"how pollen works (hint: it's only viable for a short period of time, usually hours)"
It is?
So you're telling me I haven't really had someone send me pollen through the postal system before which took a matter of days so I could pollinate a plant I have and get it to produce seed?
I suspect it varies greatly between species but I can think of any number of plants that have viable pollen for days.
That's exactly it. For some reason people like to look for magic, and they see AI in that way - they want it to provide them with magic, but once you understand how magic tricks are done they're not actually very magical or very much fun.
So the question is, if we do ever figure out how the human brain works, then what then? Where is the magic? Do we become uninterested in ourselves as a species recognising each other as being just a bunch of then known and re-creatable algorithms with no real value rather than as a magical living entity capable of extraordinary things?
See my other post in this discussion on this very topic, we use the fruits of AI research day in day out every single day, when we search the internet, when we drive a modern car, when we type a document and have our spelling and grammar corrected, when we have gestures recognised on our touch screen phones.
He might be a bright guy but AI definitely isn't his field, so just because he's said this doesn't in any way mean it's true.
I'm not saying he's wrong, but if he genuinely lives by his comments on prediction then he's not saying he's right either, he's just taking a guess.
But for what it's worth I don't think AI has failed to fulfil it's promise, I really don't get that attitude at all and a physicist should know better. AI as a topic is less then 70 years old and saying it's failed to achieve strong AI is like saying Physics has failed as a subject because we don't yet have a grand unified theory of everything. Expecting such a massively complex subject to reach it's pinnacle, it's ultimate goal in a single life time is rather absurd.
What AI has brought us to date though is good quality internet search, handwriting voice and gesture recognition, spelling/grammar check, intelligent network routing algorithms, fun and sometimes convincing computer game opponents, algorithms that have been essential to the development process of modern aircraft and cars to name just a few examples. That doesn't strike me as a field that's failed any more than Physics strikes me as a field that's failed because it hasn't got us flying through the stars faster than light like Star Trek yet. The fact is for both Physics and AI you use the fruits of research from those subjects day in day out in your every day lives more than you probably ever realise - every minute you're typing a document, doing something over a network, using your touchscreen phone, searching on Google, travelling in a car or whatever you're seeing the benefits of research in that field.
I really can't fathom why AI is held up to absurdly high standards other than a bunch of spoilt impatient people being pissy that that we don't have robot servants tending to our every need yet because they were fed a diet of too much sci-fi building unrealistic expectations when they were growing up.
AI is a young field, it has a long way to go yet and there is still very much to learn. Only now in just the last few years is it really beginning to get the sort of serious funding from the European and US governments required to try in a number of different ways to produce a fully artificial brain to test what is and isn't feasible and examine how the brain does and doesn't work. We shouldn't prejudge the research necessary and make predictions about whether the brain is digital or not as such predictions are precisely just the sort of random guesses Mr Dyson got pissy about in another question.
"(b) there are astonishingly no known pathogenic archaeans."
To be fair, there was also nothing known quite like AIDS until someone decided it'd be a good idea to start eating the local monkeys and it crossed over into humans.
I think we'd have to accept that increasing our diet of insects is going to increase the possibility of new and fairly unique diseases. Things like the most nasty strains of bird flu we've seen have come about largely because of the way we farm chickens, the quantity of them, and the proximity of humans working with them. We can't preclude the idea that increased exposure to insects in greater numbers and possibly equally as unsanitary conditions as we farm chickens wont lead to super-strains of Malaria or whatever.
I'm not saying I'm against the idea or anything, but I absolutely think it's something we shouldn't jump into blindly without considering the possible implications and mitigating the risks. I don't think it's something we could start just doing tomorrow without any consideration as to how we're going to do it safely - if we start farming insects by the billions you have to keep in mind that that's billions of new hosts for diseases to propagate and mutate in at a way faster rate than they can in the natural environment given the confined spaces we'd likely be farming them in, and also, if done in the proximity of humans there's much greater risk of interspecies transfer.
I think that's the biggest problem by far. For most meats like beef and so forth we have rigorous food safety standards and testing facilities. Adapting those to both the very different biology, very different scale (in terms of physical size, and number of creatures we'd need to test), and very different diseases related to insects is going to be where the problems are.
That and I'm not overly convinced it's legal in itself to do it this way.
If they're genuinely conveying things like gender, postcode and age then that unambiguously falls under what is deemed personal data. To pass such personal data on is a very clear breach of the data protection act and even the police don't have immunity from the data protection act, only exemptions.
This implies that Ipsos Mori, EE, and the Police were conspiring to break the law in carrying out an illegal transfer of personal data.
The only way this could be legal is if each and every subscriber has explicitly opted in to allowing their data to be sold on to 3rd parties.
Still, I'm not surprised by Ipsos Mori at least, this is the same company that offers statistical polls to show whatever you pay them to show. Want your political party to look like it's more popular than it is in the opinion polls? Just pay us, and we'll engineer a poll to show exactly that!
It's always humorous around election time and so forth when you have a poll sponsored by a right wing paper showing the right wing party in the lead and a poll sponsored by a left wing paper showing the left wing party in the lead and then you notice they're both from the same pollster, like Ipsos Mori. Most statisticians learn to beware and try and mitigate selection bias when doing statistical studies, Ipsos Mori make a profit off of it.
I'm struggling to understand how evidence that some extreme bacteria can survive in extreme circumstances in any way helps your case unless your suggestion is that it doesn't matter if all complex life dies, at least there will still be bacteria?
You do realise that just because extremophobes have adapted to far reaching circumstances doesn't mean that anything more complex can right?
You like all who parrot the "It's always been like this argument" miss the fundamental issue. It's not whether it has or hasn't happened, we know it has, that's not news.
It's the rate of change that's the issue, for example:
"I'm not buying the whole coral reef thing since those reefs are over 3 million years old and have survived the descent into the cold and back again very many times. That means they evolved in a climate that wasn't as crisp as our current era and should thrive when their natural habitat is restored."
This shows a complete lack of understanding of the timescales to support survival in the face of such changes happens. The corals have survived because through natural temperature change events they've had tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands or even millions of years to adapt to the slow rate of change. We're talking this time about something that's happening on the order of only decades or at best a few hundred years. That's simply not long enough for many species to adapt. You can't suddenly go from being a species that is sensitive to only a 0.3C change in your climate to being one that can cope with a 3C change in just a handful of generations - it takes hundreds of thousands of generations and the current rate of change doesn't allow for the time required for that amount of generations to occur before they've already been wiped out.
"Source: I work at a financial advising firm. We do some tax avoidance, but no tax evasion."
I think this gives you perhaps a rather distorted view. If what you said was true- that the distinction is clear, then the likes of HMRC in the UK wouldn't need to go to court and win some cases and lose others when it comes to avoidance vs. evasion.
The problem is that even when HMRC wins it often does little more than let them settle (sometimes less than they actually owed). This means it's still beneficial for firms to engage in evasion, wait to see if it's ruled as evasion or avoidance, if it's avoidance they can sit chuckling to themselves, and if it's evasion they can play the "Oh we had no idea! Please we can't afford the full amount now, how about we just give you half of it?".
If you think there's a very clear difference you don't know the market you're working in well, the chances are, if your firm is like most other tax minimisation firms then much of the avoidance your firm is practising is actually evasion precisely because there are so many arguably grey areas that sometimes go one way, other times go the other, but that those that are indeed evasion just haven't been chased up as such yet.
Or to put it another way, often "avoidance" is simply evasion that hasn't been discovered and prosecuted over yet. This isn't to say there isn't genuinely clear cut legal avoidance also, but simply that it's not always as clear cut as you make out.
As an aside I'm not convinced by your definition of evasion either:
"Tax evasion is where money is dishonestly hidden from being taxed"
Starbucks avoids paying UK taxes by having an overseas subsidiary that charges it just conveniently enough royalties to wipe out it's profits in the UK. I'd say this is most definitely a case of money dishonestly hidden from being tax because there's no honest reason why Starbucks would need to charge it's UK subsidiary royalties from a tax haven yet it's still technically avoidance.
I'd argue a better definition of avoidance is simply "tax minimisation with no potential legal penalties" and evasion is "tax minimisation with potential legal penalties if caught". There's no point bringing things like honesty and morals into it because I'd wager 90% of the globe would argue that both avoidance and evasion are dishonest and immoral, only that you can at least legally get away with one of them.
I think your post highlights the sort of person I'm referring to, if you think new technology is simply just new languages then you're completely missing the point.
It's not simply about new languages, it's in part about new languages, but also new languages that use old paradigms you may never have used, that use them in new ways, it's about new frameworks and new architectural concepts. Make no mistake, these frameworks are really quite big and complex and they do take a lot of time.
The fact is there are a lot of jobs out there where you can't really be great at them and still have time to be a decent parent, these things range from being special forces to being an olympic athlete, and yes, being great at programming is one of these things. There's simply too much to learn and it's changing too fast to keep up if you cannot be entirely dedicated to it.
I absolutely agree that an older programmer isn't less capable and I never suggested any such thing, in fact, an older programmer has a far greater advantage if they put in the same amount of time to learn new things as a younger programmer, but that "if" is where the problem lies - a lot don't, their priorities have changed towards family, and that's okay, that's not a bad thing at all, but again it's one of those situations where you must realise you can't have it all, and if the amount of time you put in is simply to learn the syntax of new languages then you shouldn't be surprised when someone without a family (they don't necessarily even have to be younger, they may be older) puts in even more time, and learns not just the new syntax, but the new techniques, the new algorithms, the new frameworks, and the new architectural options they all bring and then is in a more solid place than you career wise.
FWIW, I've never met such strip mining middle managers, but then, I've also never worked at EA. The fact you had to say "older programmers aren't less capable" though when that's not even the crux of my argument (opting to raise a family over staying current is, and that's really not an age specific issue, though it does correlate with age) does suggest you have some kind of persecution complex on the issue.
It's really just a question of priorities, some people prefer to raise a family, some people love programming more than even that basic human instinct, I take no issue with either of those groups of people as I've always been in the latter, but suspect before long I will be in the former. The only issue I take is with people who believe they have some inherent right to have both, it would be nice, but it's not that easy and not that simple, and it's the unfortunate reality of the situation. It makes far more sense to accept that reality and plan for the inevitable impact changing focus to have a family will have on your career than it does to pretend it doesn't work like that then cry ageism when it does have an impact on your career. One final note is that there are still plenty of jobs out there where you don't even need to update your skillset (or at least wont before you hit retirement), so even if planning for a family means getting out of one where you do into one where you can cruise by on your existing knowledge until retirement then that's fine, that's a great plan too. Just sitting in a job where you'll often even have, as part of your job description/contract a requirement to stay current and then not doing so then crying discrimination when you're not fulfilling the requirements of the job is an absolutely retarded option though - that's all I'm saying. Having a family absolutely is a life changing event in many ways, to pretend it isn't and that it's all business as usual is stupid.
To be fair, there's often a multi-decade gulf between when concepts were first conceived and when they became part of mainstream development, so I don't think the GPU is necessarily wrong in the face of the examples you've given.
The concept of the GUI for example was originally built late 50s, early 60s, but they weren't popular and weren't commonplace as a skillset required for programmers until the mid 80s.
Neither Lisp or Fortran are declarative for what it's worth also, though SQL is really a declarative language and so it is again an old and well used concept it has seen very different use in modern development such as through use of attributes in C# and annotations in Java. These are things that are trivial to learn to use but sometimes not so trivial to learn their inner workings and extent and implement your own, which I suspect is the sort of thing the GP is referring to.
When he talks about database technologies I suspect he's referring to NoSQL solutions also, many of which are actually based on genuinely relatively new concepts and algorithms, and when he talks about pros and cons I suspect he's referring to when to use an SQL RDBMS and when to use a particular NoSQL solution.
I agree that some foundational knowledge never changes and does help you learn new things faster without a doubt (which means older developers have an inherent advantage if they are dedicating the same amount of time to learning new stuff as famililess programmers do), but the GP isn't wrong and I disagree with the GGP - if someone thinks that it's just about learning new syntax and stuff then they're illustrative of the sort of programmer that doesn't actually realise how out of date their skillset really is.
That's fine and I fully agree that's a legitimate reason as to why many older developers do struggle to stay current.
But said older developers must also recognise that that's also why they're having problems staying employed and finding jobs, they then blame ageism when in reality the problem is a life choice they have made which they do not wish to suffer the consequences of.
The fact is you cannot give up staying current and remain a developer, the field moves too fast so you either need to jump into something like management, or accept that the inevitable result of unemployment has nothing to do with ageism and everything to do with the fact that refusing to stay current in the software development field, whilst also refusing to change career.
It's like the underskilled Westerner who threw away all the benefits and advantages the Western education system offered him only to then blame harder working immigrants that are superior employees to him because they actually want to succeed when he can't get a job. It's a blame game, but you make your choices and have to live with them, you can't blame ageism, immigrants, or whatever for the inevitable consequences of your own choices.
There's nothing wrong with raising a family instead of staying current as a developer, it's a perfectly fair choice, just don't then be surprised when the real world will let you no longer be a developer as a result of you opting to do other things than stay current. The world doesn't owe you the job you want to do in the way you want to do it, it's up to you to figure out what the world wants and what you feel you can and are willing to offer it that it needs.
There's been a few good articles on the topic including one just last week by the BBC, but Syria really is a cluster fuck.
The West (the US, Britain, France etc.) want to arm the Free Syrian Army because they believe part the reason al-Nusra has become so strong is that fighters joined it because it was the most succesful. Some elements of Western thinking believe that by arming, training and improving the FSA those fighters that are not inherently supportive of the Jihadis goals but joined them because there was the least chance of dying with them due to their success up to that point will switch to the FSA should it become the new elite fighting force against the Assad regime.
I can't be arsed to Google for all the relevant sources now (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader) but I also recall reading that there was a decent amount of prior evidence that Assad had even supported to at least some degree the same Sunni Al-Qaeda affiliated militants that are now trying to overthrow him as part of the al-Nusra front when it suited Assad as a proxy for attacking coalition forces in Iraq so it's certainly a bitter irony if they're now using the weapons and training he gave them against him.
Other interesting factors are that Hamas is supporting and fighting with the rebels against Hezbollah and Iran's Quds forces which is supporting the regime despite these groups all previously having put aside their religious differences to maintain close ties in their front against Israel. Israel has been providing a field hospital in the Golan Heights treating wounded anti-Assad rebels, taking the worst injured ones into Israel proper for hospital treatment, and yes, this means that potentially Israel is giving medical aid to Hamas fighters fighting against Assad.
The whole thing is both a clusterfuck and a mindfuck, but there's a certain irony in the fact that for decades Syria has used militants such as Hezbollah to carry out a proxy war against Israel and now finds itself being host to one of the most widespread proxy battles in the region with vested interests from Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Hamas, the West, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel all throwing their bit in.
If it wasn't all so tragic I'd argue there's a certain bitter-sweet sense of justice in that - if you meddle by proxy, don't be too surprised when the opportunity arises you become host to a proxy battle yourself - this is something the US has been given a lesson in in the last decade as various cold war proxy battles it waged (such as in Afghanistan vs. the Russians) had come back to bite it in the form of 9/11 and such.
"It's worth pointing out that his brother Andrew, as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands was at risk in the line of fire;"
Quite literally too. He was a Sea King pilot acting as a deterrent for Exocet missiles in trying to get them to start tracking him, rather than the ships. He wasn't the only pilot doing this at the time, but it's not the sort of job I'd fancy - literally putting myself between a missile and it's target and trying to get it to switch to me so I can attempt to evade it being much more maneuverable than the ship.
Unfortunately reports are that "other ways" includes methods to tie and individual to an IP address.
Personally I think that's even worse, it basically kills free speech online by forcing self-censorship upon people through threat of lawsuits and so forth even when they're in the right. The worrying thing is that Clegg seemed to support this to some extent in that he suggested previously to at least ensure each mobile phone is always assigned a unique IP address rather than have them assigned dynamically.
Luckily I can't see how it's even technically possible though beyond the mobile world, so I think such ideas will die a rather quick death when they recognise you can't really attach an IP address to a person. Even in the mobile world it's not like you can prove someone else used or didn't use the phone and that it wasn't hacked and some remote entity was proxying via it.
I'm in two minds about the issue, I voted Lib Dem last election and they've fulfilled a number of the primary reasons I voted for them including getting rid of the ID cards database, cutting DNA retention by the police, killing this sort of thing and so forth, compared to the Labour government, whom I still remember trying to push horrendous levels of tracking and monitoring they've done an excellent job IMHO. I just hope they wont back any stupid and absurd laws about tying IP addresses to individuals when it actually comes to the vote as that would undo all that. I'm hoping that Clegg's comments to date were simply based on his ignorance of the technical issues involved and to be fair, it may not be that Clegg even has a choice in the matter, given that it was the Lib Dem political party that voted at their conference to kill the snooper's charter basically forcing his hand on the issue.
"Also remember that a policy like this creates a perverse incentive to favor employing a man instead of a woman-- he's less of a financial liability."
This is a real actual problem here in the UK where paternity leave is negligible compared to maternity leave and I've witnessed it first hand. I've known women get passed up for well deserved promotion over male colleagues when the female has been far and away the best choice for the job, both objectively in terms of their performance (i.e. sales figures) and subjectively in terms of the quality and amount of positive and lack of negative feedback from staff they manage in anonymous surveys. I've known male managers to make comments such as "I can't give her the role because we need someone we can depend on and she might get pregnant".
The UK desperately needs fairer rights for new fathers to resolve this sort of problem.
It doesn't matter how low taxes are or whatever, if everyone is unhappy, and unhealthy it's all entirely meaningless and all for nothing.
Happiness is at the end of the day the human emotion that makes life worth living. Even those who are unhappy and who continue to press on do so in the hope that something will change and they'll become happy.
He can chide all he wants. Given that Russia is one of the most protectionist states on earth it's hard to have sympathy.
I worked for a British engineering firm a few years back and getting anything into Russia was hell. They'd stall our shipments of equipment at port for months and months preventing us getting paid, then sometimes let it through, and other times just refuse it, and sometimes even seize (steal) it.
So you'll have to excuse me if I can't help but feel it's getting it's just desserts here. Maybe if Putin thinks it's a problem he should looking at tidying his own backyard up first given that he's grand dictator of that nation and can do what he wants and has done for many years, which also implies that if it's difficult to do trade with Russia that he's also responsible for it being that way.
To put numbers on it, Russia ranks 162nd out of 185 in terms of ease of trading across borders, and is the 112th worst country in the world in terms of ease of doing business:
Even China is an absolutely breeze for doing business with compared to Russia. Honestly, we should do more of this until it's as difficult for Russia to trade with the West, as it is the West to trade with Russia, maybe then Putin will wake up to the stupidity of it, but much of Europe is dependent on his oil and gas, so we don't.
Either way, he can't whinge when this sort of thing bites him on the ass given that it's exactly what he does to most other countries in the world that try to trade in his backyard.
30 day trial? You should be so lucky. The last laptop I bought came with something pathetic like a 3, or 5 day trial. As if that's enough time to test it as a virus protection option anyway.
But obviously the laws aren't working are they? That's precisely the point - the vast majority of the public and MPs do not believe the law was ever intended to be such that companies could avoid paying corporation tax in the ways they do so the whole point in the committee is to find out why the law is not working as it was intended to so they can see if there is actually a real problem, and hence whether new laws are needed or the law needs to change, or whether companies are in fact not paying as much tax as should be expected for genuinely fair reasons.
"So how are these people picked... well, by how well known their brands are. So Hodge can look tough in the tabloids. I am struggling to see what other rationale there could be."
Have you considered it may be because they're some of the worst offenders? Google for example is one of the largest companies in the world, and the UK is one of it's most profitable markets, yet oddly the corporation tax paid here doesn't even come close to the proportion of the profits it reports in it's stock market listings relative to the size of it's business in the UK - obviously they're telling the tax man one thing, that they don't make enough profit here to pay much corporation tax, yet they're telling their shareholders that yes, we're going to carry on in the UK because it's one of our most profitable markets - obviously those two things don't add up.
The fact you had to link to The Register though perhaps explains your problem - you're getting your information from sources that are known to regularly get things wrong, not understand the situation, and in some cases, to outright lie. The Register has basically zero credibility as a reliable news source precisely because of this fact, and yes, I've even read the article you linked, and yes, it's one of those many Register articles that does have it wrong, either intentionally because it's authors are clueless, or maliciously because they have a vested interest in lying.
At least start with credible sources if you're going to learn a bit more about the situation, and what these committees are for and do.
Slashdot Mirror
"how pollen works (hint: it's only viable for a short period of time, usually hours)"
It is?
So you're telling me I haven't really had someone send me pollen through the postal system before which took a matter of days so I could pollinate a plant I have and get it to produce seed?
I suspect it varies greatly between species but I can think of any number of plants that have viable pollen for days.
That's exactly it. For some reason people like to look for magic, and they see AI in that way - they want it to provide them with magic, but once you understand how magic tricks are done they're not actually very magical or very much fun.
So the question is, if we do ever figure out how the human brain works, then what then? Where is the magic? Do we become uninterested in ourselves as a species recognising each other as being just a bunch of then known and re-creatable algorithms with no real value rather than as a magical living entity capable of extraordinary things?
See my other post in this discussion on this very topic, we use the fruits of AI research day in day out every single day, when we search the internet, when we drive a modern car, when we type a document and have our spelling and grammar corrected, when we have gestures recognised on our touch screen phones.
He might be a bright guy but AI definitely isn't his field, so just because he's said this doesn't in any way mean it's true.
I'm not saying he's wrong, but if he genuinely lives by his comments on prediction then he's not saying he's right either, he's just taking a guess.
But for what it's worth I don't think AI has failed to fulfil it's promise, I really don't get that attitude at all and a physicist should know better. AI as a topic is less then 70 years old and saying it's failed to achieve strong AI is like saying Physics has failed as a subject because we don't yet have a grand unified theory of everything. Expecting such a massively complex subject to reach it's pinnacle, it's ultimate goal in a single life time is rather absurd.
What AI has brought us to date though is good quality internet search, handwriting voice and gesture recognition, spelling/grammar check, intelligent network routing algorithms, fun and sometimes convincing computer game opponents, algorithms that have been essential to the development process of modern aircraft and cars to name just a few examples. That doesn't strike me as a field that's failed any more than Physics strikes me as a field that's failed because it hasn't got us flying through the stars faster than light like Star Trek yet. The fact is for both Physics and AI you use the fruits of research from those subjects day in day out in your every day lives more than you probably ever realise - every minute you're typing a document, doing something over a network, using your touchscreen phone, searching on Google, travelling in a car or whatever you're seeing the benefits of research in that field.
I really can't fathom why AI is held up to absurdly high standards other than a bunch of spoilt impatient people being pissy that that we don't have robot servants tending to our every need yet because they were fed a diet of too much sci-fi building unrealistic expectations when they were growing up.
AI is a young field, it has a long way to go yet and there is still very much to learn. Only now in just the last few years is it really beginning to get the sort of serious funding from the European and US governments required to try in a number of different ways to produce a fully artificial brain to test what is and isn't feasible and examine how the brain does and doesn't work. We shouldn't prejudge the research necessary and make predictions about whether the brain is digital or not as such predictions are precisely just the sort of random guesses Mr Dyson got pissy about in another question.
"(b) there are astonishingly no known pathogenic archaeans."
To be fair, there was also nothing known quite like AIDS until someone decided it'd be a good idea to start eating the local monkeys and it crossed over into humans.
I think we'd have to accept that increasing our diet of insects is going to increase the possibility of new and fairly unique diseases. Things like the most nasty strains of bird flu we've seen have come about largely because of the way we farm chickens, the quantity of them, and the proximity of humans working with them. We can't preclude the idea that increased exposure to insects in greater numbers and possibly equally as unsanitary conditions as we farm chickens wont lead to super-strains of Malaria or whatever.
I'm not saying I'm against the idea or anything, but I absolutely think it's something we shouldn't jump into blindly without considering the possible implications and mitigating the risks. I don't think it's something we could start just doing tomorrow without any consideration as to how we're going to do it safely - if we start farming insects by the billions you have to keep in mind that that's billions of new hosts for diseases to propagate and mutate in at a way faster rate than they can in the natural environment given the confined spaces we'd likely be farming them in, and also, if done in the proximity of humans there's much greater risk of interspecies transfer.
I think that's the biggest problem by far. For most meats like beef and so forth we have rigorous food safety standards and testing facilities. Adapting those to both the very different biology, very different scale (in terms of physical size, and number of creatures we'd need to test), and very different diseases related to insects is going to be where the problems are.
That and I'm not overly convinced it's legal in itself to do it this way.
If they're genuinely conveying things like gender, postcode and age then that unambiguously falls under what is deemed personal data. To pass such personal data on is a very clear breach of the data protection act and even the police don't have immunity from the data protection act, only exemptions.
This implies that Ipsos Mori, EE, and the Police were conspiring to break the law in carrying out an illegal transfer of personal data.
The only way this could be legal is if each and every subscriber has explicitly opted in to allowing their data to be sold on to 3rd parties.
Still, I'm not surprised by Ipsos Mori at least, this is the same company that offers statistical polls to show whatever you pay them to show. Want your political party to look like it's more popular than it is in the opinion polls? Just pay us, and we'll engineer a poll to show exactly that!
It's always humorous around election time and so forth when you have a poll sponsored by a right wing paper showing the right wing party in the lead and a poll sponsored by a left wing paper showing the left wing party in the lead and then you notice they're both from the same pollster, like Ipsos Mori. Most statisticians learn to beware and try and mitigate selection bias when doing statistical studies, Ipsos Mori make a profit off of it.
I'm struggling to understand how evidence that some extreme bacteria can survive in extreme circumstances in any way helps your case unless your suggestion is that it doesn't matter if all complex life dies, at least there will still be bacteria?
You do realise that just because extremophobes have adapted to far reaching circumstances doesn't mean that anything more complex can right?
You like all who parrot the "It's always been like this argument" miss the fundamental issue. It's not whether it has or hasn't happened, we know it has, that's not news.
It's the rate of change that's the issue, for example:
"I'm not buying the whole coral reef thing since those reefs are over 3 million years old and have survived the descent into the cold and back again very many times. That means they evolved in a climate that wasn't as crisp as our current era and should thrive when their natural habitat is restored."
This shows a complete lack of understanding of the timescales to support survival in the face of such changes happens. The corals have survived because through natural temperature change events they've had tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands or even millions of years to adapt to the slow rate of change. We're talking this time about something that's happening on the order of only decades or at best a few hundred years. That's simply not long enough for many species to adapt. You can't suddenly go from being a species that is sensitive to only a 0.3C change in your climate to being one that can cope with a 3C change in just a handful of generations - it takes hundreds of thousands of generations and the current rate of change doesn't allow for the time required for that amount of generations to occur before they've already been wiped out.
"It sounds fake anyway."
No actually, it sounds celtic.
Which is XBox Live that Microsoft has had since like 2003, yes.
"Source: I work at a financial advising firm. We do some tax avoidance, but no tax evasion."
I think this gives you perhaps a rather distorted view. If what you said was true- that the distinction is clear, then the likes of HMRC in the UK wouldn't need to go to court and win some cases and lose others when it comes to avoidance vs. evasion.
The problem is that even when HMRC wins it often does little more than let them settle (sometimes less than they actually owed). This means it's still beneficial for firms to engage in evasion, wait to see if it's ruled as evasion or avoidance, if it's avoidance they can sit chuckling to themselves, and if it's evasion they can play the "Oh we had no idea! Please we can't afford the full amount now, how about we just give you half of it?".
If you think there's a very clear difference you don't know the market you're working in well, the chances are, if your firm is like most other tax minimisation firms then much of the avoidance your firm is practising is actually evasion precisely because there are so many arguably grey areas that sometimes go one way, other times go the other, but that those that are indeed evasion just haven't been chased up as such yet.
Or to put it another way, often "avoidance" is simply evasion that hasn't been discovered and prosecuted over yet. This isn't to say there isn't genuinely clear cut legal avoidance also, but simply that it's not always as clear cut as you make out.
As an aside I'm not convinced by your definition of evasion either:
"Tax evasion is where money is dishonestly hidden from being taxed"
Starbucks avoids paying UK taxes by having an overseas subsidiary that charges it just conveniently enough royalties to wipe out it's profits in the UK. I'd say this is most definitely a case of money dishonestly hidden from being tax because there's no honest reason why Starbucks would need to charge it's UK subsidiary royalties from a tax haven yet it's still technically avoidance.
I'd argue a better definition of avoidance is simply "tax minimisation with no potential legal penalties" and evasion is "tax minimisation with potential legal penalties if caught". There's no point bringing things like honesty and morals into it because I'd wager 90% of the globe would argue that both avoidance and evasion are dishonest and immoral, only that you can at least legally get away with one of them.
Does Israel care about S-300s? They seemed pretty ineffective against Israel's strike on Syria's covert nuclear programme a few years ago.
It seems Israel already knows perfectly well how to render them ineffective anyway.
"You think that US citizens should be knocked down until they kneel before the world even if it is meant to be the other way around."
Are you actually for real?
I think your post highlights the sort of person I'm referring to, if you think new technology is simply just new languages then you're completely missing the point.
It's not simply about new languages, it's in part about new languages, but also new languages that use old paradigms you may never have used, that use them in new ways, it's about new frameworks and new architectural concepts. Make no mistake, these frameworks are really quite big and complex and they do take a lot of time.
The fact is there are a lot of jobs out there where you can't really be great at them and still have time to be a decent parent, these things range from being special forces to being an olympic athlete, and yes, being great at programming is one of these things. There's simply too much to learn and it's changing too fast to keep up if you cannot be entirely dedicated to it.
I absolutely agree that an older programmer isn't less capable and I never suggested any such thing, in fact, an older programmer has a far greater advantage if they put in the same amount of time to learn new things as a younger programmer, but that "if" is where the problem lies - a lot don't, their priorities have changed towards family, and that's okay, that's not a bad thing at all, but again it's one of those situations where you must realise you can't have it all, and if the amount of time you put in is simply to learn the syntax of new languages then you shouldn't be surprised when someone without a family (they don't necessarily even have to be younger, they may be older) puts in even more time, and learns not just the new syntax, but the new techniques, the new algorithms, the new frameworks, and the new architectural options they all bring and then is in a more solid place than you career wise.
FWIW, I've never met such strip mining middle managers, but then, I've also never worked at EA. The fact you had to say "older programmers aren't less capable" though when that's not even the crux of my argument (opting to raise a family over staying current is, and that's really not an age specific issue, though it does correlate with age) does suggest you have some kind of persecution complex on the issue.
It's really just a question of priorities, some people prefer to raise a family, some people love programming more than even that basic human instinct, I take no issue with either of those groups of people as I've always been in the latter, but suspect before long I will be in the former. The only issue I take is with people who believe they have some inherent right to have both, it would be nice, but it's not that easy and not that simple, and it's the unfortunate reality of the situation. It makes far more sense to accept that reality and plan for the inevitable impact changing focus to have a family will have on your career than it does to pretend it doesn't work like that then cry ageism when it does have an impact on your career. One final note is that there are still plenty of jobs out there where you don't even need to update your skillset (or at least wont before you hit retirement), so even if planning for a family means getting out of one where you do into one where you can cruise by on your existing knowledge until retirement then that's fine, that's a great plan too. Just sitting in a job where you'll often even have, as part of your job description/contract a requirement to stay current and then not doing so then crying discrimination when you're not fulfilling the requirements of the job is an absolutely retarded option though - that's all I'm saying. Having a family absolutely is a life changing event in many ways, to pretend it isn't and that it's all business as usual is stupid.
To be fair, there's often a multi-decade gulf between when concepts were first conceived and when they became part of mainstream development, so I don't think the GPU is necessarily wrong in the face of the examples you've given.
The concept of the GUI for example was originally built late 50s, early 60s, but they weren't popular and weren't commonplace as a skillset required for programmers until the mid 80s.
Neither Lisp or Fortran are declarative for what it's worth also, though SQL is really a declarative language and so it is again an old and well used concept it has seen very different use in modern development such as through use of attributes in C# and annotations in Java. These are things that are trivial to learn to use but sometimes not so trivial to learn their inner workings and extent and implement your own, which I suspect is the sort of thing the GP is referring to.
When he talks about database technologies I suspect he's referring to NoSQL solutions also, many of which are actually based on genuinely relatively new concepts and algorithms, and when he talks about pros and cons I suspect he's referring to when to use an SQL RDBMS and when to use a particular NoSQL solution.
I agree that some foundational knowledge never changes and does help you learn new things faster without a doubt (which means older developers have an inherent advantage if they are dedicating the same amount of time to learning new stuff as famililess programmers do), but the GP isn't wrong and I disagree with the GGP - if someone thinks that it's just about learning new syntax and stuff then they're illustrative of the sort of programmer that doesn't actually realise how out of date their skillset really is.
That's fine and I fully agree that's a legitimate reason as to why many older developers do struggle to stay current.
But said older developers must also recognise that that's also why they're having problems staying employed and finding jobs, they then blame ageism when in reality the problem is a life choice they have made which they do not wish to suffer the consequences of.
The fact is you cannot give up staying current and remain a developer, the field moves too fast so you either need to jump into something like management, or accept that the inevitable result of unemployment has nothing to do with ageism and everything to do with the fact that refusing to stay current in the software development field, whilst also refusing to change career.
It's like the underskilled Westerner who threw away all the benefits and advantages the Western education system offered him only to then blame harder working immigrants that are superior employees to him because they actually want to succeed when he can't get a job. It's a blame game, but you make your choices and have to live with them, you can't blame ageism, immigrants, or whatever for the inevitable consequences of your own choices.
There's nothing wrong with raising a family instead of staying current as a developer, it's a perfectly fair choice, just don't then be surprised when the real world will let you no longer be a developer as a result of you opting to do other things than stay current. The world doesn't owe you the job you want to do in the way you want to do it, it's up to you to figure out what the world wants and what you feel you can and are willing to offer it that it needs.
There's been a few good articles on the topic including one just last week by the BBC, but Syria really is a cluster fuck.
The West (the US, Britain, France etc.) want to arm the Free Syrian Army because they believe part the reason al-Nusra has become so strong is that fighters joined it because it was the most succesful. Some elements of Western thinking believe that by arming, training and improving the FSA those fighters that are not inherently supportive of the Jihadis goals but joined them because there was the least chance of dying with them due to their success up to that point will switch to the FSA should it become the new elite fighting force against the Assad regime.
I can't be arsed to Google for all the relevant sources now (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader) but I also recall reading that there was a decent amount of prior evidence that Assad had even supported to at least some degree the same Sunni Al-Qaeda affiliated militants that are now trying to overthrow him as part of the al-Nusra front when it suited Assad as a proxy for attacking coalition forces in Iraq so it's certainly a bitter irony if they're now using the weapons and training he gave them against him.
Other interesting factors are that Hamas is supporting and fighting with the rebels against Hezbollah and Iran's Quds forces which is supporting the regime despite these groups all previously having put aside their religious differences to maintain close ties in their front against Israel. Israel has been providing a field hospital in the Golan Heights treating wounded anti-Assad rebels, taking the worst injured ones into Israel proper for hospital treatment, and yes, this means that potentially Israel is giving medical aid to Hamas fighters fighting against Assad.
The whole thing is both a clusterfuck and a mindfuck, but there's a certain irony in the fact that for decades Syria has used militants such as Hezbollah to carry out a proxy war against Israel and now finds itself being host to one of the most widespread proxy battles in the region with vested interests from Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Hamas, the West, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel all throwing their bit in.
If it wasn't all so tragic I'd argue there's a certain bitter-sweet sense of justice in that - if you meddle by proxy, don't be too surprised when the opportunity arises you become host to a proxy battle yourself - this is something the US has been given a lesson in in the last decade as various cold war proxy battles it waged (such as in Afghanistan vs. the Russians) had come back to bite it in the form of 9/11 and such.
I'm not sure about dishonesty, but do you want to know something that's really, most definitely not healthy?
Having to interview for marriage, and having a homepage with an about section that obsesses about a small Brazilian girl.
"It's worth pointing out that his brother Andrew, as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands was at risk in the line of fire;"
Quite literally too. He was a Sea King pilot acting as a deterrent for Exocet missiles in trying to get them to start tracking him, rather than the ships. He wasn't the only pilot doing this at the time, but it's not the sort of job I'd fancy - literally putting myself between a missile and it's target and trying to get it to switch to me so I can attempt to evade it being much more maneuverable than the ship.
Unfortunately reports are that "other ways" includes methods to tie and individual to an IP address.
Personally I think that's even worse, it basically kills free speech online by forcing self-censorship upon people through threat of lawsuits and so forth even when they're in the right. The worrying thing is that Clegg seemed to support this to some extent in that he suggested previously to at least ensure each mobile phone is always assigned a unique IP address rather than have them assigned dynamically.
Luckily I can't see how it's even technically possible though beyond the mobile world, so I think such ideas will die a rather quick death when they recognise you can't really attach an IP address to a person. Even in the mobile world it's not like you can prove someone else used or didn't use the phone and that it wasn't hacked and some remote entity was proxying via it.
I'm in two minds about the issue, I voted Lib Dem last election and they've fulfilled a number of the primary reasons I voted for them including getting rid of the ID cards database, cutting DNA retention by the police, killing this sort of thing and so forth, compared to the Labour government, whom I still remember trying to push horrendous levels of tracking and monitoring they've done an excellent job IMHO. I just hope they wont back any stupid and absurd laws about tying IP addresses to individuals when it actually comes to the vote as that would undo all that. I'm hoping that Clegg's comments to date were simply based on his ignorance of the technical issues involved and to be fair, it may not be that Clegg even has a choice in the matter, given that it was the Lib Dem political party that voted at their conference to kill the snooper's charter basically forcing his hand on the issue.
"Also remember that a policy like this creates a perverse incentive to favor employing a man instead of a woman-- he's less of a financial liability."
This is a real actual problem here in the UK where paternity leave is negligible compared to maternity leave and I've witnessed it first hand. I've known women get passed up for well deserved promotion over male colleagues when the female has been far and away the best choice for the job, both objectively in terms of their performance (i.e. sales figures) and subjectively in terms of the quality and amount of positive and lack of negative feedback from staff they manage in anonymous surveys. I've known male managers to make comments such as "I can't give her the role because we need someone we can depend on and she might get pregnant".
The UK desperately needs fairer rights for new fathers to resolve this sort of problem.
Well said.
It doesn't matter how low taxes are or whatever, if everyone is unhappy, and unhealthy it's all entirely meaningless and all for nothing.
Happiness is at the end of the day the human emotion that makes life worth living. Even those who are unhappy and who continue to press on do so in the hope that something will change and they'll become happy.
He can chide all he wants. Given that Russia is one of the most protectionist states on earth it's hard to have sympathy.
I worked for a British engineering firm a few years back and getting anything into Russia was hell. They'd stall our shipments of equipment at port for months and months preventing us getting paid, then sometimes let it through, and other times just refuse it, and sometimes even seize (steal) it.
So you'll have to excuse me if I can't help but feel it's getting it's just desserts here. Maybe if Putin thinks it's a problem he should looking at tidying his own backyard up first given that he's grand dictator of that nation and can do what he wants and has done for many years, which also implies that if it's difficult to do trade with Russia that he's also responsible for it being that way.
To put numbers on it, Russia ranks 162nd out of 185 in terms of ease of trading across borders, and is the 112th worst country in the world in terms of ease of doing business:
http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
Even China is an absolutely breeze for doing business with compared to Russia. Honestly, we should do more of this until it's as difficult for Russia to trade with the West, as it is the West to trade with Russia, maybe then Putin will wake up to the stupidity of it, but much of Europe is dependent on his oil and gas, so we don't.
Either way, he can't whinge when this sort of thing bites him on the ass given that it's exactly what he does to most other countries in the world that try to trade in his backyard.
30 day trial? You should be so lucky. The last laptop I bought came with something pathetic like a 3, or 5 day trial. As if that's enough time to test it as a virus protection option anyway.
Yes, it's gotten that bad.
But obviously the laws aren't working are they? That's precisely the point - the vast majority of the public and MPs do not believe the law was ever intended to be such that companies could avoid paying corporation tax in the ways they do so the whole point in the committee is to find out why the law is not working as it was intended to so they can see if there is actually a real problem, and hence whether new laws are needed or the law needs to change, or whether companies are in fact not paying as much tax as should be expected for genuinely fair reasons.
"So how are these people picked ... well, by how well known their brands are. So Hodge can look tough in the tabloids. I am struggling to see what other rationale there could be."
Have you considered it may be because they're some of the worst offenders? Google for example is one of the largest companies in the world, and the UK is one of it's most profitable markets, yet oddly the corporation tax paid here doesn't even come close to the proportion of the profits it reports in it's stock market listings relative to the size of it's business in the UK - obviously they're telling the tax man one thing, that they don't make enough profit here to pay much corporation tax, yet they're telling their shareholders that yes, we're going to carry on in the UK because it's one of our most profitable markets - obviously those two things don't add up.
The fact you had to link to The Register though perhaps explains your problem - you're getting your information from sources that are known to regularly get things wrong, not understand the situation, and in some cases, to outright lie. The Register has basically zero credibility as a reliable news source precisely because of this fact, and yes, I've even read the article you linked, and yes, it's one of those many Register articles that does have it wrong, either intentionally because it's authors are clueless, or maliciously because they have a vested interest in lying.
At least start with credible sources if you're going to learn a bit more about the situation, and what these committees are for and do.