Posts by DaveDaveDave

Car crash: Uber axes another 3,000 jobs, closes 45 offices as punters snub app during coronavirus lockdown

Re: Every job loss is sad

The 'standard joke' is diametrically opposed to reality, though. Pretty obviously, the tracking involved with Uber makes attacks vanishibgly rare compared to normal cabs.

Re: Every job loss is sad

They are regulated, and the figures are that you're literally millions of times less likely to be attacked in an Over than a normal cab.

Black cab driver feeling the pinch, hug?

Re: Every job loss is sad

Yes, evil practices like providing cheap, safe cabs in which rapes of drunk female passengers are no longer commonplace. Making cabs affordable to poorer members of society does seem to be the bit that really upsets champagne socialists, though.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

It's an old, old joke that apparently they didn't recognise, or just felt like printing anyway.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

Doctors are called Dr, unless they're surgeons in which case their title is Mr(s). Cardiac surgeons on planes have been told to go back to their seats and stop interfering with Dr whoever, the retired GP, trying to deal with a heart attack patient. In one instance the flight crew insisted a non-medical PhD was the doctor, but fortunately the PhD had a top cardiac surgeon on hand for advice :)

The Great British anti-5G fruitcake Bakeoff: Group hugs, no guns, and David Icke

Re: I just get cruel to them.

I'm pretty sure 5g is harmful, which is why all 5g phones emit a cancellation field. It's only people who don't carry a 5g phone who are at risk...

If you're going to mess with their heads, tell them they're naive sheeple who haven't understood the full awfulness of the conspiracy.

Re: 5G fruitloops

Both Corbyns are fruitloops selling conspiracy theories to other fruitloops. Piers is a weather geek who claims to have a psychic method for predicting the weather, and says climate change is nonsense, while Jez believes in, and spreads, the Socialism of Fools and its attached Nazi conspiracy theories.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Ah, no. I'm in the third category: people who have a Dremel available to borrow, so can use it for the few things it's good for*, without needing to justify the cost.

(*Cutting in very restricted spaces, can't think of anything else offhand.)

Now I come to think of it, last time I borrowed it I had to fix the motor winding.

Re: the picture in the article

Was he grinding magnesium or something? Diesel is practically impossible to set fire to.

Re: Fun with power tools...

Solvent welding is using solvents to melt plastics - just like airfix kits etc, or the more grown up version, plastic pipes. It is, at a guess, made much like alcohol hand cleanser, but with a solvent instead.

The point is that it's a weld, not a glued joint. Works incredibly well sometimes - things that have broken off, e.g., join back together perfectly along the fault line (more often than any other way, at least). And it has the great advantage that if you try and use it on incompatible plastics it just evaporates without doing anything or leaving any residue.

Google solvent cement. Screwfix etc have it.

Re: I did similar only the other day...

No, a good idea is fixing the sharp edges. Bit of sandpaper, a file, or an edge-roller if you're posh.

Although may be sensible to empty the case first - not sure fine metal powder will do electronics much good.

Re: DIMM Slots

Lucas Replacement Wiring Harness Smoke kit, P/N 530433

'Needed Dremel'

Words only ever said by Dremel cultists.

Re: Fun with power tools...

Did you not know about solvent weld? Or have you used the stuff so much the fumes have affected your memory?

Contact adhesive is underrated for bodging. The grab of that stuff is unbelievable. Something ludicrous like multiple kg/sq cm.

Some of the things I've sawn...

One place, I had a work order cross my desk. Remove door to server room, widen doorway, fit new door. Quite apart from the effect this would have on existing servers, there was no reason for it - the door was fine.

Turned out some idiot had a new unit to install, and was convinced it wouldn't fit through the door because it was 120cm wide. 30cm 'long', though. Yes. They just needed to turn it through 90 degrees.

Pretty sure that if I hadn't made sure they were elsewhere, they were the type to pull out a saw and hack away at the wall instead.

Jeff Bezos tells shareholders to buckle up: Amazon to blow this quarter's profits and more on coronavirus costs

Re: Robots don't get Covid-19

Aren't the pickers controlled by an algorithm that tells them where to go next? Seems pretty obvious you could work along those lines to minimise contacts without taking a big hit to efficiency.

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, so the EU is investigating Google to get some more money in its hat

Re: $40.6bn in earnings before tax

The EU has no power to force Google to pay fines. Google would decide it isn't worth it and pull out of serving the EU. The bureaucrats responsible would probably be lynched.

Tory chancellor pledges to review IR35 rollout in UK private sector – just like all the other parties

Re: Chop chop chaps...

Contractors aren't being changed into anything. Employees pretending to be contractors are employees, and IR35 hasn't changed that, it's just made it easier for HMRC to crack down on fake contractors.

Re: Weasel words

What major disruption? You may not like it, but if you're a fake contractor you'll have to stop the pretence and pay the tax due. How does that disrupt anything?

Re: Chop chop chaps...

Where on earth does the unintended consequences notion come from? The whole point here is to clamp down on the many, many fake contractors.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Would someone explain

In the UK you can get a ticket for breaking the lights despite the front of the car passing before they turned red, if the back of the car doesn't make it over the line in time. But really, that's only going to happen in situations where you could and should have stopped.

Screw EU! Apple to fight back over €13bn tax bill

Re: Ireland has been operating as a tax haven

The funny part is that the EU's tax system was deliberately set up precisely so as to encourage tax competition as practised by Ireland in this case. Ireland could not have been more compliant with the spirit and letter of EU corporation-tax law.

Re: That should be the main headline

But Ireland's protesting because the CT isn't due there, collecting the CT would make Ireland poorer overall, and the entire thing is idiotic. The EU has just ignored express provisions of EU law in this case.

Sigh. Not this claptrap again. Apple can't repatriate profits to the US without paying US corporation tax on them. It's holding some proportion of them offshore, but that only delays paying the tax on them - they can't be returned to shareholders that way.

Re: Company's intellectual property held in Ireland

They pay tax in the US, because that's where the profits are made. The EU is trying to grab a share by insisting that the do-nothing vehicle in Ireland which allows Apple to sell to the EU single market is actually where the profits are made.

The tax system isn't broken, it's deliberately designed to work this way: corporation tax is a bad tax, and the EU tax laws were designed to encourage tax competition so as to drive it down to zero.

There's no such thing as a tax loophole, thanks to the general anti-avoidance principle. Anything that's just a sham has no weight.

Re: Apple

There wasn't any deal, though, that's the point. In which case the EU's case is ludicrous, and indeed it is, on any inspection, utterly laughable.

Re: Apple

This isn't an argument about whether Apple owes tax. It's an argument about whether they owe it to the EU or to the US. The EU has made an absurd claim in an attempt to gain at the expense of the US, that really is all there is to this.

Neo-Nazi man jailed for anti-Semitic Twitter campaign against MP

Re: Schadenfreude

That's quite nice, but doesn't do anything about the ones who aren't complete and utter morons. For every idiotic thug like this, there's a Griffin or Corbyn speaking very carefully.

Facebook chokes off car insurance slurp because – get this – it has privacy concerns

Re: I presume it has more to do

" My personal opinion is that everyone's premium is as high as possible dependant upon how likely you are to go elsewhere"

Insurance is an incredibly competitive market. If you don't bother to shop around, you're an idiot. If you do, you'll get the best possible price.

Today is the 211th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar

Re: 1805: British fleet manned by migrants!

It's also interesting to note that the UK had absolutely no controls on immigration up until just the point where the British Empire started to decline. Correlation isn't causation, of course.

Notable too that Germans were there on our side at Trafalgar, just as at every other major British battle in history other than the (admittedly rather large) anomaly of the two World Wars in the 20th century. The EU thing might have worked out better if we'd done the traditional thing and allied with the Germans against the French (politically speaking, natch*).

*Although come to think of it, even UKIPers would probably change their minds about the EU if we could use it to abolish France.

Re: Not quite...

There was also an element of protection in 'lose the battle, win the war' if it all went wrong: the British had much better access to suitable wood to build ships' hulls out of than the French, so even in the even that the French caused somewhat more damage, the long-term effects would still be in Britain's favour.

It's OK to fine someone for repeating a historical fact, says Russian Supreme Court

Re: This is bizarre

"From what I understand he was rather with Nazis following the principle that the enemies of my enemy are my friends, as did Mannerheim or Bose."

Not at all. He fell in love with Nazism and embraced it with all the fervour of a convert. A really vile character.

This is bizarre

What the f--- has the Reg got itself into here? Bandera was a Nazi. Bandera-philes are neo-Nazis. The USSR did not invade Poland when Germany did, they had to finish up another war and didn't get round to even declaring war on Poland until 16 days after Germany invaded, so the Court seems to be right on the history.

It is unquestionably true that the German attack would not have succeeded as swiftly as it did with Russian help, but that's not the point: an overtly Holocaust-denying blogger has been slapped-down for getting the basic facts wrong.

Google UK coughs up £130m back taxes. Is it enough?

Re: The Tumbler SJW jibe is silly

Do you have any point to make in response, or just some inane and insane ad hom?

Re: it is deficiencies in the tax laws

"So for example Starbucks claim that Starbucks UK makes no profit on any coffee sold in the UK because for every £1 worth of coffee they sell they have to pay £1.01 to Starbucks Logo Inc of some tax haven somewhere. This sort of thing is just pure bollocks"

Pure bollocks indeed, since that's just fiction. Starbucks didn't make a profit in the UK because they paid too much for their leases, end of story. They paid the market rate for their coffee (which we know because they also sold coffee to others, at the same price), as the law requires them to do - and if they hadn't, then they'd be moving profits _from_ Switzerland _to_ the UK, since their coffee purchasing and processing does actually happen in Switzerland (along with most of Europe's).

This really is all just some not very well-disguised antisemitic propaganda, and it's a crying shame that so many gullible dupes like you have fallen for it.

Re: The Tumbler SJW jibe is silly

No, there's no such thing as the magic money tree. It's just antisemitic propaganda.

Re: If I didn't pay my taxes for 10 years ...

Google did pay its taxes, though. You've fallen for some antisemitic propaganda.

The Edward Snowden guide to practical privacy

Re: The word is out - TOR is compromised!

Tor has always been compromised. It was built as a honeytrap with US government funding. People who use it are kidding themselves if they think there is any security at all as a result of using it.

Tor's full name is 31-tor - which is ROT-13 backwards. .

Snowden's security tips?

What are they, 'leave the front door open, you'll make my life easier'? 'Don't leave saleable data where I can get it'?

Here's the little-known legal loophole that permitted mass surveillance in the UK

Re: Anarchy in the UK - its just a song

" Democracy could fix this (Corbyn?)"

I really don't think this country's leading crypto-Nazi is going to want to decrease surveillance of the public.

"a cooperative and competitive non-socialist anarchy"

Oxymoron. Those terms are mutually exclusive.

Re: Far too late to worry

You've correctly identified the difference between being able to monitor anything and being able to monitor everything. Which is why most of the uninformed shouting is so dumb.

Re: The rule of Unintended Consequences - yet again

Unintended consequences? Only if you believe the author's flat-out lies about the intent of the legislation. In fact it was intended to do precisely what it is used for, and is right there in the preamble to the Act.

Complete tripe

I see the Snowdonites get ever more desperate in their attempts to pretend he released any novel information. Of course, anyone with any interest in the subject knew all this already, so all the author has done is to demonstrate that he'd never given it a moment's thought until recently.

As must be completely obvious, the law was not made in secret. It's been publicly referred to over the years as the justification for various government actions.

Whatever happened to the Reg having journalistic integrity and cherishing old-fashioned ethics? This is undisclosed advertorial, and the Hawker is lying to drum up business.

Euro privacy warriors: You've got until January to fix safe harbor mess – or we unleash hell

Re: Simply move or consolidate the servers to Europe

"why not simply consolidate the servers onto European soil?"

No, that's the wrong way around. Just have everything outside the EU, and then when customers send you their data, they're the ones doing the exporting. It's not like anyone bar a few crypto-geeks and similar actually cares about this stuff.

Oh, very clever

Force everyone doing business in the EU to have their servers outside the EU, get the users to send their own data outside EU jurisdiction, end of problem, end of any EU control at all over data.

Minicab-hailing app Uber is lawful – UK High Court

"Under IR35 regulations, that looks like employment"

No, it's one of a number of factors. But in any case, not one applicable here, since cab drivers have many customers, not just one. Uber is no more the provider of employment than, say, Gumtree is a provider of painting jobs for Polish guys.

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Surely there's only one option here?

The Washington Consensus - the set of ideas that for the first time in history has lifted the majority of the human population of this planet out of desperate, starvation-level poverty.