I think you're tarring all police with the same brush, but not all police are like that.
I was surprised for example that a friend in Canada who is a police officer said she'd have no problem giving a friend or fellow officer a pass on a speeding fine, because that shit doesn't fly in the UK.
I was at a friends wedding and one of the guests was a police officer, I jokingly said to him my wife had got a ticket in the area he patrols and he immediately said he too had been caught by the same mobile operated camera. I asked if they ever give other officers a pass to which his response was "Do they fuck, the guys who man the cameras would happily do their own mothers for speeding".
So whilst we might accuse them of being cunts, for doing their job to the letter in fining someone for speeding who was only 5mph over the limit on a sunny day, with empty roads in good conditions which is for example less dangerous than being at the limit in poor conditions, one thing seems clear that they're at least not corrupt and treat everyone equally - something I'm well aware isn't true in Canada, and I get the impression, in the US either.
But I've also spoken to another officer in the past who ran an EFR training session I was in, and one of the things he spoke about from his own personal experience was exactly the situation of traffic accidents - he said that when you're faced with someone in a serious condition needing CPR you don't really notice what's going on around you until you stop, and realise nowadays that some twat is filming this person dying as you try and save them on their mobile phone.
So when you have a road traffic accident so serious that a number of officers are in attendance and have closed the road then it's quite possible that they've done so because someone has either suffered catastrophic injuries (such as loss of limbs, beheadings, or many other rather gross outcomes) or because someone is still alive, but dying because they're unlikely to be saved. In this case the police officer isn't saying "Please step back" because of some great coverup that they're hiding from you, but because they a) Don't want you to see it because it's quite possible it will genuinely give you PTSD which is enough to keep you awake at night, leave you distracted, and subsequently fuck up your life by causing you to lose your job as a result if you don't get councelling and sort your head out, and b) Because someone who is dying doesn't want some member of the paparazzi taking photos of them to sell to anyone wishing to buy them in their dying moments - it's about basic fucking human decency.
Now sure, the police have a limited toolset when it comes to dealing with things like that, but they do have powers to shut roads, and prevent access in the case of such things, so it's not overly surprising that when they've told someone to back off and that person ignores them and instead tries to go through a field instead saying "I'm in the field it doesn't count!" like a petulent fucking child all so they can get their traffic accident gore photos for money that the police don't take too kindly to it - it's a hard enough job clearing up such an aftermath at the best of times, much less when someone is trying to profit off the horror of it.
Remember the policing in the UK uses the system of policing by consent, officers aren't routinely armed precisely because the aim is for them to not have excessive power over the general public which people inherently do when they wield a firearm over someone. This is drilled into them from day 1 of their training, because it's a core tenet of UK policing.
Now that doesn't make it perfect, you still get plenty of bad apples - just like in every job, there are both people who are bad at their job, and people who are outright cunts in their job. But it's not a majority, most officers are just dealing with shit that most people just don't see and aren't interested in day to day, from clearing up gory traffic accidents, to saving overdosed junkies, to counselling
"I never said anything about merging departments, that's the baggage you're bringing to the discussion. Jeff Bezos has a good principle here with the "2 pizza rule" - No team should be larger than what can be fed with 2 large pizzas. It's a good rule of thumb for optimum team size where everyone knows everyone else on the team and what exactly their responsibilities are."
Okay, so where do you decide who goes and who stays? Scrum dev teams are already typically recommended at 7 +- 2, so the rule already excludes including anyone outside of dev. Thus, that rule actually counters your argument of merging dev and ops into one team, because otherwise it would be too big, much less if you bring business in too.
"Let me revise that for you. It just means good cross-functional working, using tools to support that where possible. When people are working cross-teams, then there are extra layers of abstraction between them working together. Conflicting priorities from their other teams, context-switching between projects, lack of visibility into other things in their pipelines, and the overhead of management to arbitrate between the two groups. All that goes away if you put the different skills on the same team and provide well-defined business goals for the team as a whole."
Complete and utter drivel. Those negatives you say are only true if you have an inherent problem with company culture - teams are only abstract concepts anyway, so any detrimental issues such as people refusing to work together are entirely tangential to remaining in separate teams. No magic happens if you stick people in the same team, instead if just means you have way too big a team that becomes unmanageable, or, alternatively, you say, reduce the number of devs to such a small number 1 - 2 where they can't develop anything meaningful anyway.
To give you an example, you talk about context switching - but that's only a problem if people are actually context switching, people being in separate teams does not in any way necessitate context switching, ops people are perfectly capable of managing their time to focus on one thing at a time regardless of what team they're situated in.
"I suggest watching this video from the CIO of Carmax where he explains how the teams are structured and the incredible time-to-market that they're able to achieve: http://forresterevents.net/vid..."
Why would I listen to a CIO of a company I've never heard of when I already work for an organisation that can also achieve not just incredible time to market, but under tight regulation due to the sensitivity of our work, and with optimal security and quality too? I don't really give a toss how quickly someone can churn shit out, I care about how quickly someone can churn quality out. This is a classic appeal to authority argument on your behalf - I don't need to watch random videos because I know what DevOps is, how it works, and what it tries to achieve - that much isn't the problem, the problem is that I fundamentally disagree with the detrimentally narrow focus of it. So great, DevOps fixed their build pipelines and allow them to do CI or whatever, wonderful, but what use is that if they haven't fixed the problem of business and dev working together to get the requirements right? What use is that if regulatory and compliance requirements haven't been met? You've literally just fixed one tiny part of a much bigger problem because someone missed the point and created a term just for that little bit.
"Overall, your concerns are valid, and you're a lot closer aligned to the thinking behind DevOps than you realize. I think you're simply getting hung up on the words and preconceptions about what it actually is."
This is where I think you're rather missing the point - it's not that I'm not agreeing with what you're saying about improving corporate efficiency, and I don't disagree that there's a thing called "DevOps" that tries to achieve that. What I'm arguing
And therein lies your problem - you think that because you've always worked at organisations that have poor culture, that every company does. When you're working from that fundamentally incorrect premise, it's not surprising that you don't understand why DevOps is just meaningless.
"The biggest killer of good ideas is the pipeline where you lob hand grenades over the wall to the next team in the queue."
But that has literally fuck all to do with team organisation and everything to do with bad business culture. You can fix the latter without doing anything with the former.
So where do you draw the line? do you include HR members to ensure leave can be booked/managed as quick as possible? finance to fix any payroll issues? the CEO so any required signoffs can be done ASAP?
Currently DevOps implies you stop at dev and ops, but if the implication is that the only way you can get people with different skillsets to work together effectively is by merging their departments and giving them a retarded name then why DevOps? For devs the biggest challenge is always getting the software right based on the actual requirements, and that's consistently for developers across all organisations a much bigger challenge than any ops related issues, so why not DevBus?
The answer to that is simple, it's that we just don't need it because different expertise remaining in different departments works just fine if you take advantage of plenty of existing tools and roles for doing just that - from architects who understand views and perspectives, to project management methodologies and practitioners who make sure the right stakeholders are involved in the right places and are given the right feedback and information.
In fact, DevOps itself as I've said already doesn't even require any merging of departments - it just means good cross team working, using tools to support that where possible. It's only DevOps crackpots who try and take things to the nth degree as in TFA and as you're suggesting that believe the only way to can improve effectiveness is to eventually put every single person from every department and at every level in one gigantic monolithic team because that's the implication of your suggestion here. The only reason you've not stated it explicitly is because for some reason you think your logic only applies when devs and ops are involved because of some pre-existing buzzword that you've jumped on the bandwagon of without thinking the broader problem through more rationally.
But I'd also agree that dev and ops guys will do a better job if they understand any budget restrictions finance are under, if they understand any efforts HR are making to improve self development and staff happiness, the strategic direction the CEO wants to take the company in, the legal requirements enforced upon the company that legal regulate, and issues sales people are facing in the field, and the challenges the corporate security team face with people doing things that unwittingly cause a potential security risk like showing sensitive data on a laptop when sat near a ground level window.
Improving the ability of a company to operate well doesn't stop at dev and ops, so there's no reason for it to be special, nor does it require any kind of departmental merge. This is as I said in my previous post merely just about ensuring departments work well together whoever they are.
The flip side of that is that there isn't always time to learn everyone else's job. Thus, for every amount of time you get people to learn someone elses job, you're leaving them less time to become more effective in their own job, and if you have a company full of generalists, you'll rapidly get outcompeted by a company full of specialists, because your staff won't have the required depth of knowledge in their area of expertise to innovate and build new stuff to let you keep competing.
So sure, if everyone knew everything everyone else does then everyone would do a better job, but we have to be realistic.
I'm not really sure what the summary/article is on about. It says:
"Although many businesses have begun moving to DevOps-style processes, eight out of 10 respondents to a new survey say they still have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development."
But DevOps processes doesn't preclude dev and ops being separate teams, it just means that they should work together and use the countless bits of DevOps tooling out there to help support things like CI. It just about smoothing the path from dev to ops and automating it as much as possible.
If the suggestion is that to to DevOps "properly" which seems to be the implication of the summary then it does indeed suggest that what they're saying is that there should be crossover between developers and ops.
I work for a well regulated financial services organisation and that frankly just wouldn't fly. It's all fun and games if you're running shit that doesn't matter but for us, good luck explaining to the FCA that the reason you leaked a whole bunch of sensitive personal financial data was because Bob the dev configured the hardware firewall himself via Octopus incorrectly, or Jim the ops guy just did a small update that involved temporarily storing an admin password in a plaintext string internally in some application which got subsequently output in a memory dump on error on the public internet.
There are ample good reasons why DevOps does not and should not inherently mean merging the two departments, and frankly those suggesting otherwise should get the fuck out the industry in case someone accidentally employs them to work on something that matter and we end up with yet another complete fuckup of a software project.
It's sufficient to simply build bridges between and increase efficiency of the work dev and ops do together. Anything more than that is frankly nothing more than utter retardation. Let professionals do what they're professionals at - you wouldn't get the fucking cleaner to do their own payroll, so why the fuck would you get ops to do their own dev or vice versa?
"said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge.""
I guess "ChiefBollocksOfficer@CompanyNoOneHasEverFuckingHeardOf.penis" was already taken?
It's huge, having a first name e-mail address at an irrelevant fucking startup? Really? If it's huge I can guarantee you I can get myself 10 by the end of the week. Does that qualify me to run Google nowadays or something?
Remind me to note this down as another criteria for the instant-reject pile in my hiring process if it's mentioned in their CV. I prefer people with actual achievements in life.
Well you're right you're certainly not a current employee at least because Microsoft has been using Git for years and embracing open source internally for just as long. Once Nadella took over this moved from side project to wholesale way of working. Microsoft now has a massive interest in Git succeeding because they've bet their horse on it.
I'm surprised even as a former employee you don't know this, even former employees tend to know what their ex employers are doing through past colleagues, especially ones with the size and influence of Microsoft.
I downloaded the original Quake again the other day, sorry but it's still more playable than any modern FPS. It plays faster, the audio and effects are more enjoyable, the physics more pleasing.
The fact is, some old stuff really is simply just better. This is why Minecraft did well - because it showed you don't need amazing super-HD graphics if you have great gameplay with pleasing effects and sounds. As such, if you have an old game that got that right, it doesn't matter that the graphics aren't amazing, because they're clearly secondary to playability, and in the race for the latest and greatest graphics that seems to be one thing that's been fundamentally lost from so many modern games - playability.
It's got nothing to do with responsibilities and shit, some things back then were just more fun than they are now. I'm not saying they all were, my god was there a bunch of shit back then, just as there is now, but unsurprisingly the games that stand the test of time are those that are consistently playable, and unsurprisingly some of those were made in the past, as well as the present. It's okay to be nostalgic for stuff that was actually really good, and still is.
Yep, I'd definitely recommend everyone who has the opportunity to learns to dive, apart from being incredibly relaxing because the mammalian dive reflex physically causes the heart to slow down (some free diver's pulses have been measured dropping to as low as 5 beats per minute!) it's also overwhelming the amount of things going on down there as you say.
I think what fascinates me as someone who is interested in evolution and the natural world is how much is different, and yet how much is the same. Even staring into the throat of a moray eel I couldn't help but notice how it's warning sign of widely baring it's teeth, and it's palate and teeth were so similar to that of a dogs - a completely different branch of the evolutionary tree evolving separately in a completely different environment and completely different conditions. Also the similarities between coral, a type of animal, and cacti, a type of plant even in terms of how you can cut them up, and grow new pieces, graft them, and so on were surprising to me.
It's both fascinating and eery to see things so alien, yet exhibiting traits and actions so familiar. It strengthens my suspicion that whilst the natural world is a big and complex thing, there are a massive but ultimately finite set of outcomes that natural process will reach that are governed by the fundamental laws, not just the physical laws such as those that govern the forces, but of natural laws such as evolution. I think therefore if we ever do find alien life it wouldn't be surprising if it's actually way more familiar in many ways and way less different than some might expect.
But even outside of the fascination of science and the underwater world, just the simple act of watching a manta, or spotted eagle ray gliding by you, or a turtle brushing past you, or even something common and trivial like a trumpet fish swimming under or above you using you as cover to move about the reef is an incredible experience. It's amazing how quickly you can become just another part of the reef. Though even where there's little to no life at all, like diving between the Eurasian and North America tectonic plates at Silfra in Iceland is a surreal (albeit cold) experience too.
Actually in a lot of cases depending on what data they were storing there was a legal requirement to show consent.
Since the European Data Protection Directive in 1995 went into law in around 1998 in most EU countries it was always necessary to gain explicit consent to hold someone's personal data (unless you had a law enforcement exemption or similar).
So many companies if they held your name or address along with your mailing list subscription were already breaking the law if they did not do so with explicit consent and opt in. This doesn't likely apply to mailing lists who just held an e-mail address only of course, though even that's a grey area - if someone's e-mail address has their name in it, then it's always been PII for example.
The real game changer with GDPR is that the fines are now sufficiently high that companies are scared shitless of breaching GDPR, whereas before it could often just be dismissed as a cost of doing business. That's why companies are now finally taking this seriously.
I guess the point is at what point did they come from outside if they did? If they did, the fossil record, and genetic ancestry would imply that basically everything came from outside, precisely because we can already trace their ancestry back so far.
I'd argue therefore, that the real problem with this theory is not saying that Octopus came from elsewhere, but that because Octopus have a fairly clearly well understood ancestry, that basically everything must've come from elsewhere, and in that case, why focus the paper on octopodes specifically? It really doesn't make much sense. If the author wants to argue that only some of life came from elsewhere, then even something like humans (where we still to some degree have a missing link) and duck billed platypus (where we're still filling the gaps) would be better candidates for this particular panspermia theory. This would at least have allowed the author to paper over some of the outright factually incorrect parts of his theory with unknowns instead.
I suspect therefore the most plausible explanation is that he's chosen octopodes because they fulfil many human's preconceived notions of what alien life forms would be like, and is mostly pandering to that as a way to push his scientific theory rather than, you know, doing real actual science.
All too often though, like dogs, it's a taught behaviour by local dive guides, and divers. You see a similar thing with sharks- normally they want nothing to do with you and the most you'll see is the silhouette of one at the edge of visibility in the water. When you see video of sharks interacting with divers and brushing against them it's typically because of them having been baited and trained to associate divers with chum.
For what it's worth, I've even seen French angelfish trained to interact with people. A lady called Dee Scarr in Bonaire had a pair she'd trained which would approach her specifically when she entered the water and swam to the area they would hang around, but much as with the sharks and chum she did this by feeding them. People have done similar things with moray eels and the like, and lost their fingers as a result, such as the guy who had his thumb bitten off because a large moray mistook it for the sausage the guy would always feed it.
Ocean animals that will interact of their own free will with no training often include mammals - seals, sea lions, dolphins. You can witness this because even newly born seals who would not have seen people before will approach and play with humans. In fact, it's the older bulls that are basically horse sized (minus the legs) and could snap a human in two that prefer to keep their distance.
Then as I say there's the squid and cuttlefish, the reason I see these as being more interesting than my experience with octopodes so far is that the behaviours I see - the following and observation of people from a distance, would seem like a hard thing to train, but not only that, but I've witnessed many times across the globe. As such it would seem unlikely this curiosity they show would have been trained into so many different specimens across the globe - in contrast given the tourist draw of octopus interactions, and the relative ease of training that I believe it's more often likely to be a taught trait. This doesn't mean I think the naturally curious octopus is a myth, I think they're more than capable of it, but I think it's a relatively rare thing, at least far more so than the often sold idea that octopus will always just come right upto you and play with you - that's fundamentally not true (and probably a good thing, we don't need people dying to blue ringed octopus because it got frisky and bit them when they were playing with it).
The other interesting thing about squid and cuttlefish is that they'll try and communicate with you by flashing various colours at you when they approach you, or also if you move your fingers about, such as mimicking their attack pose by lifting your middle 3 fingers and lowering your thumb and little finger. They see this as their attack pose and will match it quite often. It's still very basic, but it's much more non-trivial communication than you get with many other species.
No one has any problem with outside theories, as long as they're backed by evidence.
But when you bullshit, fudge, ignore scientific evidence that's inconvenient to your agenda and so on, and so forth, then yes, expect to get shot down.
The very fact we have technological progress at the fastest rate in human history is evidence that outside theories are accepted and acknowledged, but only when they have a plausible backing behind them.
Sheldrake wasn't banned, in fact, his video is on the TED site, it was just pointed out that it's based on a lot of bullshit, that's just fundamentally untrue, and his arguments are themselves based on a fundamental lack of scientific understanding - he's ignorant of even graduate level philosophy and mathematics, and it was just an attempt to push anti-scientific religious dogma into scientific debate by the backdoor.
So feel free to re-think, just when you're re-think consider that you might be wrong, and when you re-think and fail to back it up with evidence, rather than assuming the world is out to get you, and everyone is trying to silence you, that perhaps the problem is simply that whilst your attempt to think differently was noble, it was ultimately fruitless and wrong, as is the case both here, and with Rupert Sheldrake.
Octopus, cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus are all related as cephalopods. They are in the same phylum as snails and slugs on land, and things like nudibranchs underwater,
Their ancestors are things like ammonites, and it really shouldn't take a genius to spot how ammonites and nautilus could be related, and whilst I accept convergent evolution can trick the eye when trying to judge descendants, it's not merely convergent evolution in this case.
So we basically have a fossil record going right back to the beginning for octopus and their closely related cousins along with a a healthy fossil record - I could literally drive to a coast line like Plymouth in the UK right now and find an ammonite fossil or imprint in about an hour or two of arrival. In fact, I suspect we have a more complete fossil record for cephalopods and their ancestors such as ammonites than we do for humans.
Octopus are weirdly intelligent compared to much other life on earth, though I've always found them incredibly shy (and boring) in the wild. Much more interesting are cuttlefish and squid that will actually swim up to you, staring at you curiously, trying to understand you. If you approach they'll back away, staying never less than a meter from you, but if you back off they'll stay close to you, watching you. It's a clear form of intelligence that you just don't see in much else in the wild other than things like apes and whales. But we're also weirdly intelligent, and that doesn't make us alien, it just makes evolution an awesome force of nature.
No, it's not. The only measure by which London was more violent than New York was by cherry picking the one and a half months of the year where the snow was so bad in New York that no one went out, whilst London was relatively mild.
London is still vastly safe, and has vastly less violent crime than New York if you use a sane, non-cherry picked measure, such as a year, or multiple years:
"In the calendar year of 2016 there were 334 murders in New York. In the financial year 2016-17 (1 April 2016 to 31 March 2017) there were 102 murders in London, suggesting â" but not proving - that at that point the UKâ(TM)s capitalâ(TM)s murder rate for any given 12-month period was less than a third of New Yorkâ(TM)s.
Similarly, New York had 352 murders in the calendar year 2015, while Londonâ(TM)s Metropolitan Police recorded 109 homicides between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2016."
So really, New York is still more than 3 times as deadly as London. The fact someone managed to find a single 6 week period out of hundreds over the last few decades where the London figure just edged higher for a short outlying period is a prime example of cherry picking stats.
If you think cherry picking makes you correct, I've got a bridge to sell you, because 3.3x more deaths is not evidence that New York is safer. I could therefore be just as an obnoxious dick as you're being and claim that it's in fact evidence that guns are the problem and say, well, I'm right, because this proves it.
But I'm not a retard like you, and I'll happily admit that correlation is causation and that whilst guns COULD be the reason New York is more than 3 times more deadly as London, I don't have any evidence, just as you don't have any evidence to the contrary. The fact is you don't know, and I don't know, but to dismiss it as a possibility is just flagrant willful ignorance, especially as both cities are pretty damn close demographically, and even Bill Bratton has advised in both cities police forces meaning guns are one of the only key differentiators, which in turn means you're more likely to be wrong, than right, that they're not a factor in New York being so much more deadly.
Yeah, I pointed this out to my wife, that if they denied her entry, they'd be breaking human rights law.
I'm also not sure they could stop her leaving frankly either, because she's got dual British citizenship and I don't think they can arbitrarily detain you over something like an expired passport unless it's actually a criminal offence, so as much as they huff and puff about having to travel on that passport, I think if you really wanted to push it they could neither stop you entering, nor leaving on another passport quite frankly. In fact, she could simply just not even mention she has Canadian citizenship and enter and exit on her British passport like anyone else and I doubt they'd even know.
Try being held for them for 3 hours for literally no reason before you're allowed to go on your way whilst they ask absurdly irrelevant and probing questions about your friends, family, sex life, finances, job, and search your laptop and ask who you speak to on random websites like Facebook and to aggressively accuse you of lying to try and rile you up and get a reaction.
Believe me, Canadian customs officers most definitely do know how to be absolute cunts for no reason.
To be fair though yes, I did cross one of the land borders at Montreal once, and they were fine there actually, so maybe it's just Montreal and Ottawa airports that are staffed by unnecessarily angry jackasses.
You probably get an easier ride if you're a citizen too though as they ultimately have to answer to you (i.e. via your MP), my wife has Canadian citizenship and generally gets an easier ride. The only time they were shitty with her is when she left on her Canadian passport and flew back on her British passport because she didn't want to renew two passports so let her Canadian one expire. Apparently they can't track whose in the country if you're not consistent on your passports, and I believe they changed the law recently so you now legally have to travel only to and from Canada on your Canadian passport if you have one for precisely this reason.
I think it's really just a symptom of the universal truth that the role of customs officer across the globe is the sort of role that has a high likelihood of attracting the odd dickhead who failed at everything they wanted to do in life (like becoming a police officer) and so had to settle for what little power tripping they could do at a checkpoint on a national border instead.
I've always found US customs officers decent, and UK customs officers nice on my return (albeit a little fucking dense), I've found Canadian customs officers to be universally complete arseholes in Ottawa and Montreal, but usually pretty nice in Toronto and Vancouver. Across the rest of the globe it's always been a mixed bag - nice and laid back in the Caribbean, corrupt and dodgy in Egypt for example.
Personally I wouldn't judge a country by it's customs officers because the high likelihood of down and out power trippers is bound to be at odds with the norm.
Fortunately UK data protection law allows individuals to be held to account, so shutting down the company doesn't absolve the people who ran it of responsibility. They can still be held individually accountable for illegality relating to personal data at a company they worked at. The fact the company has gone doesn't matter, and the ICO have made this clear themselves in a statement - they're not going to stop just because the company has shut down.
All new companies processing such data have to register with the Information Commissioners Office too, it's a criminal offence not to do so. As such the ICO will know if they're having another go and can audit them regularly based on past behavior and ensure compliance, or fine for non-compliance.
So whilst I agree, there's no doubt they'll try again, it's possible that the ICO will still file criminal proceedings against them, and if they're found guilty they may be banned from running or being director at a company for some time.
As such, I wouldn't assume they've got away with it, the ICO will take time to build their case and pursue them, but it'll happen if there's illegality.
It's also noting that GDPR becomes law this month too, so they'll be held to even higher standards which will basically make it impossible to do even much of the legal stuff they did before, much less the illegal - not simply because there are tougher laws that affect them directly, but because companies around them will be held to GDPR which will make it much harder for CA to acquire data in the first place even if they're operating outside the law themselves.
I didn't at any point say it was. It does however have the authority to issue a legal summons, and anything said there can lead to legal agreements, and be used in subsequent legal proceedings. So regardless of it not being a court room, it still has some of the same powers and authority as a court room does.
The European Data Protection Directive you refer to is the European Directive from which the Data Protection Act stems - the Data Protection Act is the UK's implementation of the directive, that's ultimately what the EU does - it forms directives, then it's upto member states to determine how to implement that into law, typically via acts in the UK's case.
Don't try and lecture me on a topic you very very clearly know nothing about - you couldn't even get the name of the legislation right, so why would you persist in pretending you in any way know anything about this topic? You gave your opinion - fine, but it was wrong. You cannot judge a legal system you clearly know nothing about by the faults of one you do know about. You are being a cynic, you're right, you're assuming that because of failings or weaknesses in your own political system that you assume they're global, they're not. Unlike the childish partisan questioning in the US hearings where retards like Ted Cruz decided to bring up an old story that had no merit at the time, and even less now to defend "conservatives" whoever they even are nowadays, British parliamentary inquiries are very much non-partisan and about real, actual fact finding - one key element of this is that the inquiry members sit down together and work out what information they need to find out, and what questions they need to ask, even though they come from different parties. Cruz's partisan bullshit wouldn't fly because he'd get no agreement from the committee to go off on a tangent with the aim of making himself look good to his voters whilst adding nothing of value to the hearing itself. This is why inquiries in the UK are effective and focused, precisely because they work together and pull in expert witnesses where needed. If it was just showmanship they wouldn't spend weeks speaking to whistleblowers and working together trying to understand the problem first, they'd just haul him straight in and ask pointless irrelevant questions that sound good but achieve nothing as in the US.
The biggest failing with inquiries in the UK isn't the inquiries themselves but the aftermath - all too often the government of the day plays politics and refuses to act on recommendations, but that's a separate issue, and does not in any way mean the parliamentary inquiries themselves aren't done well.
You're making assumptions without understanding the UK legal system, and because of that, you're wrong.
You have to understand that inquiries in the UK do have legal standing - they can legally compel him to attend, this is exactly what they're talking about here.
And this is a crime - claiming the UK hasn't regulated properly here isn't the issue, the case is being built against them by the ICO, the fact it's not reached judgement yet doesn't mean it didn't happen. Facebook is most definitely in breach of UK law because it allowed collection of data not just from people who gave permission, but people who didn't give permission because Facebook was handing out data of friends of those who gave permission - there's no basis for that to be legal under the UK Data Protection Act (the thing you mistakenly called the UK Data Protection Directive), no one can consent to giving your information away on your behalf, unless you're a legal guardian for someone incapacitated, or mentally unfit (i.e. people with Alzheimers) which isn't what we're talking about here.
I'm not sure why you think the privacy laws in the UK are as weak as in the US and Canada, they're not, they're some of the strongest in the world - the UK implemented the 1995 European Data Protection Directive, and gold plated it by strengthening beyond the minimum required as an EU member. It's also going ahead with implementation of the 2012 directive (more commonly referred to as GDPR) even if it leaves the EU - it has committed to implementation and enforcement of this regardless of the outcome of EU negotiations. If you think the UK has weak privacy laws, you haven't been paying attention to comment rationally on this topic.
Which is precisely why Zuckerberg has a legal necessity to attend (or never come to the UK again, and face his business being fined, or even it's right to process personal data revoked potentially), because as described above, what his company has been doing is unquestionably illegal. You have to understand the UK is not the US, things work differently here, and courts can take into account other information in cases like this, if for example Zuckerberg attends and makes promises to parliament under oath, then that is sufficient legally to allow a court to eliminate or reduce a fine for illegality, because a judge may view that legal oath as sufficient commitment to resolving and making good on the issue.
If however he doesn't attend, given his CTO he sent that did attend and failed to answer sufficiently, that will be looked upon negatively by the courts as willful infringement, and as a result the book will be thrown at him.
You're arguing it's the UK's fault for not having strong enough laws, whilst implying Zuckerberg shouldn't have to be held to account to UK laws that cover the violation that his company has broken that - if you can't realise how absurd that argument is I don't know what to say to you. Zuckerberg is looking at receiving this summons precisely because his firm is under investigation for a clear violation of strong data protection laws, and how he responds to that will factor in to the response to that action.
Even the likes of Murdoch were humbled by a parliamentary inquiry and had to attend, don't make the mistake of assuming UK parliamentary inquiries are the same as the political showmanship that goes on in the US, they're really not, neither legally, nor in purpose.
Actually the FSA kind of are now that Turkey has folded the extremist Sunni's they back into the FSA and turned them on the Kurds to do Turkey's ethnic cleansing for them. We can't really view the FSA as moderate anymore.
This is partly our (the West's) fault too of course for letting them get repeatedly slaughtered by barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and indiscriminate attacks by the Russians as that led to them becoming more extreme and left them with no ally other than Turkey (and a handful of other gulf nations). By not supporting the FSA we lost them wholly to Turkey's influence, and Turkey just wants some people they can arm to kill Kurds and kill Assad and his forces.
Interestingly Russia isn't really against the Kurds per-se. We're now in a weird situation where Russia is neutral to the Kurds, Assad is loosely supportive of them (because they're effective against ISIS and Turkey's incursions into Syria), and the US fully supports them - the only one killing them and refusing to recognise the fact they're the only capable and moderate force in Syria who want nothing more than peace in their slice of Syria and Iraq is Erdogan who has made a career out of blaming Kurds for his inability to run a country well in much the same way Hitler blamed the Jews to achieve the exact same thing.
Allegiances have shifted therefore - the Kurds and the SDF are the only good guys who just want peace, democracy, and secularism. The FSA now want something akin to Morsi's Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt (and we all saw how badly that went) as proxies for Turkey, and Assad and Russia just want to continue the legacy authoritarian dictatorship of the Assad dynasty exactly as you say, so Russia can maintain it's port and Assad can live a life of luxury off the suffering of his people.
Right now we should simply be doing everything we can to support the Kurds. Let's not forget, that when Sinjar in Iraq was overrun by ISIS and thousands of men, women, and children were chased up Mt Sinjar and murdered and raped, Turkey was at the time funding and arming them, and it was the Kurdish YPG from Syria on one side and the Kurdish Peshmerga from Iraq on the other that moved into Sinjar to pursue ISIS and rescue the Yazidis. That was a genuinely heroic and selfless action to save people whom the Kurds had no cultural or religious link to by the very people Erdogan dares to call terrorists.
I get the impression that were the war to end now, that Assad would if nothing else give the Kurds autonomy in North East Syria in return for keeping ISIS at bay. The Russians would back that, as would the Americans and the Iraqis - the only one with a problem with it is Erdogan because it runs counter to his programme of using Kurds as a phantom enemy. Given the FSA are now acting on Turkey's behalf in this regard and killing Kurds, we should either target directly, or allow Assad and Russia to target directly the FSA, because they are no longer a moderate force at the behest of Turkey and so in turn deserve to be wiped out as much as ISIS does.
The best outcome in Syria right now due to the failure by the West to act against Assad before Russia intervened is now to accept Assad in the West of Syria, with autonomy for the Kurds and the SDF in the East of Syria, with Turkey and it's proxies sent running with their tail between their legs with a severe military loss back into their own territory.
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I think you're tarring all police with the same brush, but not all police are like that.
I was surprised for example that a friend in Canada who is a police officer said she'd have no problem giving a friend or fellow officer a pass on a speeding fine, because that shit doesn't fly in the UK.
I was at a friends wedding and one of the guests was a police officer, I jokingly said to him my wife had got a ticket in the area he patrols and he immediately said he too had been caught by the same mobile operated camera. I asked if they ever give other officers a pass to which his response was "Do they fuck, the guys who man the cameras would happily do their own mothers for speeding".
So whilst we might accuse them of being cunts, for doing their job to the letter in fining someone for speeding who was only 5mph over the limit on a sunny day, with empty roads in good conditions which is for example less dangerous than being at the limit in poor conditions, one thing seems clear that they're at least not corrupt and treat everyone equally - something I'm well aware isn't true in Canada, and I get the impression, in the US either.
But I've also spoken to another officer in the past who ran an EFR training session I was in, and one of the things he spoke about from his own personal experience was exactly the situation of traffic accidents - he said that when you're faced with someone in a serious condition needing CPR you don't really notice what's going on around you until you stop, and realise nowadays that some twat is filming this person dying as you try and save them on their mobile phone.
So when you have a road traffic accident so serious that a number of officers are in attendance and have closed the road then it's quite possible that they've done so because someone has either suffered catastrophic injuries (such as loss of limbs, beheadings, or many other rather gross outcomes) or because someone is still alive, but dying because they're unlikely to be saved. In this case the police officer isn't saying "Please step back" because of some great coverup that they're hiding from you, but because they a) Don't want you to see it because it's quite possible it will genuinely give you PTSD which is enough to keep you awake at night, leave you distracted, and subsequently fuck up your life by causing you to lose your job as a result if you don't get councelling and sort your head out, and b) Because someone who is dying doesn't want some member of the paparazzi taking photos of them to sell to anyone wishing to buy them in their dying moments - it's about basic fucking human decency.
Now sure, the police have a limited toolset when it comes to dealing with things like that, but they do have powers to shut roads, and prevent access in the case of such things, so it's not overly surprising that when they've told someone to back off and that person ignores them and instead tries to go through a field instead saying "I'm in the field it doesn't count!" like a petulent fucking child all so they can get their traffic accident gore photos for money that the police don't take too kindly to it - it's a hard enough job clearing up such an aftermath at the best of times, much less when someone is trying to profit off the horror of it.
Remember the policing in the UK uses the system of policing by consent, officers aren't routinely armed precisely because the aim is for them to not have excessive power over the general public which people inherently do when they wield a firearm over someone. This is drilled into them from day 1 of their training, because it's a core tenet of UK policing.
Now that doesn't make it perfect, you still get plenty of bad apples - just like in every job, there are both people who are bad at their job, and people who are outright cunts in their job. But it's not a majority, most officers are just dealing with shit that most people just don't see and aren't interested in day to day, from clearing up gory traffic accidents, to saving overdosed junkies, to counselling
"I never said anything about merging departments, that's the baggage you're bringing to the discussion. Jeff Bezos has a good principle here with the "2 pizza rule" - No team should be larger than what can be fed with 2 large pizzas. It's a good rule of thumb for optimum team size where everyone knows everyone else on the team and what exactly their responsibilities are."
Okay, so where do you decide who goes and who stays? Scrum dev teams are already typically recommended at 7 +- 2, so the rule already excludes including anyone outside of dev. Thus, that rule actually counters your argument of merging dev and ops into one team, because otherwise it would be too big, much less if you bring business in too.
"Let me revise that for you. It just means good cross-functional working, using tools to support that where possible. When people are working cross-teams, then there are extra layers of abstraction between them working together. Conflicting priorities from their other teams, context-switching between projects, lack of visibility into other things in their pipelines, and the overhead of management to arbitrate between the two groups. All that goes away if you put the different skills on the same team and provide well-defined business goals for the team as a whole."
Complete and utter drivel. Those negatives you say are only true if you have an inherent problem with company culture - teams are only abstract concepts anyway, so any detrimental issues such as people refusing to work together are entirely tangential to remaining in separate teams. No magic happens if you stick people in the same team, instead if just means you have way too big a team that becomes unmanageable, or, alternatively, you say, reduce the number of devs to such a small number 1 - 2 where they can't develop anything meaningful anyway.
To give you an example, you talk about context switching - but that's only a problem if people are actually context switching, people being in separate teams does not in any way necessitate context switching, ops people are perfectly capable of managing their time to focus on one thing at a time regardless of what team they're situated in.
"I suggest watching this video from the CIO of Carmax where he explains how the teams are structured and the incredible time-to-market that they're able to achieve: http://forresterevents.net/vid..."
Why would I listen to a CIO of a company I've never heard of when I already work for an organisation that can also achieve not just incredible time to market, but under tight regulation due to the sensitivity of our work, and with optimal security and quality too? I don't really give a toss how quickly someone can churn shit out, I care about how quickly someone can churn quality out. This is a classic appeal to authority argument on your behalf - I don't need to watch random videos because I know what DevOps is, how it works, and what it tries to achieve - that much isn't the problem, the problem is that I fundamentally disagree with the detrimentally narrow focus of it. So great, DevOps fixed their build pipelines and allow them to do CI or whatever, wonderful, but what use is that if they haven't fixed the problem of business and dev working together to get the requirements right? What use is that if regulatory and compliance requirements haven't been met? You've literally just fixed one tiny part of a much bigger problem because someone missed the point and created a term just for that little bit.
"Overall, your concerns are valid, and you're a lot closer aligned to the thinking behind DevOps than you realize. I think you're simply getting hung up on the words and preconceptions about what it actually is."
This is where I think you're rather missing the point - it's not that I'm not agreeing with what you're saying about improving corporate efficiency, and I don't disagree that there's a thing called "DevOps" that tries to achieve that. What I'm arguing
And therein lies your problem - you think that because you've always worked at organisations that have poor culture, that every company does. When you're working from that fundamentally incorrect premise, it's not surprising that you don't understand why DevOps is just meaningless.
"The biggest killer of good ideas is the pipeline where you lob hand grenades over the wall to the next team in the queue."
But that has literally fuck all to do with team organisation and everything to do with bad business culture. You can fix the latter without doing anything with the former.
So where do you draw the line? do you include HR members to ensure leave can be booked/managed as quick as possible? finance to fix any payroll issues? the CEO so any required signoffs can be done ASAP?
Currently DevOps implies you stop at dev and ops, but if the implication is that the only way you can get people with different skillsets to work together effectively is by merging their departments and giving them a retarded name then why DevOps? For devs the biggest challenge is always getting the software right based on the actual requirements, and that's consistently for developers across all organisations a much bigger challenge than any ops related issues, so why not DevBus?
The answer to that is simple, it's that we just don't need it because different expertise remaining in different departments works just fine if you take advantage of plenty of existing tools and roles for doing just that - from architects who understand views and perspectives, to project management methodologies and practitioners who make sure the right stakeholders are involved in the right places and are given the right feedback and information.
In fact, DevOps itself as I've said already doesn't even require any merging of departments - it just means good cross team working, using tools to support that where possible. It's only DevOps crackpots who try and take things to the nth degree as in TFA and as you're suggesting that believe the only way to can improve effectiveness is to eventually put every single person from every department and at every level in one gigantic monolithic team because that's the implication of your suggestion here. The only reason you've not stated it explicitly is because for some reason you think your logic only applies when devs and ops are involved because of some pre-existing buzzword that you've jumped on the bandwagon of without thinking the broader problem through more rationally.
Yes I would.
But I'd also agree that dev and ops guys will do a better job if they understand any budget restrictions finance are under, if they understand any efforts HR are making to improve self development and staff happiness, the strategic direction the CEO wants to take the company in, the legal requirements enforced upon the company that legal regulate, and issues sales people are facing in the field, and the challenges the corporate security team face with people doing things that unwittingly cause a potential security risk like showing sensitive data on a laptop when sat near a ground level window.
Improving the ability of a company to operate well doesn't stop at dev and ops, so there's no reason for it to be special, nor does it require any kind of departmental merge. This is as I said in my previous post merely just about ensuring departments work well together whoever they are.
The flip side of that is that there isn't always time to learn everyone else's job. Thus, for every amount of time you get people to learn someone elses job, you're leaving them less time to become more effective in their own job, and if you have a company full of generalists, you'll rapidly get outcompeted by a company full of specialists, because your staff won't have the required depth of knowledge in their area of expertise to innovate and build new stuff to let you keep competing.
So sure, if everyone knew everything everyone else does then everyone would do a better job, but we have to be realistic.
I'm not really sure what the summary/article is on about. It says:
"Although many businesses have begun moving to DevOps-style processes, eight out of 10 respondents to a new survey say they still have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development."
But DevOps processes doesn't preclude dev and ops being separate teams, it just means that they should work together and use the countless bits of DevOps tooling out there to help support things like CI. It just about smoothing the path from dev to ops and automating it as much as possible.
If the suggestion is that to to DevOps "properly" which seems to be the implication of the summary then it does indeed suggest that what they're saying is that there should be crossover between developers and ops.
I work for a well regulated financial services organisation and that frankly just wouldn't fly. It's all fun and games if you're running shit that doesn't matter but for us, good luck explaining to the FCA that the reason you leaked a whole bunch of sensitive personal financial data was because Bob the dev configured the hardware firewall himself via Octopus incorrectly, or Jim the ops guy just did a small update that involved temporarily storing an admin password in a plaintext string internally in some application which got subsequently output in a memory dump on error on the public internet.
There are ample good reasons why DevOps does not and should not inherently mean merging the two departments, and frankly those suggesting otherwise should get the fuck out the industry in case someone accidentally employs them to work on something that matter and we end up with yet another complete fuckup of a software project.
It's sufficient to simply build bridges between and increase efficiency of the work dev and ops do together. Anything more than that is frankly nothing more than utter retardation. Let professionals do what they're professionals at - you wouldn't get the fucking cleaner to do their own payroll, so why the fuck would you get ops to do their own dev or vice versa?
Right, I've never read such drivel in my life:
"said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge.""
I guess "ChiefBollocksOfficer@CompanyNoOneHasEverFuckingHeardOf.penis" was already taken?
It's huge, having a first name e-mail address at an irrelevant fucking startup? Really? If it's huge I can guarantee you I can get myself 10 by the end of the week. Does that qualify me to run Google nowadays or something?
Remind me to note this down as another criteria for the instant-reject pile in my hiring process if it's mentioned in their CV. I prefer people with actual achievements in life.
Out of curiosity, what are you implying here? That the stats are cooked?
Well you're right you're certainly not a current employee at least because Microsoft has been using Git for years and embracing open source internally for just as long. Once Nadella took over this moved from side project to wholesale way of working. Microsoft now has a massive interest in Git succeeding because they've bet their horse on it.
I'm surprised even as a former employee you don't know this, even former employees tend to know what their ex employers are doing through past colleagues, especially ones with the size and influence of Microsoft.
I downloaded the original Quake again the other day, sorry but it's still more playable than any modern FPS. It plays faster, the audio and effects are more enjoyable, the physics more pleasing.
The fact is, some old stuff really is simply just better. This is why Minecraft did well - because it showed you don't need amazing super-HD graphics if you have great gameplay with pleasing effects and sounds. As such, if you have an old game that got that right, it doesn't matter that the graphics aren't amazing, because they're clearly secondary to playability, and in the race for the latest and greatest graphics that seems to be one thing that's been fundamentally lost from so many modern games - playability.
It's got nothing to do with responsibilities and shit, some things back then were just more fun than they are now. I'm not saying they all were, my god was there a bunch of shit back then, just as there is now, but unsurprisingly the games that stand the test of time are those that are consistently playable, and unsurprisingly some of those were made in the past, as well as the present. It's okay to be nostalgic for stuff that was actually really good, and still is.
Yep, I'd definitely recommend everyone who has the opportunity to learns to dive, apart from being incredibly relaxing because the mammalian dive reflex physically causes the heart to slow down (some free diver's pulses have been measured dropping to as low as 5 beats per minute!) it's also overwhelming the amount of things going on down there as you say.
I think what fascinates me as someone who is interested in evolution and the natural world is how much is different, and yet how much is the same. Even staring into the throat of a moray eel I couldn't help but notice how it's warning sign of widely baring it's teeth, and it's palate and teeth were so similar to that of a dogs - a completely different branch of the evolutionary tree evolving separately in a completely different environment and completely different conditions. Also the similarities between coral, a type of animal, and cacti, a type of plant even in terms of how you can cut them up, and grow new pieces, graft them, and so on were surprising to me.
It's both fascinating and eery to see things so alien, yet exhibiting traits and actions so familiar. It strengthens my suspicion that whilst the natural world is a big and complex thing, there are a massive but ultimately finite set of outcomes that natural process will reach that are governed by the fundamental laws, not just the physical laws such as those that govern the forces, but of natural laws such as evolution. I think therefore if we ever do find alien life it wouldn't be surprising if it's actually way more familiar in many ways and way less different than some might expect.
But even outside of the fascination of science and the underwater world, just the simple act of watching a manta, or spotted eagle ray gliding by you, or a turtle brushing past you, or even something common and trivial like a trumpet fish swimming under or above you using you as cover to move about the reef is an incredible experience. It's amazing how quickly you can become just another part of the reef. Though even where there's little to no life at all, like diving between the Eurasian and North America tectonic plates at Silfra in Iceland is a surreal (albeit cold) experience too.
Actually in a lot of cases depending on what data they were storing there was a legal requirement to show consent.
Since the European Data Protection Directive in 1995 went into law in around 1998 in most EU countries it was always necessary to gain explicit consent to hold someone's personal data (unless you had a law enforcement exemption or similar).
So many companies if they held your name or address along with your mailing list subscription were already breaking the law if they did not do so with explicit consent and opt in. This doesn't likely apply to mailing lists who just held an e-mail address only of course, though even that's a grey area - if someone's e-mail address has their name in it, then it's always been PII for example.
The real game changer with GDPR is that the fines are now sufficiently high that companies are scared shitless of breaching GDPR, whereas before it could often just be dismissed as a cost of doing business. That's why companies are now finally taking this seriously.
I guess the point is at what point did they come from outside if they did? If they did, the fossil record, and genetic ancestry would imply that basically everything came from outside, precisely because we can already trace their ancestry back so far.
I'd argue therefore, that the real problem with this theory is not saying that Octopus came from elsewhere, but that because Octopus have a fairly clearly well understood ancestry, that basically everything must've come from elsewhere, and in that case, why focus the paper on octopodes specifically? It really doesn't make much sense. If the author wants to argue that only some of life came from elsewhere, then even something like humans (where we still to some degree have a missing link) and duck billed platypus (where we're still filling the gaps) would be better candidates for this particular panspermia theory. This would at least have allowed the author to paper over some of the outright factually incorrect parts of his theory with unknowns instead.
I suspect therefore the most plausible explanation is that he's chosen octopodes because they fulfil many human's preconceived notions of what alien life forms would be like, and is mostly pandering to that as a way to push his scientific theory rather than, you know, doing real actual science.
All too often though, like dogs, it's a taught behaviour by local dive guides, and divers. You see a similar thing with sharks- normally they want nothing to do with you and the most you'll see is the silhouette of one at the edge of visibility in the water. When you see video of sharks interacting with divers and brushing against them it's typically because of them having been baited and trained to associate divers with chum.
For what it's worth, I've even seen French angelfish trained to interact with people. A lady called Dee Scarr in Bonaire had a pair she'd trained which would approach her specifically when she entered the water and swam to the area they would hang around, but much as with the sharks and chum she did this by feeding them. People have done similar things with moray eels and the like, and lost their fingers as a result, such as the guy who had his thumb bitten off because a large moray mistook it for the sausage the guy would always feed it.
Ocean animals that will interact of their own free will with no training often include mammals - seals, sea lions, dolphins. You can witness this because even newly born seals who would not have seen people before will approach and play with humans. In fact, it's the older bulls that are basically horse sized (minus the legs) and could snap a human in two that prefer to keep their distance.
Then as I say there's the squid and cuttlefish, the reason I see these as being more interesting than my experience with octopodes so far is that the behaviours I see - the following and observation of people from a distance, would seem like a hard thing to train, but not only that, but I've witnessed many times across the globe. As such it would seem unlikely this curiosity they show would have been trained into so many different specimens across the globe - in contrast given the tourist draw of octopus interactions, and the relative ease of training that I believe it's more often likely to be a taught trait. This doesn't mean I think the naturally curious octopus is a myth, I think they're more than capable of it, but I think it's a relatively rare thing, at least far more so than the often sold idea that octopus will always just come right upto you and play with you - that's fundamentally not true (and probably a good thing, we don't need people dying to blue ringed octopus because it got frisky and bit them when they were playing with it).
The other interesting thing about squid and cuttlefish is that they'll try and communicate with you by flashing various colours at you when they approach you, or also if you move your fingers about, such as mimicking their attack pose by lifting your middle 3 fingers and lowering your thumb and little finger. They see this as their attack pose and will match it quite often. It's still very basic, but it's much more non-trivial communication than you get with many other species.
No one has any problem with outside theories, as long as they're backed by evidence.
But when you bullshit, fudge, ignore scientific evidence that's inconvenient to your agenda and so on, and so forth, then yes, expect to get shot down.
The very fact we have technological progress at the fastest rate in human history is evidence that outside theories are accepted and acknowledged, but only when they have a plausible backing behind them.
Sheldrake wasn't banned, in fact, his video is on the TED site, it was just pointed out that it's based on a lot of bullshit, that's just fundamentally untrue, and his arguments are themselves based on a fundamental lack of scientific understanding - he's ignorant of even graduate level philosophy and mathematics, and it was just an attempt to push anti-scientific religious dogma into scientific debate by the backdoor.
So feel free to re-think, just when you're re-think consider that you might be wrong, and when you re-think and fail to back it up with evidence, rather than assuming the world is out to get you, and everyone is trying to silence you, that perhaps the problem is simply that whilst your attempt to think differently was noble, it was ultimately fruitless and wrong, as is the case both here, and with Rupert Sheldrake.
Octopus, cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus are all related as cephalopods. They are in the same phylum as snails and slugs on land, and things like nudibranchs underwater,
Their ancestors are things like ammonites, and it really shouldn't take a genius to spot how ammonites and nautilus could be related, and whilst I accept convergent evolution can trick the eye when trying to judge descendants, it's not merely convergent evolution in this case.
So we basically have a fossil record going right back to the beginning for octopus and their closely related cousins along with a a healthy fossil record - I could literally drive to a coast line like Plymouth in the UK right now and find an ammonite fossil or imprint in about an hour or two of arrival. In fact, I suspect we have a more complete fossil record for cephalopods and their ancestors such as ammonites than we do for humans.
Octopus are weirdly intelligent compared to much other life on earth, though I've always found them incredibly shy (and boring) in the wild. Much more interesting are cuttlefish and squid that will actually swim up to you, staring at you curiously, trying to understand you. If you approach they'll back away, staying never less than a meter from you, but if you back off they'll stay close to you, watching you. It's a clear form of intelligence that you just don't see in much else in the wild other than things like apes and whales. But we're also weirdly intelligent, and that doesn't make us alien, it just makes evolution an awesome force of nature.
No, it's not. The only measure by which London was more violent than New York was by cherry picking the one and a half months of the year where the snow was so bad in New York that no one went out, whilst London was relatively mild.
London is still vastly safe, and has vastly less violent crime than New York if you use a sane, non-cherry picked measure, such as a year, or multiple years:
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
"In the calendar year of 2016 there were 334 murders in New York. In the financial year 2016-17 (1 April 2016 to 31 March 2017) there were 102 murders in London, suggesting â" but not proving - that at that point the UKâ(TM)s capitalâ(TM)s murder rate for any given 12-month period was less than a third of New Yorkâ(TM)s.
Similarly, New York had 352 murders in the calendar year 2015, while Londonâ(TM)s Metropolitan Police recorded 109 homicides between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2016."
So really, New York is still more than 3 times as deadly as London. The fact someone managed to find a single 6 week period out of hundreds over the last few decades where the London figure just edged higher for a short outlying period is a prime example of cherry picking stats.
If you think cherry picking makes you correct, I've got a bridge to sell you, because 3.3x more deaths is not evidence that New York is safer. I could therefore be just as an obnoxious dick as you're being and claim that it's in fact evidence that guns are the problem and say, well, I'm right, because this proves it.
But I'm not a retard like you, and I'll happily admit that correlation is causation and that whilst guns COULD be the reason New York is more than 3 times more deadly as London, I don't have any evidence, just as you don't have any evidence to the contrary. The fact is you don't know, and I don't know, but to dismiss it as a possibility is just flagrant willful ignorance, especially as both cities are pretty damn close demographically, and even Bill Bratton has advised in both cities police forces meaning guns are one of the only key differentiators, which in turn means you're more likely to be wrong, than right, that they're not a factor in New York being so much more deadly.
Yeah, I pointed this out to my wife, that if they denied her entry, they'd be breaking human rights law.
I'm also not sure they could stop her leaving frankly either, because she's got dual British citizenship and I don't think they can arbitrarily detain you over something like an expired passport unless it's actually a criminal offence, so as much as they huff and puff about having to travel on that passport, I think if you really wanted to push it they could neither stop you entering, nor leaving on another passport quite frankly. In fact, she could simply just not even mention she has Canadian citizenship and enter and exit on her British passport like anyone else and I doubt they'd even know.
Try being held for them for 3 hours for literally no reason before you're allowed to go on your way whilst they ask absurdly irrelevant and probing questions about your friends, family, sex life, finances, job, and search your laptop and ask who you speak to on random websites like Facebook and to aggressively accuse you of lying to try and rile you up and get a reaction.
Believe me, Canadian customs officers most definitely do know how to be absolute cunts for no reason.
To be fair though yes, I did cross one of the land borders at Montreal once, and they were fine there actually, so maybe it's just Montreal and Ottawa airports that are staffed by unnecessarily angry jackasses.
You probably get an easier ride if you're a citizen too though as they ultimately have to answer to you (i.e. via your MP), my wife has Canadian citizenship and generally gets an easier ride. The only time they were shitty with her is when she left on her Canadian passport and flew back on her British passport because she didn't want to renew two passports so let her Canadian one expire. Apparently they can't track whose in the country if you're not consistent on your passports, and I believe they changed the law recently so you now legally have to travel only to and from Canada on your Canadian passport if you have one for precisely this reason.
I had it in Canada of all fucking places.
I think it's really just a symptom of the universal truth that the role of customs officer across the globe is the sort of role that has a high likelihood of attracting the odd dickhead who failed at everything they wanted to do in life (like becoming a police officer) and so had to settle for what little power tripping they could do at a checkpoint on a national border instead.
I've always found US customs officers decent, and UK customs officers nice on my return (albeit a little fucking dense), I've found Canadian customs officers to be universally complete arseholes in Ottawa and Montreal, but usually pretty nice in Toronto and Vancouver. Across the rest of the globe it's always been a mixed bag - nice and laid back in the Caribbean, corrupt and dodgy in Egypt for example.
Personally I wouldn't judge a country by it's customs officers because the high likelihood of down and out power trippers is bound to be at odds with the norm.
Fortunately UK data protection law allows individuals to be held to account, so shutting down the company doesn't absolve the people who ran it of responsibility. They can still be held individually accountable for illegality relating to personal data at a company they worked at. The fact the company has gone doesn't matter, and the ICO have made this clear themselves in a statement - they're not going to stop just because the company has shut down.
All new companies processing such data have to register with the Information Commissioners Office too, it's a criminal offence not to do so. As such the ICO will know if they're having another go and can audit them regularly based on past behavior and ensure compliance, or fine for non-compliance.
So whilst I agree, there's no doubt they'll try again, it's possible that the ICO will still file criminal proceedings against them, and if they're found guilty they may be banned from running or being director at a company for some time.
As such, I wouldn't assume they've got away with it, the ICO will take time to build their case and pursue them, but it'll happen if there's illegality.
It's also noting that GDPR becomes law this month too, so they'll be held to even higher standards which will basically make it impossible to do even much of the legal stuff they did before, much less the illegal - not simply because there are tougher laws that affect them directly, but because companies around them will be held to GDPR which will make it much harder for CA to acquire data in the first place even if they're operating outside the law themselves.
"Parliament is not a court room"
I didn't at any point say it was. It does however have the authority to issue a legal summons, and anything said there can lead to legal agreements, and be used in subsequent legal proceedings. So regardless of it not being a court room, it still has some of the same powers and authority as a court room does.
The European Data Protection Directive you refer to is the European Directive from which the Data Protection Act stems - the Data Protection Act is the UK's implementation of the directive, that's ultimately what the EU does - it forms directives, then it's upto member states to determine how to implement that into law, typically via acts in the UK's case.
Don't try and lecture me on a topic you very very clearly know nothing about - you couldn't even get the name of the legislation right, so why would you persist in pretending you in any way know anything about this topic? You gave your opinion - fine, but it was wrong. You cannot judge a legal system you clearly know nothing about by the faults of one you do know about. You are being a cynic, you're right, you're assuming that because of failings or weaknesses in your own political system that you assume they're global, they're not. Unlike the childish partisan questioning in the US hearings where retards like Ted Cruz decided to bring up an old story that had no merit at the time, and even less now to defend "conservatives" whoever they even are nowadays, British parliamentary inquiries are very much non-partisan and about real, actual fact finding - one key element of this is that the inquiry members sit down together and work out what information they need to find out, and what questions they need to ask, even though they come from different parties. Cruz's partisan bullshit wouldn't fly because he'd get no agreement from the committee to go off on a tangent with the aim of making himself look good to his voters whilst adding nothing of value to the hearing itself. This is why inquiries in the UK are effective and focused, precisely because they work together and pull in expert witnesses where needed. If it was just showmanship they wouldn't spend weeks speaking to whistleblowers and working together trying to understand the problem first, they'd just haul him straight in and ask pointless irrelevant questions that sound good but achieve nothing as in the US.
The biggest failing with inquiries in the UK isn't the inquiries themselves but the aftermath - all too often the government of the day plays politics and refuses to act on recommendations, but that's a separate issue, and does not in any way mean the parliamentary inquiries themselves aren't done well.
You're making assumptions without understanding the UK legal system, and because of that, you're wrong.
You have to understand that inquiries in the UK do have legal standing - they can legally compel him to attend, this is exactly what they're talking about here.
And this is a crime - claiming the UK hasn't regulated properly here isn't the issue, the case is being built against them by the ICO, the fact it's not reached judgement yet doesn't mean it didn't happen. Facebook is most definitely in breach of UK law because it allowed collection of data not just from people who gave permission, but people who didn't give permission because Facebook was handing out data of friends of those who gave permission - there's no basis for that to be legal under the UK Data Protection Act (the thing you mistakenly called the UK Data Protection Directive), no one can consent to giving your information away on your behalf, unless you're a legal guardian for someone incapacitated, or mentally unfit (i.e. people with Alzheimers) which isn't what we're talking about here.
I'm not sure why you think the privacy laws in the UK are as weak as in the US and Canada, they're not, they're some of the strongest in the world - the UK implemented the 1995 European Data Protection Directive, and gold plated it by strengthening beyond the minimum required as an EU member. It's also going ahead with implementation of the 2012 directive (more commonly referred to as GDPR) even if it leaves the EU - it has committed to implementation and enforcement of this regardless of the outcome of EU negotiations. If you think the UK has weak privacy laws, you haven't been paying attention to comment rationally on this topic.
Which is precisely why Zuckerberg has a legal necessity to attend (or never come to the UK again, and face his business being fined, or even it's right to process personal data revoked potentially), because as described above, what his company has been doing is unquestionably illegal. You have to understand the UK is not the US, things work differently here, and courts can take into account other information in cases like this, if for example Zuckerberg attends and makes promises to parliament under oath, then that is sufficient legally to allow a court to eliminate or reduce a fine for illegality, because a judge may view that legal oath as sufficient commitment to resolving and making good on the issue.
If however he doesn't attend, given his CTO he sent that did attend and failed to answer sufficiently, that will be looked upon negatively by the courts as willful infringement, and as a result the book will be thrown at him.
You're arguing it's the UK's fault for not having strong enough laws, whilst implying Zuckerberg shouldn't have to be held to account to UK laws that cover the violation that his company has broken that - if you can't realise how absurd that argument is I don't know what to say to you. Zuckerberg is looking at receiving this summons precisely because his firm is under investigation for a clear violation of strong data protection laws, and how he responds to that will factor in to the response to that action.
Even the likes of Murdoch were humbled by a parliamentary inquiry and had to attend, don't make the mistake of assuming UK parliamentary inquiries are the same as the political showmanship that goes on in the US, they're really not, neither legally, nor in purpose.
Actually the FSA kind of are now that Turkey has folded the extremist Sunni's they back into the FSA and turned them on the Kurds to do Turkey's ethnic cleansing for them. We can't really view the FSA as moderate anymore.
This is partly our (the West's) fault too of course for letting them get repeatedly slaughtered by barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and indiscriminate attacks by the Russians as that led to them becoming more extreme and left them with no ally other than Turkey (and a handful of other gulf nations). By not supporting the FSA we lost them wholly to Turkey's influence, and Turkey just wants some people they can arm to kill Kurds and kill Assad and his forces.
Interestingly Russia isn't really against the Kurds per-se. We're now in a weird situation where Russia is neutral to the Kurds, Assad is loosely supportive of them (because they're effective against ISIS and Turkey's incursions into Syria), and the US fully supports them - the only one killing them and refusing to recognise the fact they're the only capable and moderate force in Syria who want nothing more than peace in their slice of Syria and Iraq is Erdogan who has made a career out of blaming Kurds for his inability to run a country well in much the same way Hitler blamed the Jews to achieve the exact same thing.
Allegiances have shifted therefore - the Kurds and the SDF are the only good guys who just want peace, democracy, and secularism. The FSA now want something akin to Morsi's Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt (and we all saw how badly that went) as proxies for Turkey, and Assad and Russia just want to continue the legacy authoritarian dictatorship of the Assad dynasty exactly as you say, so Russia can maintain it's port and Assad can live a life of luxury off the suffering of his people.
Right now we should simply be doing everything we can to support the Kurds. Let's not forget, that when Sinjar in Iraq was overrun by ISIS and thousands of men, women, and children were chased up Mt Sinjar and murdered and raped, Turkey was at the time funding and arming them, and it was the Kurdish YPG from Syria on one side and the Kurdish Peshmerga from Iraq on the other that moved into Sinjar to pursue ISIS and rescue the Yazidis. That was a genuinely heroic and selfless action to save people whom the Kurds had no cultural or religious link to by the very people Erdogan dares to call terrorists.
I get the impression that were the war to end now, that Assad would if nothing else give the Kurds autonomy in North East Syria in return for keeping ISIS at bay. The Russians would back that, as would the Americans and the Iraqis - the only one with a problem with it is Erdogan because it runs counter to his programme of using Kurds as a phantom enemy. Given the FSA are now acting on Turkey's behalf in this regard and killing Kurds, we should either target directly, or allow Assad and Russia to target directly the FSA, because they are no longer a moderate force at the behest of Turkey and so in turn deserve to be wiped out as much as ISIS does.
The best outcome in Syria right now due to the failure by the West to act against Assad before Russia intervened is now to accept Assad in the West of Syria, with autonomy for the Kurds and the SDF in the East of Syria, with Turkey and it's proxies sent running with their tail between their legs with a severe military loss back into their own territory.