
Re: Ooops!
I had one of those Ejection ties, but every time I wore it to a restaurant I just got thrown out.
65 posts • joined 12 Mar 2010
Exactly. The laws about not passing on card fees were never really about consumer protection, they were the result of heavy lobbying and devious PR by the card industry and exist solely to protect the card industry's revenues. They know that if people were charged more for paying by card, some of them would choose to pay another way and card payment revenues would go down. The net result is that any customer who pays by other means is subsidising the customer who pays by card.
Many of my customers are happy to pay by bank transfer, which costs me nothing in transaction fees - and in these days of online and mobile banking it's very easy for them to do so. If they pay by card I have to hand over a percentage to the card industry. I'd love to give the bank-transfer customers a small discount as they've saved me money, but it's illegal for me to do that. Instead the fees become part of my overheads and my prices have to go up a little - for everyone, regardless of how they pay.
Said neighbours might reasonably respond that they never asked you to flood their house with your WiFi radiation. As you have no legal reason to extend your WiFi coverage into their household, you are effectively littering their property with your discarded energy. If you don't want them to make use of it, you should take steps to restrict your unlicensed signal transmissions to within your own property boundary. What they are doing costs you nothing - it won't increase the power consumption of your router.
This is, of course, different from them piggybacking into your WiFi service to use your Internet connection without your permission - they would be in trouble then, but not because of the energy used.
@older'n'dirt: Mem & Arts are on the website:
https://www.nominet.uk/corporate-governance/memorandum-and-articles/
You may also need to look at the Voting Rights bye-law. I could swear that when I looked the other week there was a link to that in the Governance section of the website, but I can't find it now. (Hmm.) However a Google for Nominet voting rights bye-law will come up with the pdf.
I believe the voting rights have operated in roughly this way since the company was set up , so it would be surprising if none had pointed out the problem before now. I suspect the key point is that voting rights are not the same as interests or shares. Having more votes does not give you a bigger stake in the company's value. Regardless of the number of votes they get in a general meeting, each member has the same £10 liability and no rights to the company's assets.
(IANAL nor indeed a qualified company secretary, just an ex-trustee of a charity that was a membership company limited by guarantee.)
Well, no. Firstly you're looking at an out of date version of the Articles. They were amended at the September 2020 AGM. The current Articles are here:
https://www.nominet.uk/corporate-governance/memorandum-and-articles/
The only bye-laws required are the ones for the election of non-exec directors, and they're here:
https://www.nominet.uk/corporate-governance/agm/
But here's where it gets interesting. One of the new clauses in the amended Articles is this one:
5.3 If it appears to the chair of the general meeting that the electronic platform, facilities or security at the electronic general meeting have become inadequate then the chair may, without the consent of the meeting, interrupt or adjourn the general meeting. All business conducted at the general meeting up to the time of that adjournment shall be valid.
In other words, if the online conferencing service goes on the blink, the chair can unilaterally decide to postpone the meeting. That might sound innocuous, but consider this:
This is the only case in the Articles where the chair can postpone a general meeting without the consent of the members present. (Even if there are still enough members physically present in the room to make up a quorum, the chair can still postpone without a vote.) There is no stated limit in the Articles on how long the chair can postpone the meeting for.
This clause was obviously added in a hurry, as it doesn't fit well with the rest of the Articles, so you have to ask who added it, and why?
What money on a sudden and totally unexpected failure of the online conferencing tech at a critical point during the EGM? It wouldn't block the campaigners completely but it would complicate the process and buy the board some more time. Maybe they are that desperate.
Looks like El Reg seriously misjudged the mood of the room there. This must be the first time I've seen every single commentard in broad agreement, and all contrary to the article's weird attempt to mock a sensible idea. I've seen a few comments recently bemoaning the Register's descent into Daily Mail-ism and dismissed them as being exaggeration, but this article does make me wonder.
"You have the ulitmate freedom to click the back button, and go somewhere else. No-one forces you to visit any website."
Sorry, not good enough. Website owners may not block "general access" to the website on that basis, though they can prevent access to specific pieces of content where there is a legitimate reason to do so.
Of course that's only enforceable for EU-based sites. I find a lot of the offending sites are from big US publishers who probably consider their European audience too small to be worth bothering about, so they aren't going to spend money reconfiguring their sites just to comply with foreign laws.
"One wonders how far they got, and did they get their "sneaky device" plugged into the network before being caught?"
No, that was installed by the third member of the team, who walked straight in behind the sheriff while he was busy arguing with Wynn and Demercurio.
Yes, I may have been watching too many reruns of Hustle.
"I honestly judge our banking supplier (Barclays) SO harshly because their online smartcard-based super-duper sign-in to authorise payments for a multi-million-pound business has a minimum spec of "IE 10, or Firefox ESR"... and it literally doesn't work on Chrome at all."
Funny - it works fine for me, using Chrome on Windows 10. Maybe you're holding it wrong?
Actually the sign-in is the only good thing about my Barclays business account - features like tabbing between form fields working properly, the fact that the time-limited single-use passcode is not hidden as you type it in, and (shock horror) a single sign-in that gives me access both to the business account and to the personal account of a relative for whom I hold LPA, all indicate that somebody actually thought about usability for once. Shame the rest of their service is so dire.
But the market remains wary of switching from more reliable analogue devices.
Weird thing to say. It's nothing to do with digital versus analogue. I don't think anyone's doubted the reliability of digital watches for over 30 years - my Timex Triathlon keeps better time, runs for longer and is more robust than any of the analogue watches I've had. It's the inflated prices and poor battery life of smart watches that's holding them back: nobody wants to have to remember to charge yet another device every night. That, and the fact that for all the marketing they're still more cumbersome and clunky-looking than a traditional watch.
On affected sites the conyouse script appears on the wp-login.php and wp-admin pages and on login forms inserted into other pages. So I'm guessing the dodgy code is more likely to be found in the login functions in general-template.php.
(I see Richard Chirgwin thinks Blissfields Festival is a "small community group". Try to keep up with the kids, Richard... :-) )
>> What do you expect from a principally "dead tree" publication?
>> (is that on the list now, I wonder... hmmm, doesn't appear to be)
No it isn't, but that would be because they already added "dead tree" back in 2007. Way ahead of you there. (Also "treeware" which I hadn't come across before. I like that.)
Meanwhile in Redmond:
"Hey, this Pascal guy is right! Our customers won't replace something that works fine. What we should do is, we should screw up XP so it doesn't work any more! Get me the dev team, I feel an urgent "security patch" coming on..."
"Richard Heaton, Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office. Sporting two-day stubble, he enthuses that writing laws is really a form of computation, so we should make it more like a software project: legislation should be crowdsourced, and full of symbols. Get hip, legislators, he says, get like the coders!"
I totally agree with this, though perhaps not in the way he meant. It's blatantly obvious that none of our legislation gets properly tested before it goes live. What we need is a "law test team" that looks at each new piece of legislation and says, "What could go wrong? How could I break this? If I press the wrong buttons, will it do something unexpected? Does it address all the bugs that were found in the legislation it replaces?" In other words, some professional software testers. If the draft legislation fails the test phase it goes back for fixing.
The cynic in me thinks that laws are deliberately made ambiguous, contradictory and full of loopholes as that means more business for the lawyers who (surprise surprise!) mostly draft the stuff in the first place. But on the whole I think it's cockup rather than conspiracy.
"Unfortunately, Sugar also kept the cost of the CPC-464 system down by having it manufactured in the Far East instead of the UK where many computers were made until the mid-80s. He also later transferred Spectrum manufacturing to Taiwan (IIRC) and then China. To be fair, other UK and US manufacturers also started doing this in the mid-80s as well."
To be fair, Sinclair had already shifted most ZX Spectrum production from the UK to Portugal a year earlier. (Strange to tell now, but in those days many southern European countries had cheap enough wage levels that they were considered a viable alternative to far-east manufacturing - which was how Spain ended up with a huge car industry.)
Actually, what the government did was funnel a *relatively* modest amount of money into green energy then conveniently fail to challenge those who chose to undermine it with ludicrous exaggerations and outright lies. (Wind farms are killing all our birds!! One wind farm won't power the whole of Birmingham so we shouldn't build any at all!!!)
At which point, surprise surprise, it turns out there's only one alternative - the insanity of more nuclear fission plants. A way of throwing billions of pounds at huge corporations who will over-charge and under-deliver, after which the public sector will have to pay the cost of cleaning up the waste. Again. As a nation we haven't even finished paying for the first wave of nuclear power yet.
Of course the government could put lots more investment into energy efficiency so we don't need so much of it in the first place. That would make both environmental and economic sense, which is why the government is raising the levies on power companies to... oh, wait. Hang on a minute.
I have only one thing to say to you:
BBC4.
They're probably working on the Tomorrow's World Restrospective even now, just as soon as they've finished preparing the next batch of 1970s TOTP episodes. (It takes ages to edit out every shot of The DJ Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned.)
Anyway, Crystal Maze was Channel 4.
Not entirely. Thunderbirds was conceived as a half-hour show and Anderson and team were halfway through production of the first series when their backer Lew 'Low' Grade decided the length should be doubled. Which helps explain why certain TB episodes slow to a crawl in the middle as they desperately splice in offcuts to fill up the time. (Let's have another long shot of the meter edging towards critical... now a close-up of a bead of perspiration on Alan's forehead and his eyebrows set to "Frown"... now back to the meter getting infinitesimally nearer critical... back to Alan...)
On the other hand it did give them space to build up the characters a bit more, which was where TB really scored over (half-hour) Captain Scarlet.
>>> I got that, but is the transfer of licenses even allowed by Microsoft?
It is, but only once. The licence agreement (Office 2010 but I think it's similar in all version) says:
"20. TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY. The first user of the software may make a one-time transfer of the software and this agreement, by transferring the genuine proof of license directly to a third party. The first user must remove the software before transferring it separately from the licensed device. The first user may not retain any copies of the software. Before any permitted transfer, the other party must agree that this agreement applies to the transfer and use of the software. If the software is an upgrade, any transfer must also include all prior versions of the software."
Dear Martin, to answer your questions:
"But will we ever need a petabyte of personal storage?"
Yes, I need at least 2.5 petabytes so I can take a backup copy of my brain.
"How many copies of EastEnders does the world need to be stored on a locally spinning drive?"
None. Not one. Delete them all, everywhere, and make the world a slightly happier place.
>>> "Exactly. I was charged GBP6.50 for parking for 2 hours 7 minutes in Reading yesterday (a Sunday). I'm not likely to shop there again. Greedy car park operators are making life even more difficult for retailers."
Yeah, that explains why Reading's car parks are always half empty and it's always easy to find a sp-
Hey, wait a minute...
You think too small.
Drive in, park, cover number, drive out, find arch enemy and commit horrible MURRRDERRR of your arch-enemy by running him/her down, return to car park, uncover number, drive out. "It can't have been my car, detective inspector, I was parked in town all afternoon..."
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