Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Beaten passenger, check. Dead giant rabbit, check. Now United loses cockpit door codes

Re: "t took a few thousand deaths for the airlines to get their acts together."

pretty sure you can pass security with a piece of sharp plastic

They sell glass in Duty Free, one sharp tap & you have a sharp weapon.

Dyson celebrates 'shock' EU Court win over flawed energy tests

Re: Petty?

Maybe suck per watt would be easier.

Maybe not creating meaningless tests that can't be accurate, in an attempt to give consumers a false sense of being informed, would be easiest of all, for both cars and hoovers. Unfortunately that would put Eurocrats out of work.

Trump signs executive order on cybersecurity, White House now runs the show

6 months to even make a plan?

The Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence ... will have 150 days to come up with a plan to protect national security IT systems

150 days? If they don't already have such a plan, constantly being revised, they aren't doing their jobs. They should be able to have that on the Oval Offcie desk by Monday, or start looking for new jobs better suited to their abilities.

Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

Will you be able to switch jobs as easily? Do employers have to prove they've exhausted all host and EU candidates before hiring you?

Maybe, and why shouldn't they?

Will you be able to set up a business as easily as an EU citizen?

Probably not.

you aren't working, will you still be able to get healthcare and unemployment benefit?

Yes, those are tied to residency status and contributions paid.

Are you sure that the UK part of your pension will rise with inflation?

Yes, that is clear in the pension plan.

When you retire, who will pay for your healthcare for that part of your working life which you weren't resident in your host country?

If I qualify as a taxpaying resident then I will expect the same healthcare benefits as any other resident, of any citizenship.

If you worked in mote than one EU country, will the rest pay your pension?

Common misconception, that has nothing to do with the EU. The UK has treaties with many countries which allow time worked in those countries to be counted towards pensionable service. It's true that EU rules require all EU countries to have such arrangements, but lots of non-EU countries also have such arrangements. It would be foolish, and unlikely, for the UK not to maintain that arrangement with the EU. Even so, it only covers the basic state pension, all the earnings-related ones are still paid by the country where they were earned.

I'm glad you're so confident about these things. Perhaps other people in the same situation are just getting bothered about nothing...

Yes, I believe they are.

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

Take a look at the difference is between your EU treaty rights now and how foreign residents from outside the EU are treated wherever you are. You wouldn't have the same status where you're resident and you wouldn't have the same freedom to cross over EU borders (on holiday, on temporary work assignment, as a frontier worker, or moving to another EU country).

In practice there's little difference, at least for holiday and temporary work assignment. Once they have a local residence permit they are treated much as any EU citizen. They need their passport to travel within the EU (especially by air), they can't just use the residence permit the way a citizen would use a ational ID card, but that's little hardship. Moving to another EU country to live or work full-time would be different, they would have to apply for permission instead of having a right to just walk in and settle. I have no issue with that, should the situation arise. Even today there are many grey areas, for example, EU rules on free movement do not apply to Channel Islanders or Manxmen, since those islands are British dependencies but are not part of the UK or EU. Most EU countries ignore this, and accept CI or Manx passports as if they were full UK ones. There's little treason to expect that any Brexit settlement won't find a similar accommodation, it would cause too much trouble on both sides to do otherwise.

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

Why would the tax be distributed differently but remain the same?

Because that's how tax treaties work. What they lose in one direction they expect to (approximately) get back in the other.

To give you a concrete example, I have investments in the US which are taxed at source, 17% federal tax is deducted before I get the money. In my local tax jurisdiction that sort of income is taxed at 30%, so when I complete my tax form I declare the income, and that I have already paid 17% tax in the US. My local tax authorities only take the 'missing' 13% to reach their 30% total. My total tax burden is the same. If the numbers were reversed I would have a 13% tax credit to apply against other local income of that sort.

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

Indeed. My point was that British expats may be required to pay tax on foreign income like American expats are

But it wouldn't matter, any more than it does for US expats. The total tax paid is the same, it may just be distributed differently. The biggest hassle, as US expats are finding out, is the need to do all the extra paperwork.

given that the present government is so keen to throw them under a bus with regards to Brexit their proposal to the EU was just convert the status of all EU citizens in the UK and British citizens in the EU to ordinary foreign residents

So? As long as we still retain the same status in the country where we're resident it won't change anything significant. I'm a UK expat living in the EU, I've not seen anything to worry me overmuch.

Re: Sounds like a fairly nice system to me

There's always the NI/RoI pig smuggling system to reintroduce.

Export a lorryload of pigs one way through the official customs post, declare them, and claim EU farm subsidy.

Take same pigs back across the border in the dead of night across an unmonitored minor road.

Put them in another lorry and re-export the same pigs again, claiming another subsidy for the "new" export.

Repeat

Profit.

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

I'm fully expecting Mayhem to bring in a tax on worldwide income for Brtiish expats.

Already covered by worldwide tax treaties which were in place before the EU ever existed, and have no connection to it. Any tax levied by the UK government on an expat is offset against tax paid wherever that person is fiscally resident. Expats already pay tax in the UK on certain UK income, and subtract it from the tax they'll pay in, say, Germany or France.

America 'will ban carry-on laptops on flights from UK, Europe to US'

Re: shoes

Finally, what is the purpose of taking the belt out out your trousers?

The buckle may make the scanner beep, and that couldn't be distinguished from having something illicit in your pocket, so they would then have to do a manual search. No belt means less chance of a false alarm, so each of the few remaining beeps is worth investigating.

RBS is to lay off 92 UK techies and outsource jobs to India – reports

Re: Confidence

The inevitable effect of having no credible opposition. 20 years ago it was Blair and Labour who were doing that.

UK General Election 2017: How EU law will hit British politicians' Facebook fight

Perhaps this explains why they both lied through their teeth in an effort to swing votes?

No, that was because they were both led by politicians.

Does "Big Data" take apathy on a rainy day into account on polling day?

Parties have been doing that for decades.Traditionally bad weather was seen as good for the Tories, since their supporters were more likely to have cars, leading Labour to organize buses in poorer areas. These days all parties have armies of car-owning volunteers to take people to the polling stations if they ask.

Just so we're all clear on this: Russia hacked the French elections, US Republicans and Dems

Re: Landslide? ... 42% of the electorate voted Macron

don't think you can directly compare a 50/50 vote vs a 2 round vote...

I'd say they were more comparable than many others. Brexit was a single-issue binary choice, not directly related to party politics. Having elected a government who promised a referendum (among other policies) the actual referendum was designed just to address that one issue.

The 2nd round of the French election was the same, after the first round to pick two candidates from a large field, the second round is designed as a head-to-head binary choice, specifically so that the winning candidate is seen to have a clear majority of those who voted.

Re: Landslide? ... 42% of the electorate voted Macron

Macron did quite well I'd say.

He did, but you're still counting the "don't cares" as "voted against", which is false logic.

Of the 75% of the electorate who turned up to vote, 58% voted for Macron. With Brexit, of the 72% who turned up to vote, 52% voted to leave (which is 38% of the electorate, not 28% as you claimed). The results aren't all that dissimilar.

FBI boss James Comey was probing Trump's team for Russia links. You're fired, says Donald

Re: Comey was caught lying under oath. So Trump fired him. -- opportunely.

You're pinning your hope on smoke then.

But did he inhale?

US Air Force networks F-15 and F-22 fighters – in flight!

Re: What a gas!

"Your bill is in arrears; an F-22 has been automatically dispatched to your location."

Reminds me of those signs along US freeways "Speed limit enforced by aircraft". I always hoped to see one strafing a speeding Porsche, no luck so far.

Tesla: Revenues up, losses deepen, in start to 'exciting' 2017

Confusing a $35K car with a $70K car, what does that say about their potential customers? Maybe there's an iPhone lesson there, just add some bling to the model S, call it the S+, and charge $150K for it.

Booze stats confirm boring Britain is drying

Re: I Remember

Back in the day most good bitters were less than 4%

The good ones still are.

Fire fighters get grinding on London man’s trapped genitalia

Re: It's amazing.....

she can illuminate hers

Is this where the term "Edison Screw" comes from?

ISPs must ensure half of punters get advertised max speeds

Re: Money talks

Forget tweaking the advertising of 'up to', just introduce a policy that if you get sold '40 Mbps for £30' and you get 20 Mbps you pay £15.

My car can do "up to" 140MPH. Should I have got it for half price because the roads are limited to 70?

I'm on a package that is "up to" 18Mbit/s, but because I choose to live in the arse-end of nowhere on the end of 3.8km of thin overhead wire I get 3-4Mbit/s on a good day. When it was first installed I had 1Mbit/s, and that was still faster, and cheaper, than the 2B+D ISDN I had before. It's not the ISP's problem that I choose to live where I do, why should it have to discount my service (and implicitly then put up the cost to other users)? I knew what I was going to get when I signed up for it, despite the marketing crap on the adverts.

The Co-Op Bank's online banking has gone TITSUP*

My guess is a lot of Intel firmware updates, which will require complete cold restarts of all the systems...

Need the toilet? Wanna watch a video ad about erectile dysfunction?

Re: Always use the disabled toilets

(*Though Tesco's "Free from" branding horribly mangles the English language. The "Free From" should be UNDER the main foodstuff name, not above it.)

Still better than "organic" vegetables. I find inorganic ones somewhat indigestible.

Re: Sticker manufacturer opportunity

There were racks of military magazines for reading while defecating,

Are you sure they were for reading, and not as a softer alternative to the military Izal?

Just how screwed is IT at the Home Office?

Mountains out of molehills?

e.g no more blue channels at airports for those flying from a country within the European Union

I could fix that with a bucket of white paint. Would £5000/litre be OK, plus travel expenses?

Maybe they should have adopted the French method when the blue channels were added, which was to add a door with a blue sign beside the door with the green one, and have both lead to the same exit hall.

Stanford Uni's intro to CompSci course adopts JavaScript, bins Java

Re: US courses are more modular

The big advantage of JavaScript is its low cost of entry. Notepad and a browser? You're ready to program.

So it's the BASIC of the 21st century? Fair enough, if we remember that the B stands for Beginner's.

Re: "Pascal had the same problem, great for teaching but crap for actually implementing"

Being able to set up a "jump table" in a high level language is a very efficient way to call such things

It's also a very easy way to send your program off into the weeds if you get it wrong, which is why Pascal (designed as language to teach good programming techniques) didn't have it. If you need such a thing (and yes, it can be useful) use a language that supports it natively, such as Pascal's successor Modula-2. Don't try & kludge it into one that was never designed to have it, that just leads to crappy, non-portable, undebuggable, code.

Irish Stripe techie denied entry to US – for having wrong stamp in passport

what the fuck do they expect you to write

They expect you to write "no", and then if they find out that you in fact were a terrorist they can just boot you out for lying on the immigration form. That's much quicker and simpler than a long and expensive civil rights court case to prove that you might still be a threat or otherwise undesirable, and should be deported.

Dark times for OmniOS – an Oracle-free open-source Solaris project

Re: It was designed to fail

The only odd thing with Sun Solaris was that if you switched off the console the whole system shutdown.

That was because switching off a terminal was equivalent to sending a <BREAK> on the console serial port, and the default config for <BREAK> caused the system to drop to a boot prompt. It didn't shutdown, just halted, you could usually just type "go" to continue. Lots of workarounds for what was basically operator error, but the default was eventually changed, probably to limit the support calls.

Uber sued by ex-Lyft driver tormented by app maker's 'Hell' spyware

Re: "Unlike Lyft, Uber changes the tokens it uses..identify drivers, to prevent such tracking."

Which explains the UK's 3rd world bus service.

Have you ever taken a bus in the 3rd world? or in the US? UK buses may not be perfect, but they really aren't that bad..

Exploding femtocells: No need for a full recall, says Vodafone

Re: Is it just me?

How does any of this stuff pass any safety tests? All electrical devices are supposed to be tested and certified by a qualified test house by the manufacturer or importer

In a word (or two): "self-certification".

Not worth the paper it (isn't) written on.

SPY-tunes scandal: Bloke sues Bose after headphones app squeals on his playlist

Re: $5M...

Yes, but if he'd asked for only $5 Bose might have paid and the story probably wouldn't be in El Reg. Ask for $5m, he might get $100k, but Bose gets some really bad publicity. Which I suspect was his aim.

Data trashed? When RPO 0 isn't enough

Re: RPO 0 is good, but...

One thing that many people forget when promising RPO 0 is that it's a double-edged sword.

True RPO 0 means that no data you write can be lost, i.e. it is always written safely to the secondary data centre as well as the primary. Implicit in that is a requirement that your secondary data centre must always be available. If it goes down, or offline (even for maintenance) any writes at the primary won't get saved at the secondary until it comes back and catches up, so you don't have RPO 0 during that period.

To put it another way, if you need to guarantee RPO 0, you have to halt primary site operation if the DR site isn't available. It makes the secondary site & network a single point of failure. Is that really what customers want?

As the article points out, you can get nearly to RPO 0 with 3-site solutions where data is written synchronously to a backup in the metro area, where speed-of-light latency is manageable, and parallel asynchonous replication to a distant 3rd site. Lots of banking organizations are doing this to meet regulatory rules. There are some clever tricks you can play with database log shipping so that you don't actually need 3 full copies of all data, one at each site. Even so, I'd be very wary of any salesman who promised me permanent RPO 0. It's a good sign that he doesn't understand what he's selling.

Silicon Valley tech CEO admits beating software engineer wife, offered just 13 days in the clink

Re: Cuberon

Indeed. Compare with the Drupal case where a developer got dumped because of consensual BSDM roleplay, yet for the real, violent, thing this guy gets 13 days jail & apparently keeps his job?

Oh snap! UK Prime Minister Theresa May calls June election

Re: The brexit party is over

There is only one way to deal with the EU, take part, make it better, stop whining, it's a work in progress.

20 years of taking part has only confirmed that it will never change, and is a work in decline. Every time anyone highlights a problem the only response is "we just need 'more Europe', that will fix it". It's a pity that things have reached this stage, but right now the only way to fix it is to break it & start again with just common market & not a political/fiscal union, painful though that may be.

Re: Who to choose?

So if it's tactical we have to vote Labour

If you assume that the UKIPpers vote Tory for the same reason it won't really change things no matter which way you vote, will it?

Re: Trump congratulated Erdoğan

Making England grape again?

Re: Don't Blame Me...

Shirley acceleration would make them as bad as possible, as quickly as possible? Otherwise you're just a velocitist.

Re: Workers

Workers

Never vote Tory

Working-class Tories are a lot more common than you might think, especially post-war and even more so in recent years (who else buys the Daily Fail?). The classic example is Alf Garnett, although I suspect if they could make 'Til Death Us Do Part now (which they couldn't, the BBC is far too PC) he'd probably be having a hard time deciding between UKIP and a Tory party with a female leader.

The most telling thing about that series was that Johnny Speight wrote him to be a figure of ridicule, and was siad to be quite upset that so many people identified with Garnett.

Poor is poor is poor.

Nor really. There's poor as in "I can only afford a second-hand Fiesta when my neigbours have BMWs", and poor as in "my children are cold and starving". There's even Dickensian poor, where the workhouse was the only option. We can never realistically hope to remove everyone from the first category, working to fix the others is of course important.

A country as rich as ours shouldn't have poor

It will always have poor, simply because we can't all be equal.

or at least should have something in place to give those in that situation the best chance to get out of that situation.

No argument there, and a good education system is paramount. You can't always make people take advantage of it, though.

I bolded the last one because it really is a WTF moment.

As in "WTF are you talking about"? Even CPAG, who have a vested interest in boosting the numbers, put it at 3.9m, and they define poverty as ".. lack resources to obtain the type of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, " which is what most authorities define as "relative poverty", rather than any absolute measure.

US military makes first drop of Mother-of-All-Bombs on Daesh-bags

Re: Stupid bastards

With ISIS, I think people in Britain who could potentially be convinced to join them are slowly figuring out that (a) what ISIS does is incompatible with being a human being, and (b) joining ISIS will bring you in situations that are deeply unpleasant, just by being with them, and quite likely to kill you.

And that same realization by the communities that originally sympathized with the IRA is exactly what brought an end to their support as well. Those people realized that it wasn't a solution, and wasn't improving the world that their children would inherit. Even if they didn't like the political status quo, they had come to the conclusion that it had improved enough to be bearable while they talked to their neighbours about making it better.

It was always known that military intervention wouldn't help. When the Catholic civil rights marchers went to the then Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, in 1968 and asked him to send the army in to give them the protection that the local police were not supplying, he famously commented "it's easy to send them in, it'll be the devil's own job to get them out again". A 30-year history lesson that Tony Blair failed miserably to learn.

Microsoft raises pistol, pulls the trigger on Windows 7, 8 updates for new Intel, AMD chips

The thing is, the people who react with hostility are a relatively narrow set. They're people who: (a) currently use Windows, (b) know what a "version" is, (c) don't like the changes in W10.

Sadly true. Most of the people who use PCs think they run "Google" and that their browser is "the internet". They likely wouldn't know the difference between XP and W10, and they're Microsoft's primary target customers.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

Re: * Get it over with and read it.

I just need to understand my own place in the Sun.

As long as it's not Page 3...

Re: But the real issue is

..Though the chocolate crucifix wasn't a big seller...

Too many people worried it will come back on them?

Half-baked security: Hackers can hijack your smart Aga oven 'with a text message'

Holy fucking shit $13k and the next model up is $18k

Ah, you get the cheap models...

Troll it your way: Burger King ad tries to hijack Google Home gadgets

Re: Shout through the letterbox

https://xkcd.com/1807/

Blighty's £1.2bn space industry could lend itself to tourism – report

Re: Spaceport in the UK

Branson's own island is much closer to the equator than Prestwick, he could just build a launchpad there...

Apple wets its pants over Swatch ad tagline

Re: Daft thing is ...

One wonders what would happen if you lost access to TehIntraWebTubes for a day or three ...

It's called "a vacation". Doesn't happen often enough.