Posts by CaptainHook

Twitter, Facebook and pals keep BEELLIONS from treasury with exec pay tax break – report

Re: The downside of atheism

Effectively the company is giving away something valuable (a stake in itself) and GETTING NOTHING IN RETURN

*****

A part from being able to make up part of the staff pay packet in a form which doesn't affect cash flow while actually increasing staff loyalty because they generally can't get at the shares which haven't yet vested if they leave. I.e. if the staff leave, they have to willing lose part of the compensation they earned with their previous employment.

The share options don't get counted as part of the wage at the point of being issued: as such it also reduces the company NI contributions compared to what the staff would have been paid without substituting part of their pay packet cash for share options.

Yep, company is getting nothing in return for those staff share options and are only doing it because the government is pushing them that way.

How the W3C met its Waterloo at the Do Not Track vote showdown

Re: 105

The reason the Do Not Track functionality exists is because the creepy line has already been crossed.

Anonymity is the enemy of privacy, says RSA grand fromage

"Customers are caught in a Catch-22. They're afraid to deploy technology for fear of violating workers' privacy" even though security intelligence tools are ultimately the best way to protect personal information, Coviello argued.

*****

Read as: "we've just spent a fortune developing a big data analysis tools but since the NSA leaks none of our customers want to be seen as collecting private information".

Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee: DRMed HTML least of all evils

Re: A reason for a standard

@ Swathy

should want the W3C and Sir Berners-Lee to develop a DRM Standard.

*****

This isn't DRM Standard, it's a standardised method for DRM to interact with the browser. MP/RIAA are still going to be the ones creating/commissioning the DRM programs. Those programs can still decided they only want to work with certain hardware or operating systems etc. so there is still no guarantee that this will lead to Linux usable streamed media.

All this has done is provided a means to ensure all browsers interact with the DRM application in the same way. It's a way to reduce DRM development costs.

Sun-seeking Cambridge boffins chase Solar Challenge car crown

Why GPS to work out where the sun is?

Why not just a half circle hoop of Light Dependant Resistors mounted on that half circle part behind the cockpit.

Each LDR is facing in a slight different direction and which ever one registered the most light is probably the best direction to point the solar cells in, that way the panels are actually pointing at the strongest source of light and not just where the sun should be which could be obscurred locally by trees and landscape.

British support for fracking largely unmoved by knowledge of downsides

Re: People are starting to realise

With their hollow transparent fibre optic like hairs, Polar Bears would make brilliant chanderliers and cast a warm even light everywhere.

Asus NV550JV 15.6in full HD notebook - the one we didn't have to send back

372GB

for an OS partition?

Dragons' Den star's biz Outsourcery sends yet more millions up in smoke

"These sorts of numbers will hardly cause traditional IT suppliers to quiver in their boots at the much-talked-about threat from the new bread of channel services firms. "

*****

Baguettes? Ciabatta?

UK's Get Safe Online? 'No one cares' - run the blockbuster ads instead

Here's A Crazy Idea

"The study warns that attacks on computer networks could soon threaten critical infrastructure"

****

Don't put critical infrastructure on networks accessible from internet. Even if you think you have a firewall filtering that traffic... don't do it.

Put an air gap in front of everything critical, it really is that simple.

Google tries putting an NFC ring on it: Bonking will keep you SAFE

Re: Flawed

The browser url will be tracked too.

*****

Of course it will, but since it's a one time password it doesn't matter.

Of course you are still vulnerable to being tapped by Man In The Middle attacks but thats not the fault of the key generator

Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by THE NSA

Encrypted Contents

Although an interesting read in general. In the specific case of Snowden, surely the US Government already know what the contents are, since it was copied from them.

What they are trying to do is find out who now has a copy of it and maybe work out how Snowden is communicating and with whom.

UK mulls ban on tiny mobiles to block prison smugglers

Re: What has it got to do with SOCA?

I want comically organised crime... is there an agency for that?

Battery-free e-ink screen grabs screenshots from smartphones

Interesting as the prototype is, there remains the question of why one would want such a thing.

*****

Shops need to updated price labels on shelf, at the moment it requires someone walking around changing the paper tickets.

A system like this would allow a member of staff to change the label just by holding a NFC device next to the label.

In fact I can think of an even better workflow allowing head office to dictact far more directly what goes on each and every shelve.

Since it's a NFC device is must have a unique identifier, so when a member of staff holds their handheld device to a shelf it knows exactly which shelf the staff member is looking at. The device can then update the price if needed but it could also change the label to an entirely different product indicating that the shelf needs to have all the jars of tomato sauce removed and restocked with tins of Christmas Pudding.

I've just removed all the shop floor managers need to organise stuff, their only role now is for staff 'motivation'

Wait, don't ditch that IT career just yet: UK vacancies hit 5-year high

Re: Impossible conditions

Wanted developer with 5 years Windows 8 experience(mandatory)

Recruitment drones get a bit annoyed when you point out that there is no one on the planet with that experience. "It's what the customer wants" they wail.

*****

Actually a developer working on the OS from inside Microsoft might do. Although obviously thats not what the company actually wants.

Superstar cluster-Zuck as Facebook tries out celeb-only edition

Re: Duh

The point of celebs using twitter is that all their fans (mostly normal people) can see what they are up to.

*****

It's not entirely clear but I don't think thats the point.

It more like a 1 way filter, the celeb can make posts to FB which fans can follow and view but they can't friend the celeb directly. Then the celeb can keep track of what the fans are saying about their post without having to friend random people or join groups etc.

Nude swimmers warned of GONAD-GOBBLING FISH ON THE LOOSE

Re: Many testicles are lost annually to kitchen appliance malfunctions

What? what are you doing with the toaster/kettle/washer/food processor ????

*****

Real Men don't use shop brought gadgets for their "Will It Blend" experiements.

Tax dodging? It's harder to do - and rarer - than you think

Re: Fiduciary duty

Fiduciary duty means the executives of a company must work in the best interests of the shareholders... that does not mean they have to use all possible methods to maximise profits.

For example:

Step 1) A telephone company changes the contracts for it's customers making the company vastly more money for than expected for a few years as the customers are trapped.

Step 2) As the various customer contracts end, the customers leave and swear to never touch that company again.

The executives have maximised the profit of a company for several years, but they haven't worked in the best interests of the shareholders because by maximising profit for a year or two they destroy the profit of the company futher down the line.

Hundreds of UK CSC staff face chop, told to train Indian replacements

Re: Redundancy?

The change of location counts as redundancy for the role.

IIRC, if a company moved its office more than 15 miles from the original office location they have to offer redundancy to any staff member who doesn't want to move because the role in the original office is now redundant. Thats a good thing, because it forces the company to pay proper compensation instead of just firing people who wouldn't move and avoiding all compensation for it.

MYRA HINDLEY found working in Capita's benefits & revenues unit

So basically

This story amounts to IT worker has part time job acting and a bit a background information to pad the story out?

Truely cutting edge IT related stuff.

Are driverless cars the death knell of the motor biz?

Re: Own the box rent the motor (again)

People can own a standardised passenger compartment* and call up the autonomous motive unit as required and to suited to the trip.

*****

Wouldn't that be the worse aspects of both systems.

+ No Parking Space Is Saved

1) Because you still have to store the passenger compartment at home, office and shopping center.

2) Still need multiple passenger compartments for multiple simutaneous trips (office and school run)

+ Up Front Costs

1) You still have to pay a large upfront capital payment to buy each passenger compartment your family would need. They would be cheaper than a whole car but not as much as you might think. They would need to be crash impact resistant compartments in the same way as cars are now so they will still be significant lumps of metal.

+ Still Dependant On Someone Elses Schedule

1) So you've got the cost of buying, storing and maintaining your own passenger compartment, but you are still dependant on someone elses schedule before you can make a trip, if there are enough motor units to nearby that wont be a huge problem, but image you live in the sticks and need to get into town, the nearest motor unit might be the town you want to visit, so you order a unit, it travels from town to your house, back to town, goes off to do other trips, then picks up your passenger compartment again to travel from town, to your house, and back to town again (a single 2-way trip needing a minimum of 6 journeys)

A final proof that this idea wouldn't work is this. Nothing in your suggestion couldn't be done now using small tractors units with drivers instead of autonomous cars and yet no one does it... anywhere in the world as far as I can see. The closest analogy is 40ft goods containers but they work because they are built in places with lots of space to store containers, lots of expensive machinery can be concentrated into one place to store and stack the containers and transport time isn't as critical as it for passenger journeys.

Windows 8.1: Here at last, but is it good enough?

Re: First experiences

While I can walk into a computer store and see rows of devices showing the tile interface and not having a touch-screen, Window 8.x is going to deter buyers.

*****

While there is still a physical keyboard attached, the touch screen is pointless, either:

You have the laptop positioned so that the keyboard is positioned so it's comfortable to type on in which case you will have to make be large arm moves to reach the screen

- or -

You position the laptop closer to you so the screen is easier to reach in which case you are no bunched up to type at the keyboard.

Touch works if you are holding the device because then your hands are right there, but if you have the laptop/PC setup on a desk it just makes no sense because the ergonomics are just wrong.

Sean Parker: 'My fairy-tale wedding harmed no trees'

Re: California Coastal Commission

5 miles inland? That's a bit more than most people would accept as being "the coast"

*****

You're right, it's not like a gigantic body of salt water, which has huge influence on weather conditions and the chemical makeup of the rain and mist in the area there could ever have an influence on the local ecology 5 miles away. </sarcasm>

In fact one of the defining aspects of Redwood forests is the mists and fogs which roll in from the sea overnight, it's an important source of water for the forest.

That enough, folks? Starbucks tosses £5m into UK taxman's coffers

False Analogy

This isn't giving the government money in the hopes the government will leave the alone.

This is trying to buy a bit of good will from their customers, I bet it's even come right out of the marketing budget.

Tech giants' offshore cash-stashing is only ever a delaying tactic

Re: And this is where the complexity comes in..

I'd argue it's the other way round, it's the stupidly complex tax system which is ripe for gaming.

What we need is a dirt simple, back of the fag packet type of calculation, that way there is nowhere to hide the money.

Personally, I'm in favour of either a vastly simplified income tax with a large personal allowance, same rate of tax regardless of source of money, so it doesn't matter if it's capital gains, salary, benefits (either from the state or from companies in the form of health insurance/company car etc) or investment interest it's all the same rate.

- or -

some sort of land value tax, on the basis that you can't move it outside of our tax jurisdiction. However although like the idea of a Land Value Tax, I haven't seen a good anwser to the issue of asset rich but cash poor people.

Nice in theory, complicated in practice

VAT is a regressive tax because the poor have to spend more of their income just to survive compared to the rich and so end up paying a higher percentage rate.

Thats not to say it's couldn't be made to work, you would need to apply zero rate VAT status to everything that is considered essential goods and services, and keep that list of goods and services up to date as time goes on.

What gets included on that list would be very politcal.

For example, a car is an essential item for a lot of people, without access to private transport access to jobs, entertainment and participation in a lot of what society offers is restricted or completely cut off. However there is a big difference between a Ford Fiesta and Ferrari 458 Italia. That means someone in Government/Civil Service needs to review everything, even different models within the same class of goods to decide on a tax rate which companies are going to want to game because it directly affects the price the end user will pay (see Jaffa Cakes)

Hacker who helped find Steubenville rapists threatened with decade in prison

That's assuming that the information is deemed as admissible evidence after someone hacked the site it was posted to though I guess....

*****

Which would be a shame, but since the cops had already ruled out any further investigations, it's made no difference to the legal position before or after the hacking.

Jobs' 'incredibly stupid' prattlings prove ebook price-fix plot, claim Feds

Re: hang on a bloody moment...

No, you've got it the wrong way round.

Apple isn't give Most Favoured Nation status, it's recieving Most Favoured Nation status from the publishers, although obviously Apple asked for it. It basically means that the publishers can sell to who they want to, but they will never offer a price to anyone which is lower than the price offered to Apple.

Former Microsoft Windows chief: I was right to kill the Start button

Re: When you look at it it's actually pretty stupid...

Getting Users to use Metro is only part of the issue, they needed Developers to make Metro apps as well.

There are approximately 1 gazillion non-touch PC/Laptop based Windows installations out there and about 100 metro touch installations. If the developers aren't forced to develop for the new UI they wouldn't bother because it makes no economic sense for them.

I'm sure in the back of their crazy little minds they were hoping forcing Metro on everything makes Windows mobile development more attractive because even if the code can't run directly on mobile hardware the UI restrictions will already have been taken into account.

Bill Gates: Corporate tax is not a moral issue

Re: Morally repugnant

"Since when is it the job of politicians to cast moral judgements? Never."

******

Why was the slave trade abolished if not as part of a moral judgement by MPs? Or enabling women to vote?

Politicians are always making moral judgements and then enacting laws to force those judgements on people, it's basically what their job is, after all we have a civil service to actually run the country.

I'm not saying the moral judgement is always right, for example Iain Duncan Smith seems to have an amazing talent for always ending on up on the wrong side of a moral argument, but pushing through laws which back up his own twisted ideology, but to say it's not the job of a politician to make moral judgements seems to miss a huge part of their job description.

Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS

Re: Get yourself issued with two notices for two different car parks at the same time

Thats not the same thing at all.

You got tickets for 2 seperate vehicles breaking the law, in the case where a driver can not be identified the owner of the vehicle is charged instead.

UK MPs tell Google: Get back here and bring your auditors with you

Re: Why?

Why do Google's accountants have anything to explain?

*****

The whole point of the original hearings was to work out how such huge companies with very large turnover were paying so little tax, it wasn't trying to establish whether the companies were acting illegally but to work out which loopholes were being exploited in an attempt to close those holes at a later date through changes to the law.

Google said they keep all their sales staff in Ireland specifically to take advantage of the lower Corporation Tax in that country (completely legal) and that the UK staff weren't sales staff, if they are just support staff they don't generate any turnover and are only a cost center and hence generate no profit to be taxed.

When the PAC asked the accountants whether they checked Googles offices to make sure what Google said about it's staff was true they said (and I'm paraphrasing alot) "Yes, Google sales are all based in Ireland, take our word for it".

Google and Ernst & Young have been summoned back because of a report by a US newspaper has evidence that Google's London Office is teeming with sales staff. Both Google and Ernst & Young are not being called back because of their tax arrangements but because everything they said to the PAC first time around now smells a little bit fishy.

DARPA looks for a guided bullet with DEAD reckoning navigation

Science Fail

navigation is just a matter of knowing one's __VELOCITY__ and duration of travel - with suitable accuracy of course.

****

FTFY

navigation with speed and time is useless without direction but velocity contains a direction compnent.

Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search!

Re: Amazon...

@Connor

You seriously don't see a problem with every search term you make on your computer being shared with at least 2 companies, only 1 of which is anonymised, and you just have to take Canonicals word for it that the search terms they pass on to Amazon are anonymised, there is no way for you as a user to check?

No problems searching for the report you've got on your harddisk using the search terms "Terminal Cancer Doctors Report"?

Google's teeny UK tax bill 'just not right', thunders senior MP

Re: Is not the legal first duty of a company to its shareholders?

Having a responsibililty to work in the shareholders best interest does not mean it has to maximise profit at all costs.

For example

1) Company shafts customers with corner cutting and poor service (e.g. Tesco's)

2) Customers get annoyed and boycott the company or the government changes

The company's net profit margin is higher until Step 2, at which point turnover drops, profit margins drop etc.

In the short term the directors were working to the idea of first duty to the shareholders, but those business decisions are not working towards the interests of the shareholders once step 2 is reached.

Capita's top brass bags 20% rise - as IT bods shiver in wage freeze

Strike

Roomba dust-bust bot bods one step closer to ROBOBUTLERS

Re: Asimo...

I thought that was learning a specific objects , based on colour and shape, it was good, but if you taught it to recognise a picture of a Mini, and then showed it a picture of a BMW, it wouldn't recognise the BMW as being like a Mini.

Voda: Brit kids will drown in TIDAL WAVE of FILTH - it's all Ofcom's fault

Fixing the Price over 2 Years Is Difficult

If phone operators don't think they can competatively predict the right call charges for 24 months, they are free to only offer contracts of 12 months where expected cost forecasts will be more accurate.

This is a case of the mobile phone companies wanting their cake and eating it, they want to lock customers in for long stretches of time but don't want to be locked into contract themselves.

Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC

Re: Didn't have a telly for many years

I'm in a similar position, haven't had a TV License since the Analogue signal switch off for our area, then I get a girlfriend and now there are constant comments about getting a new TV cos they are really cheap.

CCTV hack takes casino for $33 MILLION in poker losses

Re: Faraday cage

Faraday cage might help with stopping getting signals back into the room to prevent the guy at the table from learning how to bet at each hand but you'll note that the CCTV camera feed is going offsite to the Gambling Commision... and also presumably out of the room for the in house survailance team (i.e. I doubt the CCTV monitoring station is in the same room).

That means all the CCTV feeds are already being shipped at the very least around the hotel and probably offsite to a different building. Hopefully the camera's probably have a some sort of basic encryption and I would hope that the feed going off site is getting additional more beef encryption.

Sounds like someone somewhere managed to get physical access the the network equipment and either the feed decryption keys or the feed at that point wasn't even encrypted which is possible if the hotel thought no one would have access to the network hardware.

Feedly now home to 500,000 Reader refugees

Re: I keep looking at Feedly

@ Frank ly

If I go to the Feedly Android App's homepage there are 3 possible login options, Android Login (which immediately asks for permission to connect to Google Reader), Google Login or Connect to Google Reader.

Using the client, I can search for a feed, click on it to see the article list which gives me a + symbol at the top to subscribe.

When I click on that + button it asks me for a Google OAuth login or gives me a cancel button. There doesn't seem to be anyway to subscribe to the feed on the Android client without explictly using Google OAuth login credentials, obviously this is to provide a user account which can be sync'd between devices and the Feedly web service so the feedly folk don't need to write their own authentication service but it doesn't change the fact to use Feedly, I'm forced to use Google more, not less which one of my aims.

@David W.

The fact that all the competitors are having to modify their service suggests they might be in the same application domain as Reader was in, but aren't direct competitors... yet.

In particular, all of the services I've looked at have been trying to reduce the prettiness of how they display the feeds in favour of massively increasing the speed at which users can skim the information looking for the 1 article in 100 thats is of interest.

I suspect that at least part of the reason there weren't any competing services around was because Reader was so good at what it did there was no need/room for a direct competitor and so all the other services tried to be pretty rather than functional, now there is a gap in the market I think we'll see new services and modifications to existing services.

I keep looking at Feedly

But 2 things put me off.

1) It requires that you login with Google OAuth, I want to reduce my dependency on Google, not just obscure my dependency via a third party.

2) What the hell is the firefox plugin needed for? Can't feedly build something which displays some text and the occasional image without needing to resort to extending the browser?

For the time being, I've given up on RSS Syncing and I'm just using plain old RSS client on my phone and I'll just have to remember what I've read between devices and mark it as read manually.

Google+ architect: What was so great about Reader anyway?

Asking Too Late

Reader must of cost peanuts to run in the grand scheme of things, provided a reason for people to log into Google's servers everyday and must have given some pretty nice user profiles based on stories actually being read, in real time.

I've already cleaned out all the feeds from Reader and started looking for alternatives. That lead me into the depths of Google Account management pages which reminded me of how many services I used to use so I decided to dump everything I'm not actively using any more.

That means getting rid of AdSense accounts, Blogger, Picasa Web etc. The only one I've left up is GMail and I stopped using that as my primary email account when G+ was introduced and I decided Google were in too many aspects of my life to risk banning because I didn't use a real name on G+

Note: This is not me trying to score points or show Google how angry I am etc. I'm just tidying up ahead of making sure Google isn't as important to my online life anymore.

I think Google under estimated Readers usefulness, not as a product in it's own right, but as a gateway into Google's ecosystem. That they don't understand that reinforces my believe that it's time to ensure Google aren't the gate keeper to the services people use daily.

Brit firm PinPlus flogs another password 'n' PIN killer

Re: At least 15 years ago

I remember the show, the original idea (IIRC) was that you would supply 4 face shots of people you know and the system would use image recognition to find photos others had submitted which were as close to your four pictures as possible (a nan who was a white women with blue tinged hair would be shown with 8 other old white women with blue tinged hair etc).

When you enter your PIN, you had to choose the right four faces one after the other each presented with 8 other similar faces where the correct face was in a random position each time. It worked on the idea that we are keyed to recognise a face we know very quickly, far faster than someone could memorize the right picture of in a grid of nine similar faces.

I suspect the problem was as you mention, partly screen technology and cost but also bandwith/storage, if you had to deliver 36 faces (9 faces x 4) everytime someone needed to use a PIN you would have had to have sent those images via the network since at the time we were all using magstrip cards which meant no offline transactions, or even transactions in places with limited bandwith or high latency. These days I suppose you could store the images on the chip.

Guessing the pattern

guessing the correct pattern from one viewing is probably not easy given that the same number appears lots of times in the same grid.

The exception being ridiculosly simple patterns such as a straight lines, if the one time login comes out as 142432 and the top line reads 142432, then even if there are 12 other possible combinations on that grid attackers are going to try the straight line first.

Personally I would hope patterns like that would be blocked by the application when first setting up the pattern.

Bundestag holds 'unusual' hearing on German Copyright Act

Re: robots.txt is bollocks

"but can you give a concrete example of a website that has blocked Google that is invisible to Google?"

****

My old blog was blocked to Google using robots.txt and the log data showed I only ever got the occasional hit by the google bot hitting the robots.txt file.

Of course, my blog just had a few personal notes which weren't really private but weren't really public either. Maybe Google wouldn't have respected robots.txt if I had anything interesting there and getting lots of hits.

BBC blueprint to make EVERY programme on TV a repeat revealed

recorded programs on the PVR.

If your recording programs to watch later, you still need the licence.

UK taxmen turn heat on tax-swerving big biz, hope to smoke out £1bn

So...

"If the Government followed through on the calls by MPs and campaigners to change unilaterally tax laws governing multinationals, the UK's reputation as a stable place to do business would be put at risk."

In pretty much all these cases, the business is here because this is where the customers are and they are simply fullfilling a demand in the market not creating the market. If multinationals don't want to do business under rules which allow us to extract revenue from the profit they make here their departure will just open a market to local business to fullfil the same latent demand the multinationals used to be fulfilling... only doing it with local employees and entirely within the local tax regime.

I don't see that as a bad thing.

'Leccy-starved Reg hack: 'How I survive on 1.5kW'

Re: Buffering?

Thats what I was thinking.

A big stack of car batteries and an inverter to gvie you a bit of extra peak capacity juice

Real sci-fi space ships coming at last? NASA tests nuclear engine

Re: Where does the heat go?

Same place it goes with a thermocouple RTG - Those black fin radiator cylinders

*****

But as mentioned in the article, those things are weedy.

According to http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/rps/rtg.cfm the current generation of RTG produce a nominal 110 Watts (it's more at the start of the mission but that is what it's expected for most of it's operating life).

If you try to scale this up you are going to run out of surface area to radiate the heat with. Maybe not with the 1kw battery being discussed in this article but you aren't going to be running the propulsion units of manned space craft like this in the future.