Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

Re: Good, good.

Here you go, Phil:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51280617

Classic case in point. As the article clearly says, right at the top, "rejected his application for citizenship". Note citizenship, not settled status.

Granting citizenship to someone is something that many countries, including France, take seriously, requiring proof of integration and that you won't be a burden on the state. He couldn't meet the economic criteria for citizenship.

The article goes on to say "Mr Lawrence will still be able to stay as a resident and does not risk being deported."

So, what is your point?

Re: Good, good.

immigration was the main issue. "leave" banged on about it all the time.

Remain made just as much fuss with Project Fear, for example that all the London EU businesses and financial houses would decamp to Paris and the economcy would collapse, something where even the IMF disagrees.

Both sides played to prejudices where they could to squeeze every last vote out, it's politics. No doubt Brexit will be blamed for everything bad for the next 10 years, just as the EU was blamed for the last 25. Most of us will just get on with making it work.

Re: Good, good.

those for EU citizens coming to France to work are limited to the duration of the contract + 6 months, to a maximum of 5 years.

Only for the first one, after that they're valid for 10 years and supposed to be renewed then (despite being marked "validite permanent").

Re: Good, good.

Phil O'Sophical>> No EU citizen can be ordered to leave before Friday, no matter what their status.

Oh, that's true, of course, if they are in violation of some rules. The original post suggested that someone would be thrown out simply for being an EU citizen who had apparently overstayed their welcome, which isn't the case. If there are some other reasons why they can't stay then that is still unrelated to Brexit.

This comment shows what a fantastic job Leave.EU et al did.

Personally I don't consider immigration to be an issue for Brexit at all. Most of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK gets directed toward Asian and Caribbean immigrants, where EU membership is largely irrelevant. Brexit is fundamentally a political and economic issue, not an immigration one. The UK is still a far more tolerant country towards immigrants than, say, France or Germany, despite the impression given by the Daily Fail.

France does it all the time (Recently for Brits who couldn't prove they could support themselves after trying to apply for a carte de sejour to secure their status.

A carte de sejour doesn't secure status. Rather the reverse, it's proof that you have secure status as an EU citizen and largely fulfils the place held by an ID card for a French citizen. It's supposed to be renewed every 10 years anyway.

Post Brexit, holders of cartes de sejour will have 18 months or so to apply for settled status, and will get a different card, for residents.

Re: Good, good.

McCulloch's purchase of London Bridge (or the facing stones thereof) for Lake Havasu City turned out to be very very astute

The term "I have a bridge to sell you" has absolutely nothing to do with McCulloch & London Bridge. It refers to a conman called George C Parker in New York who repeatedly sold the Brooklyn Bridge (which he didn't own, of course) to gullible investors back in the 1920s.

Re: Good, good.

It happened to two people working with me, one of whose partner (an NHS surgeon) was ordered to leave.

Given that Brexit doesn't happen until Friday it's quite simply not possible that this sort of screwup is because of Brexit. No EU citizen can be ordered to leave before Friday, no matter what their status.

If the home office has been ordering people to leave it's because they have screwed up and not noticed that they were EU citizens, which isn't really the same thing (and entirely typical of the Home Office, I agree).

There are also people who screw-up themselves, like the French chef who's been in the UK for years but applied for permanent resident status, instead of settled status. He didn't provide the correct info for permanent residence, which until Brexit was rarely something that EU citizens would ever need to do, so his application was turned down. Big song and dance until the Home Office pointed out that he should have simply applied for settled status, which he then did and it was sorted straight away.

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

Re: Isn't it amazing

Now if only I can get paid per line of code again...

Or per bugfix ?

Outrage?

I've have thought that even mild surprise was a bit excessive. EU politicians and bureaucrats are past masters of making numbers say what they want, the single currency would never have got off the ground without it. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with the Great Project, certainly not some "fake news" about an systems outage. Cover it up & it'll soon be forgotten.

That said, "a context of temporary limitation of redundancy” is worthy of the BOFH himself! I'm sure I can find somewhere to use it in a report.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

Re: Miffy?

Miffy ?

HP drivers...

Last week I was trying to get an old HP printer to work on a PC that was recently 'upgraded' from W7 to W10. The troubleshooting guide recommended downloading new HP driver and support software.

278 fscking MB!!! For a printer!!

Reasonable printer hardware, but HP still can't write software worth a damn.

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

Re: We should just all use SCART

S-video and RGB were using different pins.

Sorry, but that's not the case, I have equipment that uses both. SCART video pin assignments are:

7: Blue (in and out) or S-Video Chromininance out,

11: Green (in and out)

15: Red (in and out) or S-Video Chrominance in

19: CVBS out or S-Video luminance out

20: CVBS in or S-Video luminance in

Some rare ones even put YUV component video on 7, 11 and 15, instead of RGB.

Re: Another corporation vs government war

Doesn't even need the single currency. I've ordered stuff from Amazon UK for delivery in France, and it was still cheaper than ordering the same thing from Amazon FR (and shipped from Luxembourg in any case). No doubt the reverse is true for some things as well.

Re: We should just all use SCART

AIUI at one time the French mandated that all TVs had to have at least one SCART socket.

Yes, this was disguised state aid for Canal+. To make sure that people would sign up for their service they needed to make sure that all TVs could accept a decoder. Since most TVs at that time were "live chassis" it was non-trivial to add suitable connectors, so SCART (Peritel in France) was defined and made mandatory. It conveniently also gave a significant advantage to French TV manufacturers, until the Japanese ones started adding SCART as well.

Even SCART wasn't really standard, though. There are versions with RGB and versions with S-Video, using the same pins, sometimes switchable in the TV setup menu.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Re: Where will the bits go?

Anything in geosynchronous orbit is travelling at about 3,000m/s, or approximately 11,000 km/h

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Companies in France

Ah, the days when GEC-Plessey Telecommunications still existed. Universally known as GPT, caused no end of amusement in France,

At least the advent of digital technologies means that newly-arrived Brits browsing the small ads for used cars no longer have to wonder why they're all labelled K7. My French friends in the UK still snigger at preservative-free jam, and people living in cul-de-sacs, though.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

The two hours' time isn't for solving the problem, it's for finding it.

Ajh yes, the old percussive maintenance rule.

£100 for fixing it, broken down as: £5 for hitting it with a hammer, £95 for knowing where to hit it.

Capita Education Services accidentally spaffs email addresses in Helpdesk snafu

Crapita

"cessation of competence"

Wouldn't that have a prerequisite of competence to begin with?

Opera hits back at 'short seller' whose report claimed its 'predatory' microloan droid apps could hurt, er... investors

Re: Six of one and a half dozen of the other

It seems in politics and business now that the truth is determined by whoever shouts the loudest first.

Hasn't it always been so? At least these days we have more access to data to help counteract it.

How a Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25,000 AI contest with hidden code – and was fired from dream SV job

There are people in the world who will choose to adopt a less attractive animal out of compassion.

True, my wife chose me, for example.

Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home

Re: Hacker?

At what point does a member of staff with valid network credentials become known as a hacker?

When he still comes back and logs in after he's been fired. Did you read the whole article?

"Moonie, who was employed by the hospital's heart and lung department as an administrator, was sacked. As part of the police caution he agreed not to access any IT system within the hospital

...

Nursing a grievance over his treatment, and believing he wasn't the only one remotely accessing the hospital network, Moonie changed the password for an admin account in order to maintain his illicit access."

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

Re: bangers and fries

Well, it was "only" spinach and ricotta parcels with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, but at the time I read the article bangers & chips sounded mouthwatering.

bangers and fries

You bastard. I'm hungry already, and we're only having pasta this evening, because we have to rush out.

Just as well there's bacon & black pudding in the freezer for tomorrow. And at one of [see icon] this evening.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

Exactly. They've taken two systems designed to work independently and bolted on code to make them communicate.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Re: Good start

And while they're doing that, make it mandatory that car headlight bulbs can be changed at the roadside in 5 minutes as well. With no special tools.

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

Re: Your big mistake was to not download OUIGO app as well

Wait until you've been commuting on them for a while, you'll be pining for the comfort and reliability of Network SouthEast,

Re: Threadripper

Let's hope that Airwick never partners with Alexa...

Re: Your big mistake was to not download OUIGO app as well

That's because French trains are always on strike, so they have plenty of practice.

Bad news: Windows security cert SNAFU exploits are all over the web now. Also bad: Citrix gateway hole mitigations don't work for older kit

Re: it's an ASSAULT

bombastic : marked by or given to speech or writing that is given exaggerated importance by artificial or empty means

Spanking the pirates of corporate security? Try a Plimsoll

Re: A decent backup strategy is very expensive.

If I have to pay 10% of my annual profits, for a form of insurance that mitigates a risk that has a 5% per year chance of occurring,

A risk assessment needs to consider more than just the probability of it happening, it also has to take into account what the cost will be if it does happen. If the result is total loss of your business then 10% of annual profits may be worthwhile even for an unlikely event. If the result is just a 20% hit on income for 2 years, then perhaps it's less worthwhile.

Agreed, though, it's why a risk assessment always has to be the first step. Work out the likely losses, and likely costs, and choose the right solution (which may indeed be "do nothing"). Unfortunately too many people get it backwards, I've seen far too many customers say "I've bought your XXX solution, how do I configure it to protect my business". Too late...

A decent backup strategy is very expensive.

But not half as expensive as not having a decent backup strategy.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

Re: Hold on!

Yet according to Transparency International, who investigate this sort of corruption, the UK is one of the world's least corrupt countries (11th place out of 180, in the top 5 in the EU), ahead of France, Ireland, the USA, etc.

the use of numbered ballots so the government can look up how everyone voted

They are sealed, and destroyed after a year. Any systematic abuse like that would be very obvious, and known.

Nobody cares how those "results" are obtained, as the last "election" clearly demonstrated.

Sour grapes because it didn't go the way you wanted?

We still have not found an answer to the mystery of the massive influx of postal votes (twice as many in the last "election" as in previous ones)

A lot of previously-uninterested expat citizens in the EU voting because of Brexit?

how people in the government or the BBC already knew the outcome of postal votes before the election was held.

Representatives of all the parties are present at the opening of the postal votes, as observers, that's part of the need to have a fair count. It seems that some of them foolishly commented to the BBC that the results were "grim for Labour". They shouldn't have done so, and the BBC certainly shouldn't have reported it.

Re: "the ECJ has made clear that national security concerns do not override citizens’ data privacy"

The appropriate way to tell a government or politician to fuck off is in an election (as the UK recently did with Labour), not with street troubles orchestrated by trade unions. Union membership in France is <10%, so they are hardly representative.

I'd also disagree that the English population is "highly apathetic' given the 67.5% turnout last year, which is fairly typical and largely the same across the UK. It compares very favourably to the < 50% turnouts in the most recent French legislative election. The lack of mass activism in the UK isn't apathy, it's a recognition that it's not the right way to do things. You get lasting change through talking and agreement, not by bottles through shop windows.

A lot of it is cultural. I'd say that the French (based on my 30 years living in France) expect the state to be paternalistic and to look after them, as the archetypal "bon père de famille", they are nowhere near as individualistic or self-motivated as the British. Britons don't expect the government to do everything for them, but recognise their own responsibility to make their own lives, a view which I personally share. That also argues against the idea of being "apathetic", that's a charge I would level at the French far more than at the British, at least when it comes to choosing governments.

only secular rights seem to count these days.

Good, it shows that at least some parts of the world are leaving medieval superstition behind.

Re: Hold on!

30% of the population voting for Brexit is British democracy, hahahahahahaha

Try US democracy if you prefer. 25.2% of the voting population voted for Trump, 26.3% for Clinton, yet Trump was elected.

Re: "the ECJ has made clear that national security concerns do not override citizens’ data privacy"

I'm glad I live in France.

Hmm, that's the place which elects a new government that promises reform, and then lets the unions take over & paralyze everything to block the reforms when they're announced? You have to wonder who actually runs the country, it certainly doesn't seem to be the elected government. But if you're happy with that...

The EU, protecting UK citizens from its own Government for over 40 years.

Not bad for something that was only created in 1993!

The dream of a single European patent may die next month – and everyone is in denial about it

Re: All sorted

Or he is Connor MacLeod...

There's no particular reason that "Europe" has to mean "EU". There are other European organizations, the European Space Agency comes to mind, whose membership extends far beyond the EU.

A patent court should be able to determine it's jurisdiction with the agreement of the desired members. If it wants to be EU, fine. If it wants to be pan-European, fine. Obviously (as noted in the article) the legal constraints will be different. It may be easier to restrict it to the EU, but would that be useful? In something as complex as the area of patent law, picking a solution that's easy is likely to result in one that's inadequate.

The main issue here must surely be what it is intended to achieve. It seems that the idea is that inventors will be able to file a single patent and have it cover multiple countries, rather than face the cost and difficulty of filing separate patents in every country. A sound idea, but that does require all the countries involved to protect IP in the same way, and the bigger the EU gets the harder it is to have 100% agreement on any complex issue. Many of the existing EU directives are intentionally ambiguous, to allow countries to fudge things enough to claim compliance, but they only work because the countries want them to. Big corporate lawyers earn their living by finding loopholes in such agreements.

I can't help but feel that (even without the sordid precedent of Battistelli and the EPO) any patent organization that tries to create a unified set of rules across the EU will do nothing but make lawyers rich, while the small inventors who might hope to gain from a unified international patent will be sidelined.

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Corporate culture

One thing that really stands out to me is how insulting the internal emails are in general. I've worked for several large international corporations, and I've never seen junior or senior staff insulting customers in email. At most people might note a 'challenge', or list a customer rep as being "not as helpful as I'd have hoped", but using 'friggin...', 'their own stupidity' and 'Idiots' about customers in an internal email would have the sender severely bounced by his/her boss. You have to wonder what sort of corporate culture Boeing fosters.

World's richest bloke battles Oz catastro-fire with incredible AU$1m donation (aka load of cheap greenwashing)

Re: Not exactly a reasonable comparison

make me that offer in writing, in legally binding form, and then it'll be a market value

Not necessarily. There are rules against over- or under-valuing things you sell in order to minimize your tax liabilities.

Love T-shirts, but can't be bothered to wash them? We've seen just the thing!

Have they never seen the film?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit

'No BS' web host Gandi lives up to half of its motto... Some customer data wiped out in storage server meltdown

Re: Talking about bullshit

I wasn't talking about price or I would have said cheap instead.

"Competitive" is generally taken in terms of "value for money", so price is a part of it. It doesn't have to mean 'cheap', you can be underfunded without being cheap.

Please name a more competitive provider

No idea, I avoid hosting providers for exactly this reason. I run my own hosts, although I do use a provider for personal email. I make my own backups, since their SLA is clear that they don't backup my user data. I do expect them, though, to backup their own data including configuration related to the service they sell me, so that they can have their hosts up again ASAP after a failure.

Re: Talking about bullshit

I haven't found anyone else equally competitive.

It's easy to compete on price if you skimp on quality and reliability.

Why is a 22GB database containing 56 million US folks' personal details sitting on the open internet using a Chinese IP address? Seriously, why?

Re: late capitalists

"....routine testing of cosmetics etc on animals was a legitimate part of their business operations?...."

The cosmetics MAY have stopped,

I doubt it, it's a useful part of the testing.

In any case, companies like The Body Shop, who make a great fuss over "no animal testing" for their finished products, conveniently gloss over the fact that many of those products can only be sold today because some of the chemicals in them were tested on animals in the past in order to get their approval, so they're still using animal-tested ingredients.

Eggheads have crunched the numbers and the results are in: It's not just your dignity you lose with e-scooters, life and limb are in peril, too

Re: Time for El Reg to re-take journalism 101?

"The rate of accidents went up from six per 100,000 riders in 2014 to 19 per 100,000 four years later."

That's a whopping 0.00019 per cent. Up from 0.00006.

.019%, up from .006%, and still a factor of x3 increase.

Who clicked on the story just because of the hottie in the photo?

No helmet, using phone while riding, not looking where she's going? Never found that sort of dumb blonde hot, TBH.

Re: It's not the riders I'm bothered about

Have you any evidence at all that there's been even one such injury?

There's lots:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/paris-scooters-lime-electric-trottinettes-accidents-a8955561.html

"Isabelle Vanbrabant was walking home through a park one spring evening in Paris when an electric scooter crashed into her, breaking the pianist’s wrist in two places. Beronique Kilebasa was crossing a street with her seven-week-old baby strapped to her chest when a man riding a similar scooter collided into her, knocking them both to the ground. In another incident, a scooter sped through a red light and straight into an 81-year-old man, killing him."

In a desperate bid to stay relevant in 2020's geopolitical upheaval, N. Korea upgrades its Apple Jeus macOS malware

Re: "Believed to be operating out of North Korea"

Believing does not need evidence. See religion.

Believing without evidence is Faith. Religion is when Faith is exploited.

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

Re: No,no, thrice times no!

"thrice" already means "three times"

Woe, Woe and Thrice Woe. Titter ye not.

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

Re: Report on Experimental Results

errant currant provides a similar amount of sparks and smoke

Errant current from an errant currant?