Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
You still haven't twigged. This climate change is a cunning plan engineered by British boffins to ensure that, come Brexit, we'll be exporting truffles and vin rouge to the world, while the froggies stare in dismay at their parched domaines. Next up, olive tree plantations in Lincolnshire.
When I saw the first mention of this green liquid I immediately thought "Green Chartreuse", which I have to admit is something of an acquired taste.
Not half as bad as that abomination invented by French ski stations, the Green Chaud. Hot chocolate with a shot of Chartreuse added. Just say no.
The early 1900 series computers had (possibly germanium) transistor memory and nil cores,
I remember using a 1906S at uni in the late 70s, it had plated wire memory, which was like core but faster. Didn't see semiconductor memory until we had Apple IIs and VAXen to play with (and 6800 development boards, great days)
No wonder, when an "official scold" and a year without promotion is the only punishment for something that had the potential to compromise the embassy network(s) and expose government data to other, possibly hostile, interests. If I'd done that with my company laptop I'd have been demoted or fired, but no doubt the UCS cretin will end up as a cabinet minister with a fancy pension. They don't live in the same world as the rest of us.
So I'm liable for my Volkswagon exceeding CO2 emissions?
The VW scandal concerned NOx, not CO2, which is important because NOx has a legal maximum limit (analagous to a speed limit) whereas CO2 is just used as a tax lever by governments.
Whether you're liable will probably depend on how the law is written. It it says that you can't drive a car with emissions above a certain level then yes, you're liable (but will have a very good claim against VW for selling unfit goods). If the law simply says that it's not legal to sell cars that exceed the limits then you're probably not liable.
It's not really the same issue as speeding. Consider the current situation with a hire car. If you get stopped for speeding, you'll get fined. If you're caught by a camera the notice goes to the owner (the rental car agency) and there's always small print in the contract which says that they will pass your name as driver to the authorities, and if you don't pay they will bill the fine plus an "administrative charge" to your credit card. I think it likely that the same approach will be applied to autonomous vehicles, the "registered keeper" will be the end of the line for the ticket.
Surely the owner of the device would be liable? Insurance isn't the first line of defence, even today, it's there as a protection for the driver or owner; the driver/owner is responsible, and the insurance policy indemnifies them. If the small print in the policy says "no indemnity for speeding" then the owner pays.
Your vitriol seems entirely justified. There are supposedly ways to make captchas comply with Section 508, the US federal law for accessibility, I wonder if any of these sites bother to consider them, and if they are any more or less immune to captcha-breaking algorithms?
See https://www.section508.gov/blog/CAPTCHA and https://captcha.com/accessibility/section508-captcha.html for examples.
I always considered the per diem as an "inconvenience allowance". During a normal week I'd have to buy & cook my own meals, and might eat out occasionally. The per diem isn't supposed to replace that, just to cover the extra costs and hassle of eating out every night.
for next year's tram ticket prices, which are due to come into force in January 2018
So they've beeen asked for next years business plan, whch they decline to provide on the grounds that it might give their competitors an advantage? Doesn't seem that crazy to me.
How would, say, Dell react if Lenovo called them and asked how much next year's laptops were going to be selling for?
George 3 (the OS, not the mad monarch) would allow you to create temporary work files called !, and these were created in a stack. Create two work files and you could reference one as ! and the other as !-1. Add another and it became ! and the existing ones !-1 and !-2.
For convenience we always called them shriek files, referred to as "shriek" "shriek minus one" etc.
The only shame is that the dimwits of the Tory party didn't support the attempt to oust her,
They had a chance, just after the election fiasco when it was all seen as her fault. If they'd dumped her then and picked someone who's main/only task was to get Brexit right, they might have salvaged something.
By leaving her in place they've associated the whole mess with the party instead of Mayhem, and made their own task far more uphill. Their election screwup also managed the near-impossible of making Corbyn sufficiently electable that they reunited Labour behind him.
The real problem for BoJo, Rees-Mogg etc. is that the only thing a political party likes less than failure is disloyalty. If any of the big names tried a leadership challenge they'd be guaranteed to lose just because they started it. What they need is to find an expendable backbencher who'll trigger the challenge and then implode, leaving BoJo & the rest to pop up as the "safe" rescuers, while hoping that Gove doesn't stab anyone in the back again and let someone like Rudd win.
Does the serial number of your TV count as personally identifiable info?
No, but no-one has that on record, not even the selling shop. My phone provider has my IMEI, though, and it shows up when I log in to my account. IMEI isn't just "the serial number of the phone".
Now, be honest, can you really justify easy access to airports?
Back in the 70s I remember Carrickfinn airstrip, a Nissen hut at the end of a dirt track across the sand dunes in Donegal, with a grass airstrip. When someone wanted to land there they had to book a fire engine from Dungloe to meet safety rules.
Today that is Donegal International Airport, tarmac runway, tarmac access road, and all, with a direct flight each day to Dublin and to Glasgow. Not very international, but it's the thought that counts.
Joking apart, you can fly direct from Dublin to SFO these days.
It was a supposed to be a baby (toddler) that had fallen over,
Then the interviewer should have said "fallen over". Nadella (like most of the commentards here, it seems), appears to have assumed "fallen" as in "fallen from a building", in which case his answer was the safe one.
At least he didn't suggest switching it off and on again to see if it would get up.
was expected to be protected by Amazon's security
Exactly. People are used to the idea that they can put anything they want on an on-premises system, and the corporate security bods will make sure it's safe. Move to the cloud, and they assume the cloud provider will do that, which of course they won't. Having your corporate environment in the cloud doesn't make it any less your responsibility to protect it, but of course that spoils the message that cloud is cheap because "someone else does everything" so the consultants will never mention it.
exclude people from voting on the grounds that the vote is only advisory
Sorry, you're seriously claiming that making a vote advisory in some way prevents people from participating? That has to be the most ludicrous sour grapes comment on the referendum that I've seen so far.
British citizens resident overseas for more than a certain amount of time (I think it was 8 years, but stand to be corrected)
15 years. Was 20, but Tony Blair decided that expats were more likely to be rightwing and reduced it. Cameron promised to remove the limit, but didn't.
there was never any possibility of most people being properly informed about what the vote actually meant in the first place.
That's perhaps the most damning comment about modern politics. You're seriously claiming that the vote wasn't valid because people weren't correctly told how they should vote by either side? I can see why you like the EU model, keep 'em voting until they get it right.
If people haven't got the interest and time to learn about the issues and make their own minds up then they shouldn't be voting. It's not a playground game, it's a serious matter.
And we seem to be going through with this silly Brexit thing even though only 37% of people voted for it.
By that method of calculation only 33% voted to stay. That's on a par with the 350m figure...
53% of the 72% who cared enough to vote voted for it, which is a bigger turnout, and a bigger majority, than any European election in the UK, and most UK parliamentary elections. If you claim that the numbers make the result invalid, then you must accept that most UK elections in the past 100 years were even less valid.
Which bit do you think is undemocratic?
Democratic is not the same as representative. With 720-odd MEPs drawn from 28 countries the chances of any of them representing anything but their own snout in the trough is nil. The unelected European Commission decides what to do, and the members of the parliament club rubber stamp it because they'll never be able to agree on anything different.
But does 'IT products' include bits travelling along fibre? Will all packets travelling across borders have to stop for customs checks?
Could be tricky, since photons have no rest mass. Would there be anything to check once you'd stopped them? Maybe you'd need red & green filter channels at Lands End?
Can illegal immigrants hide their digital identities in a stream of data? We only want British-made bits on our interwebs.
I usually use recycled bits, much more eco-friendly.
What is the WTO tariff rate for importing and exporting bits?
Generally 0%. Look up the WTO "Information Technology Agreement" from 1996 which currently has 82 participants covering 97% of world trade in IT products and who are "committed to completely eliminating tariffs on IT products covered by the Agreement". Individual countries may impose taxes like VAT, of course. Brexit is, as usual, irrelevant here.
In a short while, will the new country of Catalonia be in the EU?
That presupposes that Spain will let it go, which seems unlikely given that the referendum has been declared illegal. Is either party ready for a second civil war?
To answer the question, at the time of the Scottish independence referendum the EU bigwigs made it quite clear that if a region seceded from an EU member state it would not automatically become a member in its own right. It can apply, but will have to meet normal entry conditions, including economic convergence criteria. That is likely to take 5+ years at least.
a short incoherent stream of blather and cliched ad hominem trolling
Hmm, quite.
Can you clarify what income tax and inheritance tax have to do with the subject under discussion, which is how to modify taxes on corporations so that they find it harder to avoid paying tax on their sales (which, of necessity, go to buyers)?
(For the avoidance of any doubt, I am not the AC that your ad-hominem remarks were directed to)
If Google paid more tax, how exactly would that be passed onto the consumer?
Google would increase the prices of its advertising, the advertisers would increase the price of their products to cover their extra costs, and the consumers will have to pay higher prices. Where else could the money come from, if you assume that Google doesn't want to take a cut in profits, which is a given.
