Posts by browntomatoes

UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts

Re: Only 12.4 M downloads?

I think you needed an Android phone which had still been receiving OS updates this year, not just Android M. That cuts out most over 2 years old.

I suspect most downloads are because pubs, restaurants etc are telling patrons they "have to" install the app and check in to come in (they're not supposed to do this and instead offer a manual signing in book if you don't want to use the app, but you can't blame them because if they say app-only then they don't have any need to worry about GDPR, breaches etc of their manual signin records).

A lot of people are installing the app, checking in, then uninstalling it because they don't trust the app one bit. That's certainly what most of my friends seem to have done.

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Re: change for sake of change

The Inns of Court, City Livery companies and some parts of the armed forces give the Oxbridge colleges a good run for their money in this respect. (Not to mention some of the grander diplomatic missions and the Royal palaces of course, but I assume those are a bit too specialist).

Lucky, lucky, Westminster residents: Who better to look after your housing benefits than Capita?

Mayfair is in Westminster

Mayfair is part of the City of Westminster local authority area so Jacob Rees-Mogg’s council and council tax wouldn’t have changed when he moved.

It's been a week since engineers approved a new DNS encryption standard and everyone is still yelling

Re: Who do you trust?

Block cloudflare - or MITM all HTTPS traffic. Which has the side effect that they then MITM all the other traffic they didn’t before.

I rather suspect therefore that DoT (when you consider the consequences of widespread implementation) is likely to be LESS enabling of privacy invasion in ‘nasty’ regimes. In ‘nice’ regimes it won’t make a difference either way.

Re: Cat herding

What’s worse, they’re also making other privacy enhancements (eg eSNI) reliant on turning on DoH. I’d like to try the experimental eSNI support using my own local recursive resolver (for which I can deal with where it gets its answers and how they’re privacy protected, thankyou very much) but they won’t let me without patching the code myself.

I don’t think that’ll be the last privacy feature that won’t work without it either.

Budget 2018: Landlords could be forced to grant access for full-fibre connections

No.

It says:

b) to keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the dwelling-house for the supply of water, gas and electricity and for sanitation (including basins, sinks, baths and sanitary conveniences, but not other fixtures, fittings and appliances for making use of the supply of water, gas or electricity)

ie - if they exist then landlord is responsible for maintenance but there is not a requirement to install them in the first place.

> If you rent out a property you are required to ensure that the property has functional utilities connections.

Not true. You can rent out a hut in the middle of nowhere with no water or sewage connection, no electricity, no gas and no telecoms connections if you want (as long as it's safe, has smoke and in certain circumstances CO alarms, and you provide an EPC etc). Just that the market for tenants might be a bit smaller.

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

Re: What's next?

I always thought of it as more like an umbillical cord - as its a permanent attachment. Hence the mother/child terminology made sense.

Uber is killing off iconic black cabs, warns Zac Goldsmith

Google Maps is the real disrupter, not Uber

It's not Uber that will kill the Black Cab "industry". It's decent quality sat nav which works properly in London taking account of traffic conditions and blockages like traffic lights and junctions. Google Maps is getting better at this every day and arguably is now good enough - most minicab drivers I see use that these days on their smartphones even if their firm (eg Addison Lee) provides its own separate sat nav unit for them. The value of "the knowledge" in that context is close to zero (if the driver has a smartphone anyway, there's almost no marginal cost for them), so why would anyone pay a premium for it?

Black cabs still have a slight edge in central London as they are allowed in many more bus lanes than minicabs are. But that edge is only relevant in very heavy/disrupted traffic and is probably not enough to keep them anything close to the size of the current fleet when their pricing is regulated so that they can't take full advantage of it during periods of peak traffic.

EU geo-blocking: Ansip's crusade liable to disappear through 'unjustifiable' loophole

Re: Reality has a strong non-libertarian bias...

Regional pricing could be looked at as an implicit subsidy which runs from richer countries to poorer ones. Without it, the economically logical thing to do for companies selling in both territories at the same/similar prices would likely be to set a revenue maximising price somewhere in the middle of the two - i.e. a price cut for those in rich countries but an increase for those in poorer countries. This would most likely result in less revenue for producers than a system where regional pricing is in place, which explains why they are opposed. After all, in an ideal world, given their product has almost no variable costs to produce, they'd like to offer a different price to every single customer based on the maximum that customer would be willing to pay; this doesn't mean that the rules of the market should be rigged to make it easy for them to do this, since that is economically a bad thing.

The big problem is that if regional pricing were abolished, the resulting price cut for those in rich countries would likely be smaller/less noticed than the concomitant increase in poorer countries. The EU commissioner has simply (somewhat belatedly) noticed that this is rather poor politics. Thus the real opposition has nothing to do with niche languages/cultures (the market for local content would arguably benefit in many areas due to an increase in the price of foreign content if geographical pricing differences were lifted), and everything to do with being blamed for increasing the price of some people's pay TV quite a lot.

UK Supreme Court waves through indiscriminate police surveillance

Re: It's Over for Democracy

To be a pedant... it was really Lord North and his democratically elected government they kicked out and not George III. Lord North was a courtesy title and he was actually elected to the House of Commons as MP for Banbury... though pre-Reform Acts you could debate how "democratically" that was of course.

The issue as they saw it wasn't that the government they were revolting against wasn't democratically elected, it was that they weren't allowed to vote in British Parliamentary elections as colonists - that is, it was *someone else's* democratically elected government.

systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

Re: What is systemd

I find it very sad that the Gnome/desktop dependency on systemd is driven, ultimately, by ConsoleKit becoming "unmaintained". The correct answer to "ConsoleKit is unmaintained" was not "replace it with something else that does the same job but depends on systemd" but "remove support for it, it's not needed anyway".

ConsoleKit/logind's existence is basically motivated by the desire to support "multi-seat" systems - computers with multiple keyboard/mouse/monitor combinations connected to them used to support more than one user. That use-case is incredibly, incredibly niche. And yet it is dictating how basic components work to the detriment of simplicity in the vast, vast majority of common use cases. The same applies to its close cousin PolicyKit - it's simply not needed for the system to work properly unless you're in one of those very niche use-cases which the distros won't support out of the box anyway. The PolicyKit attitude in turn gets generalised into things like hostnamed, the very existence of which almost sounds like some kind of cosmic joke to me.

The ConsoleKit/PolicyKit mentality has been gradually infecting the (Debian packaging of) other desktop components outside of Gnome like lightdm and this is what has led to the creeping dependencies on systemd via, e.g. libpam-systemd and systemd-logind. What is badly missing is an option to simply go without ConsoleKit features and gracefully fall back to the older way of doing things (sudo and local groups giving access to hardware, with known and defined security trade-offs).

The worst part is that for all its sophistication, the *Kit software itself is very fragile and breaks in the slightest unusual configuration. For example, I recently set up a new Linux Mint install on a laptop to use my local Kerberos server for user authentication. It won't permit Kerberos-authenticated users logged in locally to suspend/resume or shutdown, despite them having logged in on the "right" terminal. Even more bizarrely, that includes suspending triggered by hardware events like a lid close on a laptop. At worst I would have expected changing the setting of what to do on lid close to be blocked by lack of permissions. But suspending itself? That is just stupid. And not even falling back to "sudo" (which it would have found those users have permission for) is also silly.

New GCHQ spymaster: US tech giants are 'command and control networks for terror'

A better and more sustainable relationship

I for one would be comfortable with a "better and more sustainable relationship". However, I don't think those words means the same thing to me as they do to him - to me that means one regulated by court orders (not ministerial warrants) which are specific to a single specified individual, necessary, proportionate, VERY time-limited and contested in a truly adversarial setting. They should also not violate other rights. I'd also add in that they should not be given blanket permission to break the law in foreign countries and remove all the other loopholes they have like asking foreigners to spy on British citizens to circumvent the need for even a limited ministerial warrant.

Sadly for them, I think they've demonstrated sufficient bad faith at this point that they wouldn't actually comply with that if it was the law, so I don't see any other option than disbanding them completely. Institutionally, they are morally bankrupt.

Caught red-handed: UK cops, PCSOs, specials behaving badly… on social media

Re: And the point is? @browntomatoes

I'd say the same thing about each of those situations - it depends on context and judgment. A blanket rule just seems inappropriate. I'm facebook friends with several of my old school teachers for example, and I would happily have been Facebook friends with my old GP (now retired). There's nothing wrong with that. You meet people from all walks of life who can be interesting or who you just get on well with. Equally there are also plenty for whom the opposite is true. The idea that people in certain relationships to each other aren't allowed to also be friends (Facebook or real life) just seems ridiculous and unnatural to me.

The behaviour that they are trying to avoid isn't clear either - is it stalking/taking advantage of a professional relationship to create or further a personal one? If so, then they should simply say that that's against the code of conduct and leave the specifics to individual cases. Or is it that having a personal relationship with a police officer might mean your case gets unfairly prioritized by them? In which case, again, the code of conduct ought to say that policing priorities and resourcing decisions should be made impartially and fairly. I imagine actually that whatever code of conduct there is already says these things. I just don't see why it needs to say *anything* about who you can/can't be friends with.

Re: And the point is?

I'd say it depends entirely on context. Are police officers only allowed to be friends with other police officers? That would be beyond stupid and would be likely to engender (more of) an "us and them" mentality. In any case, how is it any different from (in a "business" type line of work) friending a client? There should be individual judgment involved about the specific situation.

Israel snooped on John Kerry's phone calls during Middle East peace talks

Listening in, but not listening

They may have been listening in but it seems miscommunication/not listening to what was actually being said was one of the problems which led to the process breaking down. See e.g. this very interesting article detailing the whole saga (which incidentally mentions the assumption made by the Americans that their phones were being listened to)

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died

UK.gov wants public sector to rip up data protection law

Re: biggest reason NOT to vote tory this election

@AC "VOTE THEM OUT"

The retort to "I don't like any of the candidates" should be "then stand yourself" (or find a friend who agrees with you to do the same). Democracy is not about choosing between choices which someone else gives you, that's consumerism. Democracy is about PARTICIPATION by the people in government.

One of the key insights the Tea Party movement in the USA had (and why they have been so comparatively successful) was to do this via the existing party machinery rather than fight the electoral system and split the vote on their side of the fence. I keep wondering whether something similar might emerge in the UK with a more "pro-freedom" stance, especially after the Lib Dems have turned out to be so disappointing on that front in government (voting for DRIP is simply the last in a long line of inexcusable decisions from them).

Re: Not Good

I agree with the thrust of your post but I have to disagree completely on identity cards.

It was the DATABASE, along with the "papers please" requirement (backed by criminal sanctions) to carry them/be able to identify yourself to random government officials at the drop of a hat that people were (quite rightly) up in arms against, not the cards themselves (which otherwise would have served no useful purpose). And the fact that failing to tell the electricity company you've moved house simply means you are paying them for someone else's electricity whereas failing to tell the ID card people would have landed you in prison.

We don't need identity cards to open our borders to everyone from Europe. We could join Schengen without them. We could even just, you know, decide to do it anyway, and let Europe keep their borders for people going back there.

You also never used to need a passport or a utility bill to open a bank account. You used to just turn up and fill in some forms. If you wanted some credit from them then they might insist that you built up some kind of track record with them, or show them you could afford to pay them back in some other way. That worked pretty well. The root problem here is the ridiculous requirement to identify yourself to a bank before you can GIVE them money - not the specifics of HOW you go about identifying yourself.

The point is, you are proposing "solutions" to problems which the government invented to start with. The net effect of all this is that a vast civil service bureaucracy gets to enlarge itself. Which, for them, is obviously just a happy coincidence.

Major problems beset UK ISP filth filters: But it's OK, nobody uses them

Re: BT

Neither have I as a Sky customer (who signed up in the last 3 months). But then I've never used their DNS servers because I have my own caching resolver set up locally.

GCHQ to share threat intel – and declassify SECRET inventions

"cyber" security

Is this really becoming the accepted term? It just sounds terrible - whoever uses it, I can't help think they are just trying too hard and jumped on a bandwagon from the mid-90s, 15 years too late. What was wrong with calling it computer security or network security?

Twitter's got a new UK public policy wonk... 'You are the product' Big Brother Watch bloke!

Re: Is it just me

There are quite a few Tory MPs/MEPs who have libertarian views - although there is no single definition of libertarianism so I'm sure many will disagree with some/all of these names; but names like David Davis, Alan Duncan, Daniel Hannan, and Douglas Carswell spring to mind. They are also part of a long tradition of libertarianism in the party (much of Thatcherism, although by no means all of it, for example, was founded on a Libertarian beliefs).

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

Re: Article sounds like a rant

Tracking an index by naively owning the shares in the index means you will always underperform the index. This is because of a number of factors: friction costs involved in buying and selling shares in the right proportion each time the index composition changes (and the consequent market moves that the large number of people doing the same thing at the same time causes), the cost of providing liquidity if you are talking about an open-ended fund where people can decide to withdraw their money at any time (and the issue of how exactly you decide on the price at which they can do so), the administrative cost of employing people to run the fund, etc etc.

Using derivatives (options, swaps, futures) and leverage (borrowing money to invest more than what you have from investors) instead of or as well as owning some or all of the shares in the index allows for these costs to be avoided and/or mitigated, at the cost of creating some other slightly different risks. How good managers are at hedging or managing these risks is difficult to tell; but the market for index funds uses the level of underperformance/variance vs the index as an important benchmark, and this creates economic incentives which push managers towards using these types of structures. Not all index funds do this, but many do.

Re: Bull shit allert.

Actually, many algorithmic trading shops started as one person playing with their own savings. So it very much *is* something an average person could do (and there are brokerage accounts which are available to pretty much any investor and have API access these days too).

Where it gets controversial is in the small number of algorithms where timing advantage is everything. Seeing the order flow before everyone else does and trading on the basis of that information is usually called "front running" and is highly frowned upon even where it's not illegal (which it is in most places nowadays). There is additional controversy about the extent to which exchanges/trading venues have been complicit in this as they got to make some nice additional fees by selling colocation space very near the exchange.

Despite all this there is still an argument that even those traders are adding at least some value (and probably also transferring value from big investors to smaller ones) by providing additional liquidity and narrowing bid-offer spreads. The dispute is about how much, and whether the cost (if it can be measured) caused by front-running type behaviour outweighs this.

What is quite ironic is the fact is that HFT of this sort has largely moved into markets like FX where there has always historically been less transparency and there are a huge number of different trading venues - not for reasons of regulation, but of profitability. So regulation is, as ever, targetting the behaviour of two to three years ago and not today and will probably make close to no difference to those it seeks to target. What is very unfair is that many other algorithmic traders who do not engage in this type of strategy are getting tarred by the same brush and these are the people who will be hurt by this. The usual government regulation story, in other words.

A black box for your SUITCASE: Now your lost luggage can phone home – quite literally

Re: Happens to me

Yep, sadly they shut it down last year due to costs apparently. It would have made much more sense to keep it open while charging say £100/year for the privilege. The best thing about it, really, was the fact that so few people were registered (and all of those were frequent travelers so could use the system very quickly/efficiently) which meant that there was almost never a queue for it. It was also much, much quicker than the new epassport readers (the human border agents are significantly quicker than those I find).

Re: I would make use of this or similar tech

For larger/more expensive equipment (eg camera equipment which is too big to put in hand luggage) I think people end up using dedicated shippers like UPS or FedEx to take care of it rather than checking it on commercial flights (except in certain situations where it's not possible, eg film crew dispatched to breaking news event). The shipping companies are just much, much better at this than airlines and at some point the additional cost becomes a small expense worth paying. No thieving/careless baggage handlers to worry about, you can put it all in a proper sturdy box without worrying about size/weight limitations, they take care of customs issues for you (you can get something called a carnet - sort of like a passport for goods - which means no awkward conversations about paying duty) and they'll give you guaranteed arrival timescales. Plus the benefits of "traveling light" at the airport.

For the average holidaymaker, the best advice is pack less stuff and put your valuables/breakables in hand luggage (go hand luggage only if you can) plus one change of clothes. Then it gets reduced to an insurance exercise.

Re: Too the all the why questions...

Yes. Go and watch Baggage Battles. And then learn from the experience and buy something which actually mitigates this potential loss, which the product under discussion will not - insurance coverage (and also learn not to put anything which you want to retain for non-financial reasons in your checked luggage).

Re: Happens to me

27 seconds? I've done it in 5 seconds when IRIS used to work (I miss IRIS!). My personal best is probably less than one second though, in the days when all you had to do was flash the photo page and they waved you through.

Facebook splats in-app chat, whacks brats into crack yakety-yak app

Re: VK dropped support for Jabber about 9 months ago

XMPP is still working fine for me on facebook chat, and I'm not sure they've said they're planning to drop it either (though I could have missed that). It's just their own mobile apps they are dropping chat support from in favour of the other separate app.

Jack the RIPA: Blighty cops ignore law, retain innocents' comms data

Simply parroting what he's been told by the heads of the agencies

How do we actually know he (or the other oversight authorities such as the Intelligence and Security Committee, another rubber stamp) is even being told about everything they do? Why wouldn't they simply cover up what they do without lawful authority and only report what they did have authority for (along with a handful of 'blunders' to make it look like they aren't fabricating it)? It's not like these agencies don't have a history of applying the "shoot first, ask question later" mentality (police included, remember Jean Charles de Menezes?) after all...

I find it amazing that he seems to think (for he has not indicated to the contrary) he is adequately resourced to do the job he has been given in the first place when that is plainly untrue.

Torvalds rails at Linux developer: 'I'm f*cking tired of your code'

Re: my 2 cents

/dev/kmsg is writable as well as readable. This is useful sometimes for debugging situations but was rarely used by anything until systemd came along

And more importantly

Issue 4. systemd should not be writing its debug logs in the kernel dmesg ring buffer to start with

The decision to do this is simply bewildering. Nothing else does it.

Google confirms Turkish ISPs 'intercepted' its DNS service

Re: What is there to intercept?

DNSCrypt (and to some extent DNSSec which aims to prevent a MITM NXDOMAIN via NSEC/NSEC3 records) would go some way towards fixing the MiTM vulnerabilities of DNS; but that's not really a meaningful workaround to this sort of situation as one can easily imagine that if they had been implemented and MiTM became too difficult to do, Turkey would have simply outright blocked routing to the IPs of the alternative resolvers instead. Tor (or something similar) would seem to be a more durable technical workaround here.

Life support turned off: NHS Direct dies silent, undignified death

I miss the phone service, the website not so much

The NHS direct phone service was MUCH better than 111. The two times I've called 111, they spent 15 minutes asking me to spell my address and tell them who my GP is etc etc etc before even asking why I was calling. They then went through what was very obviously a script the computer was prompting them to do and appeared to have zero medical knowledge (despite apparently being "staffed by nurses"). Now we just call the out of hours GP directly instead who will do a telephone consultation in half the time.

However, BOTH websites are/were useless. The online symptom checker seems to have one answer whatever you do which is "call your GP" (unless you tell it something like you accidentally cut your own head off in which case it says dial 999).

TV sales PLUMMET. But no one's prepared to say what we all know

Re: Buying less because what they've got lasts longer?

Very true. I feel obliged to point out though that you MUST discharge the large capacitors in any switchmode power supply (with an appropriate resistor/other load) and not just disconnect from the line before you do anything else though. A broken power supply (or even a working one without working bleeder resistors) can often mean potentially lethal levels of charge persisting in them for long periods. This is especially true for CRTs but really for anything with a SMPS.

Re: "Lightbulbs, nylon tights, razor blades, can all be made to last years or decades"

Sorry, but straight ("cut-throat") razors can and do last a lifetime when properly cared for (with the occasional honing etc), offering a massive TCO advantage. It's not metallurgy or cost (although you can argue about the benefits of carbon steel vs stainless steel) but convenience which is key. Cartridge razors are evidently highly valued by consumers for two reasons. Firstly, they are easier to use (and importantly have a much shallower learning curve). And secondly, they are quicker to shave with and take a lot less time/effort to take care of (no stropping, honing, etc).

MPs urge UK.gov to use 1950s obscenity law to stifle online stiffies

Re: So...

I agree (despite being a parent - albeit one who won't benefit from any of the above schemes). But you forgot the two biggest subsidies (as a whole) from non-parents to parents - which are publicly funded schools and the NHS (children and older people are rather disproportionate users of health and social care compared to non-geriatric adults). There's also housing benefit (ie cost of providing larger homes for those who qualify) as well as a few other smaller costs.

I'm not sure the married persons allowance is really relevant though (after all plenty of people get married and don't have children, and still more have children but never marry).

Headmaster calls cops, tries to dash pupil's uni dreams - over a BLOG

Re: Truth or consequences

I'm not a lawyer but as I understands it defamation claims are the primary risk but not the only one - e.g. various protections against discrimination/victimisation exist in employment law which could apply, as could the Protection from Harassment Act, or more unusual things like malfeasance/misfeasance and Human Rights challenges (e.g. I would have thought the right to a private life could be argued) where there is public sector involvement and so on.

Defamation claims are not something you want to be on the end of though. They are expensive (and often difficult) to defend and potentially expose you to a huge award of damages.

UK mulls ban on tiny mobiles to block prison smugglers

Look up something called the "ThinCharger" (awesome for traveling light within the UK). A UK plug-based charger doesn't need to be that big.

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

Re: He was lucky :-(

Voting isn't the only option you have in a democracy. You can also stand for office yourself.

Does Gmail's tarted-up tab makeover bust anti-spam laws?

Re: This molehill is dressed up as a mountain

If you'd said that 12 months ago I'd have agreed with you. However the false positive rate on gmail's spam filter suddenly jumped a LOT about 9 months ago (though false negatives are still pretty rare) - so much so that I had to work out how to disable it so I don't lose emails as messages in the spam folder get automatically deleted after 30 days (and if you fetch your email via POP3 to store locally and only rarely use the web interface as I do, it won't retrieve the spam folder so you won't even know). It wasn't just me either - several family members started missing important emails due to this at around the same time.

US feds: 'Let's make streaming copyrighted content a FELONY'

Re: Bonkers

This was the system in the England & Wales as well before 1967 so it's not really an "American term". Felonies were originally offences for which those convicted were subject to forfeiture of land and property (really this was part of the feudal system) although this was abolished during the Victorian era. Eventually the main distinction became the rules and mode of procedure for trials which made things unnecessarily complicated so effectively felonies were abolished in 1967 and all previous felonies became misdemeanours (which were then renamed).

In the same way, some American states and the Federal government retain certain other now-obsolete aspects of the English legal system - e.g. juries for civil trials (still technically available but almost never used in England except in defamation cases), the division of civil courts between courts of Equity and courts of Law (abolished in the Victorian era but still around in some US states to greater or lesser extent, notably in Delaware) and the idea of indictments being handed down by grand juries (abolished in 30s/40s in England but actually required and not merely optional for any Federal offence in the US).

Facebook: 'Don't worry, your posts are SECURE with us'

Re: Don't worry!

You obviously haven't been paying attention. What they mean when they say "if you select this option then what you say will stay private" is "... for the next 3-4 months before the next UI overhaul when we're going to reset everyone's privacy settings for the nth time to 'all public'". Based on repeated past experience, if you put it on facebook, it's best to assume anyone in the world will be able to see it at some point in the future

Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups'

Re: Windows 3.x was never an Operating System

I can't believe noone has mentioned Xenix 386 - which came years before Windows 3.0 and was 32-bit... although it perhaps has a questionable claim to be a "Microsoft" product as the 386 version was produced by SCO (based on MS's earlier work which was in turn based on AT&T's code), as well as the fact that MS sold Xenix to SCO around that time (not sure if this was before or after Xenix 386 was released).

PEAK iPHONE? Apple mobe growth slumps to ‘lowest in its history’

Re: 1/3 of their market value as cash

It's very easy to forget what was arguably the most revolutionary feature of the (original) iPhone - the data tariff. The hardware (and OS) as you say were the result of a longer process of evolution (and convergence between mobile devices and computers) but leveraging the expected popularity of the phone to force AT&T (and later the other networks) to offer 'unlimited' data (or at least, a lot more data for a lot less than they previously had done) was what allowed the smartphone industry to take off. An iPhone-like device on the data tariffs which existed before the iPhone would have simply been too expensive for most people to really use.

Londoners can bonk their way to work without Oyster cards TODAY

Re: And while I'm on a rant...

I think this is aimed at tourists really.

Oyster is not really that inconvenient even in pay as you go mode since you can set it up to auto top-up if you register online - whenever the balance drops below a certain level you can set it up to automatically add more credit from your credit or debit card (and that includes Amex whose NFC payment mechanism isn't mentioned in this article and doesn't appear to be very widely supported)

Also if you lose your Oyster card and it was registered, they're good enough to refund you the deposit you paid on it and transfer the funds to a new card (although it's a bit of a pain to get the refund bit since it only credits when you also buy some other new credit, ie not an auto top-up credit or a season ticket; but the funds transfer is automatic), so the only loss is the difference in the deposit for a new card if it's gone up in price in the mean time, plus (potentially) whatever someone managed to spend on it before you reported it lost/stolen.

UK climate expert warns of 3-5 degree warmer world by 2100

Re: Shirley not that meme again

@NomNomNom: I'm sorry but you're wrong about what the confidence intervals represent.

If X is the "warming rate" in 2012 and Y is the "warming rate" in 1970 then what you are trying to say is that since we believe that P(a<X<b)=P(c<Y<d)=0.95, with c<b, we can reasonably conclude that P(X<Y)<0.05. This is not true; you'd need to do a different statistical test to conclude anything about the relationship between X and Y (you haven't even told us what P(X>c) or P(Y<b) are, for example). That analysis is complicated by the fact that (i) we shouldn't necessarily expect X and Y to have normal distributions and (ii) X and Y cannot be considered independent.

The data you've presented simply doesn't allow us to conclude anything about the relationship between warming rates historically and now - whether they have fallen, risen or stayed the same on any level of confidence.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks are 'immoral' and 'ridiculous' over UK tax

Re: Bleurgh

Quote: "we'll end up moving to a model where there is a sales tax (on top of VAT), only the companies won't pay that, you will!"

And who do you think pays gives companies the money to pay corporation tax? They just raise their selling price to cover that the same as any other cost of doing business.

FOlA judges: Secret 28 who made the BBC Green will not be named

Re: TV licences aren't exactly compulsory.

(Almost) all taxes can be avoided by simply not participating in the activity which is being taxed - including income tax. That doesn't make them "not taxes" or "not compulsory" and I don't see why the licence fee is any different.

Education Secretary Gove: Tim Berners-Lee 'created the INTERNET'

Re: The Distinction....

I think it would be more like confusing "using a car" with "using the road" (or even "inventing cars" with "inventing roads").

Virgin Media's 'bye-bye to buffering' ad nuked by watchdog - AGAIN

Re: As punishment

I find that even in modem mode, it still requires rebooting once a day otherwise it decides to randomly slow everything down (though in fairness this could be the network's fault too). Funnily enough the most noticeable symptom of this is that if I try to watch something on iplayer then it wont start for about 30 seconds as it is "buffering".

VM is really very poor at customer service, despite being more expensive than Sky. For example, they randomly and deliberately (by means of checking User-Agent and equivalent in Flash) dropped support for Linux from the "VM player" service without telling anyone. This service is already worse than the Sky equivalent since it only works on your home connection vs Sky which works anywhere. Then there's the fact that you can't get Sky Atlantic on VM. And that the price of a package without phone service is no cheaper than one with phone service (despite their product being priced to be slightly more expensive than Sky TV+BT line rental+a decent xDSL ISP). And they will offer you a "loyalty" discount if you complain, but only if you sign up for a new 24-month contract.