Garacesh

Yeah, fair point. Not that they should have to, in an ideal world, but eh. If my choices were "They call the shots so you know you're getting it right" or "You get it wrong and upset/offend/annoy them", I know which option I'd take.

Best way to be Those that can question any position, or play devil's advocate, are more capable dialectical thinking, which I personally consider to be a favourable trait. It's a fair point. I mean you have to accept that in any kind of communication (written, spoken, whatever) we're subconsciously analysing the content in contrast with the manner in which language is used. Despite 'sex' and 'gender' being, scientifically speaking, two completely separate concepts, in common parlance they're the same thing, so even being aware of the distinction we would most likely unconsciously associate "the gender of the headteacher" to mean we were being asked about their biological sex, when that may not be accurate nor fair on the member of staff or the requester, or both, to assume. That being said, I'm not going to be the guy that tries to verify it. If our headteacher says she's Jane Doe, I'm not going to ask her to prove it If I were answering the question and we had a headteacher who was known to be transgender, my first inclination would be to respond with their assigned/accepted gender, not their biological one (More likely I'd ask them if that were OK first, but then again I have more dealings with trans people than the average person so I may not be the fairest example). ... Then again, if the head wasn't known to be transgender, I wouldn't know either, so the point is kinda moot.

For the record, I actually agree with you - but only with the context of the Headteacher (or anyone else that legally has to be disclosed online) Anyone that must be legally disclosed should be offered the choice of how they are disclosed, and therefore if Mr. Joe Bloggs would be happier identifying themselves as Miss Jane Bloggs, they should be given that choice. However, whichever they choose to identify themselves as should be their identity until they say otherwise, because that's what they've chosen. In an ideal world, Joe should be free to identify themselves as Jane and nobody bats an eye, but I'm sure there would be situations where they might feel they would be ridiculed by the students or seen as less of an authority by the staff or something, and therefore choose not to. But we humans have a tendency to muck stuff up when we're factored into the equation. My point, much like yours, is that they are free to choose the identity they present, and as such if an FOI request requests information about that identity, a response should be given in accordance with that identity. If Joe Bloggs did put themselves as Miss Jane Bloggs online, I would expect "Headteacher's Gender" to be responded with "Female". So yes, the presented gender may very well be different from their actual gender, (psychologically speaking, and ignoring biology), but when you have to disclose an identity (accurate or otherwise) by law, your hands are kind of tied. Perhaps there's room to tweak the regulations for disclosing certain members of staff to accommodate this scenario better? I vaguely recall something along those lines, yes. But that's a statistical outlier of incredibly rare frequency. My point being people make such a fuss about gender identity (which can be understandable, given how much of a role gender plays in the average persons life) but there isn't often any kind of dysphoria or disassociation with other biological factors. Now perhaps that's a sign that we as a society aren't as fussy about race as we are sex/gender, and since people don't feel so much of a pressure about their race they are less likely to notice a similar psychological dissonance between any other biological/psychological traits. So maybe it does happen, but people don't notice. Or maybe we just put so much focus on gender that people feel that something is 'wrong', or 'different' when things don't marry up as perfectly as perhaps society thinks they 'should', and maybe if we stopped putting so much focus on gender in the first place, there'd be less of an issue, because people wouldn't feel the need to box themselves into 'male' or 'female' genders and we'd all be more comfortable as a society with things being a bit more loose and fluid.. Food for thought.

Well, yes. Precisely. You can't change your sex, because your sex is biological. It's in your DNA. So until we get some freaky mad scientists doing some freaky gene splicing stuff (someone give me plasmids!), you can't change your sex. A transwoman will still be biologically male. If you took a DNA sample and passed it to a scientist to analyse, they'd tell you it was male. But as a generalisation, we as a society respect gender identity and refer to people by their self-identity instead. Sex is a label given to biological and genetic characteristics. There are two contrasting sexes in human beings and most other mammals: Male and Female. Males have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, while Females have two X chromosomes. This is referred to as the XY Sex-Determination System. There are, as always, genetic outliers to this system, such as XXY or XXXY Males, but as a general rule, this is Sex. For example, a vet would 'Sex' your puppies to tell you if they were biologically male or female. Gender is a psychological term referring to one's self-identity. A biological male can have a female gender identity, and vice verca. Of course, a biological male can also have no gender identity, or a gender identity that is neither male nor female. In fact, there are some that argue that gender in of itself shouldn't be such a focal part of identity. After all, we don't ask what your 'racial identity' is, do we? Or any other biological characteristic? We don't have transrace people. Or transspecies people (discounting 'otherkin'), so why should such a focus be on gender? In the case of male/female gender identity, though, many people with gender dysphoria choose to still present their gender as matching their biological sex until some form of criteria is met, which varies from person. This could be anything from 'when I think people will accept me', 'when my children are mature enough to understand', 'when I start HRT' or simply 'when I feel I can 'pass' for my gender identity' - it doesn't really matter what the reason is, the point is that there are plenty of people who present themselves as having one gender identity when really they have another. So.. Is Gender Identity personal information? Well, yes. I'd say it is. It can be used to identify you, after all.

Just out of interest, @bmaloney, where do you plan to go with this now? Do you think a smaller sample size and fewer questions might be a good place to start? Or are you still thinking you need the large sample and maybe you'll look to hiring an organisation that specialises in this kind of thing? FWIW, I hope you're still going to press forward with this, but I think it's worth putting the past behind us and starting again from the beginning.

I say this as a Star Wars fan who owns multiple lightsabers: I'm considerably more excited about another Dragons instalment than I am about the Solo movie.

I remember playing Rampage on the Mega Drive. There's not really much of a screenplay you could adapt that into. I assumed it would just a 'veg out, watch the pretty explosions' type of movie. I assume it's big nasty monsters start terrorising a city (bonus cliché points if it's New York), humans come in to save the day, make it worse, $MovieStar shows up, does something risky all maverick-like and saves the day?

I always see people touting NG+ as something desirable, people begging devs to implement it after games launches and stuff and I just... never got the hype. Am I the only one that doesn't enjoy games being stupid-crazy-difficult? I want a challenge, sure, but I'm more concerned with the narrative than I am the difficulty. I blame the Souls-esque 'git gud' crowd. I think it takes considerably more skill from a developer to slowly and invisibly introduce new enemies/concepts/hazards/whatever in a safe® environment that allows the player to figure it out, rather than throwing it at you with no warning and just saying "lol git gud". Game mechanics shouldn't need to be brute-forced by the player in order to be understood.

This is precisely the issue. Nobody is saying you shouldn't be asking for this information. Again, I want to reiterate that I actually support what you're trying to do. It just comes across that you're trying to do some of it the wrong way. Asking for this much information from this many schools means someone, somewhere, is going to have to put in a lot of effort to match up all the responses, map trends, etc. There's a lot of analysis on these datasets. You don't want to do all that analysis yourself. Y'know what? I don't blame you. That's a lot of work. I wouldn't want to tackle that all on my onesie either! Simply put, you're asking for more information than your organisation (i.e. you) is able to reasonably process. That is not our fault. It doesn't mean you get to just offload it onto the Schools and onto Google without any input from yourself. Consider, then, the issue lies with the amount of data the request generates, rather than the amount of effort it would take to sift through all the data.. Perhaps cut down the request? Maybe only ask two or three schools per county? That would still get you an incredibly good sample. Yes your information wouldn't be quite as accurate, but it would be enough to point out a trend and say "Hey, look, I think there's something here we should be looking at...". From there you could approach organisations sympathetic to your cause (perhaps a charity of some sorts?) that could offer you some resources towards further investigation, or maybe crowd-fund the money required to hire a company who could handle the information from every school?

Perhaps that's an issue with you using Google Forms, then? We've been through this. (Please, someone, correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK:) You do not have the right to tell us in what format we should be submitting the responses. You are allowed to say "I want to know about X" You are not allowed to say "I want to know about X, you may only respond by Y" This is just leading back to the argument of "You're trying to offload your data assessment part onto the schools and that's unfair and not how the FOIA is meant to work" argument but the fact is, you're not within your rights to do that in the first place. You have to accept that if you're requesting so much data from so many schools there's going to be a significant admin overhead - that's why FOI requests of this scale are usually performed by organisations with lots of people who can chip in to evaluate the responses. The admin overhead is on you. Stop trying to dodge it.

Dunno about anywhere else, but I do, and occasionally I have staff forward me emails saying something along the lines of "Not sure if this is OK?" It's probably not a policy that's written down anywhere, but every IT tech will have a system to decide whether an email is genuine or not, however you did not include that in a valid FOI request, and therefore we are not obliged to explain our process to you. If someone asked me "Well how do you check if links are legit?" after I refused to click on one they'd emailed me, I would just assume they were being argumentative or stubborn. No it doesn't. Now you're just being silly. You have to accept that schools get a myriad of spam and a myriad of malicious links and files emailed to us. The Head's PA (by virtue of running Office@) and the Bursar are constantly up to their neck in it, but since they get it so often they're used to it and can pick out what's real and what isn't 99% of the time. You can like it or lump it, but "don't click links from people you don't know and weren't expecting" is advice I'm going to continue to give under the circumstances.

Well... Yeah..? I'm not really sure what your point is here...? Hijacking an email account and sending malicious files/links to all entries in the contract book is a ridiculously common attack vector. Which is why we also teach people not to click on links or files they don't expect, too.

Oh, really? I watched a bit of Race to the Edge but I didn't really stick with it. Not to say it was bad, I think I just started bingeing something else and didn't go back to it lol.

Yup, unfortunately FOIA is able to be abused this way, and there's money to be made abusing it, so people do. We can refuse to take part in "market research" just because (though, annoyingly, TPS doesn't bar "market research" calls) but it takes more to refuse an FOI request. FWIW, I think @bmaloney's request was certainly more in line with the spirit of the act, and privately speaking I do think they're trying to make a point that does need making, it was just improperly formatted and it's important both sides stick to the rules otherwise we end up setting a precedent for answering questions that fail to comply.

This, along with 'Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs 2', are my go-to examples of 'Sequels which were actually better than the original films' (well, where the original films were bloody good themselves.)

I get what you're saying, it would probably be worth appending something like "where the hyperlink is not trusted, expected or fitting within the context of the communication." As much as it is explained (and could be argued 'fitting within the context') I think it's acceptable to categorise a link in an email from someone you don't know and weren't expecting as 'untrusted'. I think that anybody wanting to improve the chances of having their FOI request (or any communication, for that matter) responded to would do well to bear this in mind, and keep all of the information in the actual email. No external links, no attachments, the basics of e-mail give you more than enough to convey your message appropriately.

Replaying Bioshock 2, only in 'nasty man' mode this time (harvesting Little Sisters) Every time I've played Bioshock I've always been nice, but I just wanted to see how different the game felt to get a power spike earlier and end up worse off by the end of it. The Little Sisters constantly remind you they've been a 'good girl' and hope you 'aren't mad' and stuff Now I feel even more like a jerk.

And would you look at that, when you use the international ISO, it puts it in English (Amusingly it also gives us 24H time rather than 2x12.. Take from that what you will)

I want to join in, but I got nothin'. I guess I'll fold.

Yep. That'll probably be it. SW_DVD5_WIN_ENT_LTSB_2016_64BIT_English_MLF_X21-07421.iso vs SW_DVD5_WIN_ENT_LTSB_2016_64BIT_Eng_Intl_MLF_X21-07479.iso Rookie mistake.

Been trawling the webs for this one and haven't really come across a whole bunch. There's talk of using an unattend.xml but not much about what one of those is or how to make one. There's also talk of using a Set Dynamic Variables task in the Task Sequence but that hasn't seemed to have worked Keyboards are still in en-US after imaging.

One of the big problems I'm seeing people mention is that you respawn on the closest island when you die, so you've basically got this war of attrition going on between ships. A crew sets their sights on your and wants your plunder, you sink them. You're attacking back, repairing your ship, healing yourself.. Using up your stock of cannonballs, wood planks and bananas, and the people you sunk are respawning at the closest island with a fresh new ship and new supplies, so PvP becomes this 'keep throwing bodies at them and whittling them down' scenario. If they're better than you are at PvP, you're going to have supplies long after they've ran out.

See also: Jane Lynch cosplaying as Sergeant Calhoun

We use Wasp. The barcode-scanner we have gathers dust, but as an asset management tool it works.

Honestly, (and I can't believe I'm saying this, this is me, who loves to argue!) I think locking the thread is the correct way to go. There's really not much progress I can see happening until the appeal is concluded. Whilst the discussion about parents being separated and how the school should/does communicate with them is an interesting one, it is considerably off-topic for this thread.