Posts by Doctor Syntax 40470 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I'd be surprised if the Speaker can legally act on behalf of the Executive."
No but AFAIK he can act on behalf of Parliament. In fact, only on behalf of Parliament.
"I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me" was how one Speaker put it at another time when the sovereignty of Parliament was under attack.
"Which is why they didn't vote to overturn the prorogation"
Not within Parliament's power. They can vote on a recess but not on proroguing.
"or to have an election"
Which would have presented BoJo with a fait accompli on a no deal Brexit and, as an additional benefit to him, left someone else to deal with the consequences. Not even Corbyn was going to fall for that.
They had time for one thing within their power. They chose to ban no deal.
"My point was simply that the MPs and the "political class" / "establishment" / whatever term you want to use are vastly more pro-EU than the electorate."
I'm not sure it's a matter of being pro-EU on a matter of principle but on informed consideration of the economic well-being of the country as a whole and being determined to do what's best for that well-being in the long term.
"And that in these specific circumstances that's helped create this log-jam."
Quite so.
"A few years ago, the appeal would have been heard in the House of Lords, which would have been interesting."
Not really different. The name and venue might have changed. But these are just the current law lords who would otherwise have sat in the name of the HoL. A case going to the Lords wasn't dealt with by the whole House, just by the senior members of the judiciary.
"No-one knows what some bits of legislation mean in practice until they're tested in court."
I'm not sure it even goes that far in this case. It was simply a matter of BoJo thinking he could get away with it. Nothing very different to a young lad being caught scrumping but in this case it needed to go further up the legal food chain before he got the telling off he deserved.
"the newish (less than 20 yo?) UK Supreme court "
Newish? It's just the continuation of the HoL sitting as a court. They now have their own building instead of having to put up in some room in Westminster Palace. Its legitimacy as a forum descends directly from the medieval royal court.
"Rarely a good thing to tell judges what they can and cannot do"
When a case goes to appeal the issue is usually a point of law and the role of counsel is to present arguments about what legal principles the lower courts should have applied. In this case one of the issues was about the rights of courts over a particular aspect of prerogative. It would be one where the court itself expected such arguments to be presented. It's a subtle difference between telling the court and presenting an argument. If you read the judgement it discusses areas of prerogative where the court can and can't intervene.
"The courts have been granting themselves greater and greater political power."
Could you explain this in greater detail whilst allowing for the reality of this judgement: that it (a) excluded any consideration of the purpose of the advice to prorogue, of of the rights and wrongs of Brexit or of the party in government and (b) simply confirmed the sovereignty of Parliament which has been the cornerstone of the British constitution for several centuries.
The case before the court was that it was the PM overruling Parliament. So your "unelected judges" have prevented that "unelected PM" from doing that. In your, and presumably his, terms that's an outstandingly bad case to make to the people.
"Presumably Bojo will resign before he Parliament decides to hold him in the contempt which he deserves."
Should but not necessarily will. Parliament has a couple of options if he doesn't. On would be a vote of confidence, the other is to charge him with contempt of Parliament. In the latter case I wonder if that results of him being kicked out of his seat as well as out of No 10. Presumably Cummings would also be in their sights.
"unless you're just bloody minded, which is a distinct possibility "
Life is too short to carry a grudge but we all have to do the best we can.
Note that one of my points was that part of Tesco's shtick was that they were really good at understanding their customers because of all their analytics. Well, that was something they couldn't analyse unless their outsourcer passed over the data, which I suspect they didn't. They weren't as good as they thought they were.
You do realise, don't you, that Tesco's shrinking turnover is the cumulative result of lots of people like me not buying from them? If you think it's some mega-millionaire not shopping there any longer then you need to grow up.
Big companies spend fortunes on marketing and advertising to bring people in or get them to pay more when they're in. They fail to realise that not pissing off customers and potential customers would be far cheaper.
They also seem not to realise that parking is an aspect of customer service. Put like that it should be simply obvious that it is. Yet they're prepared to turn over their car parks to companies for whom the store is simply bait to lure prey or to take up premises in trading estates where their landlords do that.
"And that you think that documenting the fact here will get you some sympathy."
I'm not looking for sympathy. I have less need of Tesco than they have of customers. However it does appear that more folk here agree with me than you. I trust you're not looking for sympathy either.
"if we can spot all those challenges early on, we can do something about them"
Discuss them at length at senior management level without reaching a decision with the possibility that those at the sharp end will sort it out in spite of all the roadblocks senior management put in their way.
Yes, I have worked at BT. Why do you ask?
The other weekend there was article in the Times magazine about Deep Mind in the NHS. The reporter was being shown round a participating hospital where there was fax (sneer), pager (sneer) and a PC system. The PCs would regularly crash which might explain why these sneered at old technologies were still in use.
The Deep Mind bit was picking up creatine levels from haematology and sending an alert to a nephrologist. To send the alert they were using a purpose written app for the nephrologists' phones. IOW they were reinventing the pager (sneer) for the phone but only for one of the many possible alerts that might need to be sent out.
I suppose that as this magic bullet gets extended to other conditions for which an alert might be needed we'll get Matt Hanckock's wet dream: a multitude of HNS apps for the doctors' phones. Eventually someone might realise the toll taken on the performance of the phone and come up with an all purpose alert app. They could call it Pager.
"as this article points out, is vulnerable to being bought out by more unscrupulous companies with large cash piles like MS/Goog."
Or even IBM. But from the business's point of view, as opposed to the users', that could be part of the business plan.
" If you wanted to clone Office you can, but that’s a really big job."
Just as well somebody's done it. I use one of those clones every day.
"Germany and the EU would be better off using their influence (carrot and stick) to shape MS to their needs."
Much easier and cheaper to drop some Euros to the Document Foundation if they need something specific that's not already in there.
Actually, until now Microsoft retained support for "legacy stuff" far more than open source.
The issue with Microsoft was the other way around. By periodically updating the format it meant your "legacy" version of Office couldn't open the .doc or whatever file someone sent from their more recent version so you had to buy the new as well.
The open approach is to set the file format as a standard and stick to it so our old version of the S/W will open and use a file written by the latest version or even from some other application using the same standard. Microsoft got its arm twisted to use an open standard so they got their own, reportedly of dubious clarity.
he business case has to should include the contingencies for the cloud being inaccessible, just like an 'in-house' plan business continuity by having multiple data centres, mirrored server instances etc etc
FTFY
If the driver is cost will those contingencies be included. Maybe, but very likely only after the need for them has been cogently demonstrated by an outage.
"They are not volunteers if they are paid by someone to write the code."
Yup, but it was you who described them as volunteers in the first place. If you care to read the article it's not individuals complaining about this, it's companies. Their problem seems to be that they wanted to start S/W companies, decided that some sort of FOSS licence was cool and used that, not having worked out whether it was appropriate for their business model. There are a number of models that do seem to work. One is the Red Hat 1.0, give away the product and sell support (Red Hat 2.0 is being so successful that IBM pays good money to buy yo out). Another is the Intel model where you sell some H/W and provide FOSS drivers. A less publicly visible model is that you need some particular FOSS S/W and either do some debugging or add new features and contribute back to the project.
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