brightshiny

I'd draw a distinction between intellect and intelligence. It's quite possible to have a powerful intellect and still make poor decisions, i.e. be stupid.

Intelligence is about making good decisions. Intellect can aid in that, but it's not the only factor, and after a certain level it wouldn't even be the primary factor.

Yes, healthcare is "as long as a piece of string" in so many ways that I don't think it's a solvable problem, but definitely could do with a better level of debate than the sacred cow of the NHS vs the straw man of the US system.

I'm possibly moving to Japan soon, so I guess I'll get a better comparison soon enough.

Approaching zero. It wasn't paperwork holding things back, but people who knew there was no problem with poor performance. The contractors knew it and would milk it as long as they could, and the permanent staff treat it like a sacred way of life. Trying to get them to work quicker through good practice was impossible.

Sorry, but that's the way it was.

Yes, I have, so no, it's not a complete fairytale. I was quite clear on my views.

That depends on your socio economic status. If you're rich, the service is unbelievably good, if not, it's not. You can't treat figures about the US the same way while ignoring the massive inequalities.

I've worked in the NHS, for several different organisations at different levels of the hierarchy (PCTs, SHAs, CCGs etc), as a contractor, over several years.

I would privatise it tomorrow. The amount of waste in terms of time and money were eye-watering, every time. The amount of politicking was immense. A project that should take a few weeks could easily expand into a couple of years. I resigned from my last contract because it actually felt immoral to be taking a large amount of cash to either sit around twiddling my thumbs, fight with people, or do work at the slowest possible pace in the most ineffective way. I'd rather do something else. Basically, I've never worked for a private company that was anything like that, even the worst ones, and I find it hard to believe any private company would survive very long working that way.

I'll add, my Japanese girlfriend and her friends are utterly unimpressed with the level of service. As was my Spanish girlfriend, who also worked on a hospital's grounds as a medical researcher.

I'm not saying we should copy the Americans, no way, but the Japanese system is private, the German system is private, the Dutch and French systems are also private. Going private does not mean chucking the idea of universal healthcare on the fire, it means properly separating the regulator from the provider and removing the kind of conflict of interest that led to the cover up of high mortality rates, among other things. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

And no, I'm not a Tory. Try picking up a copy of Private Eye if you want to divest yourself of the notion that the NHS is a saintly institution. Or work there.

I'm going to give it a try for a while, thanks.

Thank you.

What is STT?

I agree with you. A PhD (then) student I know was supplied with a Comp Sci Masters student from the uni to help her set up a website for data collection across Europe. She complained to me that it didn't work and I had a look.

It was shocking. The standard was worse than that of a disinterested hobbyist - I wish I was exaggerating - and it didn't work at all. It actually counted as his final project (or whatever they were calling it) and they passed him. He now has a Masters.

Needless to say, I rewrote the entire thing for her and it worked and she's now a PhD and I'm a co-author on a published paper. I know an awful lot of PhDs, and it's clearly an overrated qualification, but Masters and degrees are barely worth the paper they're written on.

I don't even have a degree, so perhaps I would say that, but Google agrees… ;-)

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-2...

There's RFC 4151 to keep in mind, TagURI, a scheme for URIs that is independent of URL (but can use it too). One reason to use it would be to mark a page as being the same resource even though the domain or URL had changed.

http://www.taguri.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_URI_scheme

I wrote a library for it in Ruby which is how I know about it.

Thanks for this. I did some extra work on it (via someone else's fork) so it can run across multiple directories. I've too many projects lurking around to cd into all of them! I added some pretty colours too :)

https://gist.github.com/yb66/44b97baecbeec6900e039ffb9461d31...

It's not asking for access to the system keychain. No, those aren't the automated update checks because I already dealt with those. Yes, I'm treating it like a hostile app - it's an app I didn't write, has recent history of sneaking in sneaky things, ignores the settings I've chosen, and repeatedly phones home even though I've disabled every single available setting that would need to do anything other than get me the webpage I ask for. My evaluation is based on those reasons alone, not your straw man.

It has a better version of Flash, that's the only reason I keep it around.

You really don't know why anyone would turn of automatic updates? Really?

I have all those boxes unticked, and yet Little Snitch shows me it still keeps trying to connect to Google's servers, around every 15 minutes and on start up at the very least. I asked it not to store passwords too, and it still pops up the password box to access my keychain.

You're putting too much faith in them.