ajdlinux

Indeed if you have a fixed fee conveyancing deal (I'm not sure about the UK but it seems common over here) the solicitor is probably losing money just on the administration of filling out the paperwork and then billing you that 4 pounds...

When the likelihood of the risk is small, but the potential damage bill could be financially catastrophic, I think it's perfectly rational to buy insurance if the premium is so low.

Here's a fun English type of real property right that has taken some people by surprise in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability

Are there any other democratic countries apart from the US where posting arrest mugshots is standard police practice?

IBM POWER8 has 8-way SMT, and POWER9 has 4-way and 8-way models.

Indeed, in some places (eg Nordic countries) the union movement opposes any introduction of a national minimum wage as it could potentially undercut their own role in setting the effective minimum wage - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/12/nordic-countri...

Singapore, of course, is nothing like this.

And in the case of issues that could touch on foreign trade or investment treaties, you may have to justify your policy using certain exceptions such as "national security".

Indeed, or at least lobby my government to cut the oil spying whistleblowers, including the author of the said book, a bit of slack... alas these things might be a bit out of place alongside the "get more exercise" and "change my morning routine" items on the One Thing List.

I'm also not sure what "one thing I am going to take action on" means when the current book I'm reading is a history of Australian-East Timorese foreign relations. In general it sounds like a tactic for reading self-help or spirituality books and not much else?

In Australia, phone directories don't generally include mobile phone numbers, and with the massive shift from landline phones to mobile phones over the past decade, this means many people are completely gone from the phone directory. I suspect it may be a similar situation in other countries - the phone directory still exists, but is increasingly useless.

The view of the sensitivity of phone numbers and home address as PII has changed with this trend too.

Wikipedia confirms that the Dutch water boards are indeed a highly significant form of local government...

> Punishments meted out by water boards were fines for misdemeanors such as emptying waste in the nearest canal; however, according to various historical documents, the death penalty was used more than once for serious offenders who threatened dike safety or water quality

The stock price of Zoom Video Communications Inc (stock ticker ZM) spiked significantly, as you would expect given the Zoom hype due to the pandemic.

However, the stock price of Zoom Technologies Inc (stock ticker ZTNO, but at the time ZOOM), a completely unrelated company based in China, went up by something like 1000%, due to what is generally believed to be uninformed day traders who saw "Zoom Technologies" and assumed it was the videoconferencing company.

Someone doesn't understand how parliamentary systems and caretaker governments work...

In Australia, the entire city of Canberra is leased from the federal government, with most blocks being on 99 year leases.

The original idea was a Georgism-inspired approach to capturing land value increases through rent to help fund the city's development, but nowadays it functions effectively like freehold, as most lessees do not have to pay anything other than nominal rent, and you can renew your lease effectively automatically every 99 years, with the added interesting complexity that the government uses additional lease clauses as a form of planning controls.

For anyone here wondering more about parking policy, I recommend Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking.

I thought 16GB sounded rather low - it's 8*16 = 128GB.

Thanks - I haven't used Travis for much in a while, so I didn't see this!

I see a lot of mentions of "travis-ci.com" in this post, are the OSS changes meant to impact travis-ci.org as well, or just OSS projects that are using travis-ci.com for some reason?

I don't work anywhere near geospatial stuff, but this would have been helpful to me a few years ago when I did some hackathon projects that involved Google Maps, frantically trying to integrate a number of different data sources that used coordinate systems I'd never heard of. It's worth having at least a vague awareness of this stuff if you might ever touch anything map-related.

> What kind of power does a 15 year old have, exactly, to influence it though? A scooter has improved my mobility when I was 15. Going on the internet and saying that the lack of public transport is at fault would have not.

True, of course.

But it's not about the individual 15 year old scooter owner who makes an individual decision to get a scooter, when they live outside the city, in a situation where it benefits them greatly, etc etc.

It's about the systemic impact of legalising a class of vehicles and thus adding hundreds of thousands more vehicles to the road network. People in situations where they could have happily stayed on public transport instead move to driving these small vehicles, which aren't as bad as full-sized cars but still consume resources and occupy valuable road and parking space. Fewer public transport users means fewer voters who care about public transport, and more who care about roads. That's not a step in the right direction.

(I grew up in rural Australia, I understand why you need private motorised transport to get around - but plenty of the customers who are going to be buying this Ami vehicle are going to be in extremely dense urban areas.)

In my experience as an Australian, if a company sells its product globally and doesn't have complicated per-country sales channels then they usually offer their student discounts program to more than just US students.

As long as the proposed regulations don't make Google's Australian operations completely unprofitable, they won't.

To me that sounds like it's intended to cover comments made on posts on the news business's own Facebook page, rather than comments made on other pages or personal profiles, etc.

For any given political view espoused by members of a major political party, if you think "none of us" want it, you need to get out of your bubble.

There's a lot of voters out there who are quite okay with the government doing what they think needs to be done to ensure national security.

The day a ratio anywhere close to that happens in the Linux kernel, be alert for all the flying pigs outside.

Note that it's not like other countries don't have consumer protection agencies - the US FTC also engages in a lot of litigation. I'd love to see a comparison of the effectiveness of various countries' consumer protection authorities.

Capital expenses, not depreciating assets.

In any case, my broader point is that tax law for businesses and other taxable organisations is not as simple as "we didn't make a profit and therefore pay no tax this year", and therefore as someone who isn't a qualified tax accountant, I can't really say with much accuracy what impact particular changes to tax law are going to have on the overall financial position of an organisation like a church.

I don't know about the US tax system, but at least in my experience here in Australia, not every expense incurred by a business or partially-taxed non-profit is necessarily deductible. For example, I formed a company with some friends for the purpose of work on a single contract, and the expenses we incurred in incorporating the company were only deductible at a rate of 20% per year over 5 years, so we ended up having to pay tax without being able to deduct most of that particular set of expenses during the 1 year we were in operation.

Except there's only really one stable coalition in Australia, and that's the coalition between the Liberal Party and some state divisions of the National Party (the Nationals in SA and WA, for example, are not part of the Coalition). The Lib/Nat Coalition has lasted so long that they are treated by the public as if they're one party, and indeed in Queensland and the NT they've merged. It's not a good example of political coalitions in general.

In recent years, there have been Labor-Greens and Labor-Nationals coalitions at a state/territory level, and of course the Gillard minority government federally, but they aren't stable - they last for as long as Labor can't form a majority government.

(Instant runoff voting doesn't necessarily tend towards formation of multi-party systems, it merely removes the risk of three-cornered contests that comes with FPTP (which is still a significant improvement for the chances of minor parties, obviously). The electoral system factors that really determine how multipartisan a political system is are whether you use proportional representation vs majoritarian (see Duverger's Law), and within PR systems, district magnitude. Proportional representation is the reason that in Australia you regularly see minority/coalition governments in the ACT and Tasmania but much more rarely elsewhere, and we see plenty of minor parties in upper houses rather than lower houses.)

It's true that some of it will remain assembly forever, but there are large chunks of existing assembly in the kernel that can be ported to regular C and where the current code paths are getting too long to be effectively maintainable in assembly - you can split out the parts that specifically touch magic registers, etc etc and keep those in asm while moving more complex logic into C.