Saros posted:

Also worth mentioning you could work for a while at a patent office as a foot in the door. If you speak German or French the EPO is a solid choice but the UK office is generally well enough regarded even if it's in Newport. For applying to firms you'll need a very good academic record going all the way back to school. Yes they care very much about how academic you were when you were fifteen, no it's never made sense to me except as a way to exclude the 'wrong' sort of people (check out the diversity of the profession, I think it's literally among the least diverse professions despite needing a strong international contingent by the very nature of the work).

It's quite different by fields. If you're in bio of some sort for the love of god don't do it while chemistry, computer sciences and some sorts of engineering are much better. Finally fair warning patent attorneys tend towards being extremely weird people though this is less prevalent in the under 35's or so.

Rust Martialis posted:

There is no ethical emission under capitalism.

ThomasPaine posted:

A few gigs of photos lmao

Guavanaut posted:

That might be the cable for the digital photo frame, but why a digital photo frame would have a 13A cable I don't know. (I bet the thin cable is for the photo frame and the coffee maker plug is tucked behind it, lol)

OwlFancier posted:

13A photo frame is for when you need to broadcast your dog pictures to the entire street.

Like a wifi pineapple with pictures of tories and dogs on it.

Guavanaut posted:

Or worse.

namesake posted:

Brexit stockpile innit?

tritsch posted:

If the internet goes out you can always go foraging for woods' porn.

Miftan posted:

Are you overcome with unmanageable masterbation urges?

OwlFancier posted:

I don't want to be squatting in the forest furiously masturbating in front of a peen and titty mushroom tyvm.

Szmitten posted:

sebzilla posted:

'member when you used to find a damp copy of Razzle under a hedge and show all your mates?

We need to Leave the EU on the 31st of October to get back to traditional British woodland smut-gathering ways.

OwlFancier posted:

I don't want to be squatting in the forest furiously masturbating in front of a peen and titty mushroom tyvm.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

WE'RE READY TO RELIEVE YOU !!

ThomasPaine posted:

A few gigs of photos lmao

Guavanaut posted:

I have a mental image of a huge bearded guy wearing a cloak and hat and wanking in the woods amongst the mushrooms.

Between this and the previous folklore chat about how gnomes historically didn't have to be small, I have to ask...

Sanitary Naptime posted:

Has anyone considered a pool as to when we might have an extension agreed? The last charity one was quite good.

Miftan posted:

Battersea Cats & Dogs are still sending me things because of that one.

quote:

One in three councils are using computer algorithms to help make decisions about benefit claims and other welfare issues, despite evidence emerging that some of the systems are unreliable.

Companies including the US credit-rating businesses Experian and TransUnion, as well as the outsourcing specialist Capita and Palantir, a data-mining firm co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, are selling machine-learning packages to local authorities that are under pressure to save money.

A Guardian investigation has established that 140 councils out of 408 have now invested in the software contracts, which can run into millions of pounds, more than double the previous estimates.

The systems are being deployed to provide automated guidance on benefit claims, prevent child abuse and allocate school places. But concerns have been raised about privacy and data security, the ability of council officials to understand how some of the systems work, and the difficulty for citizens in challenging automated decisions.

It has emerged North Tyneside council has dropped TransUnion, whose system it used to check housing and council tax benefit claims. Welfare payments to an unknown number of people were wrongly delayed when the computer’s “predictive analytics” erroneously identified low-risk claims as high risk.

[...]

Gwilym Morris, a management consultant who works with IT providers to the public sector, said the complexity of the systems meant the leadership of local authorities “don’t really understand what is going on” and this raised questions about how citizens’ data was used.

North Tyneside stopped using TransUnion’s system last month. It automatically processed data about claimants for housing and council tax benefit to determine the likelihood it was fraudulent – “risk based verification”. But most of the cases deemed high risk by the software were in fact lower risk, and benefit claims were wrongly delayed.

A council report concluded: “TransUnion provides no reason for a case meeting a high-risk category and it was found that in most cases, the reason for it being high risk could not be established … There was no reason for the payment to be withheld, but claims had been delayed.”

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/oct/15/councils-using-algorithms-make-welfare-decisions-benefits

Sanitary Naptime posted:

Has anyone considered a pool as to when we might have an extension agreed? The last charity one was quite good.

Miftan posted:

Battersea Cats & Dogs are still sending me things because of that one.

yaffle posted:

:Stockpiling porn for Brexit:

Sanitary Naptime posted:

The idea of an “outsourcing specialist” being readable as anything other than “dumping ground” loving boggles my mind

quote:

Sunderland council awarded a contract for a new “intelligence hub” to Palantir in 2014 as part of a plan to make efficiency savings. Last year, it was announced the authority faces a budget gap of about £50m over the next three years.

The hub was used to analyse data to help with the Troubled Families programme, to bring together information on those at risk of sexual exploitation, and to help find areas at risk of flooding. The council said it did not hold a review of the project and did not know how much had been saved.

A council spokesperson said it was always the authority’s intention not to renew the contract and Palantir had worked alongside staff to transfer knowledge so the council would become “self-sufficient”.

Sanitary Naptime posted:

Has anyone considered a pool as to when we might have an extension agreed? The last charity one was quite good.

Junior G-man posted:

I'm fully ready for the dystopia:


Can't wait for Peter Thiel to make blood and death decisions from afar.

Sanitary Naptime posted:

The idea of an “outsourcing specialist” being readable as anything other than “dumping ground” loving boggles my mind

E: someone good at spreadsheets please lead this, I’m going to end up single if I take on any more goon projects

Vvv e: if brexit were advertised as having only britporn available there’s no way it would have won

Pochoclo posted:

Sometimes humans can have this annoying thing called "empathy" which can hurt your bottom line as a businessgovernment, so it's important to throw enormous amounts of money at Tory donorscapable free market corporations to build new amazing brave technologies that can be used as an excuse so the employees ensuring the poor die of hunger don't feel bad about it.

"sorry mate the system rejected you for some unknown reason" is much easier than actually justifying a decision

NoneMoreNegative posted:

WE'RE READY TO RELIEVE YOU !!

Nenonen posted:

Boris Johnson is going to block access to europorn

Junior G-man posted:

Oh ok, so there's a massive budget shortfall anyway, and the 5 million paid to Peter Thiel could've helped hire some staff, but instead let's activate the wondermachine even though no-one can tell what it does, how much it saves, and we didn't check any of this poo poo.

Miftan posted:

Battersea Cats & Dogs are still sending me things because of that one.