Posts by Doctor Syntax 33095 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Have an upvote, Nick, you got there before me.
I'm sure there was a lot of heavy lifting after the event but I there's obviously no point in sharing credit when they can avoid it. And they're hardly going to admit they let him go to the US without tipping him off that they knew he was going to be arrested.
"We then have to give them an emphatic 'NO', and ask them to re-write the list, and email to it to our ticket system, and put some details on it. They then invariably say 'Oh, just one more thing' as we are trying to get out of the door."
Tell them that if won't raise the tickets you'll have to and there's an extra charge for every ticket you have to raise. Sorry, company rules. More than my jobsworth etc.
"always needing to use someone else's printer because her's isn't working"
Always cheaper to use somebody else's ink. And maybe somebody else bought more expensive paper as well. Are you sure she has a printer?
Said daughter of mine now works from home for a firm based about 150 miles away. They provided her with computers and printer. My HP all-in-one printer is of considerable vintage. Superficially "her" (ie. firm's) new, shiny, printer looks quite like it but all black. The HP badge on mine looks more solid than any component of hers. One day she asked me to look at the printer. There was some problem with the paper tray. It looked like no amount of fiddling with it was going to fix it and would most likely break it. In the end the whole printer got taken back to head office on her next visit and swapped. How are the mighty fallen.
"Student computers are a pain, they usually crash just as the critical disertation is finished and needs printing and no backup exists."
Even more so when the student's one of your own kids.
Again a long time ago, daughter arrived home after finishing her PhD. Backup was no problem. In fact all she had was the disk with her data on it as she'd used a departmental PC. Trouble is it was one of those proprietary disks so I had to buy a drive to get her data transferred onto something more portable.
"The Open Source community would have a harder time writing apps for proprietary services such as banking, Uber, etc that many consumers would expect."
A Huawei or a combined Huawei/Sumsung OS would represent so much of the new phone market that the proprietary services would provide their own apps.
The rest of the Spring Statement could do with scrutiny. He seems to have made a statement that MPs should compromise of Brexit that lead the Beeb at least to get so excited they more or less ignored anything else he said. It sounds as if he might have been trying to distract attention from whatever bad news he might have hidden in there.
Is there actually a contract in some cases? AIUI a contract is an agreement to provide goods and/or services in return for a consideration. A consideration is usually payment. If the user pays nothing what then is the consideration? If it's the provision of the user's data then exactly what would be the breach of contract if the vendor uses that data? Certainly until precedent could be established it could prove very expensive to sue as it might be hard to establish exactly what implied contract might be in place.
Another aspect is that as far as consumers are concerned EULAs may already be void right-pond as consumer protection is stronger here.
"if anyone abused the situation, it would be local yobs"
Well, you couldn't expect the Mail to tell its readers their teenage kids could go in there, shoot up drugs, nick anything not welded down and set the place on fire.
Maybe you just don't have the right disbelieving face. I don't usually buy anything there but when I did the whole attempt was made in a tone of voice which carried no conviction and petered out part way through. I can't remember if he actually started off with "I don't suppose..." but it was the impression given. Or maybe he was used to dealing with customers who knew their own minds; he was, after all, in a shop in Yorkshire.
Quite.
"MPs called on the BoE to ensure the way it is working, systems and culture are brought up to date, which it said should include a revamp of its IT systems."
What a pity they didn't pause to think things through.
"In addition, it pointed to problems incorporating the Prudential Regulation Authority's systems when it absorbed the body in 2014; this led to duplicated applications and the need to integrate large datasets."
And nobody noticed this migration happening. The BoE really needs to make efforts to get their data migrations into the media. They should ask TSB for advice.
"promised he would stay regardless of the result."
At a guess he'd never anticipated the result and didn't expect to deliver on that. Not surprising - he was a politician. Having lost the vote he realised not only that it was a stupid promise to have made and that if was to be implemented it would need someone who believed it was a good idea and had planned for it to do so. He could have seen that if he'd stayed on he'd have been in May's position - struggling to put something together while the ERG and camp followers complained about everything he did to try to put their nonsense into practice.
You can scarcely blame him for the fact that the group of those who believed it fell apart. Maybe they were of the same opinion - they didn't expect to win and didn't believe it was a sensible scheme. Maybe their only position was to heckle from the back benches and they couldn't keep doing that if they were in government. Were they emboldened in their campaigning by the belief that he would actually stay on and do the heavy lifting for them and take the blame for failing? I don't know. You'd need to ask them.
But you can't logically complain that he didn't stay on while elsewhere claiming he should have handed over the reigns.
"The jellyfish should have handed government over to a member of the party who wanted brexit."
I'm sure you're aware of it but a PM is usually the leader of the largest party in the HoC. A departing PM can't just nominate his successor in either role. So when Cameron decided to quit the only option was for the Conservative party to go through its normal procedure to choose a successor who, by convention, HMQ would invite to form a government.
The members of the party who were most strident about wanting Brexit contrived to either quit the contest or stab one another in the back. The result was someone who many of us suspect of having been a crypto-leaver who wanted to protect her position in the event of the expected referendum result.
The leading Bresiteers have only themselves to blame for one of them not being at least a candidate for PM.
"One campaign stopped with winning the referendum"
It certainly did. It stopped because it had no idea what to do next. It's entire purpose was to campaign. The nearest they seem to have thought about implementing it would be that Cameron would stay on to do it despite having campaigned against it.
"Wasnt that the Gina Miller fiasco?"
Let's consider this scenario. No case was put forward at the time and HMG just went its way without a commons vote. Somewhere in the last few months the case was put to the court and the court gave the verdict that was given originally: there was a legal requirement for Parliament to approve before invoking A50. We'd now be in the position that the entire Brexit process would have been conducted unconstitutionally and, by the terms of A50 itself, not valid.
How would that have been for a fiasco? For added flavour consider the scenario that this had been raised not in the last few months but after March 29 (April 1st seems a good date).
Leavers seem unable to grasp the simple fact that she did them a favour.
"the one man able to prepare anything (Cameron) refused to and ran when he didnt get the result he wanted."
Now there we do agree. He should have had a plan B.
We might not agree as to what the plan B should have been. Mine was to note the advisory nature of the vote and do a proper feasibility study which IMV the vote entitled him to do and simply logic obligated him to do before it went any further. What's more he should have tasked the arch remainers with doing an impact assessment on various sectors of the economy as part of that.
So for me its "ties to my official spot on the face of the Earth" versus workforce mobility.
The whole point of voting is to make decisions on behalf of a community. That's a community in the sense of a group of people sharing the same physical space. It makes sense to tie qualification to some spot you habitually inhabit.
OTOH there's an attraction in electronic voting if we could give Facebook users an electronic vote for their own MP. They could choose to vote for either the FB MP or their geographical constituency MP. The successful FB candidate could be called the Honourable Member for B Ark.
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