You utter prat. My sister is an NHS midwife and went through three years of highly technical university education for it. It's a skilled job and she's saved lives when things have gone wrong. Should we all go back to living in mud huts instead of professionally-built houses, too?
You seem to be making two contrary points: that midwives are trained and skilled, and that they're primitive and unprofessional like mud huts. This is consistent with, for example, someone's pretending to respect their sister's line of work because they're family. Pretty sure you're also afoul of the site guidelines by openly name-calling.
Interesting question, and I can't really answer it, not being American - "prat" basically means an idiot, but it's quite a useful word because it conveys a real sense of contempt (but often more for the opinion or act than the person responsible for it, in a weird way), and can easily be intensified as in this instance, without actually being vulgar. You can also use it as a verb, eg. "Stop pratting around on Hacker News and do some work!"
I also feel like it was 100% the correct word to use in this instance!
Private companies who provide services to the NHS also get @nhs.net email addresses. It's a secure email system so that patient and other confidential data can be exchanged between providers without it going out onto random internet mail servers.
An @nhs.net email doesn't mean "this person/organisation is a part of the NHS", it means they provide services to the NHS and need to deal with patient data.
That’s a headline style called the “noun pile”, at which the BBC excels. This one is tame by their standards (but I agree it’s jarring to put “China” and “Man” together that way).
Thanks, I learned something new today: "noun pile-ups" allow the insertion of many key words into a small slot. It's something I've noticed unconsciously, but now I can recognize it. Interesting that the practice is more prevalent in the British press.
'China man' seems like a good way to suggest both the nationality and gender of the person, and the location of the incident, towards the beginning of the headline.
>Although the term has no negative connotations in older dictionaries,[1][2] and the usage of such parallel compound terms as Englishman, Frenchman and Irishman[3] remain unobjectionable,[4] the term Chinaman is noted as offensive by modern dictionaries and is no longer the preferred nomenclature
In other words, BS creating an issue when there's none. Chinaman is fine.
Yes, we should also start calling black people a term they used to be called because it used to be okay. Why is it that some people lack the miniscule amount of decency required to respect a person's or group's preferences on what they like to be called? What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?
>Yes, we should also start calling black people a term they used to be called because it used to be okay.
Actually we're not all US-based here, and we don't have any historical baggage with our black people like that.
Plus, instead of worrying about words, maybe people should focus on stopping cop shootings, mass incarcerations, red-lining and other, non-trivial matters, affecting black people?
And yes, one does preclude the other. One is hypocritical theater, the other is actual change -- opportunity costs and all.
>What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?
There was no "respecting another's preferences". It was mostly due to people having insignificant lives (sic) and compensating by being worried about words on behalf of another. Nobody actually asked the Chinese...
"Chinaman" hasn't been the preferred nomenclature since at least 1998 (when The Big Lebowsky came out). Here, as others have noted, it's China man, though.
> The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature.
I've noticed a lot of people setting up UK limited companies for similar reasons - you can do it online for a few pounds and there seem to be very few checks done on your identity or business plan when you do so.
No business plan checks at all - I still don't have one. You have to pick a vague category that you do business in, but that was about it.
There's mention here about difficulties getting a UK bank account but I can't speak to that as I'm UK based. For me, as a UK-er, I got a business account (and a credit card at different bank) within a few days and I've never had to do anything in person. Total cost being the £14 for company reg (and later accountant fees because I'm bad at that). For what it's worth, my personal credit was below the toilet when I did all this as well, so no sweetheart Mr Moneybags dealing either.
Having just switched business banks in the UK, it appears that the rules have become a bit stricter in recent years. At minimum, you're now going to require the basic business details (registration number with Companies House, etc.) and the same standard of personal ID for all the people involved as for any of the other areas now covered by the anti-laundering rules (government-issued photo ID, recent proof of current address). We also got asked a variety of basic questions about the nature of the business and its finances, including things like where we did business and how we got paid. I don't know how many of those were strictly necessary and how many were this particular bank doing its due diligence, but other banks we've used have also asked broadly similar questions in the past.
In short, starting a limited company in the UK still seems to be fairly easy, but getting access to other facilities such as banking may be a different story if you're doing something unusual.
Check out Tide[0], I use them for my business banking and have had nothing but great experience with them. Had my account setup in ~10 minutes after being made to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a high-street bank business account setup.
Thanks. We did take a look at them before, but unfortunately they appeared to have a few significant disadvantages for our situation (fees would have worked out very high, they seem to be very phone/app/online-centric in their access and security arrangements, missing some basic banking features).
I'm also not quite sure how they get around the anti-laundering rules that everyone else has to abide by. They mention checking various possible IDs, but what they say they need doesn't meet the standards that every other bank and financial service we've ever worked with would require, which makes me a bit suspicious about corner-cutting.
Fair enough, I'm essentially a contractor with a Ltd company so my use case is fairly simple and I'm the only one with access, I appreciate for larger organisations it may not be quite where it needs to be yet. Probably one to keep an eye on though.
It's a strange business. AML is pretty tight on regular businesses, but the UK still has opaque structures like the Scottish Limited Partnership (may be fixed in a few years) and the various Crown dependency islands are extremely secretive.
The only problem with a UK company for a non-UK person is it has been my experience that it’s really hard to open a proper UK bank account without UK residency. Perhaps others have had better luck, but for me, that was a significant pain point.
At least pro-Brexit campaign group LEAVE.EU will have to find a new domain name. It's not just their domain, it's the name of their organisation as a whole...
I work in the NHS and regularly get the "I'm not a robot" captcha. I know what it is and why it's there when I see it, but colleagues often complain that their "Google" has a "virus".
A lot of NHS traffic goes through a few large networks like THIS [https://www.this.nhs.uk/home/] which don't have especially large IP allocations.
I'm in Silicon Valley, and outside of SF (where the ISP market isn't a monopoly), a gigabit from Comcast costs ~$300/mo. It still seems absurd to me that I'm 20 minutes from companies like Apple and Google, but getting decent ≥100Mbps Internet is expensive and challenging.
(I pay for "business class" however, so my bill is slightly more expensive per Mbps because of that (the $300/mo above is residential, though). But I get an almost nearly static IPv4 address, and customer support that's only moderately bad, as opposed to the residential level support which beyond bad.)
Romania (and if my memory serves me right, a lot of eastern european countries) have heavily invested into their internet infrastructure. Huge costs for their government, but it is paying off. As a result, almost the entire country has high speed links for dirt cheap.
It's somewhat similar throughout Europe too. Speeds may vary. Prices are relatively low. Paying 29€/month for whatever your line is able to supply is common in France. Regrettably, due to our choice of investing into copper lines heavily, our infrastructure is starting to get old. For example, I am getting 8Mbps/1Mbps and it's not likely to change soon.
The government didn't get involved at all in the infrastructure here. There were thousands of small ISPs about 10-15 years ago that got bought by the two big ones. Then the two big ISPs switched everything to fiber and increased speeds while decreasing prices.
My ISP was so small that it required me to lay my own cables and get a router.
Mine is, and I live in the UK also. I'm not sure what joke you're making. Sure, we may not have the best bandwidth (although at my previous house I had 250MBit), but supporting IPv6 (etc) has nothing to do with being in the UK. Find a decent ISP, I recommend Zen (or if you can afford them, AA).
Depends where you live. In Storrington the internet is rubbish and no phone signal. This is 2017 UK. Driving to London from that region you lose mobile signal at least 5 times completely.
People act so entitled when they live in cities; I happen not to like cities which makes me a minority, but there are plenty of wealthy business people crying every day about their connection south of London (and probably in more places; most places around Exeter aren't great either).
My parents live in a Dorset village and have the same issues. I'm on Three and even in the nearest towns (Dorchester, pop. 20k and Weymouth, pop. 50k) there is usually no or a very weak signal. They finally rolled out BT Infinity last year, so at least that's something.
I live in Lithuania now and it really shocks me how bad the UK is for these things. Here I have 600/600 FTTH for €20/month and LTE is basically universal, even in remote parts of the country.
It's cheap in Lithuania and other countries because they were was no significant prior investment in telecoms infrastructure, and the costs of deployment are generally lower too (cheaper labour, easier planning-permission) - so when it comes to deploying Internet access to a previously disconnected community it only makes sense to roll-out the bleeding-edge technology (e.g. FTTH).
Whereas in the UK, BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections - because the cost of upgrading everyone's last-mile connections from copper (or even aluminium in some cases) to fibre is very cost-prohibitive: look at the sheer cost the cablecos shouldered during the mass roll-out of coax in the early-1990s (and even then, it was only to boxes in the street, not houses) - I understand their near-bankruptcy from this move lead to them all coming together under NTL and Telewest, and then Virgin Media.
(The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy)
Give the UK a few more years and there should be a mandate from above requiring FTTH and we'll see progress: maybe even 10Gig FTTH as standard, then the tables will turn and people in Lithuania will be stuck with their 1Gbps service until their next round of major infrastructure investment, potentially decades away.
(I'm aware that Fibre is generally more future-proof than copper, and a high-quality fibre line that handles 1Gbps today can easily handle 10Gbps, and potentially 40Gbps or even 100Gbps in the future - so my entire argument may be moot)
BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections ... that wasn't what they wanted to do at all.
BT were preparing to do FTTH when I joined them in 1994 (I left in 2001). This was as you say going to be eye-wateringly expensive because BT have a universal provision requirement - they couldn't upgrade the network in the cities and not do it in the countryside. The idea was to pay for this by providing television services, but OfTel (now OfCom) said this would be unfair competition with the cable providers - who were cherry picking cities to make rollout cheaper. They would also have been in competition with Sky, which meant the Murdoch press lobbying against BT (among others; the media market is always a tangle of interests)
Additionally, local-loop unbundling (ie ADSL) was being proposed; BT were required to allow access to the last-mile network from in-exchange equipment, and do this at line rental prices that undercut themselves, in order to break their monopoly. OfTel were very likely to make the same requirement for FTTH/FTTC.
Of course, you pays your money you makes your choice - if BT had been allowed to go ahead with their TV services back then, we might've had FTTH way sooner, but BT probably still would have had a monopoly.
Source: I met the engineers doing FTTH on my first visit to Ipswich, I was part of the team working on the local-loop unbundling ordering systems (where other providers booked engineering time at exchanges) and gave presentations to them at OfTel's offices.
> Whereas in the UK, BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections - because the cost of upgrading everyone's last-mile connections from copper (or even aluminium in some cases) to fibre is very cost-prohibitive
This is especially frustrating if you have a line that's directly connected to an exchange - you don't even benefit from the FTTC upgrades. Download-wise I can't complain too much - ~20Mbps is fine most of the time (though with family members that tend to leaving streaming video running constantly and various game consoles that auto-update almost constantly it's not ideal), but the sub-1Mbps upload speed is terrible. If I've anything large to upload, it's usually faster to take it to my grandparents' house - connected to the same exchange, but get a order of magnitude greater upload speeds because they are connected via a cabinet.
> (The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy)
Reminds me a story my granddad told me from the 60s/70s (not sure exactly when it was). They'd just finished constructing a new road, laid all the conduits under the road for the various utilities, left them plainly labelled (IIRC it was also pre-planned with the companies, but not certain).... then came back two weeks later to find multiple utility companies had dug up parts of the road to lay their own and done a rough job of patching it back up. He was (understandably) less than impressed!
One of the things that really helped is that all passive telecommunications infrastructure is by law "common use" - so things like ducts, pipe work, man holes, poles, etc can be used by any company. This has really helped to level the playing field so a single company doesn't have an unfair monopoly because it was there first (cough BT cough). Where I'm living right now cable and DSL was available (maybe up to 50mbit?), but last year fibre was rolled out by a different company. There are also guidelines on how the infrastructure should be delivered within buildings, so most apartment buildings have duct work going from the basement to the top floor, and space for the providers equipment for future upgrades.
Where I live in the states, telephone pole access is "common use" but the bureaucracy around actually being able to do so makes it pretty much impossible to add new lines (eg: needing to get a expensive environmental review for adding a wire to a pole that already has wires). Last I checked it took about a dozen permits which took ~12-24 months to get. After you got the permits, you then needed to pay for the inspection and full replacement of any poles found to be old/substandard that you wanted to attach to.
I can get an unreliable 3Mbps with the wind in the right direction on Openreach, or anything up to 200Mbps on Virgin Media. I'd rather not use VM's heavily filtered IPv6-free zone, but it's not a question of not being able to afford a decent ISP, it's just practicality.
I use Virgin Media and have no problems on any of my devices. Downlink can be a bit slower at busy times, but I guess that's nature of cable internet and uplink is always at the limit. And I really like that they very rarely change IP addresses (have mine for at least 3 months now).
I have the feeling that Sky has slightly better peering (more stable speed to US & Asia during peak hours), but the higher speed on VM is more important here, and ping times are generally very low.
What do you mean with IPv6-free zone? Have ipv6 disabled on my PC (for different reasons) but haven't experienced any connectivity problems on either Computers or other devices (which should be able to use IPv6). IF you mean missing availability of ipv6, I don't think that there are any pages you can't see on ipv4?
IF you mean missing availability of ipv6, I don't think that there are any pages you can't see on ipv4?
And there won't be while ISPs are lagging in their adoption, meaning nobody can set up a IPv6-only site if they expect to be accessible by everyone.
Also, there's more than sites: an IPv4-only client can't connecting directly (P2P) to other clients behind carrier-grade IPv4 NAT, which leads to more centralized systems (and which give an advantage to large companies over more independent developers and open source groups).
These ISPs are holding everyone back, hence the site submitted in this thread.
I know that NATs were not designed as security features, but I'm not sure if we want to have every device out there to have an IP address without NAT. I think that this would bear massive potential for botnets to take over older machines. And replacing NATs with firewalls would ultimately lead to the same problem with P2P.
It's unfortunate for people with more technical knowledge, but most people don't have that, and there is point protecting them from attacks (even if it's their fault that they didn't update).
I guess in the case of pornography, both participants are being paid by a third party (the producer) for taking part in the sex act. This is different from a typical prostitute/client relationship, where one is paying the other for sex.
(I don't know if this is addressed in the article - the site seems to have fallen over.)
Another one is legal forms required for producers and actors - there are forms that each actor must fill out, these must be verified and kept. Not doing so is a felony.
So, I can't believe I'm about to say this: this kind of presents a prostitution loophole, no?
As long as a 3rd party is involved, and "films" it (still, unmanned camera in the room) and everyone fills out the paperwork, and the 3rd party handles the payment (minimum wage for party A, minimum wage + $X for party B), party A "buys some porn" at the curious cost of minimum wage + $X.
Am I missing something? Did I explain this poorly?
I get a handful of calls per year from guys who think
they're the first geniuses to come up with the great
idea of setting up a "Freeman Brothel" and calling it
a "film studio."
They're all disappointed when I tell them that they're
not getting away with this "brilliant plan" unless they
take so many steps to make it look legitimate that it
will, in fact, become a legitimate porn production
enterprise — in which case, why bother with the ruse in
the first place?
So, yes? The author incredulously assumes that "it's not worth it" in which case it actually might be worth it for someone and that is an avenue to do it.
Law is not code, prostitution as a concept is illegal. This is sort of like wondering if you could avoid income tax by just doing a bunch of favors for your really good friend, and then getting a totally unrelated Christmas present from them.
Except for when it is code. If you do something that is legal under the letter of the law or when the law is ambiguous you are supposed to be given the benefit of the doubt and granted leniency. If this wasn't the case then lawmakers would have no reason to write laws precisely.
It's the other situation where law stops being code. If you do something that is technically illegal but probably oughtn't be then the law can be reinterpreted in your favor.
Assuming you followed the absolute letter of the law with your totally-not-a-brothel then you would be fine (until the law is amended).
My point is that laws are often intentionally not written precisely, because it's impossible to enumerate every type of violation in advance. Looking at my own state's prostitution law, you would need to define the following things to get a precise law:
"money or its equivalent"
"offers"
"adultery"
"fornication"
etc.
The law is written in terms of broad concepts that a judge can interpret. In most cases there is no such thing as "absolute letter of the law", partly because English makes that impossible, but mostly because legislating such strict specific definitions would be a bad idea. I think the impossibility of bug-free software makes it clear that we wouldn't want laws written like code.
It's disappointing how many people here imagine that an incredibly transparent ruse will get them out of legal difficulties no problem. It's like they can't conceive that yes, other people have thought of it before, and yes, it's transparently obvious, and no, you can't get away with a crime with a "gotcha!".
It's because of things like the following scenario, which as a 17 year old with a lead foot, I was "lucky" enough to have happen to me.
A police trooper pulled me over for ~80 in a 65 (deserted highway at night). He somehow transposed the last two numbers in my license plate, so I obviously assumed I was home free. Until, while I was on the stand, the judge just looked at me for about 10 seconds, said "Were you driving the car?" "[pause] Yes, your honor." "[gavel slam] Guilty."
Don't rich people basically do exactly that to pay fewer taxes than they're supposed to because favors and gifts aren't taxed like income?
I'm not sure your example was the best for showing there aren't loopholes based on overly literal interpretations, given that the tax code is notorious for them.
There is a gift tax, but it's paid by the donor, and they can give up to the annual exclusion amount a year without hitting it. This year, the limit's $14,000.
Once a gift goes past that for the year, the excess starts counting against the donor's lifetime exclusion and needs to be reported on the donor's taxes. Gift taxes come into play once the lifetime exclusion limit is exceeded, and it's $5.4 million.
A friend who claims to have watched a fair amount of free online porn suspects that many of the "POV" sites are basically just fat ugly trust-fund dudes paying for intercourse with attractive young women, in those particular locales in which lots of attractive young women are interested in "getting started in porn". (SoCal, Miami, Eastern Europe, etc.) The "producer" and "camera operator" and "actor" seem all to be the same person.
I've watched some of the porn that's like what you describe, and yeah, it seems to be the same camera guy every time - and nobody else but the girl - but I think the key distinction is that they market themselves, they do sell the videos, and they are actually producing porn that a lot of people end up watching.
One of the things the article points out is that if you're going to "exploit the loophole", it's going to take about as much work as actually running a production company. This seems to be the case here.
(And, presumably the guys in question are also keeping records of the actresses, filling out all the paperwork, etc. No fun going to prison for fucking a 17 year old on camera.)
"A" buying for minimum wage + $X won't pass the smell test. Judges aren't automatons blindly following a set of rules, they're (usually, pretty clever) human beings with both the capacity and the authority to use their best judgement in interpreting the law.
