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drcharris

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Migrating to the EU 4 months ago

The gift card is a scratch off and has a number that is used to fund your Mullvad balance. So Amazon doesn't know which instance of the gift card you ordered, meaning there's no link to your specific Mullvad account payment.

The authorities might know you ordered a gift card, but not which Mullvad account you funded it with.

The epub link on that page sends me to an online reader, from which the 'Download' button does precisely nothing. This might be due to all the browser-armour I'm wearing, might be a Firefox thing, don't know. The PDF link works fine.

Anyway, if this is happening to anyone else, just copy the link for the epub button on the main page, and add "?download=true" to the URL (mirroring the pdf link). You will then get an epub file downloaded directly by your browser.

Privacy from the vendor, for cloud backups, is barely addressed by most of the cloud storage providers. I find the best solution is to - like many comments here about photo and music storage - stick to older more stable standards that aren't about trying to sell you services.

In my case that means a chunk of SFTP-based storage, and rclone to make that storage encrypted at-rest.

Credibility claimer: I built risk systems for 3 Tier-1 investment banks in a previous life.

I'm not a fixed-income (read: bonds and other interest-rate derived financial instruments) person, but I think the erosion of 'value' via inflation is missing the point.

Sovereign debt is the least risky form of debt there is, period. Everything else that's denominated in the same currency has more risk, not least due to the fact that the pricing of every financial instrument takes the risk of the sovereign debt into account aka the risk-free-rate.

Yes, the absolute amount of risk of a sovereign debt is different depending on who controls a particular fiat currency - but in relative terms, any financial model will start with that baseline. Obviously, cash in that same currency bears some risk due to inflation, which is why people talk about 'real interest rates' that take that into account.

If you lend someone money, you take risk, and you get interest as compensation. That risk includes your predictions of inflation, and the interest rate you are prepared to accept should include that too. If you don't like it, don't lend the money.

Arguing about a 'transfer of value' implies that you have another way of representing value that is better than the currency itself. I can't think of one, but I'm open to suggestions.

The trust you have in an app store is because you believe in their processes for auditing apps. But the two do not need to be linked.

Google Play Protect, for instance, works just fine on sideloaded apps or apps downloaded from other stores.

The distribution and marketing channel don't need to be the same as the trust mechanism. There's a whole anti-malware industry out there that can do the latter, and could easily do as good a job as Google currently do.

In the world of finance, "cash" is often shorthand for "cash or cash equivalents".

Instead of the usual layperson interpretation where cash is "a bunch of currency, either physically in my hand or in a bank account", the meaning here is "stuff with incredibly low risk" i.e. you can be very sure that you'll not lose money over time.

Sovereign debt, including bonds, is regarded as the safest type of debt and therefore falls into the 'risk-free' bucket in the finance world. Since cash is usually regarded as risk-free, the word "cash" has come to be a short-hand for "(almost entirely) risk-free assets".

Again, it's not about the topic. It's not about who else supports it. It's not about the benefits of a product. It's not about Iceland's policy on palm oil, or the virtues thereof.

The problem is taking, wholesale, content from a political organisation and using it in a realm that has laws about political content.

Removing the logo is, if anything, worse - it hides the origin of the video and ads dishonesty to the mix.

If Iceland made their own video about the consequences of the palm oil industry and advertised it, I'd be interested to see if ClearCast approved it.

From the article: "“The creative submitted to us is linked to another organisation who have not yet been able to demonstrate compliance in this area.”

It's a Greenpeace video with the logo taken off. So it's political.

It's not about the topic of palm oil - it's about how much an advert can take content directly from an organisation that is a political organisation. Without this, you open a massive backdoor into all TV advertising in the UK.

I think a very effective way is to get much better control over your cookies, when you allow them to be set, under which conditions, on which sites.

I use a combination of CookieBro and Umatrix on Firefox for this. Cookies are only allowed for sites I actively want to log into. For sites that require cookies to function, periodic auto-deletion via CookieBro handles those.

The 80 char limit was, IIRC, based around the capabilities of fixed-width terminals and dot-matrix printers. It's not magical.

I have the luxury of writing code only for myself, so I can maximise devotion to my 'personal style' and not worry about other people's opinions.

I'm all about information density, and since on 99.9% of monitors the vertical axis is the short one, and the horizontal axis is the long one, I want to save as much vertical space as possible. This is also why I can't stand horizontal tabs (thank you, Tree Style Tab).

On a 27" 4K monitor I get two side-by-side files open in my IDE, with a 10-point font, at 160 char wrap, with vertical tabs. This fits my style because I favour inline comments which maximises my use of the vertical space by not needing another line.

Luckily my eyes are still good enough to read this!

On a number of occasions, as a (software) program manager at several very large firms, I was tasked with taking every single piece of work that happened in the previous calendar year and seeing whether we could classify it as 'R&D' in order to qualify for one of the many tax breaks on offer in the various places that we did business.

The criteria for qualification usually boiled down to 'was there an element of unknown quantity in the project?' - which left enormous room for interpretation, as basically anything that wasn't maintenance (RTB) could be justified.

We would regularly, across the firm, get $50m tax benefits a year out of this effort.

I'm not an accountant, but I'd be interested in just how rigorous the notion of 'R&D' is in a company's annual returns. It smells of PR to me.

On this specific point, he refused to answer two questions from (Wall St) analysts, and instead got questions from a (retail) shareholder. That would seem to be the right priority, even though his attitude was wrong.

I suspect there's a secondary reason too.

MoviePass is dropping their pricing to $10/month, this screams out "Hail Mary" to me. I wouldn't be surprised if MoviePass was on its last legs financially (they just sold a majority stake, see http://variety.com/2017/film/news/moviepass-1202527956/) and their contracts with the chains could potentially leave the chains with millions of dollars of owed ticket money if they suddenly stop operating.

If that's the case, no wonder AMC are trying to get out of it.