Posts by Anthony 13 78 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Wow, just wow... Someone highlights fact that there are clear inequalities they have witnessed in society and, hey, maybe there are some simple changes around language that could encourage inclusivity for other people. And you go absolutely ape-shit? How can you be so angry about that?
Not sure why you are explaining to me? It was a bit of a rhetorical question for the OP and permies... i.e. non-contractors claim contractors pay less tax, but have no idea how or why that might be - a contractor could just pay themselves straight salary if they wanted and tax would be exactly the same! But OMG, they could claim travel expenses etc. etc.
Key point is, in my line of work at least, IR35 is pretty much a bureaucratic exercise where lots of clients just don't want to do the paperwork. That's fine by me, but they are going to have to pay extra for that laziness. And if they won't do that, going perm is a last resort. Kills flexible resourcing and probably raises less tax overall, but what can you do... It's clear no political party is going to scrap or fundamentally change IR35. The only winner is consultancy firms (hence my other observation regarding control and direction...)
I'm curious if you even know how contractors "pay less tax" outside IR35? Every penny one takes out of their company is taxed by the same rules as everyone else...
Anyway, that aside, imagine having 2 engagements in a year - doing much the same sort of project - one you and the client have got good paperwork in place, the other you've been a bit laxer. What IR35 gives you is totally different tax treatment for each - does that make sense to you? It certainly doesn't make either party's life easier.
Fundamentally the problem is IR35 itself, not specifically these changes.
PS I should also add that most clients exhibit just as much control and direction over consultancy firms as contractors, but these engagements will almost certainly end up outside IR35 ... but there you go.
What's a person to do? My personal peeve is SMS marketing - I complain to and boycott any company that does this. One company claimed they had the right to text me (which they did not) and even kept texting me after I complained, another said sorry can't explain why it happened (but I am stuck in a contract with them, so can't even boycott). Sure, I could report these operational cock-ups to the ICO, but let's face it - will the ICO ever do anything about these minor indiscretions?
That's the whole problem with IR35 - contractors are forced to take everything as 'pay' and not allowed to put aside money in their companies for sick leave, holidays, etc. IR35 is fundamentally arbitrary and unfair, so ultimately we are arguing about enforcement, when we should be looking at getting rid of it all together. If the government thinks contractors should be paying more tax, come up with better rules than these (which I doubt will happen...).
On Friday I was t-boned by a car on a roundabout - the driver accelerated into me when I was in front of them, sending me flying (no doubt "didn't see me"). So what does this information tell us about this story; absolutely nothing!!! Though to be fair, I'm not actually sure this story tells us anything at all either, other than to be another place to see how the whole 'cyclist debate' is corrupted by people's preconceived notions and irrelevancies.
FYI not badly injured, but the bike is a write-off.
... and speak languages other than English, right?
Real question - does anyone know how Bixby compares to Google or Apple when it comes to SE Asian languages, particularly Korean? Are they all equally awful in other languages as well?
I understand we are an English speaking audience, but the media don't tend to dig very deep on this.
Yes, I've done similar, immediately questioning them that they must not have had a lot of opportunities and life must be tough having to get involved in fraud. What I don't get is that they still spend 5-10 minutes trying to convince you they aren't a fraud - clearly they don't consider the cost-benefit analysis of wasting time on people who know who they are. They always ends up with them swearing at you for some reason though... I equally despise and (perhaps naively) pity them.
"Although the IR35 is irrelevant to me I still can't help but feel the government wants to big up Crapita and co at the expense of the small guy."
"Because I'm in the lucky position of earning more by working for a boutique consultancy instead. We provide vendor-equivalent services so we get to bill out at 2k per day rather than the 6-800 i used to get"
This, to me, is exactly where IR35 breaks down. I believe contractors operating through a Ltd have a fairly easy time on the tax front (though one can argue the balance of risk vs reward), but why should a single contractor pay more tax than a 'boutique' or large or whatever consultancy doing the exact same thing they are! It will cost the end-client more to bring in a 'consultancy', and HMRC will probably end up with less tax at the end of it. Having worked with both consultancy firms and individual contractors, they are usually treated the same, with the client having a big say in how they operate. So the contractor may be considered in IR35, but the consultancy wouldn't be.
Perhaps one of the answers will be for contractors to frankenstein themselves together into small bogus consultancies. But why should they have to do that? Surely there has to be some tax middle ground...
Lesson is never initiate the transfer of your number until you are happy the new service is working. I didn't do that and feel lucky that I only lost a half day of data access as I kept using my old provider until the number changed hands. Doesn't bode particularly well for the future though... At least it is month to month and you can easily change if it stays unreliable.
... did (at least) a couple of episodes on this.
Politically, you can't really put it all on the LNP - both sides wanted this. But unfortunately Labour didn't introduce it in their last term - if they had, we would have got cries of outrage from both the LNP and the News Corp bods. So, in a way, it is all Labour's fault...
Electronic IS totally different. It's not a physical thing they are looking for that you might have in your briefcase, be it a weapon or drugs or whatever - it's all about data. I'd bet you be none to pleased if some jobsbody got your private diary out of your briefcase, brewed up a pot of coffee, pulled up a chair and started reading through your life for the next 12 hours. That sort of intrusion is the exact sort of thing you would expect would require a warrant.
I admit my total ignorance in the law on this (where such a thing may exist), but I'd hoped we were at least living in a world where most people would consider this sort of action as just fundamentally wrong!
... the only interest group that has any real power to influence executive salaries are shareholders. And usually the only key group of shareholders that, together, can garner much voting power, are the fund managers (holding *our* cash). Individually, the fund providers will only ever have a tiny bit of ownership of these massive entities, but it is in our interests for them to try to work together and get cash out of the executive and put it back in the shareholders hands (i.e. ultimately us).
Like it or not, the only way to change executive pay / poor decision making is to get more pro-active "shareholder activist" fund managers...
... using your WiFi* i.e. an IP address is not a person! Should we all in fact be running open guest networks with the bandwidth locked right down?
This is not advice, merely an observation ... I take no responsibility for any negative repercussions...
* To be a pedant, this article (despite its headline) is really about router security not WiFi.
... are there that have been distributed and never 'waved'? Half the time I try to use one of those, the vendor has a machine but it isn't enabled! If a plastic card rarely works, who is going to bother trying with their phones?
So I can understand why you are are picking on NFC, but I'm not quite so sure why you using Apple as an example - I would have thought a 10% adoption rate for something relatively newfangled would actually be considered a reasonable success. And that % must be higher if you take into account regions where Apple Pay is not an option...
Yes to cash, not so sure about that pre-pay card - I believe hotels typically pre-block* a chunk of money on the card - and if it is pre-paid card that's your cash they've theoretically got their hands on! Case in point, friend was recently travelling with a pre-paid card with relevant foreign currency on it - went to a swish hotel and they kept that block on the card long after he had checked out...he was then forced to use a card with a much less favourable exchange rate for everything else.
* I'm sure there is a correct technical term for this!
You know a show is bad when you only watch the first and last episodes and you don't feel like you missed out on anything in the middle*.
Pretty good production values from the ABC though (typical IT BS aside).
Edit: * Except this LT in-joke of course (and apparently Lucy Lawless!"). Still not worth watching the whole thing though!!!
I often thought their business suggestions were odd to say the least, but thought that this was a feature for the US market where they might make a bit more effort with their data - nice to know there is clearly no point sending corrections in...
I have noticed and reported a couple of application issues - never hear back, but they have got them fixed over time:
- no tube station showing up at Liverpool St.
- the negative 0 latitude longitude bug in some versions (i.e. entering -0.02 would take you 0.02 degrees East of Greenwich)
- auto-suggest comes up with a station icon, but when picked is often some distance from the station
If I have spotted these, I can only imagine there must be heaps of other bugs across all the different versions, let alone the mapping data itself ...
Yes they have checked - via Ars - http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/cleaning-up-after-password-dumps.html
"We found that less than 2% of the username and password combinations might have worked, and our automated anti-hijacking systems would have blocked many of those login attempts. We’ve protected the affected accounts and have required those users to reset their passwords."
"And even if there really isn't anything suitable, paying someone to write software, or tweak existing software would be far cheaper than paying for MS licenses, and the hardware upgrades the monster would require."
That is one of the funniest things I have ever heard!!! Jamie, I can only assume you are a software developer with self interest at heart?
I agree Pavlov - as a white middle aged male (thankfully not too old yet) - I am sick of it too. Sadly, I don't have answers on how to fix it though - all I know is it will take a long time. As you say, affirmative action may not be ideal, but at least it's something.
To be fair to others (and I don't think you deny this), "the best person for the job" is not a bad ideal - but there needs to be a realisation from people that although you didn't get hired "because you were a white guy", you were probably picked from a bunch of white guys because most non-white non-guys never got the same opportunities / treatment over the long haul. I suspect that may not be a popular view here, however...
... surely the carriers / MVNOs could be forced to be a bit more open about what the agreements are - the consumers should know what they are getting - do they sit in a 'tier' on the network and what tier it is. Then the consumer can make the decision as to whether we want to pay to be in 'higher' tiers - be it PAYG or contract, home carrier or MVNO.
There are clearly people stating tiers don't exist, but all I can say from my own personal experience with O2 PAYG (my usage being light data - browsing, etc.) - in the same locations: O2 was OK, giffgaff was consistently poor (almost unusable) and Tesco has been OK as well. Others will no doubt say the opposite, but the networks should tell us what is going on.
"Such a refusal would simply force the complainant to take their gripe to their national data protection authority – such as the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK – and any decision taken at that level can be fought over in the courts."
I.E. Assuming Google refused the ICO request, ultimately a court could order the information be removed. Without the law, you could never get that far ...
Thanks - yes, I was thinking it might be a hashing issue - though if encrypted and then hashed it must protect those simple passwords some more. I guess my own feeling is that a somewhat complex string of memorable words is still a safer bet for most people than storing a bunch of super duper complex forgettable passwords - but I am (clearly) no expert.
... what exactly does a 'strong' password (as defined here) protect you from? This is a serious question - I just don't understand this "password long, symbols, numbers not a word" mantra. It just forces the user to write things down, store it elsewhere, reset it all of the time, etc.
- If the password isn't encrypted, it doesn't matter how complex it is.
- If the password is able to be decrypted, it doesn't matter how complex it is.
- If your encryption model depends on 'everyone' having an equally strong password - good luck with that - it won't matter how complex yours is.
- If there is a key logger (video camera, machine compromised, whatever), it doesn't matter how complex it is.
- If you are successfully phished, it doesn't matter how complex it is.
- If you are re-using a compromised password, it doesn't matter how complex it is.
- If someone is attempting a dictionary attack on your account, the security model 'should' stop the attack well before it can 'guess' the password, so it 'shouldn't' matter how complex it is.
- Further to this, if someone is simply guessing your password, the above should also kick in - the 'obvious' password examples given aren't anymore obvious than a thousand other things...
What am I missing?
WHS has always been (still is) available as an OEM license, which an individual (system re-purposer) can use .... as the OEM you have to support yourself though. I suspect most people inclined to build their own server are more likely to run Linux.
The one advantage WHS does (did) have is the built-in backup and bare metal restore for Windows clients. It seems crazy, but I haven't seen anything really equivalent on a NAS device or Linux platform - unless anyone else has?
The other advantage it has for me - the machine makes a great PVR and HTPC (Media Portal) client. NAS and Linux do offer options in this area though.
You got that right - lucky I read this, at least now I'll know why my Skype phone won't be working when I try to call friends and family come Christmas time. It's a shame - it was handy to have one 'normal' phone that could do both POTS and Skype.
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