Posts by chris 17 439 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Nov 2010
So many fares calling for a tax on sales. We already have one, it's called VAT and is applied to most non essential items at 20%.
Every new piece of hardware attracts VAT that the retailer collects from the consumer and pays to tax authority minus a percentage for the trouble of collecting it.
A £1200 laptop is actually £1000 + £200 VAT. Apple probably wholesale the laptop to pc world at £800, allegedly making ~30% so costs them ~£600. that £200 between wholesale and resale has to account for marketing, staff, stores, etc leaving a little for profit to of world.
The tax authority is by far the biggest earner of the lot, earning a huge 20% after everyone else has whacked in their costs and profit margin on the actual wholesale cost plus earning a percentage of each member of the chains profits, for essentially permitting the product to be sold in their area.
We consumers end up paying almost double the price the manufacturer sells the product into the channel for, especially when you consider we pay for goods and vat out of already taxed income, I.e you have to earn more than £1200 in order to take home £1200.
I'm not seeking to justify tax avoidance, but tax isn't simple or clear cut, lots of compounding and the tax man always takes the most.
@valv
We already have that. It's called VAT, currently @20% added to the price of goods by the end retailer which they collect on behalf of HMRC and receive a percentage for their trouble.
regardless of company accounting schenanigans every sale attracts a level of local government tax levied at point of sale. This drama is all about tax on profits after costs like manufacturing etc, eu gov's also already earned a pretty penny on the sales of these items.
just what exactly constitutes an accurate bill?
to the day/minute/second?
just how more accurate will the bill be than it is now?
just cut everyone off every 18months if they've not switched or given a meter reading in the last 8 months
Nationwides notification emails look like a total scam, telling my my statements have been sent to my internet bank. Why the hell are they sending statements anywhere especially to an Internet bank? It's proof that no one reads the emails.
if your on A/VDSL your connection speed will be the same regardless of operator so only need to check BT's checker to see
https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/adsl.htm
if your on VM that'll be a standard speed across the nation as their cabs are very close to the customers homes.
Same with any FTTP/H
leaving out Wireless BB, There are only a possible 4 types of connection to peoples homes & people will be told what speed they can get when they apply.
i do not see what all the fuss is about.
for every connection other than FTTP/H, the distance from the cab/exchange will impact the speed of the service.
@AustinTX
In addition to or instead of packet length, packet frequency
or
better still packet length and frequency of dud packets there just to be recognised as forming an identifier.
VPN's do have mechanisms to guard against identifying and snooping in this way, but once unencrypted the tell tell identifiers will be visible again.
I wonder if the detector kit will be sensitive enough to read Ethernet at a distance, like old spy kit?
Like the article suggests, if they know where you live all they really need to do is tap your incoming line and look for streamed Iplayer, or just ask your ISP to let them know every time you go to Iplayer, like if you go to a banned site.
like Mr Robot,
trying to get into it on SciFi but cringing every time they mention or do something techie and get it wrong. Like the opening episode when they get into a Jet and fly to the DC to stop someone remote hacking into a server, even though there where remote hands at the DC who could have unplugged or worked at a CLI? or constant mentioning of FTP's or other acronyms that might sound exotic to those that have no clue.
So
"just this year he responded to “a Craigslist ad"
then
Earl quickly found the problem, namely an ancient surge protector more than a decade beyond its warranty. The lightning had zorched through that device and the resulting surge had damaged the IDE chip on the Dell PowerEdge 1300 so it would randomly delete information from the hard drive.
how on earth do you know it was the surge protector that was at fault for damaging the 18 or 19 year old IDE chip? i would have guessed the chip had failed due to age more than anything else, or just the drive was worn out or had bad sectors.
what is a "PCI network" is it meant to be a "PCI network card"?
if it where me i would have purchased a new or recently used server, downloaded and installed a copy of netware 4.1 on a vm then used an ide to usb converter to read in from floppy or the HDD, unless of course i wanted to milk them for as much cash as possible by insisting they buy a bunch of over priced ancient kit of no use to anyone.
Why are we automatically switched to the providers expensive standard tariff at the end of a term?
why can't we automatically be rolled over to the providers cheapest tariff with no penalty for changing to an alternate supplier?
I'm with daligas who's standard and fixed tariffs are exactly the same & are constantly the cheapest in my area.
Also the way ofgem mandate the comparison sites calculate the annual bill is incorrect. They mandate the calculation to the end of the current term and then the rest on the standard rates to a year from now (wrongly assuming you won't have switched). its possible for your current tariff to be cheaper than any available but the comparison sites will state large savings based on the cost of moving on to the standard rate vs switching now. You will likely save by waiting out your current term and then switching at the terms end. The MSE comparison tool lets you toggle between the OFGEM method or the sensible method.
maybe even it up a bit and allow permie IT staff some of the perks like being able to offset stuff against taxes like travel, cars, equipment, training, lunch. No, thought not. There are lots of permies who for one reason or another only last a year or 2, the same as some contractors. Maybe the answer is to tax contractors like permies and pay the rest back to them once they've moved on to a different company. That way everyone wins, or doesn't.
@paulf,
buying O2 would have given Three the coverage they wanted and all the things you said they should do too. Their problem is that there is no more radio spectrum for them to buy without buying a mobile telco. EE & VF are not for sale, just leaves O2 who's owners can do with the cash & no longer want to be in the UK market.
@ Pen-y-gors
"how often do both drives in a RAID setup fail at the same time? And with a dodgy backup?"
if its that important then you need to pay more for a more resilient solution, perhaps active / standby cluster across geographically separated data centres provided by different vendors on different ISP's and supplied by different power stations. what's the cost to you of the outage vs the cost of a resilient solution?
regarding BT, yes this latest outage should not have the impact on its network that it has. Services should have instantly rerouted with little to no impact on end users.
Interesting.....
Anyone for a national wireless mpls network where you the customer get to add or remove devices to your own network? Poor coverage, just add femtocells to your lan (of course vlan'd / firewalled off). Stuff offsite, maybe 5g will permit competitor net roaming?
No more installing umpteen wifi access points and controllers. No more broadband or leased lines for site wide wifi. A laptop with 5g and no VPN client could work from anywhere. How weird would it be to securely connect with HQ without a VPN? Maybe use geofencing to enforce extra authentication away from an office or home?
Many would happily pay £30 per month for a new laptop with latest Windows, office and AV pre installed with a remote support and return to base wrap around. That for 3 years on a £1k laptop wouldn't be too bad.
How many small businesses would jump at that. Don't forget it'll be tax deductable.
"With the pound tanking they got an instant 10% (or so) salary reduction. Well done."
Wtf
If your a uk company with uk turnover/earnings/profits how does a fall in the pound equate to salary reduction? The answer is it doesn't. £20k yesterday is still £20k today. It just doesn't buy the same amount of foreign currency it did.
This was the problem with both campaigns, they publicised simple maths as project fear knowing people wouldn't understand what it meant.
Did the FIA or other aviation bodies actually instruct airlines to make any changes as a result of this mans claims. if not I suspect his hacking claims are total bogus and onlynserved to cause fear uncertainty and damage to the airline industry's reputation amongst the travelling public.
While they are opting people in they should automatically opt people into their providers cheapest tarif at all times!
Tariff ends, auto opt into cheap, not standard tarif. New tarif arrives, auto opt everyone in on it. Simple fix for people not switching.
Fibre business rates are very real and administered / processed via VOA, the same bods that do council tax valuations.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/minister-welcomes-new-guidance-on-business-rates-for-fibre-networks
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/uk-mps-hold-hope-voa-business-rates-fibre-tax-review.html
http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Fibre-rates-time-to-repeal-the-modern-equivalent-of-the-window-tax
laying fibre and under using it is an expensive habit.
Ok, so VM, KCom and the new lot running fibre and wireless to rural areas should also hand over their networks for rivals too.
I'd be fully in favour of a level playing field where i could get my ISP of choice on my network of choice. SKY BB over VM's network is appealing to me (had terrible customer service from NTL/VM lasting over a year & ongoing and after i left them) but i suspect VM don't see it that way and would rather turn a profit on their significant investments.
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