tommo123

Can't wait 'til she discovers the wonders of forced casualisation and then gets super upset when employees choose not to come in for 3 hours at 20-minutes notice. "How dare they treat my business so flippantly?" I wonder.

At the very least they've definitely been run through a middle-man at some point. So what they've done is put a microphone in a library, grabbed whatever audio is on it, voice recognition'd it and then cleaned it up, and uploaded it to Twitter. And hidden it inside a lamp. shrug

Surely that should be 'growings-up'? Motion to burn at the stake the author/poster until we reach a conclusion

It's pretty firmly established that Bush lied and had been gunning for Iraq long before WMD became his casus belli and you have a wonderful resource called the world wide web if you have any interest at all in confirming that.

A lot of people here seem to have absolutely no issue with saying "I have no problem with the ethical ramifications of a company's actions or choice of representatives or the beneficiaries of a company's wealth that my support helps grow". I can't tell if you're sociopathic or just utterly clueless. Not taking a 'moral stand' isn't business -- it's taking a moral stand of not caring. Culpability can stem from inaction as well.

I've never used it but I was under the impression that Microsoft had not killed off their Messenger platform, just MSN Messenger? They still run Lync which is the business-oriented platform and where they stand to make actual money.

That's a pretty interesting test, thanks for sharing it. The funny thing is I had to pass over a bunch of words I know from french/latin/italian that I haven't seen used in English so I don't know whether the meaning has shifted or not in the transfer. Stupid English.

I moved to Rome and got a job at a small Italian company with just a handful of other people. I'd never studied Italian before (but French and Latin, yes) and just simply turning up and having to struggle through reading and writing emails in Italian, talking to people in Italian, even terribly broken and incorrect Italian, has done for me in 6 months what would have taken about 8 years of non-intensive study. My grammar isn't great but that's for lack of actively studying it, I'm too busy. Even still, I self-correct all the time and my conversational and comprehension skills are comparatively through the roof. There really is no substitute for immersion and practice. The more familiar with something you become, the more you start to recognise patterns and where your own styles fall down -- you start to notice that others use certain prepositions in a context where you'd use a different one, and you check and self-correct. All the time you're getting better and more comfortable with the whole process; listening, speaking, pronunciation, stringing more and more complex sentences together. It's a holistic process and there is simply no substitute for jumping in the deep end, and the more organic and 'real' it can be, the better. A stale classroom a few times a week is almost doing you a disservice by making you think you're studying -- you might be better off saving your time until you can commit yourself to it properly (for e.g. reading a newspaper every day, speaking for an hour every day with a native speaker, reading and writing in forums/IRC in that language).

There's a certain niggling worry I have about googling "how to hide my data from google"

I like that. "Prove you're not a drug dealer and we'll see if there's still money to return." It kind of gives the middle fingers to 3 somewhat-important US rights: the right to not self-incriminate (being coerced into providing new evidence that might be used against you), being considered innocent until proven guilty (assets seized without an active case against you), and that everyone is equal under the law (unless we say you're a drug dealer (or, going back 60 years, black)).

Don't bitcoin tumbling services pretty much make it logistically impossible to follow the path of bitcoins if they cycle it enough? Also I wouldn't rely on the governments to do much to return people's investments in a currency they already distrust. In fact, considering the historic and contemporary roles the US and the IMF have had in deliberately destabilising and undermining international economies/currencies, you'd be naive to remove first world governments from the list of suspects. The incentive is even higher for them than normal thieves -- not only do they already have an established system for laundering stolen money, but they don't even need to remove the money to profit, they just need to steal it and render it inaccessible. The credibility of Bitcoin as an extranational, anonymous currency has been dealt a serious blow and, if you consider bitcoin a threat to the current institutions, then that has a value far greater than the few hundred million that they'd wind up with in pocket. I'm not throwing around any conspiracy theories here because there's no evidence for it so far, but I don't think there's anyone foolish enough to pretend that the US/UK/etc governments haven't already been in this ethical sphere of operations for decades. The first question was whether they have the werewithall to operate on this level technologically (confirmed by Snowden), and the second is whether they consider bitcoin a threat.

I'll nestle it here, just after my still-open 'Y2K preparation' ticket.

I think anyone who brands themselves in such a manner -- namely, to purport to be something they're not -- is a duplicitous, deceitful deceiver, and has no place in honest business. This is the worst outrage since that time I spend $500 on an apple and this punk kid handed me some shiny telephone in a box. I wanted an apple, junior, not some slab of glass and plastic. Your jedi mind tricks won't work on me.

The issue I have with this is that there's no such thing as "by the book" Federal investigations anymore. Snowden showed us that US intelligence agencies are using illicit, warrantless means of obtaining information and then providing that information to law enforcement agencies. Those agencies then go to judges and request warrants, and they can prove that the warrant is justified because they already have the damning evidence that they're legally supposed to require the warrant to get. Which renders them meaningless on a federal level.

So you have to send all the techs and teams out twice to dig up the road? The end-of-the-line has always been the most expensive part, that's why it made more economic and technical sense to do it all at the same time rather than double your work to save 25% cost. And with a projected finish date of 2020 (which is highly unlikely), you'll only begin to start rolling out the second stage at 2022, to replace technology that would be outdated if it were finished today.

And the second stage will never ever happen anyway, because it took us 30 years to replace the crappy copper network and even that could very well have been the straw the broke the camel's back for the government. In 2022 when everything is "finished" (shifted goalposts included) it will take another thirty years for the government to finally admit that 25 mbps in a 2gbps world isn't enough. And Australia will still stagnate as the anti-investment, anti-intellectual, FYGM backwater that it is today.

e: I'd love to see where those figures in the earlier link came from.

Revenue at completion date AU$21.7 billion AU$10 billion AU$18 billion

That's, side by side, the FTTH, FTTH (revised), and the coalition's estimates.

Either the coalition is flat out lying through its teeth (and it could be lying about the whole thing to absolve itself of its responsibilities or to foreward any criticism -- its standard LNP/government policy to take over and make out that things were way worse than you could ever have dreamed)... or they're planning to sell a much worse service at a far higher cost, which means it doesn't even benefit the people who paid for it in the first place, the taxpayer.