Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Hydrogen is only explosive when mixed with oxygen, and it's so light that any escape generally blows away before it reaches the right combination, unless it's in a closed space. You might get a rapidly-rising fireball, but an explosion is less likely.
only for machines that aren't connected at all
Well, aren't connected when you boot like that, at least. If you have a big CPU-intensive job like an image render, or some video processing, you may want to get everything downloaded & setup, unplug the network, and reboot into a fast unprotected mode while running that one job. Then back to 'normal' & reconnect.
And develop poverty through unemployment.
Ah, not that old fallacy, the idea that the amount of work is fixed and must be shared among the labour pool. That's what triggered Martine Aubry's 35-hour week fiasco in France, until the economists pointed out that it was nonsense and she was forced to backpedal. Work and labour are flexible, not fixed. The number of people working in factories today is far less than it was in the 1950s, but there are millions working in new industries that didn't even exist then. Suggesting that overmanning protects jobs is nonsense, it just raises costs and that drives inflation.
It's just not right that you should be able to say you value the work of the donkey sanctuary more than the NHS when spending everyone else's money.
Isn't that more a question of how organizations are defined as charities? Like you, I think it's outrageous that animal sanctuaries get tax benefits which organizations that help people do not. I also object to churches being able to claim charitable status (except perhaps for certain subgroups). I have no such objections for, say, the RNLI.
There is very little grievance against tax avoidance
There is actually a lot. Activists would happily lynch an electrician doing cash in hand job and not paying correct tax.
That is not tax avoidance, it is tax evasion and it does, as you say, rightly generate grievance.
Tax avoidance is the perfectly legitimate use of tax law to reduce tax, such as paying pension contributions from income before tax (so that pensions aren't taxed twice), or saving in an ISA. That, quite rightly, does not upset people, it's perfectly legal and there would be a huge outcry if it were changed.
I use a couple of these, I've not tested run time but it's been OK so far for shortish outages;
What does that mean? Expensive radios (almost) bricked. Mine still works to listen to stations on my 5 presets, but that's it.
Try the folks at Listenlive. They support some discontinued radio types, and there's some (admittedly small) discussion of Reciva there.
I was on site at a customer's once, and found a compiler bug. A reasonably simple test expression was failing, and reviewing the output assembler showed that the compiler was clearly generating incorrect code.
A call to the support hotline produced the response "the guy who supports that product is on holiday, could you call back in 2 weeks?". A somewhat lukewarm line, I think.
Refactoring the code worked around it, I don't think we ever got a fix.
Which of course is exactly why companies are offering one-off cost of living bonuses, and not agreeing tosilly ongoing pay rises that would guarantee the situation gets worse. If it's still bad next year then things would need to be reviewed, of course.
Why do people always assume that "profit" means money that just ends up in someone's back pocket?
When a company makes a profit (after tax), it's money that must be used to pay dividends, investment, and all the other things that a company has to spend money on to survive.
Sure, they could structure things to make £1 profit, tell the shareholders to take a running jump, and stop investing in new infrastructures & facilities. They'd be gone in 5 years as their competition left them behind. £1.3bn is really not a large profit for a company the size of BT.
As for pay rises, inflation has taken a sudden jump due to COVID & the war in Ukraine, but is expected to drop back again next year. If greedy unions press for silly pay rises to match peak inflation then inflation will keep rising, and we'll all be worse off.
If they are jobs that need to be done from the office, or which are vastly easier to do from an office environment, then the impetus to do them from the office will be from the people doing them.
If only. In civil service thinking, if the job needs to be done from the office, then not being in the office obviously makes it impossible to do the job, therefore WFH has the twin advantages of getting paid, while not having to do any work. Win-win, unless you're a victim^H^H^H^H^H^H customer.
I'm assuming the court will have suitable justification to refuse to provide the information in each and every case rather than just a blanket refusal "because".
Indeed, and that raises the issue of the burden of proof. Does the phone's owner have to prove that the phone's location is their location, and hence location data must be released, or must the telco show that there is sufficient doubt that it's entitled to say no?
I would hazard a guess that the number of such incidents is tiny compared to the number of people who have it in their pockets bleating "here I am" to all and sundry.
Even so, courts can't provide rulings based on "it's probably true". If the owner can't prove that the data in question is their PII, I do think that under GDPR the court may have to prevent its release.
If the phone is owned by the company, it is free to install its own tracking software to locate it at any time.
Ah, but that's a very different scenario. If the employee knows the tracking app is there, then they are implicitly consenting to be tracked if they borrow the phone, and if they don't know it is there you're entering fairly murky waters of employment law.
Neither situation is really covered by GDPR, which explicitly protects the PII of a person, not of an object which they may or may not have with them.
it is still no reason to prevent the owner being granted all location data held by the telco
If the telco definitely has location data on the owner, that would be true, but if the owner can't prove that the data identifies their location I would argue that GDPR doesn't require it to be released. It may be someone elses PII, and that's usually enough for the courts to arguable that there is reasonable doubt.
I disagree. The court does not have a valid point because the issue is not if it a 1-1 correlation should be established between a phone and a person. The location data is being generated by *my* phone, which *I* own and hence, it is my PII.
I can appreciate your logic, but I'm not sure if GDPR is written to consider data of something you own as being your data. It is explicit that data subjects are natural persons, i.e. not entities like corporations.
As another example, imagine that you, as a conscientious parent, buys a phone for your teenage child so that they can contact you if they need to. You're undoubtedly the owner of the phone, and you pay the bill. Does that entitle you to get the phone's location, which is actually the location (and hence the PII) of your child, who also has rights under GDPR?
I don't think it's a clear-cut issue.
In this case, though, the argument isn't about publishing or selling the data, it's about providing it to the subscriber himself.
The given argument, that the phone may have been with someone else, does make it trickier. As a few examples, what if the phone in question (or the SIM, which is the same thing) is being used in a car and the subscriber wants to check where some other family member has been? Or if it's a shared office phone and the company wants to track the employee it is currently loaned to?
Essentially, what is being described here is the location data for the phone, not the subscriber, and GDPR does clearly say that it applies to data subjects which are "natural persons". There isn't necessarily a 1:1 correlation, so the court does have a valid point.
Just make the decision to not use any intel chips within the EU institutions.
Ah yes, like the German plans to drop Microsoft for Linux. Then they flipped back again. I can just see all those eurocrats being soooo pleased to be told that their Macs and Lenovos will be replaced by ARM-based Linux models.
