Posts by Doctor Syntax 40557 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"50+% of graduates now in NON graduate level work"
That was inevitable as soon as Blair decided that he wanted 50% of youngsters to go to University. There were never going to be that proportion of jobs at graduate level but it reduced youth unemployment figures and, as was the principle of all Blair/Brown financial shenanigans, hid the immediate costs by deferring them to future decades, in this case by student loans.
"For example, some heart medications that work on Caucasians will kill Africans."
Can you be more specific, especially as to mechanism? If this is the case it's more likely to be a consequence of some specific allele. The risk would be correlated with some specific aspect of the patient's ancestry but a more sensible approach would be to test for that allele rather than make some judgement based on what the patient looks like.
Sales and marketing types habitually assume that the public will readily click on links or open files received from random unknown strangers (not that said marketing types have the self-awareness to realise they're random unknown strangers). I can only assume that expectation comes from their being willing to do the same and, in fact, here we have them reading files, cookies, from random unknown strangers relying on the belief that these are the files they planted themselves. So don't bother with just replying with an oversized payload of random stuff. Send them something really nasty.
"I also considered the unpleasant scenario of being killed during international travel and the challenge of identifying my body until someone found a pair of glasses to shove on my dead face."
Depending on circumstances glasses might be the least of their difficulties.
It depends on what balance you want to achieve. Traditionally performance requirements have dominated. The result seems to have been at the expense of security. Is that the right balance now? As H/W gets faster should the balance change? Could we reduce the performance penalty, at least in user-facing systems, by cutting down on UI bloat?
Whether micro-kernels are the way to achieve it or not (and possibly they might be) I think there's a need from the security PoV to move away from the idea of an all-powerful root user. The MO of a lot of exploits is privilege escalation.
The functions of root need to be split. One function would be to allocate user IDs. Another would be to allocate storage space. A third would install applications. None of them would have the ability to read or write anything other than what they need to do. If an application needs to access file space it should do so in a space allocated for that particular application or at most a class of applications.
Instead of calling a common kernel service an office application, for instance, would call an office data storage service with some means of checking that the client was a registered office storage client in addition to the check that the user had access rights according to user, group or public settings* with nobody else.
The storage service might even be able to check file format. It might provide versioning. What it wouldn't do would be to provide read access to some malware trying to exfiltrate data or hold the data to ransom. Such malware would not only have to impersonate the user but also the application.
This division of responsibilities might have a performance impact but that would be the cost of security. As things are we currently see security being sold cheap in terms of convenience and performance. It needs to be given a higher value.
* Or some other ACL
The whole of S/W development (and that includes micro-code in processors) is about abstracting the real bits in the computer into some form that's easier for the user to grasp. If that were not the case we'd still be writing programs in machine code.
AIUI he hasn't. He's just taken "everything is a file" and changed it to "everything is a URL". It extends "everything" to include stuff not on the physical computer. Whether or not this is a good idea is debatable. It assumes that the computer is on-line and if it isn't there must be a lot of URL equivalents of "file not found".
"This leads to absurd situations like the hard disk containing the root filesystem / contains a folder named dev with device files including sda which contains the root filesystem."
I suppose one way round that would be to mount dev on /..
Back before the internet became commonplace The Newcastle Connection had the network at /..
"That's the companies sale"
And that, folks, is the main point to remember. It's exactly the same as the biggest outsourcing company you can think of. Sales rate is not the same as the rate paid to whoever's doing the job The biggest differences are: lower day rate then them, less overheads and, it seems a much greater interest in doing a good job for the client because the sales and marketing staff are the same as the delivery staff.
Yup. It's always the same. You get that sort of comment and think "Are they really Goody Two-shoes?". They don't have the balls to try it themselves, in fact they're so far from doing it that they haven't really looked at the details so they're completely uninformed about the realities. Dogs & mangers come to mind. Or sour grapes.
It's not so much what they understand what contractors currently do for them. It's what they want them to do for them in a couple of weeks' time: vote. And the reason it's become an issue not is the realisation that over the last few years there's been a democratic shift towards all sorts of forms of non-standard (in tax terms) employment so that means more votes to lie grub for than in the past.
"it has been forced to pay it all as salary."
The official line isn't "forced", it's "deemed". A weasel word if ever there was one.
Add being between contracts onto the list of what the company should be making provision for. One of the things clients usually want is instant availability. That's an expensive attribute to provide. The freelancer who's available on Monday when called on Friday has probably been "available" for some time, otherwise the agent is trying to fish in a very small pool.
"When IR35 was first mooted, and increasingly as it has morphed into what we have today, the premise was that the 'companies' and 'small businesses' were really not companies at all, but a vehicle to be employed by a company with some significant financial benefits. So they introduced the term 'disguised employees' and then deemed that their Personal Service Company (PSC) was not really a business at all, so did not fall into the category of either businesses or companies, and thus are not in scope for his statement."
This doesn't seem to have changed as far as Labour is concerned. The only morphing here is that the Conservatives have ceased to be the party for small businesses. And can we please avoid the term PSC. The individual freelancer's company, as you go on to say, is just a smaller version of the bigger outsourcing companies although probably better motivated to do a better job. The correct terms should be "Small Outsourcing Company".
"In addition, for tax purposes, self-employed and employed by a PSC are completely different things, even now. So they can very easily claim that they are supporting the self-employed while taxing the hell out of a PSC."
Limited company freelancing only came into existence (AFAIK - it was before my time) because the IR as it then was came down on the nearest limited company in the chain if a self-employed person defaulted. I don't know if this was a frequent occurrence or FUD but it seems that HMRC have finally worked themselves into the same position again.
One of the central problems here is that tax rules are drawn up by people on salaries with incremental scales and reasonably secure employment and don't really understand that any other way of working exists and is essential for the economy.
It depends on various factors such as the attitude of HMRC and the phase of the moon. The contract and working conditions may have some minor influence but the attitude of HMRC will be that you're caught anyway.
Serious answer - get the contract reviewed by a competent reviewer along with as much additional documentation you can get your hands on about the nature of the engagement. Look like an independent company. Don't use the company account as a pipe-line to direct cash straight from Apple to you, either as salary or dividends. Pay yourself a reasonable salary whilst making provision to be able to keep paying after the engagement's ended. When a pimp agent rings up after you've finished the first question will be "Are you available?" and providing that availability will have cost your company money by continuing to pay salary whilst you're on the bench.
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