Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Surely, there are only three things that need to be done: verify the cheque is genuine, verify the source account has the funds, and transfer them."
The first of those might require that the cheque is taken out of the machine to go into the banking system and that's not likely to be until the next day.
I'm not entirely sure "lax regulation" is appropriate here. I don't know about the US, although I suspect it was similar, the situation in the UK is that it was, essentially, government policy.
We had central banking encouraged, by government to set interests rates to achieve inflation of around 2%. The statisticians were directed by government to use a measure of inflation that excluded housing costs. That was government policy. At the same time manufacturing was being off-shred to the lowest cost countries available. If there was any dumping going on that was ignores. If it caused unemployment in local manufacturing that was ignored. We had low inflation and cheap money; voters like those and governments like voters to like what's happening. Voters even liked the idea that the alleged values of their houses was rising and that they could take out more cheap loans against those inflated values.
But all that cheap money went into soaring house prices. Even when house prices and, with them, rents were at clearly unsustainable levels of inflation there was no feedback mechanism in place because they weren't in the figure used to determine interest rates. The situation was flagrantly ignored and that resulted in the toxic debts. Actually I suspect it wasn't totally ignored. I've always suspected that Blair realised it couldn't end well, rode the resulting popularity while it lasted and stood aside in favour of his Chancellor (Finance Minister) just in time for the latter to become PM and face the consequences of his policies. Although, of course, the rest of us also had to face those consequences.
An even more basic problem is that the hierarchy values generalists more highly than specialists. The nominal justification would be that generalists are more flexible and can fit in equally well in different roles. Specialist, by virtue of their specialist training can only fit their specialist roles and so are less flexible. Obviously flexibility is seen as valuable and so they are paid more. Of course the reality of this is that the generalists are equally suited to fit multiple roles is because these generalist roles all require none of the knowledge or experience with which their arts degrees did not supply. The hierarchy, of course, sets its own valuations and relative pay and is run by the generalists for whom, in essence, it exists. That none of these flexible generalists are quite flexible enough to take on specialist roles is somehow overlooked.
Yes, once upon a time I was a specialist in the Civil Service. Why do you ask.
And to produce more ATP in the first place means stepping up the rest of the respiratory metabolism. ATP is the link between various steps in the oxidation of energy stores such as glucose which make energy available and the various bits of biochemistry such as muscle contraction which need it. The cells which need that energy will already be able to signal the mitochondria to get on with the job. As you say, this is more likely to be another signally pathway to satisfy other needs for ATP.
Incidentally, as mitochondria play such a major role in energy handling and only descend maternally why do horse breeders pay much more attention to the sire than the dam?
They're regular but simple eukaryotic invertebrates whose terrestrial members have evolved to live in extreme conditions such as those which will dry out for prolonged periods. Where there's an ecological niche something will evolve to fill it and those niches must have existed since the first plants started to colonise land or even intertidal environments. Radiation resistance is likely to be a by-product of resisting drying out etc.
If panspermists were to propose tardigrades as the means by which life spread they'd then have to explain what they had to live on once they landed or how they had to back evolve to produce bacteria which are far more primitive. (They also need to explain why two sequential unlikely events, genesis of life and dispersal over long times and distances through the most hostile of conditions are more likely than one.)
There are a couple of problems here:
1. Which existing domains are to be checked? All of them? If not where do you draw the line and how do you explain the decision to the owner of a domain that just misses out on the relevant criteria?
2. How do you distinguish between a malicious attempt and a genuine one? e.g. I have a .org.uk domain. There's a corresponding .co.uk. Both are genuine. OK, genuineish. The key word is a place name. I live there, the other is a domain squatter outfit hoping someone will come and buy it off them for £££££. But the principle applies - what hoops would I have had to go through to prove I wasn't typosquatting theirs by registering mine?
I'm increasingly reminded of the first episode of Yes Minister when Sir Humphrey explains to Bernard about the title of the report being prepared for Hacker which appears to be exactly what they don't want. He explains it's getting rid of the difficult bit in the title where it won't do any harm. The title? "Open Government" and the difficult bit is the word "open". There seems to be a lot of getting rid of that same difficult bit in the title these days.
If the evidence was solid enough I think I might have written it up without actually laying the blame on any particular individual, told him that that was what the software had found and there was the bill. If he wanted to challenge it in court it was up to him. He might then have been put in a position of trying to defend his staff. But then giving evidence in court used to be part of my job so it might have bothered me less than Bill. That past career tells me that it's not uncommon for businesses to be ripped off by employees and not be aware of it.
Perhaps you should get Max Schrems on your case.
Personally, I'd have written my original request addressed to both and told them to sort it out between themselves instead of pointing fingers at each other. If they failed I'd then have raised a single case against both with the ICO. Not a data protection issue but I've used the same technique about road repairs.
I think I may have scored a very small victory with our local hospital trust. Some time ago SWMBO received an apparent phishing email (links, not from the domain it claimed - you know the drill) asking her to log on (i.e. register) to a 3rd party site to obtain some information from the trust. A complaint followed. Then I got an apparent phishing email asking me to register for some other 3rd party site to view my patient information. ??? Haven't been a patient there for years. Another complaint.
Now, several weeks later, (probably about the time it takes for these things to work through the systems) there's a mailing from the trust's domain itself explaining to patients that the former email was genuine.
There's still a few issues. The service is called Patients Know Best (PKB) so what does PKB know? Does information only get passed to them when the patient registers or has that already happened?
"we have been in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we are working to ensure our ad practices meet this decision by the DPC's deadline."
If you were in compliance why are you having to do this work?
There really ought to be extra penalties for businesses which pay a fine and then come out denying they did anything wrong. Let's start at 200% of the original fine and double again for each repeated offence.
IBM's consulting business delivered flat revenue, but 11 percent profit improvement, which Krishna attributed in part to "yield from our productivity actions." IBM-speak for firing people is "resource actions."
It's amazing thatr revenue is flat. When the effects of their productivity action really start to kick in that's going to fall as well. Consultancy is a people business.
I'm reminded of the tale of the peasant who was trying to teach his donkey to go without food to save money. He'd almost succeeded but it died.
"attendance expectations are communicated – especially around times when teams are busy finishing a coding sprint, or planning future releases."
Does this mean that when finishing a coding sprint the coders are encouraged to stay away from the distractions of the office or is it just the micro-managers who'd distract them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
