fauldsh

My presumption was it came down to money.

Machines have a lot higher initial one off costs. The repair costs of some robots might make them more expensive per hour. Humans are tried and tested, they don't break-down and stop your production line.

When designing the production lines they must weigh up the cost of a machine at each stage (initial cost, elec, repairs) vs workers and decide a time-frame they want to project and compare the costs over (because of their higher initial cost the longer period you do your projection over the more likely a robot will ever be cheaper).

I might be wrong, UK law is different than the rest of the EU (you can opt out of the working time directive here).

That said, isn't it a 40 hour max on contracted hours? Otherwise it is completely un-policeable. The idea is that you can't lose your job for refusing to work past 40 hours (i.e. refusing to take overtime). But you are allowed to work the overtime if you so please.

Don't offices and residential buildings have different building regulations, not to mention licenses. I don't know much on the subject but it would't surprise me if this was either illegal or only legal in a small set of cases where the buildings are up to standard.

Recently former BT employee here. The primary affects of stack ranking at BT is on bonus and raises. If you receive a sufficient number of sub-standard rankings then you would go through the usual UK process of being given warnings which tally up and could eventually lead to dismissal. It definitely is not the case that they fire the bottom x%.

I know for fact BT do not do this however it is my understanding that Amazon (and possibly other big US tech companies operating in the UK) employ their UK workers as contractors to the US subsidiaries to avoid employment law.

I'm getting increasingly intrigued to how much advertising they're getting for their $30m

As some-one living in a flat, if there was somewhere with a quality piano I would happily pay gym prices to go play it. Although much like a gym, if I couldn't get at the piano I would soon stop paying.

I live nowhere that would have this unfortunately (140k pop town)

I used to get put on a lot of 3:30 shifts because if you worked 4:00 you were entitled to a paid 15min break (worked retail part-time in the UK)

Was coming into this expecting an interesting piece about the distribution of prime numbers. Either a new approach to predicting them or a proof of why they're unpredictable. But no it's a visualisation of their distribution. Interesting but entirely not what was expected.

Are you saying no project can consist of multiple languages working together?

But that's precisely what this article argues is a falacy. He discusses a trial carried out in hospital conditions with regulated liquid meals of exactly the same number calories but differing carbs/ protein ratios. The results showed that given the same calories and exercise all the subjects maintained the same weight.

Unless I misunderstood anything.

What this articles says is any diet which says you can eat the same number of calories and lose weight is lying. Some diets may make you want to eat less calories, but you cannot eat the same number of calories and lose more weight without doing more exercise.

They're saying the OP came up with the puzzle in the pursuit of karma. Which would appear to have worked.

The question is not one of who is worse. Universal does some morally reprehensible things, that does not excuse Grooveshark.

Grooveshark aren't for anybody other than themselves, they base their entire business on people uploading sharing songs without giving any money to the musicians. If a user uploads the song, not a registered artist then the artist gets nothing and the money goes where?

As a result I believe through those actions they weaken the argument for DMCA safe harbour provisions by showing such a clear loophole in the meaning.

That's my moral and non-legal argument against Grooveshark (but not for Universal).

I have no real knowledge of the law. But I thought it was more along the lines of, you have to have sufficient evidence. If it transpires you were wrong you're ok as long as you had good reason to think it was true.

I'm very intrigued to know how exactly the law works now.

They're not legally guilty but morally guilty.

It's websites like Grooveshark that weaken the premise for laws like DMCA safe harbour. Their entire business lies in using DMCA in a way in which it was clearly not designed, making it much easier to against such provisions. It's not only big music who might lose out because of them.

28 days is the legal requirement in the UK [1].

I'm getting 35.5 total which is reasonably uncommon but not unheard of.

Although paid paid holiday does sound pretty fantastic.

[1] http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/employment/employees/timeoffandh...

Because any surplus saved for the bad years is money that could have been invested in further growth.

This drive for any business to continually grow (and this isn't a Valley specific problem) is a topic I could rant about for hours. From my understanding growth is necessary in public companies so shareholders can make a profit (assuming the company isn't big enough to issue huge dividends). What perplexes me is why people cared about SecondLife growing if it never tried to go public (beyond the initial investors caring).

This is entirely similar to my experience. I played when I was around 18 and created a hacky fix for skirts (they were an object attached to your body and when you sat down they would flow downwards still), this netted me a few hundred £ and started an enthusiasm for programming which has yet to stop. I still believe a 3D environment is one of the greatest ways to start learning object-orientated programming (due to the visual and tangible representation of your classes).

I used to work in a small supermarket, towards the end of last year we were being directed not to accept credit cards.

Just wanted to add that I've been craving something akin to this system for a fair few years now, the amount of reasonable little bits and bobs I've come up with that I just can't think of what to do with frustrates me.

As for monetisation, tip jars seems the obvious short term solution to me.

I can't be the only person who has never used timelines?

I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more.

The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...

I think this is a good compromise between allowing their business to run for the day and getting the message to as many people as possible. I particularly like this style of black-out because it's so visually powerful.

I've never seen a news post which exemplifies the idea that the comments can be worth more than the article. Obviously this isn't news to any-one here but it gives a place to discuss the changes.

Tenuous link (was mentioned in the article)

I find it more astonishing that Rupert Murdoch would have the gall to say on twitter: "So Obama has thrown in his lot with. Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery. -"

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Construction kits with some pre-made sets is probably a good way to go. I would be interested to see if advertising on western manga or anime sites would provide better value for money.

Consider that Apple own patents for pinch-to-zoom and the use of a gyroscope to control the rotation of a screen (turn the phone sideways, get landscape view). Given the thousands of patents all of the big companies own it becomes very believable that Microsoft would own a bunch of patents that many phones infringe on and that it would take Microsoft time to even realise it owned them (a possible reason for the delay in going after phone companies).

Patents that are essential to the phone being popular (can you imagine a smart-phone without the two above features).

Patents that would force most suppliers to just pay up.

EDIT: Just to confirm, I am agreeing with you, I just figured I'd explain why I think their claims are likely valid. This is not to say I agree with these patents being given but I've seen so many comments that seem to assume this is all a big con that will fall apart at the slightest scrutiny.

I'm interested to know where this certainty that these patents wouldn't hold up in court comes from.