Other providers like Tencent are offering a few terabytes for free, so the only real reason to pay Amazon is for their guaranteed service level... Which appears to be non-existent. So, I'm not sure why you would pay $60/year for this.
I like having unlimited on-line encrypted backups. If good software is available that supports Amazon I suppose that would be a selling point.
As a Scotsman, it is my duty to say "England" is not interchangeable with "UK". Even in the published piece from Educational Testing Services the term *actually* used is "England / Northern Ireland". While Nothern Ireland is a part of the UK, calling it out alongside England only adds to the slight. The possibly non-existent / mythical Scotland and Wales are many times larger than Northern Ireland but clearly down't merit a mention.
You chose to be part of the UK, you can live with being referred to as a citizen thereof. If you don't like it, you can try another referendum.
Good point about screwing with the delivery, though I would assume that the BBC is big enough and has a solid enough reputation that this would be a 'blip' rather than a noticable loss of confidence.
You're forgetting that Top Gear is the most popular television program... in the world. It's rather on the same scale as mismanagement of the Superb Owl.
Like just about everybody, my picks for a new co-host include Sabine Schmitz
Her English is very good, but not good enough.
But they have to look very carefully at the show and decide if its worth continuing first. I'm not convinced it is.
You cannot sub out the cast and have the show work. So they shouldn't, but not because it's not worth it, but because they can't do it.
Oh please, American cars technologically are no different than any other cars these days.
On average, that's false.
The main problem with American cars these days is styling.
No, the main problem with American cars these days is build quality, just like always. UAW simply doesn't do as good a job as the non-union workers at the Japanese plants. Whether that's because higher per-hour labor costs make it impossible to pay them enough to torque fasteners correctly, which is a thing they seem to have trouble with, or just because they're shiftless layabouts without work ethic, the truth is that American cars tend to be assembled like shit.
If I want a car assembled correctly, I buy one which was put together in Germany or Japan, or second choice, by a Japanese company operating its own plant in the USA.
Only the top-end American cars are built from the same basic design strategies as euro cars... well, maybe and the Fiesta and Focus.
Realistically though, How could the BBC have resolved this any other way?
The way most stars are handled when they act out, you put them into counseling, make them make a public apology, that sort of thing. And that's why the BBC is stupid for being all PC over things Clarkson has said in the past. They gave him final warnings over things which didn't deserve any warning, now this happened and they had no choice but to go straight to firing him.
Is your entertainment more important than someone being assaulted?
You mean battered. Just threatening someone is assault.
I think a lot of people would benefit from a pop in the nose. And I say that as someone who was bullied in school. Namely, some of those bullies could have used a good socking-up, for some perspective.
We don't know what was said. It's easy to say that violence is never an acceptable answer to something that someone says... But if that's true, then it's equally never acceptable to say something hurtful to someone, because words can hurt more and longer than fists depending on how they are applied.
I'll worry about Clarkson being violent when I find out what was said, and not until.
I imagine people made the same complaint about newspapers when black rights really started to gain traction and the last racist laws were being challenged/repealed. They definitely made the same complaints when gay rights and same-sex marriage was being introduced.
Actually the same-sex marriage "debate" has many interesting parallels to this one. Many of the anti-gay-rights people made similar claims to the anti-feminism people, e.g. gay people aren't interested in marriage and the whole issue is just an attack on straight people. There were claims that it was just a tax dodge, people wanting to marry their same-sex children or friends just to transfer money without any of it going to the government. All sorts of theories about how it was all nothing to do with the core issues: rights and fairness.
Don't worry, big improvements are being made, most of the major tech companies are making a real effort to sort this out. In a few years it will go away.
I think he probably took for granted the freedom the BBC actually gave him to speak his mind (about cars). It may turn out that the PC brigade were much more understanding than the world of advertising driven commercial TV.
I think that a corporate master will let Clarkson speak his mind, because that's a big part of the appeal. Without that, he's not the same guy.
Here is a really good post on Oculus and why they are failing, rather than being an example of why there isn't a problem: http://killscreendaily.com/art...
If you want to claim that Oculus is proof women don't want to work in tech, you have to explain why their parent company (Facebook) manages to employ a 30% female workforce.
My mental model of "low electricity" is a $20 pogoplug drawing basically nothing and sharing two USB3 disks, plus 1 SATA disk. The whole arrangement will use less than your CPU.
Your example of Oculus is misleading. They are almost 100% male, and yet companies like Facebook are around 30% female, so clearly the problem is with the way they are hiring and not with women simply being uninterested in technology. They actually mentioned what the problem is in their Q/A session:
I will address this carefully. [laughter] I noted there were some people online pointing out that Oculus Connect is mostly male. I will point out that in the selection process, there were very few women that applied. It was not that we selected for males and, in fact, women may have come out slightly ahead in the selection process by a slight margin. But I'm not 100% sure what we could do.
So they know the problem - very few women applied - but don't know the solution. Companies like Facebook clearly do know the solution, it's no great mystery. A lot of applicants come from networking contacts. Men tend to network with other men more than women, so it's a feedback loop that ensures most of the applicants will be male. Maybe they were not offering much flexibility that women look for to balance their work and family lives. There are books about this stuff, they could fix it if they wanted to.
Why are you trying to make it into some kind of gender war, where one side has to lose for the other to gain? It's not a zero sum game and it's not about women trying to beat men down. That's your take on it, not what mainstream feminists and companies that make an effort to hire more women are trying to do.
BBC clearly would not let one of their few global stars go unless they saw no other way.
There's probably a lot more that went on behind the scenes to which we are not privy, conversations mostly. They might well have asked Clarkson to make an elaborate apology and he refused, for example.
Your anecdote is interesting because it shows who people's preconceptions colour their perception of events. Let's look at alternative explanations of what happened, with no offence intended towards you.
But each year at Ranking and Rating, there was a pointed questioning, only about the minority female technical employees, that was HR-driven. "What is your justification for not ranking this employee higher?" "What are you doing to make sure that this employee is promotion-ready next year?" On the basis of those directed questioning, one of the minority women was given a specific high-profile task by my manager, which she completed competently. On the basis of that task that was steered to her based on her gender and skin color, she was promoted.
It sounds like HR had identified specific issue in the company and was monitoring it. An employee was then promoted based on merit. If there is any fault here, it's that HR didn't make enough effort to check that other employees were given the same opportunities.
My department was given an extra FTE from magical goodness-knows-where to interview and extend an offer to this lady. You NEVER get free headcount--but I did. So, we interviewed her, but found she had already accepted another offer from another (non-competitor) firm. I was then authorized to beat their offer to get her on our team, and did. So, we ended up with an extra person to do the job, and life was very good for a while, since she turned out to be an even better fit for the job than the white guy we were already in the process of hiring.
Someone had identified this employee as a valuable asset and decided it was worth making an effort to employ her. It turned out that they were right. Race and gender had nothing to do with it.
When these sorts of things get to trial there usually has to be more evidence than this, precisely because it can be interpreted either way.
That's certainly the current anti-feminist narrative. There is no problem, sexism is over and anyone who complains is themselves a sexist, usually a man hater. Same with racism, there isn't any of that any more and people complaining about it just want money and privilege.
Trap full -- please empty.
