Posts by Len 889 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009
Ultimately what makes someone a good politician to vote for is their ideas, policy suggestions and ethics. Not whether they share a similar hobby.
Remember how we used to think brain surgeons had to be very smart people? And then Ben Carson went into politics?
I think the Brexit reference was not necessarily about the political clown-car-on-fire of it but more referring to the fact that literally nobody (not even the people whose job it is) knows what's going to happen to the UK's airports and borders in a few weeks time.
If I had scheduled a major international conference in April or May in the UK this year I would be shitting bricks right now.
Agreed, if you're organising an international event why would you do it in obscure places like Saudi Arabia, the US or Belarus? Just choose a developed nation with good transport connections and facilities. Canada, most of Europe, most of South America, parts of Asia would work just fine.
Fortunately the European Convention on Human Rights and its court, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, are not EU institutions and so leaving the EU will not affect the Convention. Ironically, I can see the amount of cases against the UK government using the Convention increase as that will now become the main way to curtail the UK government's inclination for authoritarianism.
Of course, there are quite a few far right elements in the Conservative Party that wish to abolish the UK's human rights act and the country's ties with the Convention. I doubt they are going to successful though, especially since what Brexit is going to do to the Conservative Party makes what invading Iraq did to the Labour Party look like a small scratch.
I was meaning to write "a hamburger menu doesn't state what it does". Hopefully that came across nonetheless.
I think the problem with a hamburger menu is that it only works if people have learned that a bunch of horizontal lines in a corner somewhere means a button that can be clicked to show settings or options. Ideally it should not be necessary to learn it, it should be obvious even for the person that encounters it the first time.
That way, however, lies the contentious stuff called skeuomorphic design. Some times it makes sense to design digital stuff the same as real world stuff to make its function immediately clear. Some times it's downright awful.
I am currently working with a young designer, fairly fresh out of his education, and he said that if they'd ever hand in a design with a hamburger menu he would fail the assignment. Exactly because a hamburger menu does state what it does.
Either it's not designers who are the cause of hamburger menus or we are witnessing a new generation of designers who would agree with you.
The key to design is not about tools. You can have 20 years of experience with Photoshop, know it inside out, and still be an absolute rubbish designer.
I have worked a lot with designers and the more I've worked with them the less I am inclined to do any of it myself and as I know I will fail.
Of course the basics of contract law will still apply. The other 27 countries have had contract law for centuries and will still have contract law after Brexit. They are not the ones changing, we are.
At the moment there is a whole host of agreements such as the 'Lugano Convention', the 'Brussels Regime', the 'Rome I Regulation' and the 'Rome II regulation' that deal with how the EU members, the EEA and Switzerland recognise each other's jurisdictions and courts, how to settle cross border legal disputes etc. Most of these would at some point during the transition be negotiated by the UK to limit the disruption to UK businesses. They will, however, most certainly not all be done and dusted before 29 March. That is why business worry about a No Deal crash out. The disruption is real.
An English court can say that an Austrian debtor is liable for a breach of contract but unless there are agreements between the UK and Austria (as there are now under EU law) that debtor might just decide to shrug their shoulders about the ruling of some foreign court. Austria is not going to extradite one of their citizens to the UK for a missed payment and for a UK business the cost of pursuing someone abroad may not add up.
"...subject to the jurisdiction of the English courts."
You're right of course, that's what it currently says. The problem is that, until there is a new agreement on how to solve cross border legal matters with the other 27, the English courts have lost a lot of the powers they currently have over people not residing in England and Wales. No Deal means that English courts are no longer automatically recognised in the other 27 countries.
For instance, we always have the "...subject to the jurisdiction of the English courts." in our contracts, even if the counterparty lives on the other side of the planet. We just have to hope that it looks impressive enough because taking a Cambodian client to an English court is not worth it.
Any government worth its salt wouldn't have triggered Art. 50 until it had decided what country it wanted to be in ten year's time and gotten three quarters of the country behind that vision. Even Nigel Farage called Art 50 a trap that would lead to a vassal state, and that was years before the word Brexit was invented. That was a major strategic blunder.
It took the UK Government 22 months to present the EU27 with their first proposal. And that proposal, "Chequers", was disliked by a large part of the population within a day. By playing their cards close to their chest the Government never showed their workings. They didn't show the people the touch choices, the options that were discussed but found inadequate, the downsides to certain options, the impact reports.
And now, with just weeks to go on the clock, we are still debating options that should have been debated and discarded as too damaging a year ago.
I am currently dealing with the headache of intra EU contracts.
What happens if you sell a good tomorrow to a customer in Sweden and it comes with a two year warranty? The good can be shipped this week without any issue. What if that customer wants to make a warranty claim six months after a No Deal? It's not a Good any more, it's a Service. Even the hardest fall back option of WTO trading doesn't deal with services at all.
What happens if a customer in Austria decides to stop paying their instalments after a No Deal? Just finding out which court would be appropriate is something nobody has had to think about until now.
Currently a B2B business doesn't have to charge VAT on intra EU invoices. That will probably change in case of No Deal, I have not found a definitive answer to that yet. Will I need to reopen all contracts to change pricing?
I have found a needle in a haystack the other day, someone who is dual qualified as a lawyer for English law and Dutch law. He is raking it in at the moment. Now on to find someone dual qualified in English and Portuguese law...
I had a meeting with two HMRC VAT chaps on Tuesday and they weren't even sure if they would still have a job in case of No Deal (in two months!) as most of their work depends on intra-EU trading VAT processes.
As for the contracting point. A friend of mine researched the effect of Brexit on staffing issues for one of her clients and created a table of least affected and most affected based on citizenship status. Quite useful for HR to know so they can adjust hiring practices etc.
* The lucky bastards were people with Irish Citizenship as they get to keep Freedom of Movement and the Common Travel Area.
* One level below them were non-British EU Citizens living in the UK as they get to keep their Freedom of Movement and their right to reside in the UK so can easily cross borders for work in any of the 28 countries (up to five year long stints).
* Below those were people with only UK Citizenship living in the UK. They are about to lose their EU Citizenship and therefore lose their Freedom of Movement. They can keep working in the UK but lose the right to work in the other 27 countries.
* At the bottom of the table were the poor bastards who live in other EU countries, are going to lose their EU Citizenship in two months and only have UK CItizenship to fall back on. In many cases they can stay were they are or move back to the UK, other routes are closed.
So yes, if you live in the UK and will still have your EU CItizenship after Brexit then you have quite a sweet deal when contracting is concerned.
There is not much point suing the EU, they are just following the process that the British people voted for. If you want to sue anyone, sue the UK government for destroying your assets.
You may think I'm joking but the fallout of Brexit will be going through British courts for many years after the politicians have stopped talking about it. I do sometimes believe that No Deal will not happen but if it does happen, just losing the Rome I and Rome II regulations will remove the legal basis under many everyday business operations. Fun and games if you are a lawyer, not if you're anyone else.
I don't see them being shutdown, if they don't comply with the law they will simply be fined. Shutting down would only happen if they don't pay their fines, keep re-offending and things escalate to criminal legal proceedings.
We are a very long way from that and very few businesses would want to miss 500 million of the wealthiest customers in the world.
I don't know where you are but the UK government has already said it will stick to the GDPR, regardless of what happens regarding leaving the EU. Not implementing GDPR would kill a lot of the UK tech business, the government is stupid but not that stupid.
If you are not in the EU then you could always choose not to collect data on EU Citizens or decide not to sell to them. I worked on a project in 2017 where we didn't want to spend six months wrestling with enormous amounts of American red tape, permits and faxing(!) forms. We simply decided to put an IP block on any American traffic and explicitly barred American Citizens from signing up to the service by warning them not to sign up and requiring new users to tick a box that they were not US CItizens. Worked a charm.
The reason many global companies did implement GDPR compliance, even if they were not in the EU, is because they would still like to sell to about half a billion of the world's richest people.
That is quite a good summary of what RTBF is and isn't.
The rule of thumb is that if you (or something you did) is important enough to be on Wikipedia then the RTBF is not going to help you. It doesn't erase crimes, it doesn't erase reported events. It may work for Joe Bloggs but it won't work for anyone with a modicum of notoriety.
I was working in the cybersecurity field when the RTBF campaign kicked into gear and met a lot of cyberbullying campaigners (and some victims) who were campaigning for a RTBF to deal with bullying cases. I will never forget the presentation by a victim whose ex-boyfriend had made a bunch of dubious pages with similarly dubious photos of her. This happened when she was 14 and she was now early twenties, graduated from an internationally renowned university but struggled to find work as any search for her name* produced a few Google pages of shit about her. Her only option was to change her name..
* No, I am not giving her name because if you know how to search many of the pages and dozens of copies of it are still splattered across the web, more than ten years later.
The EU does not have that right, that is precisely what the Advocate General (and quite possibly the CJEU soon) is stating. EU law applies in the EU, not outside of it.
There is a lot of de-facto (and even some de-jure by copying) operation of EU law globally, called the Brussels Effect, but it is called an effect for a reason. It's not necessarily intentional, things just work that way.
I think you're missing the asymmetry. For European firms the default will be to store data locally, in Europe. This automatically prevents the clash with European data sovereignty regulations. For non-European firms the default will be to store data locally outside Europe, meaning that they automatically clash with European data sovereignty regs. If you are a company that stored everything in a data centre in Amsterdam you had nothing to fear, if you stored everything in Virginia you do have problems and had to adapt.
These regulations require non-European internet giants to take more action to protect the privacy of their European customers than the other way around.
It won't be foreign governments putting pressure on the American government. It will be companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber etc. that will put pressure on the US government as they don't want to get sued into oblivion by their European customers or victims.
In 2013 Max Schrems was just an Austrian law student who had had enough but who has since been very successful in his legal case against Facebook. As of this year he has a new case against Facebook and now also Google. There is no reason why there could not be tens of thousands of similar people all across the EU taking internet giants to court. It's the last thing Facebook needs right now.
The reason Privacy Shield was drafted so quickly was because it's essentially a stopgap. It wasn't entirely surprising that Safe Harbour was struck down by the CJEU, what did surprise many was that it was struck down on the basis of being incompatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
The Charter provides each EU Citizen basic rights that trump simple agreements and laws, the right to privacy being one of them. That meant that just some tweaks to Safe Harbour or covering over some cracks was not going to be enough. It required an entirely new approach. Time was short and the risk was that any large American internet firm would have to cease operation in the EU on short notice. That they got Privacy Shield drafted an installed so quickly was quite impressive. It also explain some of its shortcomings. I expect the successor to Privacy Shield to be considerably better.
There is definitely room for improvement when it comes to Privacy Shield but I wouldn't dismiss it too lightly.
We're seeing the increasing scrutiny that Facebook is under and various players in Europe, from privacy advocates to legislators and regulators have Privacy Shield as a serious stick to hit them with if they are not forthcoming enough. Facebook will not want to lose European users, half a billion of the world's richest users.
It's good that they are putting some pressure on but I firmly believe Privacy Shield is not going to last very long. Just like Safe Harbour, its predecessor, Privacy Shield will ultimately by struck down by Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) as it has too many conflicts with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The Charter trumps any agreement, as we've seen with Safe Harbour.
The wait is now for a case to reach the CJEU and we're back to square one. The main difference will be that when the successor to Privacy Shield needs to be created it will happen in a time when more people, from Joe Bloggs to legislators, will be more aware of potential and actual privacy violations. Bring it on.
Some more conscientious site operators do not embed the Facebook button from a FB server (as that means a user is actually downloading an asset from FB servers, giving them the metadata mentioned in the article). Instead you can just locally host the image on your own servers with a link behind it that only gets activated if someone clicks on it.
It is a great way to take your visitor's privacy seriously but still have the option of some of them choosing to 'Like' your site.
I know exactly how this is going to pan out. At the end of the £92 million investigation (the outcome of which will be kept secret) it will be decided that the UK should build its own system. Will it be called the Postoffice Imperial Satellite System?
£1 billion will be spent on it (coincidentally a joint venture between James Dyson and a cousin of Jeremy Hunt will "win" the tender for a large chunk of it) before it gets cancelled as having been a massive waste of money.
Being UK focused probably means that all their (current and prospective) customers are in the UK. His suppliers might not be, though. I bet that he has to pay a bunch of his suppliers in dollars or euros so he could be vulnerable to foreign exchange problems it things get rapidly worse.
Also, if the UK were to fall into recession or suffers from drops in spending then even being fully UK focused could still be a risk.
Agreed, 11 December is a key date.
It is fairly asymmetrical, though. If the Government's deal is approved we'll have some idea of what will happen on 30 March, not 100% clarity but quite a bit. If it doesn't pass anything can happen.
This must be the worst possible time to plan something as complex as an IPO. I wouldn't take a go/no-go decision on anything this complex until April at the very earliest. We may be deep in the shits by then or a lot may have been avoided at the last minute, in any case at least you will know for certain whether you are deep in the shits or not. It's the uncertainty that is killing investment.
One of my proudest pranks is from the late 90's. The whole office was using Eudora as an email client. There was a 'ping' sound that Eudora would play every time you received an email. The sound was stored in a file called newmail.wav or something along those lines.
I took the full version of Frank Zappa's Peaches En Regalia, downsampled it to an 8 bit mono wav file to make it not too resource heavy and replaced the original newmail.wav with my version. Now, every time he would receive a new email, he would be treated to the full minutes long track. Every. Single. Time.
I don't really know what the article means by "notifications" but it may refer to the system to track food.
That comes in handy when suddenly a bunch of people start falling violently ill and it is discovered that all of them had lamb the day before. We currently have a system where we can trace (across Europe) every piece of meat in the supermarket to see who packaged it, who cut it, who slaughtered the animal and who reared it. You can then work backwards to try and identify the issue and prevent more victims. A system like this is quite useful and hopefully Brexit means we can still have food safety.
I understand that in some cases it makes sense to use a tried and tested off-the-shelf OS like Windows. It may not be perfect but its flaws are often well-known so you can work around it.
What does puzzle me, though, is the use of Windows for systems like this, or those ad displays, public information displays, video terminals etc. They usually have a very narrow set of requirements (some network activity, some display functions, some times limited mouse or keyboard input) that could easily run on a much more pared down OS without all the unnecessary baggage that a consumer desktop OS like Windows has.
If you develop the application in a high level stack (Java? Python?) and run it on a severely pared down Linux or BSD flavour that only has the minimum required functionality compiled for this task you'd likely be much more reliable. You could probably even do a major hardware or OS upgrade without the higher level application noticing it.
Anyone able to shed some light on this?
I complained to the Electoral Commission a couple of years ago that all ballot papers in the UK are numbered and that that number is recorded by the polling clerk against your name. That means that a person's vote is not secret and so it's not a secret ballot as is standard in proper democracies.
They said it is done to tackle voter fraud and that I should just trust the government not to abuse it. I retorted that it is ridiculous that anyone can rock up to the polling booth without ID or even the polling card and claim to be anyone they have a name and local address of and vote on their behalf. Until a couple of years ago I lived across from my polling station in a building with a shared letterbox. I could have easily popped over in the morning and vote as myself, pop over around lunch time claiming to be my next door neighbour and pop back around dinner time claiming to be another neighbour. A polling clerk who sees hundreds of people a day would not notice a thing. How can someone claim to have numbered ballots to protect against voter fraud if anyone could vote as anyone?
If requiring ID (or at a minimum handing in the actual polling card!) means that they can introduce a secret ballot I am all for it.
...has:
* 3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz)
* 64GB 2666MHz DDR4
* 2TB SSD storage
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Nbase-T Ethernet with support for 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ‑45 connector)
Quite amazing to have the above in such a small package.
My partner is a doctor and she is seething internally whenever a patient comes in and says that they "know their body". It's not unusual for a patient that claims to "know their body" to be three months pregnant or have months of untreated chlamydia and all that time they didn't notice a thing.
You may live in your body but unless you've studied medicine you know f*ck all about it. I've learned the hard way by discovering that there are a lot of things she *does* know better...
If asset stripping bothers you I would look away for the next ten years or so. I think small and medium businesses (and perhaps even some larger ones) are in for a shock.
Imagine you run a business based in Belgium, you've been trading globally for the last twenty years and quite successfully too. Your main competitor is some company from the Midlands who have been successfully trading globally for forty years. As a result they have a better brand recognition and own more valuable IP than you do.
In comes Brexit, your Midlands based competitor can no longer benefit from the trade deals with 60-odd countries that they used to enjoy in the EU days and half of all their trade is with countries among those 60. Tariffs make some of their products less competitive and some of their products are no longer certified. Furthermore, their domestic market has taken a hit as buyers have tightened the purse strings.
If you run this Belgian company it becomes quite interesting to buy your Midlands based competitor. The company is struggling and the pound has lost a lot of value against the euro so you might be able to swoop in on a bargain. Of course, owning production facilities in the Midlands won't help you as any products you make there are still behind a tariff and certification wall. But, buying the brand, the IP and their customer list is very valuable for your business. You buy the lot, incorporate the brand and some of their product lines but close the production in the Midlands.
For a lot of sectors uncertainty is a bigger problem than knowing for certain that things are going to get worse.
For the financial services sector it is practically guaranteed (unless the UK cancels Brexit before March 2019) that they will lose financial passporting. That is tough for them but at least they know what is going to happen so they have had time to start moving processes and people that deal with EU customers out of the UK.
For a lot of other sectors things are less certain. It could all go to hell in a hand cart quite quickly or it could all fizzle out into some minor discomfort that might manifest itself slowly over the next decade. Some answer will be provided by the Withdrawal Agreement that is currently worked on (and without which we enter No Deal territory) and the subsequent future agreement that will hopefully be negotiated from late 2019, after the May elections, installation of a new Parliament en subsequent voting in of a new Commission.
The problem is, how on earth do you plan for so many unknowns? If you are a big company you might be able to devote one or two people to scenario-plan four or five different scenarios and mitigating actions. If you are an SME you can't afford to devote staff to it or hire expensive consultants to work it out. It is no wonder that in a survey that came out last month only 14% of SMEs were reported to have prepared for the No Deal scenario. It is simply too costly to prepare for something that might not happen.
Last month I received a letter from HMRC with some basic information about what I could do. It was clearly tailored to my business as it literally stated "The information from your VAT registration shows that: You're a trader based in the UK currently importing and/or exporting goods within the EU. You do not currently trade with non-EU countries". It proceeded to tell me that if there is no deal I will have to apply customs, excise and VAT procedures to goods traded. Trading partners will have to do the same with any trade with me. Does it now make sense for me to spend time and money preparing all my business processes to include customs, excise and VAT? Not really as I believe there will be a withdrawal agreement. But I can't know for sure. That basically leaves the business paralysed on that front until we know...
Airspace is not handled by EU agreements so an Irish airline like Ryanair could fly through UK airspace even with the hardest of Brexits. Dublin - Paris should be fine. The only thing that Ryanair risks is not being allowed to offer flights within the UK, Stansted to Aberdeen for instance.
There is also a small problem that too many of Ryanair’s shareholders are UK Citizens, which would disqualify Ryanair as an EU airline. Just like BA they are expected to solve it by making those shareholders sell their shares.
The government’s plan is to rip up all the existing free trade deals with 60+ countries. They have convinced themselves that that is what some people voted for.
Going from 60+ free trade deals to zero trade deals means actively throwing up barriers to trade.
Therefore it logically follows that trade will become harder and will reduce.
Once in a while a UK government does something magnanimous.
The Conservatives set up the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent watchdog for government finances. I bet they regret it now, but it’s too late fortunately.
The Labour government before them introduced the Freedom of Information system. Something they regretted later.
I hope that, whoever takes over after the current mess (unless it’s a colonel’s regime) has the balls to set up a proper independent electoral watchdog at sufficient distance to take action against sitting politicians.
Did you know that a large part of the current Electoral Commission ‘rules’ are only advisory? Some local organisations charged with organising elections can ignore them if they want without punishment. Ideally the organising of elections is taken away from the Cabinet Office(!) and given to a properly independent and empowered electoral watchdog. Ideally a watchdog that answers to parliament, not the government.
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