Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
An over-seas allowance? I'd have appreciated that. Instead I was up against the Civil Service/HMG mentality which says "We rate people who are qualified for their jobs by their education well below those who aren't, promotion comes with responsibility measured by direct reports, not by what the actual job is, and if we want a national pay policy the easiest place to start is with the public sector."
Scene of crime visits could be nasty and some of the nasty bits got brought into the lab. A colleague had a sofa brought in; it stood around for weeks for some reason and had to be given a wide berth - the little buggers can jump. In fact fleas were a (fortunately infrequent) occupational hazard. But the nastiest job was removing bits of a bomber who'd scored an own goal from bits of his clothing so the latter could be shown to his family for identification.
Amazon is going to show you what *they* want you to see and buy,
They may succeed with the first but fail with the second. Perhaps they could try an A/B test with an alternative search engine that does as it's asked to find out how much trade they're turning away.
"it's probably best just not to answer the call"
No, siita has the right idea. Get them to hang on. While they're doing that they're not bothering anyone else so you can put it down as a public service on your part, and it's wasting their time. Given how few such calls we get my belief is that there are lists circulating of numbers it's best not to ring.
I keep saying this but:
The telco has records of at least who it took the call from. What's needed is a number, say 1476, to ring immediately after hanging up to report the spam. The telco records the number and with a bit of statistical checking to see if the source is being reported enough times it credits the reporters' accounts with a fee for their troubles (at least double for numbers on TPS), adds a fee for its own troubles and bills whoever sent it the call. If it's another telco then they can add their own fee and pass the bill back to the source until it either reaches the caller's account or a telco which has not yet learned to keep records. This will make it unduly expensive either for callers or for telcos who are prepared to handle the calls carelessly. One way or another it would kill the whole business stone dead.
In practice it probably wouldn't need to be implemented. It would put telcos to considerable upfront costs to set up the system. Once legislators or regulators started talking seriously about implementing it I think the industry would quickly discover other, effective ways of stopping such calls, ways which up to now haven't been practical.
"although I never answer calls from numbers I don't recognise"
What you should do is answer ask them to hold on - you need to look something up to answer their question, have to go to answer the door, whatever - and then put the phone aside for 10 minutes. AFAICS that gets your number on an even more valuable list, the list of numbers it's best not to call. It certainly works for me as we get very few.
"Such a notice could be served on Apple, who demonstrated such technology two years ago, and by extension can be served on everyone else, because Apple have proved it is technically feasible."
Have they? Having a piece of software that reads files and gives some answers falls short of technical feasibility. How many of those answers are false positives and how many are false negatives? What are the allowable percentages? If the allowable percentages of false positives is greater than zero what redress has an innocent user who is hit with a false positive and against whom, the service provider or OFCOM?
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