Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Chief EU negotiator tells UK to let souped-up data adequacy dream die

Re: The more I listen to the EU...

"Scotland is better off out of the UK" has no contradiction with "The UK is worse off out of the EU", if Scotland is *in* the EU, and the UK is out.

Except that the EU leaders have been consistently clear that if Scotland leaves the UK it leaves the EU, and if the UK leaves the EU then all of it does, so there is no situation where Scotland is in the EU and the UK is out, unless Scotland declares independence post-Brexit and applies to join the EU, Schengen, Eurozone and all.

Re: "The United Kingdom needs to face up to the..reality of Brexit,"

Please stop exaggerating statistics to make your point. Most non-UK nursing staff originate from India, with the Philippines in 2nd with 15,391

The report you quote is for "NHS staff" in general, which includes everyone from Doctors to Janitors, not just nurses.

I took my figures from a BBC report that quotes the "nursing and midwifery council" which presumably has accurate figures for nurses. From their graph ~23000 from the Philippines, ~16000 from India

Re: The more I listen to the EU...

Don't the 'Remain' voters understand what freedom is?

Of course they do. It's what EU politicians tell them they have already.

Plus none of the major parties have the guts to tell the Great British People "You were wrong - We're smarter than you, so forget democracy"

It's OK, the EU is saying it, as is has been for years. Look where that has led.

Re: Irish abortion referendum.

that referendums have no legal force in France.

Nor in the UK, but there's little point in having one if you're going to ignore it.

Re: Irish abortion referendum.

So, err, that 65% threshold you asked for? Well, it was reached, thanks for asking.

For the common market, which was a good thing. We should have kept it.

The EU, as political empire-building by power-hungry civil servants, was not wanted. Most countries didn't get a vote and whilst places like Italy would have voted in favour (oh, how times change!), opinion polls in the UK at the time were showing 62% opposed, even Denmark voted "No" by 50.7% and had to be asked again to get the right answer. France voted for it by just under 52%.

Re: "The United Kingdom needs to face up to the..reality of Brexit,"

Recruiting of NHS nurses in foreign countries dropped 92%.

Not quite. Recruitment from EU countries (foreign? surely not!) dropped by 96% in the year after the Brexit vote (almost 1000 fewer candidates), hardly surprising given the initial uncertainty over residence status, but EU citizens make up only a small proportion of UK nursing staff. Most non-UK nursing staff come from the Philippines (20,000+), with many others from India and the Caribbean where they don't have a language problem coming to the UK. Recruiting nurses has been problematic for years, just due to costs. It's hard to live in London on a nurse's salary, no matter where you come from.

Re: The more I listen to the EU...

This belies a fundamental lack of understanding (or deliberate misrepresentation) of what Barnier is saying.

Not at all. For the record I think the principles behind GDPR are good ones, and the UK should adopt them in or out of the EU (the actual implementation of the regulation is an ambiguous wordy mess that will make lawyers rich,. but that's another story). In practice the UK consumer and data protection rules have always goine further than EEC/EU ones, so that's shouldn't be a problem.

What Barnier is saying, in short, is that if other countries want to play with EU data, they have to do it according to EU rules.

He is also saying that they will tolerate no input from other countries into the definition of those rules, even if that might be beneficial all round, which is arrogant. The EU is entitled to ignore such input, of course, but part of valid international politics is sitting down together and discussing how things which would affect everyone could be done.

The UK is suggesting that it should have a consultative role in discussing and formulating rules which all European countries (inside and outside the EU) will be expected to follow. That's not an unreasonable position, it would indeed be in the best interests of all EU businesses to cooperate.

It would not, however, be in the interests of those running the EU. Hence Barnier's position of "We're not interested in your views, they are our rules, our decisions. Everyone has to accept them or fuck off." which is not helpful.

The EU knows that a successful Brexit would damage its image, and just as with Galileo it will not tolerate that. The UK has to lose, even if the EU loses something as well. No "win-win".

Re: The more I listen to the EU...

I do have to admit that Sturgeon was performing top notch politics.

Absolutely. It's truly impressive how she manages to spin "Scotland is better off out of the UK" and "The UK is worse off out of the EU" as both being right for the same reasons. You can tell she studied Law, and not something like Logical Analysis.

Re: Irish abortion referendum.

The paltry 2% leave got should never have been enough to trigger this clusterfuck.

I presume you mean 52%?

Why not? The French only voted 51% in favour of creating it. A 65% threshold for the "create" vote would have avoided the clusterfuck ever seeing the light of day.

Re: Well, duh

You can be in the EU and opt out of things, but you can't be out the EU and opt in to things.

Technically speaking, why not? Works for Norway & Switzerland. It's politics, anything is possible.

Re: The more I listen to the EU...

And frankly, the EU is now considerably more bothered about Italy than it cares about the UK.

And rightly so, Brexit is only a risk for the EU if it's successful long-term, Italy could bring the eurozone crashing down in a matter of months.

What's the ‎€/popcorn rate these days?

Re: The more I listen to the EU...

...the more I conclude that it is the EU itself that is trying to have its cake and eat it.

Seems so. Barnier's comment that "This autonomy allows us to set standards for the whole of the EU, but also to see these standards being replicated around the world." is practically American in its arrogance: "We'll set the standards alone, and we expect everyone else to adopt them".

Smut site offers VPN so you don't bare all online

Re: subversive material

I have a large collection of patio chair pictures in various compromising poses. In fact I think I have the full set.

I was looking for a Kama Sutra (Seatra?) pun to make for that, then I found these: https://en.egoparis.com/collection/kama-2/

(SFW, in case you're wondering)

America's comms watchdog takes on the internet era's real criminals: Pirate pastors

Re: Pirate radio is harmfull

the students took to removing sections of their antenna coax

Too obvious. Push a pin through it to create a short, and cut it off flush with the insulating sheath. Hard to find without the right test gear, and potentially much more destructive to the connected equipment.

Is your smart device a bit thick? It's about to get a lot worse

Re: Some men do get periods ...

I'm definitely intersex though I think I may be misunderstanding the word.

Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in .... ?

US websites block netizens in Europe: Why are they ghosting EU? It's not you, it's GDPR

You're not that big, you're in decline, you're being overrun by totalitarians and socialists and migrants, you disrespect us, and your regulations suck.

Funny, remove "socialist" and you'd get the European view of the USA.

Re: Am I mistaken?

I thought GDPR applied to all EU citizens regardless of where they live.

As far as I can see GDPR makes no reference to citizenship. Everything is worded in terms of "data subjects" which are natural persons who are present in the EU.

That raises an interesting question. If an EU citizen, in the EU, uses a VPN to access US services, will GDPR apply, even if the controller of that service doesn't know where that person is? Will the derogation where "the data subject has explicitly consented to the proposed transfer, after having been informed of the possible risks of such transfers" apply to this, using a VPN being seen as informed consent? For a non-EU citizen doing this the waters seem even murkier.

I can only imagine that the lawyers for Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc. will be salivating and perusing Mercedes catalogues this weekend.

Ongoing game of Galileo chicken goes up a notch as the UK talks refunds

Also, the "getting back control of the borders" line is a pile of putrid slimy drivel.

Not entirely, there's a lot of resentment in all EU countries about the centrally-imposed migrant quotas, and some (like Hungary) are on a collision course with the EU over this.

Of course, the UK is actually the second-most welcoming EU country for migrants (after Germany) so these quotas have no practical effect, but the basic idea that a centralized authority that we don't trust can overrule our decisions on immigration rubs a lot of people up the wrong way. The same is true for the ECJ's ability to prevent the UK from deporting people that its courts have deemed undesirable.

Brit-bashing

Yes, they seem to be having a problem with these clocks in their installation in the Giove test birds that were built in Guildford. May well turn out to be a British problem.

If you read the official EAS report into the failures you will see that one of the problems has been traced to a component in the RAFS master clock, designed and built in Switzerland, and another is in the PHM clocks built by Selex-ES, an Italian company. It goes on to say that "No RAFS clock failures have occurred aboard the four Galileo In Orbit Validation (IOV) satellites, the original Galileo model." which are the GIOVE ones you're referring to.

So, sorry to disappoint you, but it's not a Brtitish problem.

Ah yes; the white commonwealth will save us dream!

Have you looked at the colour of most Commonwealth peoples?

Re: So sad we are leaving

Tusk made quite clear immediately after the referendum that he hoped that Britain would move swiftly so they could get it over and done with as soon as possible. How more obvious could he have been?

True. The government should have invoked article 50 the day after the referendum, but instead they were too busy backstabbing each other over the leadership and we ended up with a useless "safe pair of hands" (joke!) like May.

*ALL* of the core negotiations with respect to life-after-Brexit should have been completed before Article 50 was invoked, so the 2 years could be used to implement the coming changes. Yes, I know the EU didn't want to do that,

I can't see the EU taking negotiations at all seriously without Art. 50 being invoked. It's been clear all along that they expect the UK to "see the error of its ways", and drop the whole idea of exit. It's part of the arrogance of the EU that the cannot conceive that anyone who disagrees with them could be right, they simply assume that their view will prevail as the only valid one.

Only when Art.50 was invoked did they start serious negotiations, and even today they waffle and stall. The rare occasions when they realy get upset and drop the patronizing waffle is when they seem to be losing, like when the UK brought up the facts of the Galileo contracts. That seems to have woken Barnier up a bit. We need more moments like that, hard facts and a convincing display of willingness to just walk out, hard Brexit included. For as long as May plays the conciliatory doormat, and keeps her cabinet divided, the EU will retain the upper hand.

Re: Let's not question the EU

This means a second referendum would be an actual informed vote.

So you want a referendum on whether the Government & EU should seriously negotiate leaving, which I doubt very much the EU would have agreed to (they would have said "trigger article 50 if you're serious, and then we'll talk) and then after years of pain you want another vote on whether they did a good job?

We pretty much had that. Lot's of non-binding opinion polls (and rising UKIP votes) which clearly sent the message that the goverment needed to do something. They did, and Cameron came back like Chamberlain, brandishing his "look at the the changes I negotiated!" letter. He then called a vote on whether the changes were acceptable, and the people said No.

If we don't like the result of the negotiations, we do of course have the option of throwing out the government at the next election and electing a pro-EU party to undo it. The lack of massive increase in support for the LibDems in the last election (after the referendum) doesn't make that seem likely, though.

Re: Let's not question the EU

If you are going to be critical, at least be correct :)

OK, if you'll be reasonable :)

Counting the whole population of the UK, including infants, isn't realistic. 46.5m people were eligible to vote, so claiming 65.6, as your baseline is nonsense.

UK citizens living elsewhere in the EU only lose their vote after 15 years, so you can't include all 1.5m. I'm one of them, and would have voted leave, so you can't even assume they'd all have voted Remain.

Realistically the only valid interpretation is that 33.55m out of 46.5m actually voted, which is indeed 72.2% (and far more than vote in EU elections, which shows that people took this seriously).

Of the valid votes 51.85% voted to leave, which is 37.4% of the voters, twice the "1/6th" that was claimed.

Re: Let's not question the EU

I do love the way remainers downvote facts they don't like. It's almost Trump-esque.

Re: Let's not question the EU

a) Your maths leaves a little to be desired.

It's far more correct than yours.

b) You could equally read that those happy to stay number 63%

No, you could not. People who don't vote are implicitly declarding "I don't care, somebody else can choose" which means they agree to go with the majority decision, which was to leave.

The non binding nature of such referendums was soon forgotten.

That's sophistry. There is no point in asking for a formal vote and then ignoring it because it was supposedly "non-binding". If that's all you want, just use an opinion poll.

Referendum shows deep discontent, we need to make some changes - we'll see what changes we can make over the next 5-10 years and then come back and ask again.

That's exactly what happened. Cameron said that there was deep discontent, so he would work to negotiate changes and put them to a vote. He negotiated bugger all except window dressing, which was completely unsurprising since the EU was never going to accept anything else. He then lost the vote.

If we go through with this, then we can never reverse the decision - the best we could do would be to apply to join as a non founder full union member..

And? We never were a founder member. The common market was founded in 1957, De Gaulle didn't want us to join and we didn't until 1973. By the time the EU was created out of it we were just sucked in with all the other members, few of whom even had a chance to vote on the issue.

If it all goes wrong, and it turns out that the EU is the only future for Europe, we can of course hold another referendum in 20-odd years to ask to rejoin. Personally I'd be surprised if the EU still existed in its current form by then.

Re: Let's not question the EU

Leavers are very much against a second properly informed referendum, because they fear the outcome.

No, we're very much against a second referendum because we believe that if it returns what the EU insists is the "correct" answer (i.e. "stay") we'll be forced to accept that withoiut further discussion, but if it also returns "leave" there will be demands for yet another vote, and so on. Best of 3? Best of 5?

You can't keep holding votes until you get the result you like, and then stop. You either vote at regular intervals, such as in an election, or you make a decision and stick to it for long enoiugh to see it through, which would be roughly a generation for an issue like this.

Re: Let's not question the EU

Not half the country. About 1/6th if it.

53% of 74% is not 1/6th. If that's an example of remainer maths then it doesn't bodw well for the quality of your other arguments.

Re: So sad we are leaving

The EU negotiating position is simple and entirely valid - we want the best outcome for the EU members; we don't give two hoots about how it affects the UK since the UK will not be an EU member

Not really, if that were the case they would be negotiating properly. Their actual position, which is entirely logical when looked at from the EU point of view, is that the UK must be made to lose even if the EU loses as well. A successful post-Brexit UK would be highly damaging to the concept of the EU, so the EU is willing to take a hit as long as the UK takes a worse one. "win-win" isn't an acceptable outcome.

That's not a good situation for fair negotiations, of course, something which seems to have excaped Theresa May's notice.

Re: Let's not question the EU

I really do think that the security risks that are ahead of the European Union demand a very strong cooperation between the UK and the European Union

Indeed so, and Barnier's comment that "third countries (which is what the UK will be following withdrawal) cannot participate in the development of security-sensitive projects" is just plain silly. Even outside the EU there's no reason that the UK wouldn't still be a secure ally for the other members, that is in everyone's interests. It will still be in NATO, for example. Arguably it would be safer for the EU to trust the UK as an ally than to trust some of the ex-eastern block member countries that are less stable, and more at risk of attack/infiltration.

It's just gesture politics, the EU has to punish the UK for leaving its club.

Church of England will commune with God for you via Amazon's Echo

I initially misread the original as Google Pay. Internet of Indulgences?

Zuckerberg gets a night off: Much-hyped Euro grilling was all smoke, absolutely no heat

Re: Ha

I've this pain in the neck I'd like to go away.....

Time for a necksit?

Z turned up for the EU, tiny solo UK is an irrellevance and can be safely ignored.

So he turns up to meet the blustering bag of wind knowing that he has nothing to worry about, but avoids the chat with the apparently harmless little guy who might just land an embarassing punch or two?

Re: Well isn't that just great

Italian MEPs are fabulously well paid it turns out

Not any more. Italian MPs are fabulously well paid, and any MEPs elected before 2009 can still get the same salary as an MP, but since 2009 all MEPs elected now get the same, around €100K/year

The unelected commissioners, though, get paid around €270K + allowances per year. That indicates how the commission sees their relative values...

Not a complete waste. The MEPs will all be able to claim their expenses, so a successful day for them.

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

Re: The economics??

I bet there's people with some high-power output valves squirreled away

I doubt it, there's not much call for paired 500kW transmitter valves outside of professional & perhaps military broadcasting. Still, I'd be surprised if it weren't possible to have some made if necessary, they aren't particularly complex items. 500kW medium- and short-wave transmitters are catalogue items from the large RF manufacturers and could no doubt be adapted for long wave if a total replacement were required.

it's also "listening live" that's dead, rather than "listen on demand". People don't want the waffle and adverts and talk-overs and the "most popular" song on constant loop. They want to listen to what they want to listen to.

Except that after a while you realise that you don't have any new music, because you're only listening to the stuff you bought & ripped years ago. The one big advantage of the waffle etc. from a radio station is that occasional moment of "hey, I like that, who is it?"

Das blinkenlights are back thanks to RPi revival of the PDP-11

Re: How noisy are the cooling fans?

So you work in both farming and computing industries? That's a first for me!

Cue old joke: Why are experts like farmers? They're both people out standing in their fields...

Re: Grammatical point

In real German, perhaps so, but the original text was not exactly correct: http://www.blinkenlights.nl/

...so relaxen und watchen das blinkenlights.

Re: PDP-11 Adventure

I'm sure the fortran source is out there somewhere...

In many forms:

http://rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html

https://www.dwheeler.com/adventure/

are just two I have bookmarked.

It's Galileo Groundhog Day! You can keep asking the same question, but it won't change the answer

Re: Aerospace Valley

Sometimes in the Brexit vs. Remain debate, I wonder which side is actually the intolerant one.

Indeed so. The whole thing has echoes of religious fervour like the Reformation, when anyone daring to speak out against the established order was persecuted from the altar by the high priests of the status quo. Remainers seem not only to be agressively intolerant of anyone that isn't pro-EU, they insist on categorizing all leavers as racist and/or stupid and seem quite unwilling to accept or understand that there could be valid economiuc and political arguments in favour of leaving.

Re: "We have to look at the clouds, no-one's allowed to look for silver linings these days."

In all cases - better within the EU.

You've got to be kidding, have you ever lived elsewhere in the EU? The eurozone economy is shit, the French are far more anti-immigration than the UK (can you imagine the outcry if the BNP got even half the votes that the Front National gets?), The EU pays lip service to democracy with a sinecure of a parliament while runnig a paternalistic bureacracy. It's a protectionist trade bloc, which always leads to mediocrity, and as for sovereignty, you don't get much of that in a federal state.Whether the UK can do better on its own remains to be seen, but whatever the problems are, the EU is not the right solution.

Re: "Which is, of course, the main reason the EU is building Galileo, "

Give it to Diane Abbott and she will spend it even more (sarc).

But she'll have no idea of the price of whatever she spends it on.

Admin needed server fast, skipped factory config … then bricked it

Re: And in a similar vein

Then there's the "party poppers" attached to rackmounted equipment. "popper" fastened to the chassis, firing upwards, string tied to the removable card. Always good to enliven a sales demo when it comes to show off the "hot swap" fetaures...

Maybe us Europeans can offer some advice on the current best practice - they may resist though...

There's certainly potential for improvement, though perhaps some reluctance.

My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?

clientele being managed (e.g. two people gathering 20+ nursery-age children in seconds).

At that age they are used to just doing what an adult tells them, unlike supposed aduts who argue, or want to go back for their phone.

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

Re: Article is a bit light on facts.

VAX Fortran from mid-80s was standard F77, with a few VMS extensions available.

Do you think NASA will give me a job then?

Get in line...

US citizen sues France over France-dot-com brouhaha

joining the annual festivities of "French youth" setting fire to tires and automobiles.

Assuming that Air France, SNCF etc. weren't on strike when they tried to travel, of course.

Eurocrats double down on .eu Brexit boot-out

Or it dawned on on the Eurocrats that one approach would cost them money, and the other could make them more money...