Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7408 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
In my day, the Highway Code had a special section dealing with police officers on point duty, a whole concept which has disappeared.
That's a shame. The town I used to live in had a light-controlled junction that was always jammed at rush hours, except when the lights failed (not uncommon) and a motorcycle cop from the nearby police station turned up to manage the traffic. It always flowed much more smoothly then.
You seem to be saying that you're perfectly willing to let Google harvest and monetize your customers' personal data in order to make your business life easier and cheaper, and if the law prevents you from doing so you'll simply abandon those customers.
Doesn't sound like a company I'd want to do business with.
What exactly is included in the term "Fibre Broadband" here, just pure FTTP, or also FTTC? I know many people who have decent speeds (20-80+ Mbit/s) via DSL or FTTC, and see no reason to move to FTTP to get higher speeds which they don't need. That would certainly affect the figures for "uptake", even when the actual availability is much higher.
Also, nobody hates BMW drivers any more, we pity them. It's Audi drivers we all hate now.
That's because the BMW drivers got fed up with the hate and bought Audis, taking their driving 'skills' with them. I wonder where they'll migrate to next, Mercedes or Tesla maybe?
the UK has been slow to follow through on its other commitments under that treaty (particularly around small-vessel fishing and the whole NI Protocol),
The UK has fully met its commitments for small-vessel fishing, and has gone out of its way to help some vessels that were unable to provide the required evidence. The issues with the NI protocol are largely due to the over-zealous enforcement of checks by EU officials. If they applied the same level of checking to all the EU external borders world trade would seize up.
why everyone across Europe wanted the UK partners to remain in Horizon...
and which is why it's even explicitly agreed in the TCA, except that the EU (not the UK) keeps delaying it.
It's the British who suddenly want to change the agreement signed by the British government.
No, they just want the EU to respect it, instead of deliberately making it as difficult to use as possible. It should be a win-win for the UK and the EU, but the EU is not interested in fair play.
We can't rip up 250-odd pages out in the TCA because they're "overly legalistic" and "heavy-handed", hold up a few remaining sheets with Horizon written on them, and then get stroppy and say "Johnny EUers just aren't keeping their side of the bargain".
No one has suggested that. The UK has fully followed the agreed fishing rules, even helping EU trawlers that had problems proving their previous location in UK waters, by releasing data from UK fisheries vessels. The problem is that some French boats are still unable to provide the proof that was agreed in the TCA but France is demanding that the UK grant them licences anyway.
As for the NI protocol, it was intended to ensure that intra-UK traffic between GB and N could flow smoothly, as could traffic between NI and RoI, but that there would be no abuse of this as a back door to send goods GB->NI->RoI and on into the wider EU. The number of products affected was expected to be small, not least because wholesale smuggling on that route would be pretty obvious (how many containers could you send from GB to France via Ireland before someone noticed?). Unfortunately the EU officials have chosen to apply more zealous checking on that tiny border than on any other external EU border. There are stories of refrigerated lorries being made to unload to verify paperwork (thus breaking the cold chain & making the contents undeliverable) and of own-brand supermarket goods being blocked from GB->NI shipment even though they could never end up in the RoI because the supermarket has no branches there.
EU officials, especially the French, are past masters at using excessive bureaucracy to make life difficult while still respecting the letter of the law, and it is clear that this is happening. If threatening to invoke Article 16 (which is not "ripping it up" but using an option in the agreement) is the only way to get the EU to play fair then why should it not be used?
finding it's own partners for it's endeavours without input or meddling from Europe.
And it wants to partner with other countries, some of whom are in the EU, on scientific R&D. That's what Horizon does.
perhaps I just don't understand enough
Or perhaps haven't read enough about it before adding an anti-Brexit knee-jerk comment??
Why do British universities think they're still entitled to EU funding?
No one has mentioned entitlement (nor Universities for that matter).
The European Commission's Horizon fund is a global fund to encourage research worldwide. It is open to "researchers and innovators from around the globe who are encouraged to team up with EU partners", and "not only to EU neighbouring countries, but also to any country in the world with a strong research and innovation capacity that share common values". "The United Kingdom will be associated by means of a Protocol to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement." (all quotes taken directly from the Horizon website).
No entitlement, just international agreement in co-operative research, as science should be done. In the past the UK was a member, now it's an associate. Or would be if the EU would stop using the NI protocol and the fishing dispute to keep holding the UK's feet to the fire to block the agreement.
France Telecom went out of their way to run a telephone cable and plant the necessary poles for a mile or so right up to my front door. All for no charge.
In the pre-internet days, BT would have done that too, as part of the Universal Service rules. They'd install something like 5 poles for free, after that they'd ask for a contribution.
Of course, the rules back then for data specified that the line had only to support a 200bit/s modem...
the government habitually gives budget increases that are below the increase in demand, and often below inflation,
False. NHS spending increases have been consistently above inflation since the mid 1950s, under all parties except for a brief glitch under Callaghan's Labour government in 1978. It's about 7% of GDP today, compared to 3% in 1955.
The real problem is that medical treatment has evolved spectacularly over the past 50 years, and costs have gone through the roof. When the NHS was founded, noone could have anticipated treatments for a single person that cost tens of thousands of pounds per week, yet today the NHS is expected to fund them.
If you're copying and hosting code you should have a process in place to track reported security issues.
If you pull it dynamically and unchecked from a 3rd party site you're invisibly exposed to any future bugs that get introduced, accidentally or deliberately.
If you're providing code that will be executed by your users or customers there's simply no excuse for not validating and hosting it yourself.
Oh no, it's so onerous having to list ingredients
So much easier to replace them by numbers, that no-one understands. E (for Europe) numbers, that is.
The simple option is not to buy processed crap. I had a lovely steak on Saturday, straight from the farm shop. Local potatoes, with just some olive oil & pepper. No additives, no GMO, just good food.
I had a German colleague who wanted to stay on in the US for a few days vacation at the end of a conference. Adding the Saturday night stay made the flights cheaper, and of course he would have paid the extra hotel nights himself, but it was forbidden. The trip would then have counted as part-business and part-personal, and he would have had to calculate what proportion of the flights was for the personal part of the trip, and it would have had to be declared as a benefit in kind for tax. Too complicated for the bean counters to process, it was easier to say "No".
Scotland is almost completely self sufficient for green energy
Only when you fiddle the figures, as Sturgeon & the SNP propaganda does.
That statement is based on the idea that (in 2020) Scotland produced 32TWh of renewable electricity, and consumed 33TWh of electricity and therefore "almost all Scotland's electricity comes from renewables". In reality, renewable energy production is dependent on weather, and the supply/demand periods don't align.
In 2020, Scotland exported over 13TWh of renewable electricity at some times, and used over 14TWh of non-renewable at other times. Over the course of a year only about 55% of Scotland's electricity comes from Scottish renewables (the remaining 45% is from nuclear, gas & oil), a far cry from "self-sufficient".
VMS got most things right.
There is, though, a well-known bug filed against VMS for a related issue. The standard message display only permits 4-digit years, so even if the clock is fine until 31,086 there will be a display error when it ticks over on Dec 31st 9999. Last time I saw that bug in the DEC tracking system it was in an 'accepted' state, with a note that it will be fixed "in a future major architecture". Sadly unlikely now...
The "street clutter" thing is going to be interesting.
Until the car systems can apply a "is this plausible" test it will continue to be so. Just scanning the environment for obstacles isn't sufficient, it needs to understand those obstacles in context, and none of the much-touted "AI" systems are even close.
It's like the hacks people play with street signs. If you're driving though a residential street with pedestrians around and you see a speed limit sign showing "80" your first thought will be "that can't be right, someone's been messing about with black tape on a 30 sign". A Tesla just goes "I can do 80MPH! Wheee!"
