Welcome Italian Viewers

Today marks an interesting day, we're a little after 11am my time and Italy has rocketed, for the first time, into my top ten source viewers company, equalling the United States... Welcome Italy!

I also see their near neighbour across the waters Serbia on the list for the first time!...

What are you all reading?

Donald Trump hits Rock Bottom

Just watching this travesty....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44017172

What he fails to mention is that when everyone has a gun they hang out of casino hotel windows gunning down festival goers, kids kill kids in the hall ways of schools and colleges, that murder suicide is through the roof and you can be shot dead for as little as looking at someone in the wrong way.

Donald Trump and especially the NRA have this attitude utterly and totally wrong, and I can't begin to express how god awful this man is.

But then, let us remember, he is "leader" of a country where we report mass shootings as "the worse in" and insert very short amounts of time.  This however is glossed over in US reporting of this to it's citizens.  Where as we hear that Stephen Paddock killed 58 people, "the worst mass shooting in the US since 1991".

The CNN version states "the deadliest mass shooting in modern US History".... Define Modern Mr Trump and Ms CNN... Because 1991 is not a long time ago, I mean I know you're in a country with a history we can list on the back of a couple of greasy burger wrappers, but please 1991 is not old, and 1992 on wards is not modern history, and how many mass shootings have there been in "modern history", in say the last five years?

Well we have:

1. Stoneman Douglas - 2018 - 17 murdered
2. Lass Vegas - 2017 - 58 murdered
3. Sutherland Sprints - 2017 -  26 murdered
4. Orlando - 2016 - 49 murdered
5. San Bernadino - 2015 - 15 murdered
6. Umpqua College - 205 - 9 murdered

That's six attacks, how many where terrorists?  None... Not a single one is a comparison to the Paris attack, not a single one of these attacks was in effort of a social political aim, they were murder, for jealous, revenge, homophobia, all by people whom had armed themselves without the need to leap through hoops of be part of a terrorist cell.

Normal everyday people killing people with whatever happens to be at hand.

Which takes us to Trumps commends about the London Knife Crime, he's right, this is a problem, it is the exact same problem as I have just mentioned are on US streets, people killing people with whatever happens to be at hand.  Except, a kitchen knife, a shiv, heck even a sharpened stick is in an utterly different; lower; category of concern that someone picking up a .38 pistol and pointing it at coworkers over a parking spot, or their YouTube video loosing advertising!

America you have a problem, a much larger problem than you realise, you are being brain washed into looking outwards, that the world around you is horrid, that you might have it tough, but "hey look at London, look at Paris".... Beyond Terrorism, which is clearly more common here in Europe where we have a land bridge to the middle east & north African unrest.... we do not have a problem here, and you are being made look idiots (more so than usual) as you're letting Donald Trump and the NRA pull wool over your eyes.

There are no mass shootings, nor mass killings, here in the UK, nor Paris, nor anywhere else, except by extremely rare nut jobs, and I mean extremely rare.  The only ones which come to mind are Anders Brevivik in Norway in 2011 and Derek Bird in the UK in 2010... Remember we're going on the "modern" moniker given by CNN... Five years, both these attacks happen outside that time frame!

Look for the next killing spree in the UK, one does not look to the same year, not even the same decade we have to go back to the Dunblane killings in 1996.

This is what the world means, yes we all get this behaviour in our populations, people killing people, since time immemorial, the difference is in the US the tools to achieve such aims are so so much more readily available.  They are not a "tool" to fend off a terrorist attack, guns just become a tool to carry out more attacks, more people killing people, in more places on more occasions.  When will the American people wake up and smell the cordite?

This whole situation beggars belief.

People : Donald Trump

This afternoon, in a few tens of minutes actually (by the time I schedule this post) there will be a new President of the United States of America.  A controversial figure, whom some might argue didn't win the election in a 100% clear cut fashion (his opponent - Hilary Clinton - won the popular vote, and then there's a little grey area with foreign involvement in the whole process).

But, I'm British, so I'm not too invested in who the man is, I am more interested in his politics, he's a half Scottish, through his Mother and has close ties to Britain.

We ourselves are not enamoured with the whole EU affair, and so trade avenues with the US may now open back up.  I certainly have a vested interest in the US economy as one of my pensions is tied up over there in a US fund, but for the tiny amount I put into that pension it's paying for itself, and depending on how things look in a years time, I may have to jolt things around.

However, we're left guessing about the next steps he will take, we can not tell whether he'll stick to all his pledges or promises.  He is however a business man, rather than a dyed in the wold politician, so he may have more rancur than previous presidents elect.

But politics aside the question today then is what will happen with the man?  Will, with protesters, detractors and so many unhappy voters in the US, both foreign and domestic, will the man survive?

This is a very serious question, one of the major points of out going president Obama's calls was for gun reform, however, everyone and their granny is seemingly still packing a piece in the US, even in liberal New York City & Washington DC.

So, will he survive the day?  The week?  The Year or his whole term?  I think that is an important question to ask.

As for the politics, we can but wait and see, though I believe the markets will heave this afternoon and though the seas may not boil and the sky may not fall, Donald Trump will be sworn in.

Developer : How Big Is Your Floppy?

What are they teaching kids today?  I've just had the pleasure of talking to a gentleman whom has received a degree in computing from Stanford in the United States, I'm sure he paid a fortune for this education... He didn't know how many bytes were in 1.44 megabytes.

He literally said "about 1.44 million".  This was related to an old format of file being taken and converted for transmission over Wifi, the size of the data was relatively immaterial, but the source; historically speaking; was a 1.44 megabyte HD floppy disk, and though the floppy was long gone, the format of the file with it's limitation was not.

It got me thinking though, he was sat there, I'm sure earning more than myself, and he only had a jogging mental map of memory sizes, so I took a look at the Standard website, particularly the CS101 course... sure enough:

• "Byte" - unit of information storage
• A document, an image, a movie .. how many bytes?
• 1 byte is enough to hold 1 typed letter, e.g. 'b' or 'X'
• Later we'll look at storage in: RAM, hard drives, flash drives
• All measured in bytes, despite being very different hardware
• Kilobyte, KB, about 1 thousand bytes
• Megabyte, MB, about 1 million bytes
• Gigabyte, GB, about 1 billion bytes
• Terabyte, TB, about 1 trillion bytes (rare)

(Source: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/bits-bytes.html)

Yeah, a terabyte is rare?... NOPE!... A kilobyte is not "about" anything it is exactly 1024 bytes, and a megabyte is not about 1 million bytes, it's exactly 1024 kilobytes, therefore exactly 1048576.  By using this "about" prefix they had made a megabyte sound 4.8576% smaller than it actually is, that's not insignificant!

And so forth.

This looks very much like an out of date page, but it is the first search result from google too!

Even wikipedia gets the right values before this page did!

Tech Pricing - The UK Getting A Bad Deal - International Shipping & UK Import

With the news today that Samsung is not going to be selling laptops in Europe, I wondered about how in the future we here in the UK would be able to get our grubby mitts on their Chromebook offering, and other hardware.

Whilst trawling the interwebs, I became more and more infuriated, now this is a matter I've seen before, but I've largely ignored it.  But with the purse strings needing tightening here at home I've had to think carefully about hardware changes and upgrades, but this problem I'm going to put forward just pisses me right off...

International Pricing... Specifically with technology kit, I was watching a review from Linus Tech Tips, and he was telling how this kit he had costs less than $1000 US... That's £612.89 at the time of writing, not a bad price for the overall package he was touting... However, paying for the exact same kit, from supposedly the same suppliers here in the UK came to a wallet busting, mind numbing, pay-packet stealing rip off price of £1014.58, over a thousand pounds, which is $1655.41... A six hundred dollar price hike...

I could pay for the same goods in the US, pay shipping and import and not end up paying as much!

Here's an example, two Amazon pages, both showing the same item (honest it is the same graphics card, just different pictures)..

£330 to $339... It almost seems as if they've taken the dollar price and slapped a pound sign in front of it, this clearly aids them, in this particular case the card comes to £208 if we convert the dollar price to sterling... £208 for the latest graphics card seems a lot better than £330... So where does the additional £110 come from?

Well, I looked at "Value Added Tax" in both the UK and US... I wondered if Amazon UK was having to add more, and it seems not, most "General Sales Taxes" in the US are calculated per state, and start around 23.5%, so that's more than the VAT 20% rate in the UK... So the US is paying a lower price even after tax.

Okay, what about shipping?... Are there significant shipping costs to bring goods into the UK?... Nope, same container ships burning the same fuel... And then once in the UK they are moved around on a single tank of fuel, unlike the US where deliveries are quite literally transcontinental!

So, if the sellers of goods are not paying more to deliver, and we in the UK are not paying more in TAX where does this £110 hike come from?...

It plainly seems to be because of greed, I can't fathom out a single other reason for the difference, all the goods I've looked at are made in the far east, it's just as far to sail them across the Pacific or around to Britain... It's less distance from any port to Amazon warehouses in the UK because we're such a small island, even if we look at Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Mann they all stack up to be less distance than some of the Amazon Warehouses from Manhattan!

All in all, it makes my blood boil... 

So, what if I just bought the goods from the US?.. Well, apparently here in the UK I'd then have to pay Tax again, so I've paid for the goods taxed in the US, then to even bring them into the country I have to pay again?...

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/customs/post/buying.htm

This, this just makes no sense, in this modern age of the internet and it is full of holes, I can go onto Steam log into a US server and order then download a game, paying for it once in one place, I can do this with Music, with Films, with Streaming services, with Porn, with News, with almost anything on the screen... But I have to pay tax to import the screen, and pay for the imported delivery service, and pay to then get it off of the customs chaps who poke and prod it?... Mental.

And I think just a way for the exchequer to keep an eye on what I'm doing, and to skim off the top.

So, how much do I pay?... Well, say it's this £208 graphics card... This comes under the "Non-EU Country" and its "All Other Goods", and I have to pay "Customs Duty on goods with a value that exceeds £135" and "import VAT on goods with a value that exceeds £15"

So how much are these two costs?

Well, the HMRC website doesn't want to give you clear straight forward figures, they give calculators for VAT deadlines, link upon link to registering for VAT.... But never do they give a figure...

So you go to the internet to find out, and you're met with searches which ironically relate to overseas imports from overseas countries... For example this: http://www.dutycalculator.com/popular-import-items/import-duty-and-taxes-for-graphics-card/ it has a very nifty calculator, so I stuck the $339 price in, selected $50 shipping and $20 insurance, so this is a total of $409, which is still only £250, so we're still making a saving on our price even importing the item...

The calculation site gives us zero duty, and 20% VAT, to be added, this brings the price to £300... Still a £30 saving.

It's a lot of faffing about, but it's a possible saving... My question now is, who wants to try this out?

Robin Hood in North Carolina

In case you missed things, I'm in Nottingham England, the land of Robin Hood - an international phenomenon ignored in this his fair county...

But Robin Hood is not ignored everywhere...

Like Jacksonville North Carolina... I was happy to be looking for directions, and somehow the system got stuck in the US, and... Well... This is what I saw....

I was impressed, streets with classic names...