Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Post-Brexit plan for .EU tweaked: No dot-EU web domains for Europeans in UK, no appeals, etc

Out of curiosity, I wonder if there are any Channel Islands or IoM companies with .eu domains? Under this new ruling they should never have been allowed them. I could see that ending up in court.

Re: Legal traditions

British court might be found to have no standing and courts on the continent might not be a venue open to the British.

Court cases always go to the court which has jurisdiction, so a case against the EU will go to the ECJ. It makes no difference where the complainant is, a Briton suing the EU will do so in the ECJ.

(*cough*patents*cough*)

The EPO is a European organization, but not an EU one. It has 38 member states.

UK-EU infosec data sharing may not be KO'd by Brexit, reckons ENISA bod

Re: 4 letters covers it

This is a framework that will allow certifying authorities to certify everything from lightbulbs, toasters to atomic stations and submarines. And processes and services,

Great. "CE" marking for nuclear submarines. We can all sleep more soundly now :)

Re: Remember the vote!

You all voted to "leave" all this co-operation behind.

We did nothing of the sort. We voted to leave EU control, and return to a model based upon agreed co-operation. It looks like at least some European organizations are willing to co-operate.

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

Re: Where is the poll option for

when the Hobnobs and Marmite run out in April.

Brexit will kill off Marmite? And you still wonder why people voted leave?!

Re: If I were a tech billionaire...

retire to the ... South of France

You might want to keep a mooring for the yacht there, but it's not a retirement spot for the taxpaying rich if they want to stay rich. Monaco, maybe, if you don't mind the vertical houses.

Re: Dyson

Dyson the company has been moving its production to Singapore for yonks and now makes nearly ALL its stuff there

He's also said to be working on electric cars, and China is the next big place for that, by all accounts. Makes sense to have an HQ in Asia, and Singapore's probably one of the better places to be in that part of the world.

Re: Money well spent

History shows that far right movements generally enjoy the support of the wealthiest ones.

Hardly surprising since the far-left ones generally have "confiscate all private property" (except that of the party leader) at #1 on their manifesto.

EU will have agreed a tech tax by March, says French finance minister

Re: French politicians have a history of declaring what the Eu will decide - and being wrong

Well, if Amazon starts adding a labelled "3% 'Le Maire' tax" to items in the basket it'll give Les Gilets Jaunes something else to protest about, anyway.

Re: That could plug the EU's brexit budget gap.

the gap between what the UK pays to the EU budget and what comes back is quite small.

I wouldn't call £9bn/year all that small, but then I suppose I'm not Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison.

Ever feel like all your prayers go unheard? The Catholic Church has an app for that

Re: "Pray for me that the Greek test will be canceled."

When did they start playing cricket in Greece?

Re: No point

It's about your devotion, your communication to Him.

What if he's opted-out under GDPR?

IBM HR made me lie to US govt, says axed VP in age-discrim legal row: I was ordered to cover up layoffs of older workers

Re: Changes staying the same

Frankly, I won't trust an English website on French grammar or literature

Then go to the source. Alphonse Karr, Les Guepes Volume 6, page 278 "Ne faites pas dire : «plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose»"

https://archive.org/details/lesgupes16sr06karr/page/n287

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

Re: Seems strange

They did not bother to get a proper DNA test and publish the results alongside.......

They did. Did you even read the whole article?

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

to leave the EU and stay in EFTA/CU.

Unfortunately Norway is the current big fish in EFTA and doesn't want a monster shark like the UK moving in and taking over, so it vetoes that option.

Re: Error messages

"The data is not monotonically increasing"

are not, shirley?

Re: It is possible to produce an idiot proof interface.

But it does the require the extermination of every idiot.

Sadly, evolution will just produce better ones.

Having votes is undemocratic!

Ban it, it just encourages politicians.

Lawyers' secure email network goes down, firm says it'll take 2 weeks to restore

Egress Technologies?

One has to wonder if anyone looked up the meaning of Egress before buying this product.

PT Barnum was ahead of his time.

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

What benefits do we actually get from projects like CERN?

We don't know, yet. That's why we do them.

Re: The FCC, eh?

"Small beer" used to mean a weak beer. The sort of thing you'd drink all day on the fields.

Because plain water often made people sick, but they'd discovered that beer didn't. They didn't know about bacteria, and hadn't made the connection that boiled water, as used in beer, was safe (and it was an excuse to drink beer all day anyway).

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Re: Pesky microwaves

ISTR that back in the '60s Divis was relaying a signal from the IoM which was relaying a signal from Holme Moss.

That seems unlikely, Divis started in the mid-50s, and there was no IoM transmtter until long after that. People on the IoM west coast used to get their TV from Divis. Perhaps the microwave backhaul links to Tele House in Belfast followed that route? I have a vague memory of a mirowave relay on Snaefell.

Presumably you were in a location where you couldn't get Divis direct.

Indeed, although it was the 80s, not the 60s. There are some hills outside Newtownards that used to be mined for lead, they made a very effective RF screen if you were in their shadow, but the Cambret Hill relay on the Mull of Kintyre usually produced a watachable signal from Border TV. It was at fairly low altitude, hence the tidal fading Some relay transmitters were eventually installed around the area to fix the problem.

Re: Military Ship Radar

Was that the training session where the instructor forgot to switch the system into "dummy" mode before getting the student to run an exercise? I remember reading about that.

Re: Pesky microwaves

Why doesn't the high-tide dish work at all states of the tide?

You can get fading due to interference between direct and reflected (off the water) signals, so that when one path is ok the other isn't. We used to have that problem getting TV across a sea path between NI and Scotland, reception varied between great and almost unwatchable as the tide rose and fell.

Didn't they have to coat their metal bar in some strange chemical waste product first?

CES flicks the off switch on massager award… and causes a buzz

Metadata

Some websites can't even get ordinary data right, let alone the metadata. I recently tried to order a box for an electronics project from an electronics website. First I had the meta issue, was I looking for a case, box, instrument case, or an enclosure? Having tried to resolve that I then went looking for something that was about 20cm x 15cm, and 8-10cm high. I clicked the "width" menu., only to be offered a list of dozens of options such as 19.8cm, 19.9cm, 21.8cm and so on. Much further down in the three-digit section I then also found 210mm, 225mm, etc. Was there a simple "between x & y"? Nope.

Of course, that wouldn't have helped, since a search for a box/case/enclosure that was 20cm wide and 15cm long wouldn't have returned one that was 20cm long and 15cm wide.

I gave up and bought some sheet aluminium from a hardware store & made my own. Fortunately no nudity was required, or offered.

Just for EU, just for EU, just for EU: Forget about enforcing Right To Be Forgotten outside member states

Re: EU being sensible again...

I can't recall the UK government ever managing to string this many words together on any mildly technical subject.

Then maybe you haven't read the past UK legislation on data protection, which is both in advance of, and more complete than, the EU minima.

Re: Good

choose not to collect data on EU Citizens

GDPR doesn't apply only to EU citizens, it applies to natural people ("data subjects") who are present in the EU. It doesn't even explicitly say "resident". A US citizen working in the EU is included, and indeed even a US citizen on vacation in the EU is likely to be included, although I can see that having to be clarified by the courts at some point.

Steamer closets, flying cars, robot boxers, smart-mock-cock ban hypocrisy – yes, it's the worst of CES this year

Profane?

immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA’s image

Profane just means not religious or respectful of religion, so while iThings are probably OK there are surely many other gadgets that should be banned under that ruling?

And to rehash a relevant old joke, there are four types of orgasm:

Postive: Oh yes, Oh Yes, Oh YES.

Negative: Oh no, Oh No, Oh NO.

Religious: Oh god, Oh God, OH GOD.

Fake: Oh john, Oh John, Oh JOHN.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Re: Wow, it's almost...

Observers have been taking notes about names and hidey holes.

And you're accusing others of being fascist?!!

Re: Wow, it's almost...

51.7% is by any sane standards, & the government & EU's guidelines for the referendums far too small a majority for a major decision that will change the political, economic & social landscape for a generation.

And yet getting 51% (on 69.7% turnout) in a referendum was perfectly OK for France to agree to create the EU in the first place.

You can't have it both ways. If 51% is enough for "in", you can't reasonably claim that 52% is insufficient for "out".

Re: Brexit just gets better?

This is why a Deal is so important.

Of course a deal is important, to both the UK and the EU, if it's a good deal with reasonable compromise on both sides. Your discussion above is a little ingenuous, not least because tariffs on imports to the UK will of course hit companies like BMW, Audi, Mercedes, etc. through a drop in sales. It's in everyone's interests to negotiate low tariffs in both directions, and that is, after all, the main purpose of the WTO. Also note that imported components which are later re-exported in finished products will likely not be subject to tariffs, which further changes the calculations.

The chances of the EU agreeing to such a deal pre-Brexit are fairly close to zero, though, because that would mean them trying to make Brexit work in good faith, and that's politically very difficult for any EU politician. This is why we've got Theresa May's appalling sell-out deal, it's all the EU could ever offer.

After the Brexit dust settles, when all these negotiations go back to being shady negotiations between civil servants in back rooms, and not on the 6-o'clock news every night, I'm sure many workable deals will be done that will save face on both sides. That's what politicians are best at, especially when lobbied by industry.

In the absence of (an impossible) fair deal up front, it's far better to have a clean no-deal Brexit with full freedom for post-exit negotiations than to accept a bad deal for the UK which the EU will then simply refuse to change in any way.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

A non-vote is a vote for The Establishment

A non-vote is not a vote, for either option. It's a "don't care".

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

"It's one of the most welcoming countries in Europe". WTF, did you read that in the Daily Mail?

No, because I prefer facts to red-top bigotry.

The UK comes second (behind Germany) in the percentage of asylum requests accepted. It consistently scores well above the EU average in opinion polls asking if immigrants are welcome. In my personal experience it is far less institutionally racist than France, to take just one example.

The UK does charity quite well, but it does not do 'welcoming'.

Educate yourself.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

If we learn one thing it should be to never do anything on such a vague nebulous concept again, where the goalposts can be moved and mean something different for every single voter.

But what would you replace General Elections with?

Re: Wow, it's almost...

If that happens, oh fuck, we're going to see the case of UKIP trying to put forward MEPs, aren't we?)

Where have you been the last few years? UKIP came top in the last UK european elections, 27% of the vote and a plurality (24) of the 73 seats.

I think the non-UK vote will be much more interesting, my money is on the populist parties cleaning up. That should give the EU elite something other than Brexit to worry about.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

However if in an unbiased referendum without interference & criminality leave won a supermajority of at least 60% of the vote, I would accept it.

If only we'd had one of those in 1991 when John Major signed us up to Maastricht to create the EU. But he didn't, because he knew he'd lose. Even the French, great Europhiles, only accepted that by 51%. If we'd had an EEC-wide referendum, with a supermajority required, to create the EU it would never have happened, and we wouldn't be in this mess.

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

Yes, which is why I suggest one of the ways to 'fix' EU is more powers to parliament rather than commission.

You have more faith in that toothless parliament than I do. The monthly Strasbourg-Brussels charade shows how powerless it is to take any difficult decisions. By all means take the powers from the commision, but don't give them to EU politicians, give them back to national parliaments who have a direct stake in the outcome.

The major strength of the EU is in simplifying day-to-day living and business (ie economic rather than political integration). The grand plans to make a Europe-wide superstate are as stupid now as they were in the time of Napoleon.

True, but try convincing Macron etc. of that.

Unfortunately not too much that the EU as a whole or any European country can do about that one. A lot of African / middle eastern countries are in a mess

Also true, but a mess of Europe's making, thanks to the likes of Tony Bliar. Governments are happy enough to charge in and remove unwanted dictators, if they applied the same level of money & committment to deal with the gangs of people smugglers they could make good inroads into the migrant problem at source. Unfortunately a war is always more appealing to politicians than police action, it tends to be over before the next election.

So in any case there will be a flow of refugees, and the EU needs to be able to welcome them humanely and integrate them as productive and contributive elements of society.

Absolutely, but there's a need to differentiate between genuine refugees, and those economic migrants who have an unrealistic idea of a "promised land" where they can make more money that they can at home. Some of them may be welcome, if they can genuinely be productive in their new society, but in most cases it would be better for both countries if they stayed at home and worked to improve their home countries, instead of chasing some imaginary El Dorado where the reality is that they'll end up in shanty towns, no better off than before.

Re: How long until the new referendum will be called?

You just argued there were multiple leave options and not everyone who voted leave wanted the same thing. In fact, I doubt many had even considered the consequences; it was a non-binding vote and many took it as a general protest vote

I honestly doubt that, given the celebrations after it and the immediate collapse of UKIP which was then seen as "job done, now irrelevant". Those who voted leave did so because they wanted to leave, and I suspect most expected that leave to be basically "no deal" with some minor clarifications, followed after departure with new trade negotiations. The suggestion of a pre-leave divorce bill etc. certainly didn't go down well.

the one negotiated with the EU by such Leave politicians who were prepared to take on the job, let's note

Well, no. The Leave politicians weren't allowed to negotiate anything, they were overruled by remainers like May who forced them to either resign or negotiate an agreement that is essentially worse than either "remain" or "no deal".

"Given that there are really only a couple of leave options available to vote for then a second preference vote works fairly well."

True, that could be an option.

Re: How long until the new referendum will be called?

I think the sensible people asking for another referendum are asking for one that really seeks to establish what people wan

But realistically you can't do that, because there would only be one possible "remain" option, the one decided by the EU which controls the terms of membership, yet multiple ways to leave. Give people a choice between, say, three types of "leave" and one of "remain" then obviously the "remain" option would get the highest number of votes, even if the total for the leave options still exceeded it. For many people I suspect that "kill off the EU, go back to the EEC" would be a preferred option, but clearly that isn't a choice that can be realistically offered by one country alone.

The black and white stay/go option was the only viable one.

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

Have you given any thought on how much cost your ridiculous queen and her family?

Absolutely nothing. The Crown Estate provides ~ £330m income to the treasury each year, of which only £82m is paid to back the Royal household as a grant. We actually make a substantial profit from them, even before you consider intangibles like tourist income.

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

I think one of the problems with the EU is that it's very real benefits founded on lasting peace

The peace was the result of the post-war economic stabilty of the common market, allowing neighbours to trade together while building trust. Ever since it was converted into the EU there has been a steady rise in nationalism and populism, to the point where the EU is becoming a leading cause of conflict (cf the Brexit arguments) within European countries. Free trade brings peace, empire-building politicians do not.

Immigration needs to be better managed but is not going to be stopped, short of surrounding Europe with barbed wire and machine guns

Very true, which is why immigration itself is not relevant to the debate.

What is relevant is the control of it, and controlling it on an EU-wide basis clearly isn't working. The Dublin agreement is largely ignored, the weaker countries can't police their own borders. The centralized solution is to attempt to manage the uncontrolled flow it by issuing quotas by diktat, which simply adds to the internal conflicts. Migration needs to be tackled at source, before people leave their homes, not after arrival in Europe when it's too late.

The UK is, and always has been, largely welcoming to true immigrants and asylum seekers. It's one of the most welcoming countries in Europe, and should continue to be so post-Brexit, but that has to be on its own terms.

Re: Does anybody actually use a .eu ?

You only need to change the address given in the registry to one in the EU.

So pick one in Belfast. It's (officially) in the UK, but Ireland considers it to be in Ireland. People born there can claim both UK and Irish nationality. Let's see the EU unpick that one.

Re: Brexit just gets better?

This is a chocolate orange in Dublin.

They grow cocoa in Ireland?

Look at the whole picture, what taxes were paid to import that chocolate to Dublin from outside the EU? Where was the metal for the foil mined, and where was the cardboard made? Then recalculate the whole thing on a non-EU basis, without any double-dutch-irish-sandwich tax trickery. It's far from your simplistic "EU good, non-EU bad" theory.

The EU no longer works for you, it looks after its members self interest,

No, it looks after the EU's self-interest, as decided by its politicians. That is not at all the same thing as looking after its members' interests.

Re: industry practice?

of or business directed to that country

And yet that is precisely what the EU is now attempting to block, non-EU countries directing their business to the EU. People accuse Trump of being protectionist, but he can't hold a candle to Brussels.

How many people with .eu domains actually have them because they want them, and not just to prevent cybersquatters grabbing them?

In short, it's a bad deal for everyone, everyone knows it, there are other better options, yet for some reason politicians and bureaucrats are insisting on continuing to rush headlong off a cliff.

The reason is obvious, Brexit must be made to fail. It will be embarassing for the EU if it actually works, since more people might begin to question the value of the EU.

Google Play Store spews malware onto 9 million 'Droids

Re: Right. Sure. Whatever.

I make $1500 a week from my home using Google

but who for...?

Drone goal! Quadcopter menace alert freezes flights from London Heathrow Airport

Re: pictures?

Playmobil?