Episode 16: The missing TPS cover sheet

Outsourcing is probably less of a problem going forward than automation, which is increasingly replacing white collar jobs as it has done blue collar jobs previously. Even lawyers' work is being automated these days, especially profitable work that requires you to be a lawyer but is otherwise low-skilled.

I think your post constitutes a 100% increase in the number of times I've heard Opera mentioned this year.

I think I read about these guys in an H. P. Lovecraft novel.

Offshore your maintenance jobs to someone in the correct timezone!

All my telco worker friends grumble about being forced to praise their customers' horticultural skills on their site visits.

The paper states that animals would enter the wheel, leave it, and then re-enter it. That could be accidental but doesn't suggest escape.

So wait, Skynet eventually became Weyland-Yutani? I missed Aliens vs Terminator.

I'm too lazy to evaluate the arguments.

I'm going to wait for Theo de Raadt's Libre remix.

Clearly we should have invested years ago in finding renewable sources of IP addresses...

Obviously Netflix will just pass the cost on to its subscribers (where else would they get the money from?). It's very unlikely they'd implement this as a surcharge for their Comcast subscribers only (I wish they would, but I expect their contract with Comcast prohibits it), they'll just absorb it into the single subscription price. So in fact non-Comcast customers will effectively be indirectly paying Comcast to subsidise other users' access.

From an engineer's point of view it's all baffling (Netflix and their customers are both paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, so where's the need for anything more?), but when you view it through the lens of capitalist incentives it all makes perfect sense.

I think to really accentuate the difference between the two violins we need to commit them to vinyl. How else can we really appreciate the true richness and colour of the sound?

I think a fire alarm is an instance where I'd like something to have as simple and foolproof a mechanism as possible. I suppose a smart alarm could perhaps call the emergency services or something... but I'd still probably combine it with a bog standard fire alarm.

In the post-Snowden world, I think we can replace most instances of the word "paranoid" with "reasonable".