mattgibson

12 ms·

61.
by mattgibson 11y ago
If you define 'effective' as 'maximises the amount of money that shareholders get', then it's not ineffective at all. The best investments you can get are monopolies where the companies provide shit services. Costs
62.
by mattgibson 11y ago
If you want to take a cynical stance, you could look at it as deliberately introducing competition to an obvious natural monopoly, which pretty much guarantees an inefficient market and therefore monster profits. Thatcher (and later Major)
63.
by mattgibson 11y ago
Excluding localhost and some obvious cases where the values are in a local config file still leaves around 111,000: https://github.com/search?p=1&q=filename%3Awp-config.php+DB_...
64.
by mattgibson 11y ago
I wasn't aware of this. Do you happen to know which law/act/whatever covers it? Would have come in handy a few weeks ago when I was trying to negotiate my way out of a 3 month notice period.
65.
by mattgibson 11y ago
I wonder if in years to come, there will be similar stories when messages from enslaved foreign tech workers are found buried in leaked source code.
66.
by mattgibson 11y ago
I think cheap rare earth magnets was a factor, although I suspect only a part of the reason. The motors are now far smaller, lighter and more powerful, as well as cheap to produce. Given you need four of them, they are now light enough that
67.
by mattgibson 12y ago
It looks to me like a transition to 'inverted totalitarianism'/'managed democracy': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism The state is increasingly controlled by the hyper-weal
68.
by mattgibson 12y ago
> the problem in practice is that government sucks at running things. They introduce layers of infrastructure that business doesn't Actually, there is no evidence of this. See this report that compares the Govt run industries before
69.
by mattgibson 12y ago
> Is it really that impossible to believe that someone would just prefer gendered pronouns for stylistic reasons? This kind of preference is completely believable, but I'm afraid it's also a little bit sexist. I sort of see whe
70.
by mattgibson 12y ago
Not easy to answer without more detail. Monetisation depends on the type of people you have visiting. StackOverflow had a lot of difficulty monetising with adverts for books from Amazon, which they concluded was because people come there lo
71.
by mattgibson 12y ago
I've always assumed that the privatisation game is so easily corrupted and rigged towards milking the taxpayers with one-sided deals, that the losses offset any potential efficiency gains. So many anecdotal stories that I've lost
72.
by mattgibson 12y ago
> in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy. This is meaningless if you get to define any innocent/held-without-charge person as 'enemy'.
73.
by mattgibson 12y ago
Does anyone know any good fixes for the fixed-header overlap issue? I noticed it with regard to clicking anchors with links too, and have been thinking about using some sort of separate span positioned X pixels higher than the real target t
74.
by mattgibson 12y ago
I'm told that Italian, for example, has such a regularity that pretty much every word is spelled phonetically, so guessing the spelling always works.
75.
by mattgibson 12y ago
This sounds very much like the stories that Paul Devereaux ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Devereux#UFOs ) collected and analysed in his books. I like his work because he takes the scientific approach: the evidence
76.
by mattgibson 12y ago
Perhaps a better question: How long do you have to Google before you're not stuck and can start coding? :)
77.
by mattgibson 12y ago
Just curious: what application needs 100M lines of anything?
78.
by mattgibson 12y ago
I've heard something similar suggested as part of the reason for the spread of Islam. 5 prayer-breaks per day where you get to chill out in the shade for a bit is a pretty compelling offer in a hot part of the world. Especially if you
79.
by mattgibson 12y ago
If you enable the free New Relic add on and turn on availability checking, then the pings it sends every 60 seconds keep the dynos from ever being shut down. Also, if you're using Rails, switching to Unicorn as the server allows 3-5 co
80.
by mattgibson 12y ago
"Does anyone else have a problem with this?" I imagine the delivery guy does. It's a free market though, so if that $21 turns out to be far more than is necessary for making the SAAS site, then a competitor will see it as an
81.
by mattgibson 12y ago
Surely these won't be too effective. They'd be easily brought down by getting anything at all (fishing wire, string, etc) fired from a makeshift catapult caught up in the rotors. High tech crowd control that can be defeated with s
82.
by mattgibson 12y ago
So someone could make that motion tracker thing out of Alien, which works through walls, just using wifi and an LCD screen? I want one. Where's the app? Actually, reading the original paper, it needs quite a bulky antenna array, lookin
83.
by mattgibson 13y ago
The fact that he's still going despite their trying to crush him suggests that he may be a good bet.
84.
by mattgibson 13y ago
This leads me to wonder if maybe the cargo was the target. We already heard that the manifest has not been released and that they left 50 seats empty to compensate for the weight.
85.
by mattgibson 13y ago
Deniability would have been a very likely outcome if a convincing crash scenario had been engineered. I suspect that the pilot was supposed to turn off the satcom link at the same time as the transponder. Now that we know that it kept flyin
86.
by mattgibson 13y ago
If we assume that there is some level of outside planning here, with maybe a state actor involved, then getting the plane secretly fuelled up beyond the assumed 7.5 hour range would perhaps not be too difficult.
87.
by mattgibson 13y ago
I'd say that if you're using public info that they have chosen to share, e.g. blog posts, then acceptable. If using underhand tactics like tracking them via an ad network, then maybe scummy.
88.
by mattgibson 13y ago
"we lack the leadership to resist this" Many of our 'leadership' (1/3 of MPs in fact: http://pastebin.com/1249K1N4 ) have large buy to let portfolios and don't give a toss if the economy crumble
89.
by mattgibson 13y ago
The source of the value is mostly the land, rather than the building. When prices rise, it's actually the land value rising, but we talk about it like 'house prices' are going up. Causes a guaranteed bubble as you can't
90.
by mattgibson 13y ago
This is not some weird oddity due to council mismanagement, it's just the latest example of one of the greatest naturally occurring scams in history. The process that's occurring is Ricardo's law of rent: https://e

More ›