Posts by Peter2 2946 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
"The dandyish Armstrong"
Dandyish: Noun
a man who is excessively concerned about his clothes and appearance
I don't think he meets that definition. I know people who do meet that definition and they actually look good. So, he's not a dandy. He's an ill dressed prat who makes his clothes out of mismatched cut offs and can't afford a trip to the hairdresser.
. . . Or is that too judgemental for this day and age?
White, barrister for Google, also said: “We have the gentleman from The Register in court... that journal [is] widely read in the tech sector.” Your correspondent was the only journalist present for large parts of both cases.
. . . And this neatly sums up why the Register is widely read in the tech sector, and why a lot of people who wish they worked in the tech sector read El Reg. If other news outlets such as the BBC do cover this case, then all they can do is plagurise your work.
My spam filtering is done by looking at the contents of the body and assigning a score to particular words. You can assign postive or negative scores for particular words and anything passing particular thresholds gets quarantined or deleted in the software i'm using.
The word "unsubscribe" has a very hefty positive figure on it which is only surmountable if it contains a lot of industry specific words.
Any executable files (exe, bat, vbs, etc) gets arbatarily deleted at the firewall as does any zip files containing any of the previously mentioned file types. Anything containing Macros is quarantined and marked as suspicious.*
Unsurprisingly, while all of our normal transactional mail arrives at it's destination unhindered very little spam or virus laden shit makes it to the end users.
* We're an office that should only receive word, excel and PDF files normally and so can afford to be picky. We're also a really, really big target for scammers due to holding lots of money in the bank so need to be rather more careful than average.
Important correction: England has oft been referred to as 'Perfidious Albion'.
Important correction: It was Great Britain up until 1807 and the United Kingdom thereafter.
Or had just had all their land and property confiscated without compensation.
Important correction: The land was rented, and the largely Scottish landlords decided that they'd make mindblowing amounts of money out of sheep farming, and so evicted their tenants to make space for sheep.
Indeed, it has not been entirely without reason that the UK has oft been referred to as 'Perfidious Albion'.
Indeed, great reason for that. It was a title created by Napoleon's "Le Moniteur" newspaper, which specialised in propoganda aka fake news. The title largely came about after Mr Bonaparte signed a peace treaty with the Britain. The Royal Navy was laid up and while peace was being celebrated Mr Bonaparte assembled a half million man army on the shores of france and started practicing landing exercises for crossing the little moat in the way.
This was considered a bit off, so Britain quietly and quickly rearmed and then declared war while the French army was still on the far side of the channel. Mr Bonaparte was really, really not happy about this and ranted about us being the trecharous ones, almost as if he was trying to deflect attention away from something...
And from the same newspaper should you consider it accurate you can read about the huge French/Spanish naval victory handily won at Trafalgar a few months later:-
http://navalmarinearchive.com/research/trafalgar_propaganda.html
That's because it's either:-
1) a deliberate attempt to manipulate the AMD share price to make a profit via shorting AMD's shares
or;
2) a hit peice from a certain well known company which has recently been discovered to have both a shockingly wide variety of severely dangerous remotely exploitable security flaws in it's products and a well known historical track record for having a predeliction towards illegal dirty tricks being ultimately responsible, and using a share price scheme as semi plausible cover for trying to prevent to competition from exploiting their shortcomings.
Most people won't even switch from Google to another search engine like Qwant (for free!) to protect their privacy.
I struggle to accept that many people just interested in protecting their privacy would be willing to splash out $2-3k for a 6 month contract/$4-6k PA. That's a bit steep. Also, the requirement that customers be referred from an existing user instead of doing the usual sales pitch on a website would appear to indicate that something dodgy is going on.
Altimeters aren't magical, just a barometer with an output that reads in feet rather than inches of mercury. Ever seen a barometer go up or down an inch in an hour in changable weather? If your in a plane then that's your altitude, which could be a problem if ground level is reporting as 500 feet. People have crashed when overly relying on altimeters before and i'm sure people will do it again in the future.
You should be aware of the limitations of the instruments and avoid relying on them when they might be inaccurate. ie, reported airspeed and truespeed are different things, as if there is a 30mph headwind then the truespeed is 30mph slower than you think. Assuming the pitot tubes aren't blocked...
> to make it self sufficent takes lots of mass
No, to make it self sufficent takes resources in-place. Mars has stuff we can refine. L5/Moon does not.
To make it self sufficent just in air and food you need plants. Huge numbers of plants. Insanely huge numbers of plants. In turn, this needs building material to build a greenhouse on the moon/mars to put them in, plus water for both you and the plants. And fertiliser or a precise mix of nutriants to feed to the plants. Whatever, they need them and it takes up both cubic space and mass, as does shipping in oxygen. You can probably rely on the people to produce the Co2 for the plants after all.
And if this is to survive WW3, your minimum viable poulation size for the purposes of genetic diversity is 4,139 people. (Plus spares for the people who suicide when they realise they are the last humans in the universe if you want to get into that, and i'd rather not)
Just thinking about the infrastructure required for that number of people is giving me a headache. Your talking square miles worth of room simply for the plants for air, which might also double up for food if your lucky. I'm not so sure about water and recycling there, but again massive filtration systems would be required. And his is before we start considering the living quarters, creature comforts etc.
Once you've finished with that lot then you can start thinking about industry for space mining, refining and then manufacture into tooling. It's mind blowing before you get half that far.
All of this has to be shipped to the destination. Just doing it by truck would be expensive enough to daunt any normal human, but putting the lot into space? The closer the better.
The moon simply is closer and easier to do things with. The only thing Mars really has going for it is the extra gravity, but that's only 2.5x what there is on the moon and under half what we have on earth. (1.62ms for the moon vs 3.71 for Mars and 9.8 for Earth)
I don't get this. The logical way forwards seems to be to build a base/assembly point at one of the Lagrange points (L4 or L5 are the obvious choices) followed by a moon base (nice and easy to leave as well...) followed by progressing out to Mars once the tech and supply problems have been resolved.
Going directly to Mars makes it dramatically more expensive without adding anything but publicity to the equasion and since nobody has any weaponry that will exit orbit then a moon base would be perfectly safe in WW3, especially since the military value of targeting a moon base would be zero resulting in no rationale in developing new weaponry especially to reach it. The serious danger to it would seem to be the staff starving or suffocating to death when supply convoys cease if it's not self sufficent.
And to make it self sufficent takes lots of mass, so the closer it is the cheaper/easier it is to get the mass to it (as less fuel is required, meaning that you can send more per rocket to the moon as opposed to Mars)
The 1% requirement is correct, and I believe that they're pretty accurate on that.
Oh, totally accurate. The UK grid is rarely more than 0.1Hz out.
My point is simply that given that it could be as low as 49.5 or as high as 50.5 legally, if your complaining about the average being 49.996Hz because it's *that* important to you then you should be taking corrective action youself instead of relying on the grid, which is not required to provide that level of accuracy.
UK grid frequency is currently 49.952Hz ( you can check yourself - http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/)
The National Grid is (IIRC) legally required to be within 49.5 and 50.5hz. I personally wouldn't rely on the grid being that accurate.
Shouldn't they have it on a UPS generating a pure sinewave at precisely 50Hz if it's THAT important that their supply be completely, perfectly accurate? I'd hate to know what that lot would be saying if somebody on the same circuit started arc welding or similar...
I don't agree.
Frankly all modern newspapers are crap. There is little investigation or journalism on any topic and lying by omission is so commonplace that huge numbers of people read multiple news sources to try and get something approaching the truth.
Compared to the newspapers of a hundred years ago todays all news is an utter disgrace.
Or by shooting slower, though upping the size of the magazine is always good.
The max fire rate of 30 proximity fused high explosive 35mm shells per second is useful for shredding fast moving and evading full size jets a couple of miles away, but one suspects that a drone moving at speeds measured in miles per hour (rather than mach numbers) within a range where the shell will reach it within a second is probably an easier target requiring less in the way of ammunition.
Uh, no. Little drones generally can't take out armoured targets or ships.
What happens is that the target shoots itself out of high performance, high price anti aircraft missiles that (each) cost several thousand times what the drone did. What's going to happen as a result is that the anti aircraft guns developed just before the end of the cold war (ie; marconi marksman) are probably going to get built since a hail of cheap 35mm shells is perfectly suited to the job.
The 12 pound warhead on the brimstone missile hits what it's aimed at and destroys or kills just that.
A 2000 pound guided bomb landing close enough for a ton of high explosives to blow the target to bits tends to send those bits flying at high speed, which has a high risk of killing a lot of people in the immediate area.
Hence why the Americans are a fan of the guided missile.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11133680/Brimstone-British-missile-envied-by-the-US-for-war-on-Isil.html
You don't seem to understand the difference between evasion and avoidance.
You don't seem to understand the difference between semantics and the systematic collapse of public services as a result of companies deciding that they aren't going to pay any tax. If everybody is allowed to get away with this then our society is going to be financially as well as morally bankrupt and frankly we don't have 30 years to debate about it while these companies destroy local companies who are paying tax.
As I noted in my previous post, the revenue tax proposals are well under the levels of tax taken through profits. I am sure that businesses involved will all post huge losses as a result but at this point my sympathy is zero because they would cheerfully produce multi billion pound "losses" every year to offset against their future tax bills to continue paying nothing in tax so ignoring the posted losses is pretty essential really, isin't it?
If they wanted a system that only took a certain percentage of profits then they should have used and not abused the existing systems. I'd also be prepared for the tact that BigCompany™ will simply immediately outsource all operations with revenue in to BigCompanySubsidiary™, to reduce their posted revenue. The answer is simply to play games back faster and harder than they will do so that they come off considerably worse every time. If they go bankrupt as a result then they can stand as a warning to others.
Competition is seen a good thing because it leads to better products or services, with the crappest going out of business. 99% of people benefit, with the remaining 1% being the employees of the organisation that went out of business.
What you a describing as "competition in tax regimes" is in fact companies being resident in a country defrauding that country of the amount required to maintain infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. If done on a wide scale, this leads to that infrastructure collapsing. This is generally considered as being undesirable, especially by the people living in those countries.
The problem is that the tax rules are so complicated that without doing a Trump unilaterially and rewriting the tax rules from scratch you won't ever really reform them into something sensible. (and even then, rules written unilaterially and quickly are likely to be a bit iffy) Corporate lobbying will tie the discussions about up for a decade and a couple of elections with large wads of cash on offer to election campaigns if parties will consider making just a few adjustments and exemptions...
The best route is probably to have a really big penalty to managing to evade the existing rules, and I think that a revenue tax is the best way to go for companies that have agressively avoided paying any tax.
The issue I have is simply the numbers mentioned here. Services companies can expect a 20% profit, and retailers can make much more than this.
Assuming that 20% of revenue is profit:-
10% revenue tax would be equivilant to 50% tax on profit
5% revenue tax would be equivilant to 25% tax on profit
2.5% revenue tax would be equivilant to 12% tax on profit
At the moment UK corporation tax is 20% tax on profit. If there is a 2% revenue tax applied as suggested off in the article then companies are still considerably better off than they would have been if they hadn't of gone evading tax to start with.
My take on it is that revenue taxes should be deliberately punitive and painful and applied individually to companies that have taken the piss for a multi year period, following which they can decide if they'd like to pay normal taxes on profits without playing games or if they'd like to keep revenue taxes. I'd say tax them at 15% of revenue (or higher) until Her Majesties Revenue & Customs have collected around 120% of what they think was been evaded by that company and then we could start talking about returning to a percentage tax on profits if they promise to be good.
If the affected companies struggle, good. Public services have been struggling as a direct result of them evading tax. If they become uncompetitive and are then replaced by other companies who pay their tax, then this is a good thing. People have died as a result of public services being overstretched and I see no good reason why corporations shouldn't end up in a worse off position than they would have if they hadn't of gone playing their little games.
The obvious route for the BBC is to simply run netflix style and fully digitalise their catalog, making them a corporate monster that would be tricky for anybody else to compete with.
However, as soon as they do this then their DVD sales basically vanish overnight and it becomes rather difficult to sell that back catalog to other broadcasters, which presumably is why they haven't done it.
Ofcom should be abolished other than for technical regulation like spectrum licenciing
I'm not convinced that they are compentent at doing that, I seem to recall howls of protest from radio hams about powerline ethernet equipment and OFCOM refusing to use the powers that they already had to protect the spectrum from interference from unlicensed users.
It's not a city led phase of decline.
It's an inability to consider that if most of the population is earning barely enough to pay their rent and eat then those people won't have any disposable income, and any area of the economy expecting them to be spending money will decline because the customers can't afford to buy anything that doesn't present immediate value well beyond it's financial cost.
Ergo, as more companies offshore work (because it's cheaper) and cease employing staff, and others reduce their wage bill the problem gets progressively worse.
There are essentially two ways out of this situation IMO.
1) Pay the workers more.
2) Reduce the living costs of the workers.
Just google "millennial doorbell" if you doubt me.
I doubted you and googled it. I used to think that the term "snowflake generation" was ridiculous. This has just persuaded me otherwise.
People who get terrified of doorbells terrify me. If people today really can't deal with something as mundane as a doorbell, I now understand why people have nervous breakdowns around things like minor accidents and equipment malfunctions.
Just out of curiosity, how does UK handle _their_ equivalent of H1-B?
Our equivilant is inter company transfers, where a multinational can bring anybody into the country to work. It was intended to make it easier for large companies to have meetings and collaborate on projects. What actually happens is that entire sites are staffed by foreigners, who can't get another UK job because they lose their visa and immediately end up being returned to their "home office" in their original country.
I'm not convinced our system works any better, frankly. Both systems get abused to hell by large companies.
"If you can afford a new car then you’re not going to buy a beaten up second hand vehicle..."
Well, actually...
I bought a cheap, beaten up near 20 year old second hand vehicle instead of a new one, despite being able to afford to. Why waste money? A visit to a scrapyard yeilded replacements for the "beaten up" bits for less than an hours wages, and it's good as new.
The yearly cost of maintenance is under the monthly cost of a brand new replacement, and my car is better built, has the same fuel efficiency as something new, and kicks out less than the legal emissions limit all of the time, instead of just when being tested. Most importantly I can spend literially tens of thousands that i've saved on things I do want, instead of a flashy car that II don't particually need. (since my need is to get me to work, and go out places, not to try and show off how much better off I am than the next door neighbors and advertise please rob me in carparks. Nobody breaks into, vandalises or steals 20 year old cars!)
When it comes to data storage, much the same applies.
HP Proliant 380 G8 1.6TB SSD, $3,995.95
HP Proliant 380 G8 2.0TB HDD, $195.95
Now, $8k for a SSD pair to RAID, or $400 for a pair of larger HDD's resulting in a $7,600 saving that could be applied to buying other equipment. Let me think...
HDD's are going to be around for at least the next decade precisely because of this. SSD is too expensive to stick everything on, unless your lucky enough to work somewhere where IT is given a blank cheque to spend as much as they want.
So the problem is; how to you secure it *and* still give easy access to the people that need the information - currently it's "because it's bolted to the fire engine" and that just ain't good enough.
Well, it is for most cases. The exceptions are when the police/ambulance crew/fireman leaves the vehicle with it unlocked. Solution, give each emergency responder a keyfob with their user id. If no keyfob is within 5 metres, lock the device. If within 5 metres, unlock the device. And turn the device on/off with the ignition.
Hey presto, stealing a police car doesn't attach you to the network unless you have kidnapped a police officer as well.
I think at a certain stage, courts say "we disagree, and you've now got a prison sentance for contempt of court".
And if he doesn't turn up for that, then a warrant for his arrest is issued, and he ends up with famously humourless german police arresting him and unceremouniously tossing him in the clink.
What i'm carrying away from this article is that the "chief digital officer" of london is a professional party politician of the local political party controlling london, who has no technical qualification or experiance, he has no defined objectives that his performance can be measured against and yet is being paid £107k p/a, putting him in the top 3% of earners in the UK.
In addition, its also who makes the more compelling argument in court.
Actually, it's not. Very common misconception though, it's whomever persuades the majority of the Jury to find innocent or guilty.
And the jury can do whatever it damn well pleases, ignoring actual guilt or any arguments presented. This was firmly established in 1670 (Bushel's Case) where the jury refused to convict somebody who broke a law because they thought the law was unjust, and has been done repeatedly since.
Retail shops aren't automatically doomed because they are retail shops. They are doomed, because the management has a seeming imability to actually manage as much as a SWOT analysis and then taking action on the "O" and mitigation against the "T".
There is a miniscule, tiny little clothes shop locally to me that has survived many, many large chain stores around it. It survives because it caters specifically for men who work in offices who hate shopping, which is evidentely a big enough market to thrive on.
The shop has a decent selection of somewhat above average quality shirts, trousers and other "suitable for an office" clothing (in both casual and formal) at somewhat above average price, but below the price that people mutter "i'm not paying that" and go elseware. You can buy cheaper stuff online or from the ASDA clothing section down to road, which to many people ought to indicate immediate death for the company.
The pace is perpetually empty, but that's because they have what is by todays standards amazing service so your in and out in only slightly more time than a formula one pitstop. Alterations available at moderate cost if you'd like a perfect fit.
As a result, they have enough people visiting to keep them doing quite nicely.
This compared to M&S where menswear is at the back of the 999th floor, and everything is constantly moved around to make you hunt for things. Hellish shopping experiance, and the place deserves to die. Or ASDA which is full of cheap , tackily low quality stuff that falls apart after a few months.
So you can run profitably run retail shops, you just have to offer what people want to buy.
The scandal has superficial similarities with accusations that Apple was fiddling CPU benchmarking scores back in 2003. ®
If both reports are true then Apple fiddled performance reports to show their product was better than it was. The only negative effect would have been a small cost to the wallet of people involved.
Cheating on vehicle emissions tests however, is a bigger issue. The emissions test is set to require safe levels of particulates and gasses to be emitted. Cheating on this test and emitting unsafe levels of particulates and gasses has health effects for everybody. It's been reported elseware that 50,000 people in the UK die every year due to cars that shouldn't have passed emissions tests emitting illegal levels of pollution, and many more people have chronic respitatory diseases as a result of companies ignoring the law for their own profit.
There is no real comparison in severity between the two.
Meanwhile, almost everyone with an economic interest in the outcome of Brexit is lobbying hard for everything else to stay the same.
Obviously?
Anybody doing well at the moment wants to continue doing well. People who might do well as a result of future changes (ie, imposition of tarrifs making it attractive to make things in the UK/fishing quota changes) aren't doing well at the moment, and therefore don't have huge amounts of money to spend in lobbying/bribing politicans to pay attention to them.
I'm more inclined to believe that the wave of Trumpism (and in the UK, Brexitism) is actually explained by Hanlon's Razor. We, on both sides of the Atlantic, have become a real-life Idiocracy.
Hmm.
This is a breakdown of income in the UK by percentage point of the population:-
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax
Would I be right in assuming that your in the top 50% and only socialise with other people in the top 50%? Personally, i'm in the top 25% but I do actually socialise with people who aren't so and i'm not inclined to mock anybody earning less than the "average" wage.
I think that the simplest explanation is that people generally earning less weren't happy that their career prospects have basically been eliminated. I know people who started off working as a teaboy, and ended up working their way up and retiring confortably as a middle manager.
Things are now different. I now know people who started off on the minimum wage, and are trapped there a decade on. There is no avenue for promotion or any other form of advancement, and their quality of life gets worse year by year as the cost of living rises and their working conditions deteriorate. After all, why should companies bother taking care of staff? If staff do leave then there are plenty of desperate people lined up ready to replace them. They have little hope things are going to improve, largely because politicans have completely ignored and marginilised the concerns of anybody in the bottom 65% or so of the population.
Without hope that these people are going to do anything in their interests, or that their lives will otherwise improve they pick an alternative that they feel will deliver a better life for them. I don't blame them, because i'd be doing the same if I was in their shoes, and so would you.
I would say that there are two ways to go from here. First is to address the concerns of the majority of the population. This is the sane, sensible choice.
The other option is to ignore the concerns of the majority of the population and demonstrate that your part of your mates "in group" by insulting people not as fortunate as you are. I'm not sure what the end result of this will be, but I am sure that it will not be pretty, and it will not end well.
Imagine for a second an intelligent virus (yes, I know, such a thing is well beyond our current capabilities, but this is a thought experiment) that manages to infect air traffic control workstations with the intent of causing as many deaths as possible. Or traffic light control systems. Or the emergency alert system.
Ok. Firstly, I don't think you understand how ATC works. I do because I have been taught to fly and have spoken to them via radio, which is how commands are passed. If aircraft seperation is compromised then ATC will know quite quickly via irate pilots shouting about it and they'll revert to their ermergency plans. As pilots are responsible for their aircraft there is unlikely to be any serious trouble if ATC packs up.
Traffic light systems are designed with physical safeguards such that they'd blow a fuse if you illuminated both sets of lights. Harm, zero as it just falls back to manual operation.
Emergency alert systems could cause people to panic and stand around doing nothing, but that's not going to cause the end of the world.
And that doesn't even get into the nightmare scenarios of hospital systems and infrastructure control systems. How many people do you think would die if medical equipment started putting out inaccurate data and all the lights went out? Heck, just shutting off gas pumps would result in millions of deaths in the US inside of a month.
I've worked for the NHS. My guess would be zero casualties, because everything critical is airgapped. Yeah, returning the wrong patient records wouldn't be good but that's about the most harm possible and the damage would have to be done by humans. Lights aren't going to go out because light switches aren't connected to computers. Power is backed up with generators that are tested weekly, the switchover and switchback to and from which causes more damage to computers in tests yearly than an AI could aspire to. FFS, UK hospitals are built with EM buffers on incoming lines designed to protect against a nearby nuclear detonation.
In the UK, petrol pumps are a very manual and offline process. Harm, zero.
The biggest harm would be that Just In Time supply systems would probably become SomewhatTooLate, which is suboptimal when it comes to things like food.
True, we don't have to worry about AI triggering a nuclear apocalypse directly, but what about sending falsified communications to all the world's nuclear powers making it seem like they were under attack?
Again, knowing something about these systems I know that they are designed by people who are considerably more paranoid than I am and have far less trust in technology and people programming it than I have, which is why everybody has their nukes set up to survive the first strike and then launch in response later.
They deal with alerts tolerably well. You know about the horror stories of training tapes of a full scale attack being ran on a live system by the USA during the cold war, right? It happened, yet failed to set off a nuclear war.
This is sort of like the X-Files. Things seem plausible when you don't know how they work, but the more you know the more it seems a bit silly.
A sneaking fear that the machines might turn on us is just not good enough - we need to be able to quantify that risk if we want to avoid it, or at least manage it. Or we could just push on regardless and see how things work out.
At the moment, the threat is massively overhyped. Even if we were to ignore the fact that AI simply isin't capable of developing a desire for world domination and is in truth more akin to a complicated excel macro than an intelligence then what could an AI do to us?
On the desktop side machinery has no ability to harm the operator (excepting these) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/07/usb_missle_war_breaks_out/
At a high level, nuclear weapons are very, very offline and rather throughly airgapped. They are also controlled by 1970's floppy discs and elaborate man in the loop security proceedures, so nothing is going to happen there. That leaves causing industrial accidents from companies putting too much online secured very poorly, but that's not going to wipe out humanity and has a questionable ability to harm any significant number of people.
The only thing likely to change that is actually self driving vehicles if they are insufficently secured as a few million self driving EV's roaming around under computer control trying to run anybody over on sight would be a mite unpleasant, but simply requiring a physical key in the circuit (doing it in software would create a risk of bypassing the safety measure) would allow humans to remain in control there, eliminating that as a threat.
In short, AI can't seriously affect the RealWorld™ unless we allow it to. I'm all in favour of making sure that anything connected to the internet is (by design) set up to be physically incapable of causing serious damage as the more real threat is people hacking who would try and cause serious harm for "teh lolz".
Or because Belgium exists because of the 1839 Treaty of London, which has UK PLC as a guarenteeor of Belgium existance. This was put to the test in the first world war when the Germans were certain that Britain wouldn't declare war on Germany because of a "scrap of paper" if they invaded Belgium. Britain disagreed, and thus Belgium still existed post WW1.
And for that matter post WW2, since the Belgium government was dissolved and replaced with a German military dictatorship in WW2, only to be reestablished by our army passing through enroute to Germany in WW2.
Can you see any reason why Belgium may wish to retain close political links with the UK...? Government and diplomacy runs on longer timescales than the media and twitterati does.
In a lawyer's office, especially, I would not want to manage the logistics of issuing a laptop that goes home with them with all kinds of stuff on it.
Why not?
As the IT Manager of a law firm i'd comment that as all case files are stored on the case management system and not on individual PC's, to access anything to do any work you have to remote in to our remote access server. Therefore, nothing sensitive is stored on the laptops even if they do get stolen.
She was a highly paid presenter, reportedly on over 100K a year. If she's not been paying NI on that wage then she's certainly not 'poor'.
This is what GOV.UK thinks yearly personal income is by percentage points.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax
So, to pay £419,151 for a period of 2006/07 to 2012/13 (6 years) is £69,858.50 of tax each year. Even if you assume she was taxed at 50% then she's in the top 1% of earners in the specified years.
Christ, the hospitals are at breaking point, there's fewer and fewer police on the streets, yet it's a tragedy when people are asked to actually pay their fair contribution to society.
I appreciate she's been given bad advice, and it's not her fault. But I, and a good chunk of the people reading this have to pay NI; don't have a lot of sympathy for those that don't.
Personally, my sympathy is zero for the top 1% of earners who have dodged tax and are now required to pay it. The question has to be asked though as to if the BBC as a public body is operating a tax avoidance office at the public expense to further line the pockets of a large number of the richest 1%.
Perhaps BBC news could do one of their "fact checks" on this?
"why should we worry?"
. . . Because while a single individual isin't a problem, it becomes a problem at nationwide scale.
If a certain group of predominately very well off people had not have ignored and justified illegal immigration, tried to NewSpeak said term to "undocumented migration" and condemn as ThoughtCrime any moderate discussion of this then we probably wouldn't have seen "far right" groups existing to any noticible degree, and the UK probably wouldn't be heading out of the EU.
At this point, it's more than a bit daft to continue arguing that it's ok to quietly ignore the problem.
This is more than a bit of a straw man. Are people really going to plug their EV into the kitchen ring?
Probably the garage socket if going with the cheapest option, but any house with a 60amp breaker is going to be a really old electrical installation and will have a single ring main, and will be unlikely to be running a seperate ring just for the kitchen. It'll also be running fuses rather than MCB's unless the owner has upgraded.
You also wouldn't want to be drawing 55+ amps constantly from a system with a design limit of 60. Electricial safety rules ask sparkies to keep below 80% capacity.
But yes, that's a surmountable problem, preferably by adding charging points along the road. The overall draw on the grid probably isin't reasonably surmountable.
Sorry, I don't believe you on this one, at least on every handset that I have been in contact with, OFF is OFF.
I'm an IT professional, not a preist so i'm not demanding beleif. Just duplicate the conditions and see what happens.
Once upon a time I was assigned an urgent job to figure out why $importantperson had problems with their deskphone in conference mode getting intermittant severe interference that made it unusable. Problem traced to their mobile when it received a text while they were on a call. Turning the mobile off resolved the issue and ticket solved. Ticket was then reopened at a point afterwards with a comment along the lines of "it still does for about a second every so often". Problem immediately traced back to mobile (this was many years ago, so would have been pre-smartphone) transmitting while turned off.
Que a couple of us scratching our heads and duplicating the conditions to recreate the issue, figure out what was happenning and then figuring out how to eliminate the problem. IIRC it happened on several phones and we fixed it by taking the handset apart and reconfiguring it so that the conference mode used external speakers. The downside was that the speaker was also used for ringing, as we discovered when somebody rang the phone...
I'm tempted to set up a little experiment....switch off a phone and leave it next to a speaker in a very quiet place. Set up some audio recording equipment and leave it overnight. Should be easy enough to review the recorded WAV file and see any spikes where the speakers have picked up activity from the phone (better than listening to 12 hours of audio anyway)
Give it a go. Make sure that you get noise from your speaker setup when you send/receive a text first though.
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