This sort of thing is why I think Corbyn's strategy of opening distaining the media may ultimately pay off. I'm hoping that people will tune more and more of this noise out and then start going directly to source when they want to hear what someone has to say.

The Internet certainly is making it a lot easier to go directly to the source, and skip the old-fashioned media.

I think the point OP is making is that the people who went to University 100-200 years ago didn't have to worry about employability because they were usually from wealthy families. What has happened in the intervening time is that higher education has extended down the income scale and as such more students need jobs at the end of their degrees.

The costs have also dramatically risen, so people view their education as an investment as opposed to an interest.

I'm curious to see the interaction between self driving cars and bicycle friendly cities. What about banning human driven cars from a city and then using the resultant savings in road space to make it more cycle friendly?

The thing is that is the employees that pay the the income tax _not_ Facebook. Facebook (and others) are still not paying the taxes on the the income they earn from operating in the UK no matter how many people they employ at high salaries.

The choice you present is a false one, the multiplier productivity effect that Facebook employees gain from operating in London as opposed to Dublin far outweighs what Facebook would end up paying in corporation tax under a more reasonable system.

You forgot the VAT that Facebook's UK clients have to pay, the VAT Facebook have to pay on their expenses in the UK, the council tax that they have to pay on their offices, the pension and NI contributions they have to make, etc, etc.

At the end of the day, they aren't a UK corporation, so why should their corporation tax by high?

To be honest, it's hard for me to really form an opinion on this when the information provided by the media is so superficial. For that reason I tend to share mrkmcknz's sentiment. It all smells too much of the kind of trolling that's institutionalised in the media now.

It's just a representation of a collection of photons taken at a particular point in time and space.

... Context is everything

Yeah, its a nice idea but doesn't seem to work at the moment, give it a few months and someone may well implement it properly.

As an aside does anyone recognise what they've used for the data vis on http://www.submetrics.org/#/about ?

It looks quite similar to a graph visualization method I once used in Gephi [1].

[1] https://gephi.github.io/images/screenshots/preview4.png

Yep, it's Gephi !

It may be a bit of a liberal reading of it but doesn't the database that the patent is stored in on that page violate the patent? It certainly has date stamped data which is ingested and query-able...

Just wait for the next patent to be approved by USPTO: "Method of assigning exclusive rights to an inventor."

Who wants to file "Method of assigning exclusive rights to an inventor." with me?

My favourite quote on this (from the UK perspective) from Ross Anderson (one of the co-authors): “A point I would like to make to the prime minister and his circle is: whoever put the prime minister up to this should get a complete bollocking. The proposals are wrong in principle and unworkable in practice.”

There is no quicker way of alienating people who understand complex things than by pretending that you know better and have thought of a brilliant solution.