Posts by Dave 15

Facebook's UK wing paid just £4k in corporation tax last year

Fine

So when the good old treasury sends its folks around to me I will pony up the shaving from the edge of a penny and claim I am paying the same % as these guys.

Frankly it is time the treasury started actually doing something about it.

Simple answer from my view is a single flat tax on all income whether personal or company. If the company gets paid anything at all in the UK then it pays the flat tax on it... don't give a fig if it is profit or not. I don't pay tax on the profit I make from going to work... I have to pay for my car, for the fuel (soon it seems for the car parking space at the office) for the christmas party invite (unless it is cunningly hidden as a company meeting), for coffee or lunch if its provided in the office etc etc etc

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

4G?

I would settle for 3G or even 2G actually working before anyone worries about 4 or 5 or 101g

Round where I live - with a mast in plain sight - no signal. No signal for 95% of the A14 between Cambridge and Norwich, no signal on most of the A1 on the way to London (yes I am often a passenger as well as a driver).

Situation just as shit in other parts of europe... take Germany, was on a call earlier, signal just disappeared, call cut and a minute or so later it was all back again... even when you have a signal it is not reliable

Dixons warns of looming Brexit storm cloud amid bumper results

Re: Carphone warehouse also has problems

Makes a change from land of leather, world of leather, leather world, leather land or whatever the bunch or arsewipes call themselves today...

They take the approach of having a sale, taking payment (or at the very least deposits), going tits up, reopening with a different name, the 3 piece you have already paid for still in the show room... and then turning round and offering to sell it to you a second time. Oh and yes, the receiver (chum of the guy in charge no doubt) makes a packet sending you letters explaining how you will never get the money back. And the bank then tells you that you paid with the visa debit not the visa credit so they will also not help....

Government turns round and says... well the tax man was first in line for payment and got his dosh, customers and suppliers can swivel.

Great world this corporate bugger everyone over to pay the shareholders and CEO more money...

BTW, anyone here ge caught up with Lufthansa? Cancelled my flight twice, said tough shit a strike is not covered by any compensation so swivel... and no its clearly not our fault we offered the workers 2% while the board took 25% pay rises.. thats just plain reasonable

Re: More opportunity than threat

Basically using brexit as an excuse to sack a few people and I assume replace them with cheap labour elsewhere.

Typical me thinks... to be honest if we hadn't left there would be some other excuse - probably that staying in is forcing the price of the pound up and reducing competitiveness.

Well, well. Auditors say UK govt procurement body hasn't saved your tax cash

Re: Bit click-baity, eh?

If it can't say then the correct conclusion is that it failed, this is diplomatic and politically correct phrasing for 'it didnt work but we darent say so because our political masters dont want to hear that and the guy running the show is slipping us some schkels from his latest undeserved payrise to avoid being sacked for incompetence'

Where does all the money go

This government collects even more tax than the last one.... a trend which seems to continue regardless of the party in charge.

Where does it go? Well not on the Royal Navy, we have nothing there any more (just sent the last aircraft carrier to scrap because we scrapped all its aircraft), not to the airforce because they have no planes, nor the army (it can't fill a football stadium so its not an army).

What money the government does collect (and it is a huge amount) goes almost entirely to:

Germany for police cars, fire engines, ambulances.

France for Indian produced software and army lorries

China for uniforms for the armed forces

America for late, under developed and faulty aircraft

Sweden for the police cars the Germans don't supply

Spain for army tanks

Belgium for army guns

South Africa for bullets...

Anywhere in the world for free cash handouts to spend elsewhere

The list goes on.

What is apparent is that none of this saves us any money. What happens is that the company uses OUR tax money to employ people in THEIR country (as indeed I would if the boot was on the other foot). These people pay tax in the country that employs them (so we miss out on that revenue). We as tax payers have to pay those who could and should produce the goods to sit watching day time television. Then we have to watch as the people we still manage to employ making cars, tanks, plane bits etc. have to watch as their offshore competition say 'you don't want to buy from them, even the UK government wont, they must be total crap... buy from us instead' and see the remaining orders dry up and disappear.

And frankly, if Jaguar tried to sell a police car to say Ethiopia and the Ethiopians looked at our roads and saw BMW, Volvo etc police cars would they buy Jaguar... of course not

Guess King Battistelli's plan to fix the Euro Patent Office. Yep, give himself more power

Re: Do they not have...

One other way of course. If all the staff that are so upset just resign on mass the resulting mess will force the hands of the governments involved

Normal

Put someone unsuitable in charge and when they show they are acting against the interests of others fail to act and you end up with nothing.

Brings to mind Nokia with Elop, HBOS and Goodwin, every British government and their PMs since 1945.

No one seems willing to turn round and deal with the people at the top who take massive salaries for their massive responsibility, then fail and still keep taking the salary while blaming every one else. SACK THEM (better still hang them)

HMS Illustrious sets sail for scrapyard after last-ditch bid fails

more rot

Yes you CAN keep things that size on volunteer labour, and you can of course teach future engineering apprenticeships about engineering by having them learn how to repair it (not volunteer but cheap labour who get something positive from it)

Forgot, only things we seem to need in the UK are degree qualified shop assistants, spies and bankers (spell that how you will)

Last ditch efforts, reasonable...

Bollocks

The government wants us to believe we are a pathetic nation of third rate twats, they DELIBERATELY thwarted EVERY attempt to keep this ship in the UK

I even have the emails where apparently the now near empty Portsmouth has no room for a 'hulk'... i.e. can't find another dock like the victory, the warrior, mary rose or hms Bristol... of course Plymouth is not very full either, nor Chatham.

OK Lusty is not small but frankly neither is she big.

Every attempt was turned down by some snot nosed petty paper shuffler who is the one on the receiving end of the backhander from Turkey where we are sending several million pounds worth of metal and getting a fraction of its value (oh, and no jobs at all.. unlike we would have had if we had sent her to a UK graveyard... its pants, pathtic, annoying, typical of the horrendous whitehall machine which is turning the UK into a desert bereft of any value at all but spied on to stop us getting 'uppity'

Uber is watching your smartphone's battery charge

uber need to think

Why would I want an application that lets someone else know what state my phone is in... if they look at that what else do they snoop on?

I also wonder what happens with battery charge info when I plug the phone into a charger... never checked as I still use an old Symbian device because that way I get a battery life around a week rather than around an hour. :)

In the three years since IETF said pervasive monitoring is an attack, what's changed?

same mistake?

Well, maybe I do choose to email Fred, but I don't always know Fred well enough to know his private life as a bomb maker.

If I take a job at the NSA I do know what they are about, and if I take a job there I expect it is a good bet that it is because I approve of what they do... very few seem to turn into whistle blowers

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act allows the State to tell lies in court

surprised?

Not really

These make hitler, the gestapo and stalin all total amateurs.

Worse is that the labour party were just as bad

It is about control.. fear and control.

The British people have no freedom or rights anymore. We are drones educated just enough to do the jobs our 'betters' decree are needed.

Hateful laws from a hateful civil service (they are the ones who should be stopping this crap)

Jeremy Hunt: Telcos must block teens from sexting each other

Re: Why 18?

Love to know what explicit is...

wide range of interpretations available depending on how much they want to lock you up

Re: Why 18?

As I recollect she didnt get a year older for the whole of my degree course.... she turned up once or twice a month, including I recollect a rather fetching school girl outfit... mmm

Ooops, that just means I admitted to being a sicko and should be chemically castrated, hung, drawn, quartered and finally shot

Re: "Because there is technology that can identify sexually explicit pictures "

I know it is pantomime season.... its behind you (does a behind count as a sexually explicit.... no, dont start, dont go there, stupid stupid comment)

Re: What planet do these people live on?

The glib answer is ask a politician, but they actually think they now their arse from their elbow...

Re: What planet do these people live on?

Its all about the old boys network.

Sure you are only 40 but we will give you a job running an international bank because you are 'so experienced'... ooh, you sunk the bank? Never mind, now you have even more experience (and a huge pension pot) why not let us put you in charge of a retail chemist chain... obviously the experience is relevant! Similar occurs at the top of government.

But try this...

I have 20 years coding and 15 years project managing secure, embedded consumer product.... but try getting a job in a bank... ooh no, you have no experience in banking, or perhaps in defense... ooh no, no experience in defense... (yeah, but I did get my degree from the military...)

Yup, one rule for the old boys and another for the rest of us scum

Re: Jeremy Hunt

The people who will benefit are almost certainly offshore software houses who will charge billions for failing (like they did with the nhs system). The fact that many of the MPs best friends have shares in these companies is purely coincidental and doesnt need declaring to anyone... anymore than the thankyou christmas presents that just by coincidence include massively expensive family holidays etc.

Corrupt... you bet, just better hidden than most third world dictatorships

Re: Think for a minute

yup as I said police are a waste of space (and money, and time)

the school are pretty much no better. You might get somewhere if you can claim it is racist bullying but even then your chances are pretty slim

But this was always the case.

Re: Think for a minute

Waste of time going to the police... they will do nothing (apart from add you and your daughters dna to their dataabase)

Best find the perps and sort them yourself (or if you arent big get your friends to help)

Re: Think for a minute

oh cobblers

Bullying from a distance???? You can swap your phone, get numbers blocked etc it is not difficult to control on an individual level. If you don't want people laughing over photos of your short and curlies, beer belly or sagging boobs then don't let people take them... its not rocket science

It is NOTHING to do with this. It is much simpler, they want to exert control over what you can and cant see, they are using porn, sexting, etc as an excuse to get the wedge in, once in they will keep banning, and you wont know what, they will keep snooping and you wont know what on, they will control you with inability to see news sources they dont approve of and fear of being prosecuted if you dare to try and find a way around it.

Control, pure and simple. They are scared of the people that they have bullshitted and lied to for decades working out what a bunch of frauds they are. Terrorism... pah, porn... so what, bullying... oh my heart bleads. Try wearing glasses and having red hair 40 years ago and you KNOW what bullying is, and I wish I could have escaped by turning a phone off... I couldnt. it was in my face (literally) every hour at school, every walk to school and home, every sports club, every social club, the cubs, the scouts... everywhere, and yes I coped ... there was no damned choice.

Re: What's worse ...

The BBC employs arts graduates for everything. They dont have a single person that understands the first thing about technology (just look at Rorys reports)

They are not alone in this

They have also abdicated ALL responsibility for reporting and just regurgitate speeches or press releases as instructed without stopping to ask what? This is part of the process... degrade the knowledge of the average person, control the news, control the thinking and control the person. All people can be controlled if all their inputs are controlled and monitored. This is not about controlling porn etc. this is about controlling sources of information.

Re: How?

via an id card

And of course the id card will have bio metrics so you will also need to have a connected camera to allow the isp to verify the bio metrics from the card that will have to be plugged in a special socket. Then you will need special software on your machine that allows the machine to know if the card is in and it is you as you claim (so no covering the webcam up, no being away from the machine... Then they will have you by the short and curlies

It is about control... they control you, from the moment you are born to the moment they kill you off or lock you up as no longer useful to them.

Re: Facepalm

alarm bells should already be ringing but yes clearly the next step will be age verification which will be mandated to be via an ID card and therefore you will need an ID card....

Re: Most concerning

Unfortunately there is no law yet to prevent the stupid from breeding.

If you go back to the 30s and 40s there was a large body of opinion that said the human race was doomed because the breeding of the stupid was out doing the breeding of the clever so the average IQ was falling

Re: Technology does exist

and if they rely on such technologies then anyone who is a real pervert and really wants to send such stuff will of course create apps that suitably encode the data and decode the far end (just a standard encryption should do this well enough to prevent a man in the middle filter)

Re: Really??

Obviously... I just have to go to school with them, bed with them, the bath with them, the toilet...

TBH yes we should take care of our kids (I do) and we should protect them from harm BUT they have to live, they have to learn and they have to make mistakes.

I did when I grew up, as did many generations before. Yes we were told about the flasher in his mac but yes we still walked to and from school.

clueless

I think you should just have said these braindead fucks are clueless. They are clueless about everything. I reckon most of them are so stupid they need someone to dress them in the morning.

What amazes me is that these rectums think we believe they are somehow elected.

IF the British people had a set of balls between them we could line these damned politicians and civil servants up on the cliffs of dover and shoot the damned lot.

And there was I

There was I sitting at my desk, seeing the brexit failing to progress, watching the inexorable growth of the civil service and my tax bill, seeing the accelerating decline of our armed forces (they were supposed to protect us and now only one of the dozen ships we have left can manage no better than to fire some thing at the enemy, and thats only iron balls), I see the road system in disarray, airport runways being approved when apparently there isnt even a plan of how to do it.... and the government is so confident that this is all ok that it worries about a few people a year stupid enough to pose naked for a photo and then get upset when someone shares it ... .the people concerned are morons (so are probably all either in the house of commons or house of lords), they deserve to lose everything and frankly wasting more government time, police time and adding to the costs and hassle of my internet and mobile phone access is disproportionate.

Add to this that I was told that after a judge sentenced a guy to a suspended 6 month sentence for repeatedly sexually assaulting several underage girls that the crown prosecution saw no chance of a larger sentence on appeal so there would be no appeal (or investigation of the obviously perverted judge)

German minister seeks facial recognition at airports, train stations

Re: Minority Report is coming true before our very eyes

The thing is most of the population is already carrying around a mobile phone. In Germany you have to give all sorts of details for a mobile here (you don't for visiting which is currently a loop hole I guess they will close eventually). All mobiles form android and apple are very capable of tracking you (the phone companies do it for everyone else) and if you check theses companies know where you were every minute of every day since you owned the phone... and its available on the net.

Re: Ban my backpack? You don't want my money then.

I HAVE been to Oktoberfest and YES THERE WERE PEOPLE WITH CHILDREN AND PRAMS

Oktoberfest is also used by people on their way home from work who might well have work laptops or stuff to carry. I daresay therefore some could use it on their way from office to airport. True I would prefer to book a hotel and stay longer but hotels are hard to find at short notice, those that can be are often far enough that you don't go from the office to the hotel back to the Oktoberfest.... you go to the fest on the way to the hotel (or airport)

Its not just beer drinking there are other things there AND frankly if you haven't prebooked to be in the large tents you are probably one of those wandering around buying an expensive wine, an over priced beer on a roundabout, a sausage in a bun or an authentic candle in a glass pot inbetween fairground rides

Re: Ban my backpack? You don't want my money then.

And to be honest IF the terrorists exist (and frankly the number of apparent incidents is trivial anyway) and if they are from the extreme Muslim ideology are you going to bad Burkas? Not in UK or Germany where politicians don't have the balls. How many pounds of explosive and metal balls etc can fit under one of those tents ...

True in theory they shouldn't be drinking but Oktoberfest does have a large market and funfair they could be going to, and Munich a large and crowded airport, trainstation, and city centre...

As usual politician opens mouth before brain is in gear

Re: Wow! In Germany?

I can take a photo of someone, that is a large step away from having them on a database, accusing them of a crime, storing information for ages....

just to prove hunt isnt the only...

Yup seems that even the obedient Germans have their rectums

When most terrorists are not know until after their bits are recovered it seems unlikely this is any better than a way of tracking people... I guess not enough people have android or apple phones for the fact those have tracking that you can access online to cover 100% of the population

Going underground: The Royal Mail's great London train squeeze

20%...

20% of the supposed working age population of the UK are not working, no point in inventing a driver less train when it is so easy and cheap to get a person

The Chinese worked this out years ago... cheaper to have a lot of people than spend money on machines.

One good thing May and Hunt could do...

They could stop sticking their oar where it isn't needed and insist on the royal mail reopening and using this damned railway to get their noisy, polluting and foreign vans off the over crowded streets of London.

In fact I would force them to extend the railway.

I guess some snotty RM board directors and some government ministers got together with the directors of Mercedes and Shell to get some nice kickbacks from abandoning an environmental, cost effective, cheap and existing solution in favour of a nasty, polluting, overcrowding and expensive alternative. Just like Beeching did in the 50s

Creaking Royal Navy is 'first-rate' thunders irate admiral

Re: All in all it is unclear if RN is following the right doctrine

rot.

missiles were the reason we destroyed our navy and airforce in the 60s, it was a mistake then and to repeat is a mistake today. missiles and even drones are just not capable to evade, defend or check the real situation when they arrive. for that you need real people in real planes.

the fact the navy is stupid in that it requires an undefended ship of oil and aviation fuel as well as the carrier itself means that it is entirely vulnerable. you dont have to sink the carrier, just deprive it of fuel. as we have perfectly good nuclear power plants (we use them in subs) and the ability and knowledge to use them to drive a ship we should use it. The space saved in ships fuel tanks could be used for ammo and aviation fuel and the money saved on supply ships could build extra carriers. If we also made all the frigates and destroyers nuclear powered we would end up with a navy that can operate more than 5 miles from Portsmouth

cobblers

Dont buy an american nuclear missile, develop our own so it is ours, it is independent, we can use it and it will support some r&d spending in the UK

However do buy a large nuclear missile capability... frankly when all the other defence you possess is a couple of broken down ships unable to hit the enemy (no missiles, no guns) an airforce which wont be able to fly 0.2 seconds after the start of war as the runways will be full of holes (as we had in ww2 and we did to the argies in the falklands) and an army so small that it is lost in a football stadium it doesnt matter if the attacker is or is not nuclear armed it is the only credible defence we do have.

If we took 100 billion or whatever trident spend it would NOT be spent on warships, tanks or planes, and in a couple of years further defence cuts will have removed any extras we had

Re: "Rolls Royces do not breakdown, they fail to proceed"

Worse than the fact it has a German engine is that it is actually a German car... the chassis, engine, drive train, electronics all come in from Germany. The only thing related to England is a bit of stitching of the imported leather (probably also German) and a bit of polish on the imported wood at the front.

Its as English as a tin of Russian Caviar.

MoD confirms award of giant frikkin' laser cannon contract

Good

Phew, relief, thought for a moment that the BRITISH tax payer funded protector of the BRITISH people - the infamous MOD - were going to abandon their usual practice of buying foreign things (foreign missiles, guns, bullets, planes, engines, tanks, uniforms) and spend some of the billions in the UK actually creating jobs and hope in the British arms industries (if indeed there are any left).

Wouldn't be cricket old chap to actually be intelligent and realize asking Spain for tank spares to protect Gibraltar, or asking China for more uniforms if we need to protect Taiwan, or perhaps trying to ship more bullets from South Africa or planes from the USA when we have no navy is not a particularly realistic set of scenarios in a war.

To be honest given the pathetic state of the MOD, the fact we don't have the industrial muscle left to make a bolt or the technical knowledge left to debug the shit the yanks palm us off with suggests that we might as well do away with the whole damned lot, cross our fingers and drink some more tea

RAF Club members emailed fake invoices. Has it been hacked?

hundreds?

There maybe quite a few former officers but the raf is now such a small organisation (after ill advised cuts from both Cons and Labour) that I doubt there are more than a handful of serving officers...

Unless of course it is like the royal navy... 40 admirals, 260 captains, 77 ships (including Victory and some glorified inshore ribs ... 19 warships if you count the unarmed ships we class as major combatant units)

European Council agrees to remove geoblocking

unjustified... what a get out

Love the phrase.

So will the blocking of porn sites by the UK ISPs be an unjustified geo block or a justified one?

What about the continued blocking of many videos in Germany because of some rights issues (I mean, what is the point to having the right to a video if no one can buy it anyway... so why use that as a justification to stop them watching it... bizarre)

Basically what I read is a law with a title that means the politicians can claim to have done something, but a law with so little meaning and so totally toothless they have done nothing. Its yes minister for real (again)

Wow. What a shock. The FBI will get its bonus hacking powers after all

Re: Really? Making this about representation?

It is fun to write to your representative (MP in the UK), I do on a regular basis.

100% of the time it makes not a jot of difference either to the law or the way my MP votes

About 20% of the time a response arrives form my MP - always a reprint (not even a rewrite) of the governments stated position, my representative is a greasy pole climber who would sell his daughters, shoot his mother and lick the brown hole of anyone he needs to on his way 'to the top', totally shameless

UK's new Snoopers' Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor

Re: Tories - Enemies of freedom and democracy

Naturally they did.

They were told to - by their boss the PM. The fact that they should be representing their constituents doesn't matter a damn.

The whips probably told them that if they 'rebel' (as voting according to the wish of your constituents is termed when - as it often does - this means not voting the way of the boss in number 10).... if they rebel then they will be pointed out as someone willing to help terrorists in the face of the natural good work of the police and security services, would be accused all over the media of being a closet terrorist and would never again even get selected.

Re: Doesn't the UK already have form

If I were the next PM the very first thing I would do would be to clear out the entire civil service, every last man jack of them, send the lot to prison. It is difficult to find an example of any part of the civil service which isn't complicit in the continued undermining of the UK... from the debacle over the negotiations to leave the EU back through the amazing goings on with 'defence' (ships with no missiles, guns with no bullets, squadies with foreign uniforms), to the Falklands (basically telling the Argies they could have the Falklands), the continued attempts to offload Gibraltar to the Spanish... back through history. You couldn't make it up

Ah... an idea

OK

So the messages, browsing etc. are linked to mac addresses and they can also tell which ip (&therefore router)

Make ALL our routers open. After all the scare stories a couple of years back that people could get to your pc because they could get to your router are bollocks... if they weren't then I could hack anyones PC on the works network.

Then buy and sell once a week or month at a car boot ...

Then the records will be pretty much pointless and useless.

Re: Will they ban FOSS

come it isnt some lines of basic you can recompile

even if you take the time to disassemble the mamouth mountains of modern software you will be looking for a needle in a haystack. The hack wont look like if(governmentinspector) then revealall(); It will be something subtle, a ++ on an integer somewhere, a < rather than <= on an if... this is all they will need to ensure the encryption is compromised enough for them to decrypt it. It is a mathematical formula nothing more, and get the coding wrong and the whole premise falls apart.

Re: This solves nothing....

Terrorism? What terrorism?

Yup, there is NONE.

A couple of attacks a decade or more back possibly made by the security forces and some unsubstantiated claims of blocking 1 or 2 more a year.

The IRA managed several dozen a year when they were trying. If any modern terrorist were inspired there are hundreds of ways of attacking, no need even to club together in groups and talk to your friends.

Re: VPN?

You will have to try and find a way to import the unhacked vpn, you wont be able to download it (the ip will be blocked, or maybe silently redirected to a hacked version), you wont be able to bring it in on media or devices they will be scanned (if not now very shortly when some terrorist outrage is caused by someone circumventing the obviously 'very sensible' laws)