With HMRC, the reasoning is that this forces the company to have an accounting package. They don't care which, they just define the API. Not unreasonable. There are more issues with MTD IT (making tax digital, income tax) due to some detailed requirement decisions such as the need to report different income streams separately.

Could Garibaldi read Narn?

HTCPCP. Btw, the RFC is buggy. I once used it as a comprehension test for first round interviews, and had to be careful to avoid the bugs.

It is easy, yes. About the equivalent of two or three A levels for anyone in the UK. However the point is not networking, but understanding large areas of business operation that you don't already know. For people like us, that's generally things like strategy, finance, marketing (which isn't the same thing as advertising), organisational behaviour (effectively applied sociology), HR (the weakest area of the course I took). It's not particularly useful for networking, since the people you meet are at your own level.

> understanding large areas of business operation that you don't already know

Library card, google search, LLM, Annas archive, not even joking. I've seen the curriculum, its the kind of stuff you read a book about on a weekend.

> not particularly useful for networking, since the people you meet are at your own level.

I think you may have missed the point of the MBA.

A library card etc. are useful, but a very long way from the usefulness of a planned and taught course. And no, I haven't missed the point - you most certainly have. There are useful methods of networking, and they are based on breadth (how many people you meet), depth (how specific your discussions can be) and length of engagement. People from completely different industries whom you meet over coffee in a group exercise are not that, and would not justify the cost of the course. What does justify it is what you learn.

I just find it odd that Mark Zuckerberg runs a multi-billion Dollar business without an MBA.

He just kind of taught himself that in his spare time.

I guess some people get alot of value out of the 'knowledge' you gain from an MBA..

I view it as a signal to other MBAs as to the type of manager you are.

> including the famously flat Lincolnshire fens.

I think they might have gotten flatter in the intervening 200M+ years.

So, you expected a map that omits all adjoining land to the mountains?

Most people wouldn't object to an article about Kilimanjaro containing a map of where it is in Tanzania, but for reference, here is a map of just the mountain: O.

If the map labelled the whole of Tanzania, Kenya, and Malawi as being Kilimanjaro, yes, I would have a problem with that.

The current models are apparently ok. Wet clutch, which realistically won't wear out and is certainly not vulnerable to the engine seal failure which traditionally took out BMW clutches, and from what I gather they don't require the bike to be returned to kit form to change it. Also they finally got rid of the Bochum indicator switches.

BMW bikes have improved. It used to be with the last of the dry clutch flat twins that when the clutch failed (and it would fail), you had to remove the back half of the bike. Literally. As in not figuratively, to avoid doubt. The front half would be left standing, like some bisected cow artwork. Apparently it was a two day job.

Funny, I posted a pic to exactly that further down in the thread.

I mean, they are generally excellent motorcycles. Their monocylinders are super smooth with great handling.

But often you have to deal with those weird engineering decisions that make repairs annoying. My local garage is a BMW car specialist, and it appears that it's basically the same deal.

Funnily enough, in my youth I visited the BMW factory in Munich, and I was amazed back then. But the maintenance fails to amaze as much, haha.

This is an area I have some peripheral involvement with. For retrofitted sails on bulkers, the figure of 10% saving in fuel is the usual one mentioned rather than 20%. However given the long life of ships, there is much more interest in retrofit than in new build.

You mention container ships. I haven't seen anything explicit on these, and I think the reason is probably that they cruise much faster than bulkers and tankers, which means the potential savings from sail is smaller. I would have thought 20% optimistic even for a new-build.

Retro fit is clearly a preferred path for a new approach given ship life spans and size of existing global transport fleet.

My gut objection to the container approach taken above in the first link was existing container locking mechanisms for ships can struggle in severe weather to keep the boxes on the boat .. additional forces from a sail (in good weather) might well mimic the forces that break stacks in bad weather.

Your point is well taken, I might suggest that container ships could be segregated into fast and slow cargo and that might help somewhat with total fleet fuel consumption. (pure spitball notion).

I'm sure there's plenty of businesses out there who'd love to advertise near zero or zero emissions transport for their goods, with the caveat that they have to plan a few more months ahead.

Also if possible, use a unique email address for each site. I know that's not feasible for most people, and some sites (e.g. LinkedIn) are structured so that email addresses become linked, but it does provide useful isolation.

No. I oppose any formal requirement to practice software development. And this isn't because I disagree about the requirement to be ethical, but because it would draw a moat of "professionalisation" around software development, excluding new entrants. It's a fashionable trend across many disciplines: it starts innocuously with informal groups and seminars. Then someone starts one or more professional bodies which devise some sort of qualification. Then they start charging a yearly or triennial renewal fee for that qualification. Then they try to make it impossible to get work without their qualification. The profession comes under the thumb of people who spend their time getting on to the committees which control these professional bodies.

That can be reasonable for something like medicine or structural engineering. But is it appropriate for a developer cranking out Javascript or Excel macros? This is pulling up the drawbridge behind you, excluding anyone who comes to the profession through informal means - and in my generation, that meant almost everyone. It also means that you will need to determine how much of your time you dedicate to politics.

Those are all fair points, but the Internet and smartphones happened. Software is a necessity for existing in society these days. Yeah it sucks that we'd be pulling up the drawbridge. Donate some of your software developer salary to non-profits to make testing accessible to whichever groups you see as the younger version of you to assuage your guilt. Crowdstrike shouldn't have been possible. Mulitple airlines going down for days because they botched an upgrade because it wasn't properly resourced. Someone cranking out some silly shit on the weekend doesn't need licensing, but having unprotected S3 buckets full of drivers license photos of your users in this day and age should be criminally liable.

There you are discussing ability and responsibility. Those are entirely different matters from a professional association requiring you to sign up to a code of ethics.

They are not. That's the point of a professional association, to connect ability with responsibility. It defines what competence looks like and how to enforce it when it fails. Without that link, you just have people claiming skill with no mechanism for accountability. Most of software already looks like that which is the entire problem!