wildjim

I have often wondered whether UK Immigration Officers have a quota to meet...

It's easily as useful a comparison between any smartphone and a mainframe.

I have regularly wondered how all these Hedge Funds (let alone the Banks) are doing so well without some kind-of inside information and/or some means to "generate interest or concerns" in the direction they would find the most beneficial.

There is a continuing misunderstanding between "suits" and dev's, where most dev's _do_ learn the business through experience, but the suits continually choose not to, and instead of working as the "teacher" and filter between both areas, just push the demands down to the dev. And "yes": teacher is always part of the job.

In the UK and NZ, the vaccine is only given to those at-risk from Chickenpox. Children don't receive it as a matter of policy, and I don't believe adults who've never caught the disease are normally offered it, either.

One of the reasons/theories I've heard for this, is that if you've had Chickenpox, you are at-risk for Shingles -- which is often extremely painful and difficult to overcome. However, if you are regularly exposed to Chickenpox, your immune-system gets "reawakened" to the virus, therefore can more-quickly recognise and fight-off a recurrance, before it becomes Shingles.

One of the easiest ways to aid this exposure is to keep the virus active, but under-control, in the community. This has a useful side-effect of the community also being aware and more-knowledgeable about the disease, too.

Another argument I've heard against the vaccine is that it's simply not possible to get rid of Chickenpox totally -- it's _highly_ infectious, and the infectious stage is before symptoms appear, etc -- but the vaccine gives a false sense of security of protection, perhaps in the same way as everyone thinks they're safe from Smallpox, Hepatitis, Ebola, etc because we worked so hard to get rid of or control it.

Strictly speaking, it's not the same as Chickenpox, especially in symptoms and effect.

I agree. It's a little like a Java programmer knowing JVM bytecode: definitely not _needed_ but you'll be much better at understanding why (for example) some code structs are more efficient than others.

Years ago, before ActiveRecord, I started writing my own ORM for Ruby. I got a reasonable way into it, too. I gave it up, because I realised that it was much, much simpler to write many small PL/SQL views and write-triggers and use temporary local objects and/or lazy writes (etc). The DB could do much better query-optimisation this way, for one thing. But anyway, that was a long time ago.

TBH: If you want all your relational logic in your app, NoSQL systems make an awful lot more sense these days -- esp. if you've got a decent API/wrapper-layer that can automatically manage the freshness of locally cached data for you.

Was it really "giving" or did they just get an arrangement to be able to use them "defensively" against other patent suits?

Not quite: businesses (or corp's) are effectively made of groups of people. These particular groups seem to want to act more psychopathically / self-interested than an individual might -- think mobs or riots.

Isn't this part of the reason for references, but more importantly: probation period ?

I would say a Senior iPhone Dev in London would be £60k+ but since the number of com's who need ObjC is pretty small (even though London has a lot of Mobile dev's) then I wouldn't be surprised if it topped-out at £50k. In London, a £75k job is very well paid, even in finance, therefore a £100k job (I assume you meant $160k) is getting into higher-management or Contractor territory, not Senior Dev.

I remember payments in NZ being <1 min -- possibly seconds -- 10-15 years ago, as there was a single clearing-house for all EFT, nationally.

Apple seems to have a policy of regularly testing the water for further lock-down/lock-out/lock-in.

Almost as if they think because an awful lot of people have accepted it on iTunes, a similar number accepted it from Microsoft for such a long time (and still do) that it's simply a matter of waiting until the public are too jaded to care any longer.

Don't wait.

The usual effect of such misdirected management behaviour is most of the good/talented/valuable people leave earlier than later, as they smell blood in the water.

Where's the evercookie-kill script?

Citrix IOS? Seriously?

For a while, maybe 5+ years ago (7? I can't remember clearly) it seemed like Perl was stagnating a little. This was about the time Ruby really seemed to take off, and some neat Python projects appeared (e.g. Gentoo Linux).

Now, even though the core language hasn't changed, there seem to be all sorts of clever Perl modules appearing which take advantage of a lot of Perl's highly flexible nature.

I really like Ruby myself, and really hate Python (even though I have to use it at work) but when the other languages fail me, I can almost always turn to Perl in a pinch and get it to do what I want. I also have to admit that the potential power of Perl6's syntax is a little astonishing; I think I would pick Perl6 over Ruby, for example.

I kind-of agree with the idea of no damages -- where I assume you mean compensation to the aggrieved party -- and instead a fine (or other punishment) for illegal activity, collected and kept by the government.

Worse, the arguments seem to be based on "potential" rather than "fact".

It seems to me non-"internet" piracy cases are largely based on hard evidence, and when they try to include evidence for "potential to do" it's also based on some other hard-evidence, e.g. a large-scale CD-copying machine, a pallet of 100,000 blanks.

If you'd been convicted before for the same offence, then you're more likely to get more jail-time for repeat offending, i.e. a predilection for continuing that proven behaviour, but the punishment meted-out for copyright offences seems massively, unbelievably out-of-scale. Probably because they're often compensation paid to the copyright owner, rather than punishment for breaking the law.

I have yet to hear a solid argument for 75-year "ownership" of a copyright.

I also view the ability to sell the copyrights themselves (patents, etc, etc) to a third-party as very distasteful -- as opposed to allowing someone to use your copyrighted item(s) for compensation -- as it seems very against the spirit of the law to give up your original right as the author.

That's just slang! You can't actually steal an idea!

Once someone has made it possible for the idea to be shared -- even if they wrote it down and locked it in their safe -- then the information is already potentially accessible!

Breaking-in to someone's home to steal the paper you wrote your idea on is explicitly the theft, and getting the idea written on it is a side-effect.

What's interesting is that iTunes would never have existed if not for MP3 downloads, but also because of Napster-style ease-of-access to a large catalogue of music.

This popularity seems to have been the big catalyst for trolls trying to make a buck, which means the whole blasted thing is deeply mired in a lot of people's long-term interests.

To me, this means the whole thing is going to be completely lacking a sensible view for decades -- both POV's that support "in the public good" (e.g. being able to use excerpts of copyrighted material for publication/research/etc, make digital backups of your property) as well as being compensated for the service (e.g. selling copies of your music to pay the bills so you can write more songs).

But isn't legal (even now) in the UK. Though I believe they're reviewing copyright law, atm.

It's still not theft -- i.e. taking something from. It's explicitly a lack of compensation, which is still not "taking something from" -- though there are laws which require compensation for services provided, they vary hugely across the world, and can get people in trouble when they apply their local knowledge in other jurisdictions. Several countries don't apply copyright/patent/IP or even contract law(s) in anything remotely like a USA style (for want of a better sterotype).

"Depriving" is a somewhat loaded term that implies a "take" behaviour to you, but it's just not strictly true.

Where's the London version? ;-P

As opposed to myself: I'm a Psychology Research graduate working as a Computer Engineer (for the last few decades) who taught myself an awful lot of what I know from reading books and manuals...

I think the point is they've re-invigorated Analog computer tech, which is enormously useful for lots of AI-style calculations, like pattern-matching, fuzzy-logic, etc. Software emulations of these alg's are traditionally far to slow to use real-time, so a hardware implementation could make this possible.

it's like this in all the big cities, and densely populated areas. the only place I know where its easy to spend time with your family is New Zealand, but the work is nowhere as interesting as is available in the bigger economies.

Traditionally, it's been about support from the "creator" of the tech, but also blame and compensation when things go wrong.

In reality, most end-user corp's have an in-house support team of a size and skill that's comparable to their level of reliance on the systems. And when you try to lay blame or get compensation from the "creator", they always have excuses to avoid paying for it.