Josh - Latest Comments

Re: Tax

aiusepsi — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 05:50:49 -0000

As far as I'm aware, they tag you with a particular PAYE (pay as you earn) code, and deduct a set amount from your wages each month.

Then if you end up having over or under paid at the end of the year, it gets reconciled with the amount you should have actually paid. So you can end up getting a cheque from the Revenue at the end of the year with a refund on overpaid taxes, which is probably what will happen to you, as they'll probably base your PAYE code on your per annum salary.

So yeh, once you get your first payslip, look up the PAYE code on the Inland Revenue website.

Re: Spam

線上英語 — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:29:20 -0000

Thumbs up for this information. I just shared it and will shortly tell the rest of my friends know. They should find it as interesting as myself.

Re: The Cinema

Beer — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:22:25 -0000

Some of the best are the cheapest

Re: Graduation and Tax

Mark — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:57:20 -0000

Coupled with that jobs are far and few between thus many people settling for lower paid jobs. During the recession, and even after, where every penny does count to each person, graduation tax is another outgoing attached to a student with massive debt that no one will want.

Re: New Laptop

Ian — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:31:21 -0000

I think you're requirement of an internal DVD and small screen means you won't be able to find much under £400. I would still recommend a Dell d420 off ebay... It doesn't have an internal drive but most come with an external one, which is about the size of a DVD case. Ubunut runs smooth as butter and Jas runs windows 7 on his. With the extended life battery, I can get 5-6 hours with the wifi turned off.

Re: HTC sues Apple

aiusepsi — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:00:17 -0000

It's basically awesome. Every company has to have a circling flotilla of these bullshit patents so that they can counter-sue when they're sued. It's absurd. If you don't create such a portfolio, you're the one who gets screwed. Everybody has to keep applying for these things, lest they be the ones without a chair when the music stops playing.

I heard part of the problem is that the US Patent Office was told to operate like a business, i.e. turn a profit. How do you do that? Well, you slash costs by reducing the scrutiny each patent receives, and sell as many units, I mean, issue as many patents as you possibly can to bulk up your revenue.

Re: Overpriced iPad

Andrew Slater — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:43:07 -0000

Whilst I think the iPad is overpriced and i'm not a huge fan, you've not exactly compared like-with-like or added any value for touch. How about weight, form factor, apps & games? I could see the EEE being more awkward to use on the Tube for example.

Or, for £599 you get the 3G (but 32Gb) iPad, does require a monthly data contract but does provide you with internet anywhere with phone coverage. You could tether an Android with a laptop though, although hardly as seamless, requiring cables (can you force the phone to not charge if you need?) or battery-draining Bluetooth.

Personally, it's still not worth the extra £250, however there's still the 16GB iPad @ £429 and (although a limitation) the space doesn't get much use with an iPad. Makes it a bit competitive for certain uses. Why would YOU buy an iPad? Probably no reason to.

I'd say least objective comparison I've seen on the iPad in some time.

Re: Electoral Reform

aiusepsi — Sat, 08 May 2010 19:34:49 -0000

You're right; it's completely not just a Lib Dem problem. It's a problem whenever your party's support is spread thinly and evenly as opposed to being sharply concentrated in a few areas. So Conservative Scottish get fucked, and the Lib Dems get fucked basically everywhere.

Apparently AV+ has open lists, so you vote for a party, and you can rank the party candidates in order, so general public will can keep out the worst people.

I think parties are a rather sad but inevitable feature of democracies, especially representative democracies. Even the direct democracy of classical Athens had party-political features, although that was far from the worst problems they had. I suspect there's some game theoretical reasons for why they seem to spontaneously come into existence.

Anyways, we can continue to have an electoral system that operates as if parties didn't exist, or try something else. Anyways, a better solution to the locality of politics is devolution of power from Westminster, IMHO.

Re: Electoral Reform

Josh — Sat, 08 May 2010 19:19:12 -0000

I like local politics and do not like party politics, so do not accept that just because the locality of politics is often over-ridden by national politics as a reason to stop trying.

I remember reading about AV+ a while ago. It seemed to create two classes of MPs. One elected directed and one not. I think I will always be immediately put off any system that removes or weakens the link between people and the politicians.

I do not want the decision to be between the system we have not and another system chosen by someone else. What if I wanted neither? Making it a yes or no choice is far too blunt.

Also, just to point out that I could not find figures earlier but have now, in Scotland the Conservatives got 17% of the vote but only 2% of the seats. So it is not just a Lib Dem problem.

Re: Electoral Reform

aiusepsi — Sat, 08 May 2010 19:07:19 -0000

I can see what you mean about FPTP allowing you to unseat people, but it actually works well in very rare occasions. The counter-examples are the failure to unseat Balls, who I think even his own party regard as a bit of an odious twat, and Dr Evan Harris, who was a really wonderful parliamentarian who did a lot of good.

I think whatever happens, there needs to be a commitment to a referendum once the inquiry is over. The Jenkins inquiry held back when Blair came into power did a very through report into all this, and it just ended up going nowhere.

I believe he chose something called AV+, or AV top-up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Re: Election Results

aiusepsi — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:55:11 -0000

I quite want to put money on a Conservative overall majority, just so that at least winning money will make me feel better.

Re: Immigration

Josh — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:50:26 -0000

A federated union is probably the way to go. With some powers being evolved to the EU with the majority being left at the hands of the individual states. Something like the US but much much more emphasis on the individual states.

There should be properly and simply elected representatives. A senate of some sort that is clear and transparent.

The EU is anything but transparent at the moment.

Possibly a president, I have never been to keen on the idea of presidents. But someone elected by the people, not by national leaders behind closed doors.

The problem now is that if people were given the choice they would probably chose to leave or regress Europe. Simply because of the way it has been forced through unelected and un-chosen.

Re: Immigration

aiusepsi — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:37:51 -0000

I think like many things this is an very nuanced topic, so one should be very careful about making blanket pronouncements about it.

However, I think you're right in that applying the same policies to the new accession countries that we had with the older EU states was quite probably a mistake. Nobody is worried about unrestricted immigration from Sweden or France, for instance. Hell, more Swedish immigration would be awesome! There's a qualitative difference between them and the ex-Soviet bloc countries.

Not that Poland isn't a lovely country, Warsaw is like any other large European city, but their GDP per capita is a lot smaller than ours, for instance. It's going to take time for it to grow to match the other EU nations.

As regards EU institutions, I think our political class is following a very deliberate policy of starving the EU of democratic legitimacy. If the population of the EU elected an EU president, that person's authority would utterly overshadow the authority of the heads of mere nations. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas. By selecting them, they become nothing more than administrators and co-ordinators.

As I've probably said before, we've fallen between two stools. The EU is neither one thing nor the other. It's quite possible that the EU is the victim of an odd paradox; people don't want to see Europe become more like a proper federal union because they feel remote from it; they feel remote from it because it acts like a secretive club, not like a democratic federal union; it's not a federal union because...

Re: Spam

aiusepsi — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:10:52 -0000

And yet, some people will fall for it.

Re: The Browser Choice Screen for Europe

Josh — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:19:53 -0000

Never noticed that before.

MS did get the name right tough. Hit 'Start' and type "internet" what is the first result you get?

To someone just starting out on W7 never really using a computer before (for example my mum) that would be a completely sensible thing to do. "I want the internet, so I go to Internet Explorer. Chrome? Firefox? what are they for?"

Re: The Browser Choice Screen for Europe

aiusepsi — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:28:36 -0000

Indeed, Chrome is the only browser I've seen that actually gives a shit about not wasting vertical space by default.

IE and Firefox are just abortions in that regard. I like how Chrome even thinks about the little status bar at the bottom: it only appears in Chrome when it has something to say, and if you have to mouse over where it was supposed to be, it appears somewhere else.

Somebody actually sat and put some thought into that, and if I ever meet them I'll buy them a pint.

Re: The Browser Choice Screen for Europe

Josh — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:21:24 -0000

I used to use Firefox because it was faster and better than IE, and of course tabs. Now I use Chrome because Firefox has become bloated and slow and IE like in some ways.

A bowser is a window to the internet, it should not be cluttered and surrounded by crap. No toolbars, as few menus as possible, it should be just a thin walled box with the internet inside.

And I like having tabs at the top, not as another tool-bar type thing. And the ability to drag them into different windows, with the only bug being that you can't directly combine two tabbed filled chrome winds in one step, you have to do it one tab at a time.

Re: The Browser Choice Screen for Europe

aiusepsi — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:13:21 -0000

The did look like they were written by ad men, not people with an actual understanding of what the product is, and what its virtues are.

I especially liked the one that talked about creating a playlist on Spotify, as if that was even relevant.

Re: The Browser Choice Screen for Europe

Josh — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:11:38 -0000

I thought those were quite poor in the end. I liked the giant ones that just said 'Chrome' with the logo. But the ones with "3 tabs for....... 7 tabs for....." etc that were on the walls of the tube stations were actually quite shit.

They really cocked up, and they could possibly have been saved if they had been funny. It was Christmas ish time, so why on earth did they not go "10 tabs for.... 9 blog posts for..., 8......2 bookmarked albums 1 Google browser" possibly with music.

Re: The Browser Choice Screen for Europe

aiusepsi — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:59:27 -0000

Especially considering the huge ad push Google have going for Chrome at the moment.

Re: Apple granted patent on capacitive multitouch displays

aiusepsi — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:08:06 -0000

Yeh, it's pretty messed up. I can see the benefit of preventing people from freeloading on the ideas of others, but this shit just slows down innovation.

Big companies just keep huge libraries of patents they might not even use, just so that hopefully they can do some patent horse-trading to keep from getting sued. It's a disaster.

Re: Books + Welcome

aiusepsi — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:20:13 -0000

Getting better at writing was part of the point for me of writing my blog, too. I'm honestly not sure if I'm better or worse. Most likely, I'm simply different.

Clarke is absolutely one of my favourite writers. I'm trying to pace myself on reading his books, because there's a finite supply of them now.