understand the value of retaining staff experience and the costs of obtaining and training new. However, it is easy for the employee to mistake this for a screw-turner as naturally everyone over-estimates both their own worth and how green the grass is elsewhere; we have an innate assumption that we're being screwed, usually true but a false belief in this case. The employer is also very likely to be restricted by available opportunities - they know you could do a manager's job, want you to do a managers job but simply have neither an opening nor the money. While you may have to resort to getting a new job to be promoted or else find yourself going nowhere, do understand what a rare gem you have found. Typically a small to medium non-public company.
OK, so there's a 4th:
4. Cushy places where pay is a bit low but you spend half the day on the interwebs and "coffee and cake mornings" are considered important meetings. They might even be called a team-building exercise, which is strange because it's mostly that bitchy gossip that you get from people who are deeply unfulfilled by their 'career', lack any sense of genuine achievement and are so devoid of real stress that they have to go create some. Often easily identified by their gibberish emails using some cartoonish font, because they actually have time for that and don't understand being professional. Most however continue to believe they are underpaid, commonly comparing their salary with advertised (i.e. outlier) salaries no matter how obvious it is that those jobs come with 65 manic hours per week while subject #4 simply has no comprehension of what a hard day's work is for everyone else. As alluded to, this is probably the worst employer of all.
In UK, and I think EU generally, non-competes are much harder to enforce. The emphasis is on the ex-employer to prove that they have a legitimate business interest at stake - merely being in competition is not enough, it would have to be e.g. you moving to a competitor and previously had access to customer lists. That interest would have to be sufficient to override the public interest in free trade.
Court will also have to decide that the restrictions are reasonable. If not, the whole thing is invalidated, they cannot reduce an unreasonable term to a reasonable one. Time and distance are obligatory textbook examples (6 months within city limits, OK, but forever globally is never going to fly), as are some form of sensitive information - particularly access to customer lists.
IANAL, my training is to spot a potential issue and give a ballpark-ish explanation why a client needs to see one, but I'll have a go at guessing this may well have been held valid here too. The position of the employee is highly significant. Any restriction for a supermarket shelf-stacker isn't going to hold, but a bigwig marketing GM for an international company going to a competitor... Well, global might still be a bit of an ask but state-wide I doubt would be much of an issue.
(In practice it's not uncommon to require lengthy notice periods that the employee can be put on gardening leave.)
It's stories (when not just crap about celebs) are written so that the brit sheeples can feel 'informed'.
Just from "reading" The Sun, this is a conclusion easily drawn.
From conversations with Sun readers however, every single one of them has been fully aware of the standards of "journalism", reading it not to feel informed but rather entertained.
It's easy to condemn ignorance and apathy, but one should not feel superior for having full knowledge whilst still doing nothing.
(Bizarrely, a minority of Daily Mail readers did show signs of having some faith in it however. The Mail does have some pretences at being a paper but is rather less consistent, occasionally having some decent articles but at least as many where I'm almost certain the editor is trolling, too bad even to qualify as a parody).
Why I am always even more sceptical of any claims that "greater access to information and control is needed" (to paraphrase) when they then state it should be themselves doing it?
I keep finding myself wondering "needed by whom?", and why wasn't a relatively independent observer saying the same thing?
Wait, "enable cardholders to be eligible for electronic remittance schemes"... Soooo, Interpol wants unhindered access to all your international bank transfers? Oh I see.
Anyway, I imagine most of the participating governments would fail to implement the large IT system required, nevermind Interpol connect them all in a usable way.
music is extremely affordable and reasonably priced
Back in the day, true. Then along came Napster. More important than piracy, it changed the market by redefining the value proposition. A CD a person might once have rushed out to buy at $15 now seemed expensive at $10.
There is no other reason for this than a change in perception. Is $15 a fair price for an album? $5? It costs $0.50 to make the physical product and absolutely no idea how much that particular CD's share is of the cost to write, perform, record and produce the music. Previously the market perceived $14.50 was probably fair since... Since that made it up to what the price of a CD was. There was no other point of reference, and no free-market self-regulation because the labels were oligopoly and price fixing. Napster turned up and the $14.50 went out the window.
This of course was a calamity for the labels, but their fate was of their own making. The market turned on it's head and they didn't merely utterly fail to adapt, they actually put great effort into fighting the market in the absolutely wrong direction because they were used to complete control. How long, and how much convincing, did it take even to sign up to iTunes just to compete on the service and convenience of downloading? And still at old pricing. Endless bitching about just how much music people were stealing and yet it still didn't click that their market was consuming a vastly greater quantity of music. If the music industry had been at all price competitive they would have realised the opportunity in maintaining revenues by selling 4 times as much music at a quarter of the price with zero additional cost.
It even took them many years to realise they could profit from the surge in popularity of music through concerts and events.
I'm no proponent of piracy but I have zero sympathy for their total failure to follow the market. That they lasted more than a couple of years is nothing short of an embarrassment to the notion of the free market.
In US the 2008 fatality rate was 1.25 per 100 million "vehicle miles of travel". That's not one fatal error in 80m miles; 2 deaths in one accident is being counted as 2 so the fatal error rate can only be lower.
A few tons of machinery whizzing around at up to (and sometimes over) 80mph, in all sorts of changeable weather conditions and innumerable other unpredictable variables, and still 1.25 per 100m miles.
1 death is one too many, but the main reason there are a lot of car-related deaths is there is a lot of car-related activity. Certainly, a computer is not prone to the human factors in car crashes, but that is to forget how astonishingly good we are when not being a complete asshat and driving when fatigued, drunk or using a cellphone.
The product hasn't been banned. The wording of an advertisement has. The ASA ruling specifically addressed your point, however concluded that "the overall impression of the ad was such that it encouraged consumers and businesses to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes" (my emphasis).
Computers aren't advertised to do the things you mention.
Frankly I suspect the ASA wouldn't give a damn except that there was a complaint which was technically correct by their own rules.
TG is about 3 petrolheads cocking about. It is unabashed about offering primarily entertainment and that it's "reviews" are highly slanted. While they will give the occasional nod to any excellent motoring product, the "reviews" are intentionally slanted to be by petrolheads, for petrolheads. In the same way, all these Nuremberg videos posted on Youtube by car manufacturers aren't intended to be representative of your commute to work either.
Though Tesla admits aggressive driving will reduce mileage, it claims that Top Gear’s assessment is not representative of real-world range.
Their assessment is only intended, and only presented, to be representative of driving like a maniac petrolhead on their racing track. Tesla are trying to argue that that Top Gear's fact isn't "representative" of a different fact that Tesla would rather be emphasising.
Now, if the fact as actually stated on the show - namely that they could only achieve 55 miles when driving like a petrolhead manic on a racing track, or that they experienced breakdowns - are factually incorrect, well OK, Tesla would have a point. We'll have to wait for the day in court to conclude on this.
If Top Gear was trying to claim that 55 miles was representative of real world usage, then Tesla would also have a point. But they didn't.
$500k is probably a lot cheaper than adding a retractable roof, especially when it may be saleable after, or shared during the event.
Roofs also impact on the sport. For example in some sports (e.g. rugby) it may be desirable to retain the variable introduced by wind (I daresay most fans do not like a kicking game). Then there's the atmosphere: obviously a roof has a considerable effect on the acoustics. Not to forget grass needs sunlight, tens of thousands of supporters in an enclosed space are going to generate some heat of their own... I think it's fair to say roofs are considered to be a significant compromise in favour of the reliability from reducing weather effects.
I could well be totally wrong on this but I was under the impression certain sports - or rather certain sporting events - require an open roof, or allow retractable roofs to be closed only under certain conditions and when approved by an official of the governing body.
Having been an environmentalist at one point, I can tell you that BEING ALIVE is a detriment to society. Humans produce tons and tons of pollution each year. [...] (No I'm not some kind of nut advocating genocide. It's a thought experiment.)
Far as I'm concerned the objective of "environmentalism" is striking a balance on quality of life (current and future), therefore any ideas of eliminating people or even reducing the opportunity of life is running contrary to the fundamental objective.
Environmentalism is not, except for a small fringe, about "saving the planet" but rather reducing the negative impact on quality of life in the future. "Saving the planet" is a somewhat failed edu-marketing slogan once used as a strategy towards achieving the objective, but is now often confused as the objective itself. Witnessing some horrendous result of pollution may appear to trigger a feeling of guilt just because it looks like we're ruining mother earth, but really what we're thinking is that we're fucking shit up for future generations. A bit like how we might feel guilty when looking at the bumper we just hit not because we care much for the car but rather it's owner.
While the significance of the iPhone seems overplayed in the article, handset exclusives generally do play a significant role in carrier competition. That is, shift the carrier competition to handset exclusives and away from "true" competition such as on price and service. Anecdotal, but everyone I know for the past couple of years has decided what phone they want and then selected the best deal from the carriers that offer it.
There should be very little difference between carriers other than price and service, so the industry should mirror that of a mainly homogeneous utility, desperately hammering every fraction of a cent out of costs and passing the saving on through pricing. Instead they're still behaving like they're in early-mid growth stage, throwing insane cash at advertising and clearly making fat margins since you can negotiate vastly better deals than they advertise without even feeling a bit guilty afterwards.
I do think carrier competition would be substantially increased just by preventing phone exclusives.
Whether this is of any beneficial use depends on how it is used.
A system providing some data that a skilled operator may choose to consider can, provided it works consistently, be a tool of (however minimal) benefit only.
A system attempting to provide an excuse for call queuing systems, or with the aim of being able to use less skilled operators, is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately most systems seem to be designed to introduce "cost savings". If it's not the entire point then there's at least something thrown in so marketing can make the claim and the buyer can justify it up the chain.
I'm confused. Why would I ever want to pay for news?
I've got free news from: cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc.uk, new radio, various news apps on my smartphone, and tens of thousands of idiotic commentary available to me across the web.
What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?
Obtaining news from multiple different sources, especially if somewhat random, has problems.
Obviously there's questions over the quality of your news source. Obviously very poor with the idiotic commentary like at fox news, but I still haven't found any free news source that is as good as an actual paper. Even if the source actually has a physical paper, they seem to put drafts online (in order to be quick) which are later amended once the editor has had a run at it. There's also often lots of crap that never makes the paper. It's only in the physical paper that everything has been through the editor properly, and it's only the paper which is put together as a package. There is a different balance between quantity, quality and timeliness between the website and the paper. From what I gather, the NYT intends to apply the same high standard to the online version.
But arguably even more important is to be familiar with the source. Most paper readers are very familiar with their daily, often even with the individual writers. Is this even possible when you're obtaining news from aggregators? Information is inherently unreliable when you do not know the bias and weaknesses of the source, and even poor information can be valuable if you are aware of what's wrong with it.
Why so keen for a new building society? There's already ample choice.
There are also other types of organisations you may wish to consider, for example the Co-operative bank. Whilst this is a bank and not owned by it's customers, it is owned by the Co-op, a supermarket (etc) which *is* owned by it's customers. Just pop into a store and pick up a membership card.
Actually, depending on what's available where you live you can pretty much avoid the, uh, corporate corporations. If you're looking for a department store there's John Lewis (owned by all of it's staff), for your daily there's the Guardian which is owned by a trust (kind of, but not quite a charity), BBC for telly... Often the mutuals etc are at least amongst the better options, though your choices would be pretty limited especially for entertainment.
Am I missing something? Consoles have always lagged the availability of hardware in PCs.
Not really. Think about it in terms of demand rather than in absolute computing performance.
For starters, new consoles usually are faster at running games than a typical gaming PC at the time. Enthusiasts may have something faster but they're a niche while most games are mass-market. Ignoring outliers like Crysis techdemos it usually takes a couple of years for PC games to catch up. But this is still missing the point.
New consoles are plenty fast enough for by far the biggest market: the console gamers. Most of them have no idea what's going on in PC gaming, it's when console gamers start thinking that their console is aged that they might even start thinking of looking at PCs. Even then, many prefer playing from the couch, with a joypad, on XBL so much (and then there's the switching costs) that they would have to perceive the PC to be much better in other ways (which of course it is;) ) to convince them to move over.
However I suspect the actual strategy of the developers is to keep them building up their tech. They can't stop moving forward and the PC is the only platform that allows them to keep doing so. Even if, perhaps, their main incentive is to be competitive when the next console gen arrives. IIRC the Xbox 720 or whatever is expected around 2015, so the big engine-sellers probably want to have an amazing techdemo out around 2012/13, when all the smaller devs start thinking about what engine they'll be licensing for it.
There is nothing inherently good about a democracy, nor anything inherently bad about even a dictatorship. The moral judgment comes from the actual actions of the members of government in either system.
A dictatorship is a form of government that has the power to govern without consent of those being governed. This is inherently bad.
Yeah F1 engines are only 2.4L, and a huge number of other restrictions like 18k RPM, single fuel injector, standard fuel... Even the air ducts are heavily regulated. Sucks if you were wanting to watch the fastest cars that can still go around corners, but it does keep things sane and leads to a lot of development on the other stuff.
TFA seems to consider a troll anyone being offensive. These are childish n00bs. A decent troll is adept at manipulation and is using it largely for his entertainment: trolling is a game, the objective is teh LOLS.
For many trolls there's a superiority/inferiority ego-massage thing going on and LOLS are to be obtained at the expense of others. Generally "points" are scored based on the amount of time others spend responding to you and the level of attention/infamy gained. Bonuses can be awarded for rage and combo bonus if you can dupe the tide of opinion in your favour against selected victims.
A ragequit is a decent victory however stealth is more successful at obtaining a win from convincing someone of a falsehood, particularly if the falsehood is liable to be realised "IRL" in a manner that causes embarrassment. Or indeed the LOLS of your victim - it is entirely unnecessary to take a negative approach. While all trolling involves gamesmanship, more sporting trolls set themselves rules and recognise that misery in easy meat is pyrrhic as you would have to be quite sad to consider it a game.
When counter-trolling, arguably the troll has set the rules of the game but one must be wary of this being the trap: a negative troll may be baiting with the objective of inducing you down to their character's level then pulling the old switcheroo. It's more important to adopt their rules if they are sporting trolls with higher standards, since this is a gentleman's game and you're playing on their court, failing to observe the rules is undignified and failure by default.
If any of this post is +informative, I'd hesitate to suggest counter-trolling since they're practiced, enjoy this kind of thing and negative trolls tend to, how should I say... have more free time and much less self-esteem. One of the easiest strategies though is to simply play along as the victim, all you need to do is keep them in the game and posting more than you, dancing to your tune.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that advice.
Good to know I should take my sensitive information seriously.
Thanks for the concern.
No, really.
Thanks.
Whoa there. Outsourcing had nothing to do with the UK auto industry failures, if anything there wasn't enough. It collapsed because we made shit cars, had shit manufacturing processes, especially shit management and negligible government support.
The highly successful, foreign-owned car assembly plants in UK are highly successful because the foreign companies invested a ton of money on R not just on the actual cars but how to make them. For that we have, IIRC, Nissan to thank. The British auto industry was globally written off but Nissan spent the money and turned out one of the most productive plants in the world.
Of course it should have been Honda, who had hopes of doing similar with Rover decades prior, but a combination of government and British Aerospace left them with their fingers burnt.
BTW the workers aren't now on the cheap. The good plants take the best workers, train and pay them well. It's all about productivity.
Firstly, the sample refers to Hunch users only. This is not a general population sample and should not be applied to the general population. While they failed to spell out the implications of this important bit of context, Hunch did at least disclose prominently that the survey was of Hunch users, unlike PC Mag which seemed to reluctantly mention it once. The Slashdot summary however ignores it completely and thus implies reference to the general population.
Almost a quarter of those who actually responded described themselves as neither PC or Mac. The sample is stratified and the terms "PC user" and "Mac user" no longer exist, you only have the (markedly different) categories of "self-described PC people", "self-described Mac people" and "neither". To their credit TFA not only discloses this, in the header no less, but makes it a theme of the infographic. PC Mag seems to mention it once then forget. The Slashdot summary, however, appears not to have even noticed that there is any distinction:
52% of respondents were self-described PC (Windows) people, 25% were Mac users and 23% were neither
These aren't relevant to each other, it's like a random collection of figures that add to 100% by coincidence. Or... Hmm. Subby appears to be promoting a Pro-Mac bias but perhaps this is really a subtle dig, intentionally implying the terms "Mac users" and "self-described Mac people" are one and the same? Have I had my own humour fail and underestimated the summary?
There's some rather odd statistical presentation. For example "PC people are 33% more likely than Mac people to say that two random people are more different than alike". 33% looks like a big difference, but "more likely" is relative and says nothing about significance: the same figure is arrived at when 8 of the 202k PC people say that and only 3 of the 97k Mac people do (0.000040% is 33% more than 0.000026%). Why have they not simply said the full result, the almost ubiquitous way to present the result of a binary question? Any time you see statistics presented this way alarm bells should ring because it's a great way to grossly over-emphasise trivial things.
Noted that there is no control group, no attempt to compare survey results with statistics of the general population simply in order to gauge reliability. This is despite the generally accepted view that questionnaires are utter horse shit and anyway Hunch isn't exactly a reliable scientific source.
With the Hunch infographic, none of the above matters because the whole thing is presented as slightly tongue-in-cheek entertainment. Unlike PC Mag or the Slashdot summary which appears to take it quite seriously.
I didn't quite get the Google demonstration on their destruction of a drive. First they wipe it, verify it's wiped, bend the plates, and then shred it? Why? It would save a lot of time and manpower to just shred them.
Shredding requires extremely noisy machinery and therefore it would not be practical to hold it in the most secure area where the drives are kept. The shredding is probably a redundant step, partially to catch any screwups and partially just to allow customers to tick off the "shreds drive" requirement box.
I'd expect the scrap would also be worth a lot more, just having run it through a fragmenter can double the value per ton.
If you thermite your drives I'd assume you'll end up with a not-so-nice chunk of all the drive materials melted together. Shredding the drives like in the Google video is essentially putting it through a fragmenter, stage 1 of standard recycling processing. Magnets can then be used to separate out the ferrous metals, and so on.
3 broad categories of employer (with the usual pros and cons of stereotyping):
1. The Screw gradually steps up responsibilities and workload without corresponding increase in pay & conditions. Key here is the gradual stepping up which is never individually enough to warrant being called - or pay increased as - a promotion, however each year you can compare to the previous one and realise you're doing a lot more for little extra money. "Turning the screw" tends to be more common with smaller businesses, you'll notice a corporate culture against disclosing pay with colleagues and it's probably a faux pas to raise pay with management, even at appraisals. Here you get promoted by leaving and joining a new company every few years, starting off the new job at about par (similar responsibilities, much better pay) before they start turning the screw.
2. The Slave-Driver ridiculously overworks staff without paid overtime, or even TOIL, incentivised with the promise of fast promotion. Promotions are incremental and usually not much of a pay bump, though they might look bigger when they forget to mention it includes the annual inflation increase. Actual performance doesn't matter so much, just whore yourself and you'll keep being promoted until you are over-promoted to the point that your undeniable incompetence is such a risk to others that they make your life hell until you quit. More common with large companies where HR is the friend that leaves you wondering who needs enemies; beware job adverts highlighting 'career opportunities'. Trying to find a new job elsewhere isn't really a promotion route, it's a horizontal move if looking for a type of work or conditions better suited to your personally (i.e. you're over-promoted or you realise there's more to life than these bastards).
3. Yes, there are actually some employers who increase pay and give promotions as and when deserved... Or would like to, anyway. Such employers are looking long term, understand the value of retaining staff experience and the costs of obtaining and training new. However, it is easy for the employee to mistake this for a screw-turner as naturally everyone over-estimates both their own worth and how green the grass is elsewhere; we have an innate assumption that we're being screwed, usually true but a false belief in this case. The employer is also very likely to be restricted by available opportunities - they know you could do a manager's job, want you to do a managers job but simply have neither an opening nor the money. While you may have to resort to getting a new job to be promoted or else find yourself going nowhere, do understand what a rare gem you have found. Typically a small to medium non-public company.
OK, so there's a 4th:
4. Cushy places where pay is a bit low but you spend half the day on the interwebs and "coffee and cake mornings" are considered important meetings. They might even be called a team-building exercise, which is strange because it's mostly that bitchy gossip that you get from people who are deeply unfulfilled by their 'career', lack any sense of genuine achievement and are so devoid of real stress that they have to go create some. Often easily identified by their gibberish emails using some cartoonish font, because they actually have time for that and don't understand being professional. Most however continue to believe they are underpaid, commonly comparing their salary with advertised (i.e. outlier) salaries no matter how obvious it is that those jobs come with 65 manic hours per week while subject #4 simply has no comprehension of what a hard day's work is for everyone else. As alluded to, this is probably the worst employer of all.
In UK, and I think EU generally, non-competes are much harder to enforce. The emphasis is on the ex-employer to prove that they have a legitimate business interest at stake - merely being in competition is not enough, it would have to be e.g. you moving to a competitor and previously had access to customer lists. That interest would have to be sufficient to override the public interest in free trade.
Court will also have to decide that the restrictions are reasonable. If not, the whole thing is invalidated, they cannot reduce an unreasonable term to a reasonable one. Time and distance are obligatory textbook examples (6 months within city limits, OK, but forever globally is never going to fly), as are some form of sensitive information - particularly access to customer lists.
IANAL, my training is to spot a potential issue and give a ballpark-ish explanation why a client needs to see one, but I'll have a go at guessing this may well have been held valid here too. The position of the employee is highly significant. Any restriction for a supermarket shelf-stacker isn't going to hold, but a bigwig marketing GM for an international company going to a competitor... Well, global might still be a bit of an ask but state-wide I doubt would be much of an issue.
(In practice it's not uncommon to require lengthy notice periods that the employee can be put on gardening leave.)
It's stories (when not just crap about celebs) are written so that the brit sheeples can feel 'informed'.
Just from "reading" The Sun, this is a conclusion easily drawn.
From conversations with Sun readers however, every single one of them has been fully aware of the standards of "journalism", reading it not to feel informed but rather entertained.
It's easy to condemn ignorance and apathy, but one should not feel superior for having full knowledge whilst still doing nothing.
(Bizarrely, a minority of Daily Mail readers did show signs of having some faith in it however. The Mail does have some pretences at being a paper but is rather less consistent, occasionally having some decent articles but at least as many where I'm almost certain the editor is trolling, too bad even to qualify as a parody).
Why I am always even more sceptical of any claims that "greater access to information and control is needed" (to paraphrase) when they then state it should be themselves doing it?
I keep finding myself wondering "needed by whom?", and why wasn't a relatively independent observer saying the same thing?
Wait, "enable cardholders to be eligible for electronic remittance schemes"... Soooo, Interpol wants unhindered access to all your international bank transfers? Oh I see.
Anyway, I imagine most of the participating governments would fail to implement the large IT system required, nevermind Interpol connect them all in a usable way.
music is extremely affordable and reasonably priced
Back in the day, true. Then along came Napster. More important than piracy, it changed the market by redefining the value proposition. A CD a person might once have rushed out to buy at $15 now seemed expensive at $10.
There is no other reason for this than a change in perception. Is $15 a fair price for an album? $5? It costs $0.50 to make the physical product and absolutely no idea how much that particular CD's share is of the cost to write, perform, record and produce the music. Previously the market perceived $14.50 was probably fair since... Since that made it up to what the price of a CD was. There was no other point of reference, and no free-market self-regulation because the labels were oligopoly and price fixing. Napster turned up and the $14.50 went out the window.
This of course was a calamity for the labels, but their fate was of their own making. The market turned on it's head and they didn't merely utterly fail to adapt, they actually put great effort into fighting the market in the absolutely wrong direction because they were used to complete control. How long, and how much convincing, did it take even to sign up to iTunes just to compete on the service and convenience of downloading? And still at old pricing. Endless bitching about just how much music people were stealing and yet it still didn't click that their market was consuming a vastly greater quantity of music. If the music industry had been at all price competitive they would have realised the opportunity in maintaining revenues by selling 4 times as much music at a quarter of the price with zero additional cost.
It even took them many years to realise they could profit from the surge in popularity of music through concerts and events.
I'm no proponent of piracy but I have zero sympathy for their total failure to follow the market. That they lasted more than a couple of years is nothing short of an embarrassment to the notion of the free market.
Remarkably good.
In US the 2008 fatality rate was 1.25 per 100 million "vehicle miles of travel". That's not one fatal error in 80m miles; 2 deaths in one accident is being counted as 2 so the fatal error rate can only be lower.
A few tons of machinery whizzing around at up to (and sometimes over) 80mph, in all sorts of changeable weather conditions and innumerable other unpredictable variables, and still 1.25 per 100m miles.
1 death is one too many, but the main reason there are a lot of car-related deaths is there is a lot of car-related activity. Certainly, a computer is not prone to the human factors in car crashes, but that is to forget how astonishingly good we are when not being a complete asshat and driving when fatigued, drunk or using a cellphone.
The product hasn't been banned. The wording of an advertisement has. The ASA ruling specifically addressed your point, however concluded that "the overall impression of the ad was such that it encouraged consumers and businesses to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes" (my emphasis).
Computers aren't advertised to do the things you mention.
Frankly I suspect the ASA wouldn't give a damn except that there was a complaint which was technically correct by their own rules.
TG is about 3 petrolheads cocking about. It is unabashed about offering primarily entertainment and that it's "reviews" are highly slanted. While they will give the occasional nod to any excellent motoring product, the "reviews" are intentionally slanted to be by petrolheads, for petrolheads. In the same way, all these Nuremberg videos posted on Youtube by car manufacturers aren't intended to be representative of your commute to work either.
Their assessment is only intended, and only presented, to be representative of driving like a maniac petrolhead on their racing track. Tesla are trying to argue that that Top Gear's fact isn't "representative" of a different fact that Tesla would rather be emphasising.
Now, if the fact as actually stated on the show - namely that they could only achieve 55 miles when driving like a petrolhead manic on a racing track, or that they experienced breakdowns - are factually incorrect, well OK, Tesla would have a point. We'll have to wait for the day in court to conclude on this.
If Top Gear was trying to claim that 55 miles was representative of real world usage, then Tesla would also have a point. But they didn't.
$500k is probably a lot cheaper than adding a retractable roof, especially when it may be saleable after, or shared during the event.
Roofs also impact on the sport. For example in some sports (e.g. rugby) it may be desirable to retain the variable introduced by wind (I daresay most fans do not like a kicking game). Then there's the atmosphere: obviously a roof has a considerable effect on the acoustics. Not to forget grass needs sunlight, tens of thousands of supporters in an enclosed space are going to generate some heat of their own... I think it's fair to say roofs are considered to be a significant compromise in favour of the reliability from reducing weather effects.
I could well be totally wrong on this but I was under the impression certain sports - or rather certain sporting events - require an open roof, or allow retractable roofs to be closed only under certain conditions and when approved by an official of the governing body.
Having been an environmentalist at one point, I can tell you that BEING ALIVE is a detriment to society. Humans produce tons and tons of pollution each year. [...] (No I'm not some kind of nut advocating genocide. It's a thought experiment.)
Far as I'm concerned the objective of "environmentalism" is striking a balance on quality of life (current and future), therefore any ideas of eliminating people or even reducing the opportunity of life is running contrary to the fundamental objective.
Environmentalism is not, except for a small fringe, about "saving the planet" but rather reducing the negative impact on quality of life in the future. "Saving the planet" is a somewhat failed edu-marketing slogan once used as a strategy towards achieving the objective, but is now often confused as the objective itself. Witnessing some horrendous result of pollution may appear to trigger a feeling of guilt just because it looks like we're ruining mother earth, but really what we're thinking is that we're fucking shit up for future generations. A bit like how we might feel guilty when looking at the bumper we just hit not because we care much for the car but rather it's owner.
While the significance of the iPhone seems overplayed in the article, handset exclusives generally do play a significant role in carrier competition. That is, shift the carrier competition to handset exclusives and away from "true" competition such as on price and service. Anecdotal, but everyone I know for the past couple of years has decided what phone they want and then selected the best deal from the carriers that offer it.
There should be very little difference between carriers other than price and service, so the industry should mirror that of a mainly homogeneous utility, desperately hammering every fraction of a cent out of costs and passing the saving on through pricing. Instead they're still behaving like they're in early-mid growth stage, throwing insane cash at advertising and clearly making fat margins since you can negotiate vastly better deals than they advertise without even feeling a bit guilty afterwards.
I do think carrier competition would be substantially increased just by preventing phone exclusives.
Whether this is of any beneficial use depends on how it is used.
A system providing some data that a skilled operator may choose to consider can, provided it works consistently, be a tool of (however minimal) benefit only.
A system attempting to provide an excuse for call queuing systems, or with the aim of being able to use less skilled operators, is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately most systems seem to be designed to introduce "cost savings". If it's not the entire point then there's at least something thrown in so marketing can make the claim and the buyer can justify it up the chain.
"I believe this is the first time someone has taken an integrated circuit and said, 'Let's get rid of the part that we don't need,'"
I believe this to be a basic part of design.
Look at that subtle off-white coloring.
The tasteful thickness of it.
Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.
I'm confused. Why would I ever want to pay for news?
I've got free news from: cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc.uk, new radio, various news apps on my smartphone, and tens of thousands of idiotic commentary available to me across the web.
What has NYT got that I can't get elsewhere for free?
Obtaining news from multiple different sources, especially if somewhat random, has problems.
Obviously there's questions over the quality of your news source. Obviously very poor with the idiotic commentary like at fox news, but I still haven't found any free news source that is as good as an actual paper. Even if the source actually has a physical paper, they seem to put drafts online (in order to be quick) which are later amended once the editor has had a run at it. There's also often lots of crap that never makes the paper. It's only in the physical paper that everything has been through the editor properly, and it's only the paper which is put together as a package. There is a different balance between quantity, quality and timeliness between the website and the paper. From what I gather, the NYT intends to apply the same high standard to the online version.
But arguably even more important is to be familiar with the source. Most paper readers are very familiar with their daily, often even with the individual writers. Is this even possible when you're obtaining news from aggregators? Information is inherently unreliable when you do not know the bias and weaknesses of the source, and even poor information can be valuable if you are aware of what's wrong with it.
Why so keen for a new building society? There's already ample choice.
There are also other types of organisations you may wish to consider, for example the Co-operative bank. Whilst this is a bank and not owned by it's customers, it is owned by the Co-op, a supermarket (etc) which *is* owned by it's customers. Just pop into a store and pick up a membership card.
Actually, depending on what's available where you live you can pretty much avoid the, uh, corporate corporations. If you're looking for a department store there's John Lewis (owned by all of it's staff), for your daily there's the Guardian which is owned by a trust (kind of, but not quite a charity), BBC for telly... Often the mutuals etc are at least amongst the better options, though your choices would be pretty limited especially for entertainment.
Am I missing something? Consoles have always lagged the availability of hardware in PCs.
Not really. Think about it in terms of demand rather than in absolute computing performance.
For starters, new consoles usually are faster at running games than a typical gaming PC at the time. Enthusiasts may have something faster but they're a niche while most games are mass-market. Ignoring outliers like Crysis techdemos it usually takes a couple of years for PC games to catch up. But this is still missing the point.
New consoles are plenty fast enough for by far the biggest market: the console gamers. Most of them have no idea what's going on in PC gaming, it's when console gamers start thinking that their console is aged that they might even start thinking of looking at PCs. Even then, many prefer playing from the couch, with a joypad, on XBL so much (and then there's the switching costs) that they would have to perceive the PC to be much better in other ways (which of course it is ;) ) to convince them to move over.
However I suspect the actual strategy of the developers is to keep them building up their tech. They can't stop moving forward and the PC is the only platform that allows them to keep doing so. Even if, perhaps, their main incentive is to be competitive when the next console gen arrives. IIRC the Xbox 720 or whatever is expected around 2015, so the big engine-sellers probably want to have an amazing techdemo out around 2012/13, when all the smaller devs start thinking about what engine they'll be licensing for it.
There is nothing inherently good about a democracy, nor anything inherently bad about even a dictatorship. The moral judgment comes from the actual actions of the members of government in either system.
A dictatorship is a form of government that has the power to govern without consent of those being governed. This is inherently bad.
Yeah F1 engines are only 2.4L, and a huge number of other restrictions like 18k RPM, single fuel injector, standard fuel... Even the air ducts are heavily regulated. Sucks if you were wanting to watch the fastest cars that can still go around corners, but it does keep things sane and leads to a lot of development on the other stuff.
That'll cut down on the commute, but what's the CO2?
TFA seems to consider a troll anyone being offensive. These are childish n00bs. A decent troll is adept at manipulation and is using it largely for his entertainment: trolling is a game, the objective is teh LOLS.
For many trolls there's a superiority/inferiority ego-massage thing going on and LOLS are to be obtained at the expense of others. Generally "points" are scored based on the amount of time others spend responding to you and the level of attention/infamy gained. Bonuses can be awarded for rage and combo bonus if you can dupe the tide of opinion in your favour against selected victims.
A ragequit is a decent victory however stealth is more successful at obtaining a win from convincing someone of a falsehood, particularly if the falsehood is liable to be realised "IRL" in a manner that causes embarrassment. Or indeed the LOLS of your victim - it is entirely unnecessary to take a negative approach. While all trolling involves gamesmanship, more sporting trolls set themselves rules and recognise that misery in easy meat is pyrrhic as you would have to be quite sad to consider it a game.
When counter-trolling, arguably the troll has set the rules of the game but one must be wary of this being the trap: a negative troll may be baiting with the objective of inducing you down to their character's level then pulling the old switcheroo. It's more important to adopt their rules if they are sporting trolls with higher standards, since this is a gentleman's game and you're playing on their court, failing to observe the rules is undignified and failure by default.
If any of this post is +informative, I'd hesitate to suggest counter-trolling since they're practiced, enjoy this kind of thing and negative trolls tend to, how should I say... have more free time and much less self-esteem. One of the easiest strategies though is to simply play along as the victim, all you need to do is keep them in the game and posting more than you, dancing to your tune.