Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Sadly the follow-up is likely to be the cancellation of the new servers, because manglement has blown the whole discretionary spending budget on paying a design agency to create the new brand. Which will probably look like an artistically-italicised cattleprod sticking out of a plastic duck.
I think this is going to be one of the big headaches. Say you're in a band that maintains a website where people can sign up to get email about forthcoming performances, new CD releases. Will you now have to put the whole GDPR infrastructure in place to allow people to (securely) log in and manage the PII you hold?
I can see a market for companies to provide "club sites" that look after this sort of thing, for a fee of course, much as eBay and Amazon Marketplace do for small traders. Some of those sites will be competently and securely run, but others will not. Fot those that are not, there's an opportunity for hackers to gain access to far more PII that would be put at risk by keeping a mailing list on your home PC, even though the latter could be a GDPR violation.
you are saying no country in the EU has it's own government
Ah, propaganda 101! Take something I said, and claim I said something different and more extreme. Very good, but perhaps a little too obvious this time.
I didn't say that, because that would be a ridiculous thing to say. Evidently each country still has it's own government, which has control over some things (a policy called subsidiarity) but those governments are subject to overall control by the central EU bodies. That's the basic principle of the EU, central control where it considers it to be appropriate, problems to be resolved by increasing control: "more Europe". Much as Westminister delegates control of some issues to the Scottish, Welsh and NI local assemblies while remaining in overall charge of what it wants to be.
As for Parliamentary elections for Westminister, of course they happen, and it's very interesting to look at the turnout figures. Prior to 1992 (the year the UK joined the EU) turnout was consistently around 75-78%. After 1992 it dropped to 60% but has climbed back up steadily to 70% since then. European parliament election turnout in the UK has been around half that, pretty steadily 35%, except for a drop to 20% in 1999. That's a fairly clear indication of how people see the relative importance of the two parliaments.
Did you by any remote chance vote for the UK to leave the EU?
Nope, did you miss the bit where I said I didn't live in the UK now?
The Pound Sterling has dropped very significantly against the Euro and the US Dollar since the referendum. It has lost about 15% of its value compared to those currencies - which will affect the price of imported goods and materials.
Indeed so, although that has also helped exports. Of course, the winners don't complain about it, only those who lose out.
Dan 55's original comment was that income hasn't risen, and prices have. That situation has been around for at least the past 4-5 years, so it can't be blamed on Brexit alone.
Phil O'Sophical doesn't appear to like Europe or its inhabitants.
Really? Then tell me why I (a Brit) live in an EU country (which isn't the UK?)
I like Europe just fine, I just think it's a silly idea to have one government trying to be in charge of all of it. Europe's strength comes from the diversity of it's members, one size demonstrably doesn't fit all.
Theresa May losing her majority and becoming a minority government, when she asked the electorate to increase her mandate to make Brexit
That's an interesting interpretation of the situation, but doesn't correspond with the facts.
May was stupid enough to believe polls which said she had a chance to get a large majority, which would have put her in a position of much greater power in general. She then announced (or rather her advisors told her to announce) that her new powerful government would introduce laws that directly hit the finances of the people who voted for her. Unsurprisingly, they gave her a kicking.
It had little to do with Brexit, which should be obvious since the party which gained from the election was Labour, also pro-Brexit. The LibDems, who are vehemently anti-Brexit made only small gains, and even lost the seat which their anti-Brexit campaigner had won from Zac Goldsmith at the previous election. May is an clueless autocratic menace who does far more harm than good to the tories. The missed a chance to kick her out after the election and I think they'll come to regret that. That was the election issue, not Brexit.
The figures were compiled by NHS Digital, not The Guardian as you claim.
The figures may have come from the NHS, the opinion that stated "experts fear the number of people leaving is the more significant trend" was part of the Guardian article that you linked to, clearly bylined. The expert quoted is from the RCP, she said "confirm our our fears that EU doctors are feeling unsettled and, at worst, leaving or planning to leave the UK". Fears, not figures.
So, I repeat, it's interesting that you stopped quotiong the Guardian article where you did, and left out the bit that said "EU staff numbers rose across the period analysed" in the Guardian article.
A total of 17,197 EU staff, including nurses and doctors, left their posts in 2016, compared with 13,321 in 2015 and 11,222 for 11 months in 2014.
Interesting that you stopped the quote there, and didn't continue with the next line:
"Even though EU staff numbers rose across the period analysed, experts fear the number of people leaving is the more significant trend."
So net EU staff numbers are going up but the Guardian's "experts fear" that the number they can use to crank the Brexit FUD machine is the significant one.
Well, it is the Guardian.
Pick the NHS or agriculture sector or university teaching or research article of your choice. Oh, here's one.
That's an article on how a British family business selling salad invested in new facilties but didn't get the increase in business that it needed to pay for it, which it blamed on the pound's fall after the referendum. It has nothing at all to do with EU citizens leaving the UK!
Please do check the numbers and let me know if I've overlooked something.
The numbers seem correct, although the rules apply very specifically to (as the court judgement says) unemployment and maternity benefits and exclude social and medical assistance. The fact that this had to go all the way to the ECJ for a somewhat unusual case shows that individual countries have little control over it.
If we assume that EU citizens make up about 5% of the total UK population this means that they're half as likely to claim benefits as UK nationals.
Yes, that is unsurprising, and shows again that EU immigration isn't a major factor in Brexit, because most EU immigrants do come to work and contribute. It's only one, relatively small, issue.
1. Will UK actually save any money from exiting
Doesn't need to save anything, just needs to break even. The UK is a net contributor to the EU, to the sum of around £8.5bn per year (£160m per week, not the silly £350m gross figure that's sometime bandied about) so there is budget to cover extra costs.
2. Does government and general public has a complete understanding how to practically make this separation happen
Nope. Never been done before, no-one knows how it will come out. That's why there are two years of negotiations before the full details will be agreed.
3. I understand that biggest benefits are seen in restricting immigration
That is incorrect. Some politicians have been using that as an excuse, and some of the pro-remain campaign use it to claim that all leavers are racists, but it's not the major issue. It will have some impact: reduction in "benefit tourism", and the UK won't be subject to EU quotas for non-EU immigration, but the UK is already one of the most welcoming EU countries for immigrants (just behind Germany) by choice. That is unlikely to change significantly.
I think UK, and western Europe in general, has too generous benefits for people who are not working ... I would suggest to make much harder to such benefits, provide them for shorter time and immigration problem will resolve itself.
This control of "benefit tourism" is exactly what the UK government has been pressing for for many years, but the EU consistently refuses to accept it. It was a key part of Cameron's "renegotiation" platform, and the fact that the EU rejected it was one of the many reasons that people voted to leave.
The main reasons for leaving are economic. When the EEC was an economic group of co-operating neighbours it worked pretty well. When the politicians started to turn it into a trans-european empire it all started to go downhill. Economic stagnation, austerity as a failed cure, rising populism, refusal of the 'elite' leaders to listen, all signs of a group that is about to implode.
It's not surprising, every time someone has tried to unite Europe under one leader, from Cæsar to Napoleon, and on to more recent events, it's always failed and often violently. Never seems to stop them trying.
Being outside it will give the UK the opportunity to deal with other world countries on a level footing, not limited by EU policies and dogma. It won't be easy, but it will be better than going down with the sinking ship. It is a pity that it became necessary, though.
It's a pity really that Britain is the way it is about body acceptance
The French papers had a recent survey about which nationalities of women were comfortable about being topless on a beach, and Britain didn't do too badly. No surprise that the US was joint last...
Spain 49%
Germany 41%
Netherlands 35%
France 29%
UK 26%
Italy 20%
US 11%
Canada 11%
True capitalism depends on increasing the business output to satisfy the demand of increasing customers. Unfortunately without infinite resources or customers it will always fail at some point.
That simplistic model assumes that resources are destroyed after use, and are completely separate from customers, neither of which is the case. One classic resource is labour, which is renewable on both the individual level (I can work again after a night's rest) and collectively (when I retire or die, someone else will take my place). I am both a consumer and creator of resources, and the resources I consume are not destroyed by that consumption but converted into a form where they can be used by another consumer.
Since the earth is not a closed system, being constantly refuelled by energy from the Sun, we can't even consider resources as finite, at least not in terms of the practical lifespan of humanity.
I'm sure general human rights, cosumer protection, and general data protection will be head of the queue.
The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted in 1950 by the Council of Europe, of which the UK is a leading member (it is not an EU body). That was 23 years before the UK joined the EEC, 42 years before it joined the EU.
The first UK Sale of Goods act was passed in 1893, 99 years before the UK joined the EU. It's been updated many times, and exceeds EU minima in many areas, notably digital services.
The first UK Data Protection Act was passed in 1984, 11 years before the EU DP directive.
The UK does not follow the EU unwillingly in these areas, it leads, and there's little reason to feel it would do otherwise in the future.
if your client was say, in America, you wouldn't just go and visit them every time you needed a discussion on the basis it's good for relationships. Sometimes you have to draw the line.
True, but why video? I have phone conferences with US colleagues every week, and 2-3 times a year I travel to meet them in person, and have a chat over a beer. These days a phonecall + shared screen to discuss a document or a bug is much more useful than a videoconf. It really adds very little.
This ranking is based on speedtests, so they seem to be testing download speeds from some server, not just individual homes. It would be useful to know where the server(s) are (in the country, outside, near the test site, etc.) and what the overall internet backbone is like. Unsurprisingly some of the worst figures come from small islands which probably have a single satellite link at maybe 20-40Mbit/s to the rest of the world, so even if they have FTTP to every house performance will still be crap for, say, a Netflix download from the US. Singapore, on the other hand, is a big hub for international fibre links.
For example, why is any company sending people from Manchester to London for a 1 hour meeting when there's video calling? Oh yeah, because it's unreliable, and isn't something all people can / are prepared to do.
Yeah, I spent years doing video meetings, never got to know the people I was "meeting" with. Just one face-to-face meeting is worth a dozen TV calls. Funny how our video suite now lies empty and unloved, so much so that the facilities team wants to remove it to save money.
Strasbourg is much more democratic.
I'm genuinely curious about how you define "democratic".
The European parliament has 751 members, elected last time round by only 42% turnout, much lower than most national elections. The number of MPs from each member is inversely proportional to the population, smaller countries have more MEPs per head than large ones and hence more weight.
It can't decide to make law, it has to wait for the Commission to do that, after which the parliament can only change or reject it. It spends a fortune of taxpayers money every month switching between Brussels and Strasbourg to avoid upsetting the French even though most MEPs would prefer to be based solely in Brussels, but that would be vetoed by France.
Frankly it's more like a company board than a parliament, I'd argue that most national parliaments, and regional assemblies, are more democratic and more representative of their constituents than it is.
subject to the ECJ, something which Weak and Wobbly May has claimed will not happen to the UK after Brexit.
The ECJ rules on EU law. Doesn't matter where the parties involved are, it's the law in question that's the decider. Nothing about Brexit was ever going to change any of that, if you thought someone said otherwise then you misunderstood. Where the UK replaces EU law by UK law, the ECJ will not have jurisdiction. Where the UK is still affected by EU law, such as in dealings with EU countries, the ECJ will have jurisdiction. Just as it does for US, Chinese, and any other non-EU country that deals with the EU.
Have you tried using kickdown?
Kickdown is great on a torque-convertor auto linked to a decent, torquey naturally-aspirated engine. On a modern DSG box with a little turbocharged lump attached, kickdown tends to become "pause, jerky downchange, screaming revs, slow acceleration until turbo kicks in, zoom" invariably followed by an upchange and drop in acceleration halfway through the overtaking manoeuvre. At least with a manual you can change down smoothly and get the turbo spinning in preparation, ready for the gap.
I can't think of a single use-case where we wouldn't be better off using the machines real name or IP.
We have some machines on our network with 10+ interfaces, some physical some virtual, all on different subnets. Which one is the "real" name or IP?
localhost as a name, and it's associated IP addresses, is not just an understood convention, it's built-in to implementations. Most Linuxes/Unixes that I've seen have an explicit loopback device, lo0, that the address is bound to, and that gets special treatment in the IP stack.
As far as DNS resolution goes, IPv4 and v6, does anyone not have
::1 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost
as the first two lines in /etc/hosts?
and future-proofed
Another commentard with a crystal ball. Given the rise of smartphones & tablets, are you sure people will care about hardwired broadband in even 20 years time?
would also provide good competition to satellite and cable TV
and there's a problem. Can you see Sky and Virgin allowing the government to spend taxpayers money giving Openreach a network that competes with them? That will only make lawyers rich.
whether broadband customers should be automatically compensated for consistently failing to receive the speeds that they pay for,
The problem is that linking cost and performance is non trivial, and may even have a negative correlation. I pay the same for my 4Mb/s as other customers pay to get 20Mb/s, but I'm on the end of 4km of overhead cable which has already been repaired and partially replaced three times in 10 years. You could make the argument that providing my service is more costly for the telco because they have more (and more fragile) plant to maintain for me, and hence I should pay more than the guy in the house next to the exchange who gets 20M.
Try to play the compensation game and there's a risk that people will pay a smaller internet fee if they get lower speeds, but will be billed more for "line rental" to maintain the longer line.
Knowing that those loans will come due is an incentive to make the most of the college opportunity
Not necessarily, rightly or wrongly a lot of people assume that they'll be paid by some future employer, or forgotten/ignored.
Plus, when you say "grants" I'm going to assume that you mean "taxpayer-backed grants". Thank you no, my taxes are plenty high already. Pull your own weight, whippersnapper.
I'm no whippersnapper, I graduated as an electronics engineer 35-odd years ago when I paid no tuition fees, and received a (taxpayer-funded) grant. The taxes I've paid since then, thanks to the advantages of that education, have more than covered the grant costs. I'd argue whether splashing 45m on battery tech is a better use of taxpayers' money than spending it on grants. There's also no need to assume grants are paid by taxpayers, what about companies (Dyson?) sponsoring graduates?
