Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"There's no VAT benefit to HMRC. Whatever the contractor adds to the invoice will be reclaimed by the client."
It depends on the client. It can be set against VAT collected on VATtable supplies to the client's customer if the client's product or service is VATtable. If it isn't they can't and end up paying the VAT.
"Cisco also has uncovered evidence suggesting that Mr Williams was offered employment at the same competitor after proposing a go-to-market strategy he dubbed 'Project X,' which had been developed and refined at Cisco,"
Is it just me who gets the impression that this might have been developed, refined and turned down at Cisco?
"If they could continue trade and have the 2 different regimes they would be a thriving country both in and out of the EU, part of the EU project and part of the global community."
Real Brexit thinking - have cake and eat it.
You can only have one regime. They're sticking with the in EU regime and prospering.
Read the article. Business is moving from the UK to Ireland because Ireland stays in the EU and the UK is leaving.
"Well, they are quite correct."
Yes but only for a very limited value of correct.
They are not correct in assuming that criminals will only use legal communication methods if those are back-doored. I've said this numerous times here: you do not stop people intent on breaking the law simply be providing them with more laws to break. Non-backdoored communication exists; they'll use it even if it;s illegal.
They are also incorrect in overlooking the fact that for the rest of us every-day use of the net as a trading medium requires secure communication. I've said this before but obviously you need to check it for yourself: go and look at the T&Cs of more or less anything you're signed up to that deals with money but especially banking. You'll find you are contractually bound to keep things like log-in credentials to yourself. How do you do that if those creds are being passed over the net insecurely? Which, to cut off your likely reply....
They are also incorrect if they think that only they would be able to use the back doors. A back door in encryption is a deliberate breakage. If it exists somebody who shouldn't is going to use it so although you may think you're going to be given secure but back-doored encryption to meet your legal obligations on those cred you're sorely mistaken.
The winners in all this are going to be criminals and any snooper who gets themselves on the back-door snooping list (and in previous rounds of investigative powers legislation that list has extended to unbelievably low levels in your local bureaucracy). The losers are going to be the general public and only the most dense of petty criminals. But mostly the general public.
So, yes, they're correct as regards the densest of petty criminals. Wrong everywhere else. And BTW I spent almost half my life working in criminal investigation so I'm not likely to be against anything genuinely useful.
From the point of someone with pensions I don't have a problem with the pension funds spreading out the investment and that includes having investments in competing businesses. OTOH I don't want to see winner-takes-all monopolies developing because I want to see all those competing businesses prospering.
I can answer that one: a combination of both.
We had the new Y2K system set up to cut over for Jan 1. It was a new pair of boxes because the hot standby for the old main box couldn't run the Y2K version of the database.
Because the year end accounts still had to be finalised the client's accountants insisted the old system had to be kept going for a couple of weeks whilst they finalised did that. So for a couple of weeks the non-Y2K system was crapping all over new orders and the vendors dialling in on a daily basis to fix the problems.
I don't know why they didn't let us move operations over to the new box and let the accountants play with the old one. If they'd given me some notice that they wanted to do that I could have arranged to bring over data on work completed in January, if that's what was needed and set the clock back to 31 Dec every day or some similar fudge.
"Seriously, what if your house was on fire and your wife was inside and couldn't get to a window?"
Internal mechanical over-ride. Panic bar, panic button whatever you want to call it. Fail to locked is secure. Mechanical override is safety. Both are basic requirements.
Similar to my car's automatic headlights. Yes they do always switch on when it's actually night or nearly so. But they'll also come on during bright sunshine. Or going under a bridge. OTOH on a dark day driving along a long lane with an overhanging tree canopy they remained resolutely off. And then there's the allegedly self-dipping electronic mirror.
"I've now arranged to get a better boiler fitted by our regular gas-safe plumber for £1500 less than BG's quote."
And he'll undoubtedly do a better deal on servicing than the extended warranty the makers will try to foist on you no matter how many times you return their letter-box litter as unwanted junk.
Great respect for the guys who live jointed the faulty 3-phase in our road a few months ago; that would rate at a huge amount more than 10A. About 12Ω showing in the neutral. It buts onto the section that was replaced with similar problems a few years ago. I think the entire cable is being replaced in 12 metres stages.
"I'm sure this is where some other commentard is gonna tell me of just such a file system!"
Not such a file system but certainly such a system. Open/NextCloud keeps versioned files (it's the V in WebDAV) and there are a couple of server side apps that claim to detect such behaviour.
But that's a client-server system. Maybe what we need is a new architecture that fits that into one box. Your user-facing WP, spreadsheet or whatever doesn't directly read and write files but asks for such services from the server. Maybe two VMs would be enough to run client and server or, for the truly paranoid sensibly security minded, two separate processors. For added security the formats of the updated files could be checked before being saved.
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