Posts by johnB 123 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
What possible purpose - other than making their bid for the work sound "sexy" - is there in using AI for pension payments, for deities sake?
Pensions are about as simple as it gets: "Pay X the sum of £Y until he / she / it dies".
It's worked for many years without AI.
And it's Crapita. What possibly could go wrong?
In Newcastle, Barclays closed three city centre branches & opened a new branch in the middle of the main (Nothumberland Street) shopping street.
The Market St branch, now a restaurant, had a couple of sandstone plaques about 60 X 60 cm that must have been there for many years, engraved with "Barclays & Co, Bankers" & the like.
I suggested to them that they might fit in well if they were installed in the lobby of the new branch - would show continuity, etc, etc.
They referred my comments to their complaints section, who never made the promised response.
It's not the amount (at least here in the UK) of energy a house uses in a day, it's the amount of electricity it uses. The quote ignores space heating, which is more than that by a factor of about 4.
It's bad enough when media types, bless their innumerate selves, get confused, but in a technical setting this simply shouldn't happen.
I've spent years ranting about non-metric measurements.
But I've got to admit the American usage of cups in certain recipes is by far easier than using spoons, weigh scales & measurers.
Some recipes are actually more dependent on ratios, not volumes / weights.
e.g. my morning porridge (for two) is one cup of porridge (oatmeal) & two cups of semi-skimmed milk. No scales, etc & washing up simpler.
Otherwise, yup, systems other than metric are simply bonkers. (And far too error-prone).
Every time I read about crypto currency I get more baffled.
Why would I (or anyone else) want to part with real money for an IOU, whether paper or "digital", from someone I don't know, can't find, and have no means of trusting? All I can do with the crypto is swap it for other crypto or hope it's still got some value when I want to change it back to usable currency.
The only use I can see is for nefarious purposes - and even then I'm not so sure. I'd hazard a guess that all the cryptos are under quite close inspection by law enforcement authorities & tax agencies. Surely as soon a swap of real money is made some red flags are set? Especially if our friend blockchain is involved.
Great plane for passengers - it just seems to float into the sky from takeoff. Amazing given it’s huge bulk. I seem to recall the wingtips rise by something like 2 (or is it 4 ?) metres by the time it takes off.
I look forwards to reflying it once this pandemic is past. (Emirates to Dubai means I don’t have to use Heathrow - a holiday bonus in itself).
Seems to me to be a typical swiss cheese error:
* IT didn't delete her access at the right time - unclear why
* Aggrieved (ex-)employee
* Ex-employee decides to abuse IT's error / oversight
What's interesting to me is why she was able to delete stuff. As has been said, the data IS effectively the credit union & should be more or less impossible to delete, if for no other reason than compliance with corporate reporting, taxes, etc. Surely deleting critical data shouldn't be an option for someone apparently fairly low down on the food chain?
Alternatively, $10K is peanuts to most companies, esp in the financial sector, so maybe it was deemed an acceptable risk of doing business?
As updates for Android only run for a couple pf years I'd guess most Androids are insecure by virtue of running an out-of-date OS.
So running a banking app on Android seems a dubious practice at best. Even if the OS is currently up to date, it'll probably be no longer so by the time the device is disposed of.
I sold a property as executor & the solicitor was content to sign on my behalf. However, she did know the family both professionally & personally, so maybe that made a difference.
In the case here, the email shown doesn't seem to carry any of the regular caveats, e.g. "E&OE", "this is an offer","final terms to be agreed",etc, etc, so possibly that influenced the judges thinking.
Whatever, I think this needs to be considered on appeal by a higher court so some clarity based on precedence can be established.
"While 98 per cent of Universal Credit claimants make their claim online there is support for people who need extra help. Staff are on hand to help people to claim and we can give support over the phone or through a home visit where needed." ®
Not up here in the NE of England it isn't. Every week we get new UC claimants without IT skills referred to us by the JobCentre. The dialog seems to be:
"Fill in this 28 screen UC application & we'll consider your claim";
"But I don't have a computer & have never used one";
"Go to the library, they'll sort you out. In the meantime until the claim is completed & approved there's a food bank you might want to visit".
Is that I just can't rely on them to support their offerings.
For example, I used to find both My Tracks & Picasa simple, easy to use & useful. Google's dropped both. Finding suitable replacements has been a bit of a pain (and so far unsuccessful as far as Picasa's concerned).
They have the appearance of being a company long past it's innovative / growth stage & one now simply concentrating on protecting their market & profits. The story about their massive lobbying endeavours supports this. As is the way with most big US corporations, profits (i.e. bonuses) first, the long-term to be looked after by the next wonderkid brought in to save the sinking ship - Kodak anyone?
Not to my knowledge.
Staff at NI HQ always denied to me when I worked there that there was any such checksum. Not surprising for a system devised in the 1940's, long before computers. The first two (alpha) characters can give some indication of age, but that's more or less it, as far as I'm aware.
(VAT numbers are, however).
When my step mother died, I had the choice of re-taxing the car or "SORN-ing" it. Neither of which I could do as I wasn't the owner.
After long calls with DVLA I was told to just forge a signature.
And then of course there's the scam where they make you pay an extra month's tax when you trade in your car.
DVLA - wouldn't trust them to get the time of day right.
Yes,
Electronic may be easier to count, but for me doesn't meet the bill of being easily understandable, nor do I trust it.
Paper - a big pile of easily-examined votes for candidate "A" can be compared against the pile of votes for candidate "B", by any ordinary person.
Electronic needs intermediaries to examine the data & compile the results, with the non-expert being unlikely to be able to detect. And, given the pass of a few years, both the hardware & software are likely to be obsolete (think punched cards), effectively meaning analysis by later generations is difficult if not impossible.
After vowing never to let anything from Adobe onto any machine I was going to use ever again I switched from Adobe to Foxit some years ago. Life just got better.
Then my local public library forced me to use an Adobe product to read their on-line offerings. They haven't got any better.
No way I'd voluntarily sign up for anything from this outfit.
One point which tends to get overlooked in these discussions is just what is the overall effect of a Corporation Tax (at least as it works in the UK).
If megacorp makes a profit of (say) £/$/€1M, then it pays tax on those profits (not it's turnover, as some politicians would seek to imply. We use VAT to tax turnover.) at whatever rate it's home country charges.
If Corporation Tax didn't exist, then the same profits would still be taxed, only as dividend income in the hands of shareholders
So the net effect of a Corporation Tax is to bring more tax into the coffers of the "home" country, at the expense of shareholders - both domestic & foreign - who have less profits distributed to them. Nothing to do with "fairness", just a pre-emptive tax grab by the local government.
As one who watched Neil Armstrong make his "one small step...", what I've never figured out or had explained to me is just why we need the heat shield at all. Surely the craft could just spend longer gliding to earth?
Any commentards able to indicate just why or where I can find the answer appreciated.
I used a thumb drive for years and then when I plugged it into a Linux box I found a hidden partition with executables (and couldn't access the Windows partition).
So even after formatting a new drive, I reckon it's not possible to be secure knowing a drive is "clean". And this was from a known brand name, supplying UK gov't.
All a bit scary.
The middle / senior realms of the civil service are not where I'd look to find people with the skills to oversee such a project (I speak as one who was given a performance bonus for being the only member of the team able to apply a filter to an Excel spreadsheet).
In my experience of a (different) large civil service project, the aims & objectives were under constant review / adjustment, and consultants were able to utilise this lack of precision to pad the project out, giving every input from senior management an answer in the form of "yes, we can do that". Without, of course spelling out the costs & delays inherent. Needless to say, the deadline dates were wildly overshot.
Systems guru John Seddon of the Vanguard Method predicted this likely outcome when the project got underway in 2010, and, sadly but apparently inevitably, he seems to have been proven correct. (In brief, Seddon suggested the system be decentralised to local government and added to the Housing Benefit scheme they run, as they already held all the relevant data. It would have been up & running within a year, but not under the direct control of Whitehall).
One point that tends to get overlooked is that AFAIK Starbucks and other outfits are predominately franchise operations.
So mostly they are local businesses who can't escape paying the panoply of PAYE, NIC, VAT, Business rates, and Corporation Tax. They also pay royalties to the multinational for the use of the name and to receive marketing support, and it's those royalties we're talking about when we excoriate the megacorp for not paying taxes here. The local guy is just a businessman trying to earn a crust, so don't boycott him / her (and no, I've no connection to any franchise operators).
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