Posts by Doctor Syntax 42530 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"To be a (eg) biology teacher, you need at least a degree in the subject, preferably a masters or PhD."
Perhaps I should point out the SWMBO taught biology and has a PhD - in that order and all a long time ago. As at the same time I worked briefly in a biological suppliers that went bust. Apparently I still owe her several pairs of dissecting scissors.
"bringing in leadership experience from other domains obviously has it's own strategic value"
In too many cases these days the leadership experience being brought in seems to be to cut all costs that give the business an ongoing future and cash in on the businesses reputation for as long as it lasts.
"But don't get me started on a rant questioning why MS-Outllook doesn't seem to include the Search index within the saved PST files."
Seamonkey email client (similar to Thunderbird). Just opened the 2009 archive, note the first title, search for one partial word on the complete account: that email and several other matches from other archived years found about as quickly as it took to put them up on screen.
"Now if I need something, I search my inbox - turns out that's quicker that remembering if I put an email from someone I met on my 2001 trip to Scotland in 'save', 'golf', or 'travel' and looking in each"
Archive complete years. Then you don't need to search your complete inbox, just 2001. Which reminds me, must archive 2014. And 15...
"I was once told at an Oil & Gas firm that we should delete everything after 3 years of the project ending so that our own email records couldn't be used to sue us in the future."
The alternative view is to keep them so that they can be used in your defence in the future.
The choice made tells you a lot about the company.
"A better metric would be to count how many times Steve Jobs has been in court as compared to Bill Gates. Gates faux geek persona was what let him for years, get away with murder."
Not wishing to take sides between either of them but the second item on that page is Apple suing Microsoft.
"How do you explain the 2 year delay on your CV?"
Depending on who he's explaining it to it could be the high point of his CV.
"Clearly not a danger to anyone and most probably learned from his mistakes so what could he have done to piss off the authorities?"
We know what he's done to piss off the authorities. He's shown up a whole lot of very senior US officials as being completely crap at managing their own security and inconvenienced them into tightening up, possibly to the state they should have been in all the time. And not only that, he could do it while not even being bright enough to avoid being caught.
"Basically, the US has a monopoly of all smartphones and is prepared to use it in trade wars."
The basis of Android is open source, ZTE is able to use that and add its own cruft additional features. Manufacture takes place outside the US. Components are available outside the US. Own brand application repositories AKA Play Stores can be hosted outside the US.
"Trade wars are good and easy to win" vs "Those who do not learn their history are condemned to repeat it".
"The account manager had got the price hideously wrong and was told that if I insisted they put the order through, the company would supply at the agreed price but the account manager would get fired on the spot."
I'd be surprised if the account manager didn't get fired anyway if the price was still wrong after three checks.
"There's only two more week [sic] to go until IP Expo Manchester 2018, Europe's number ONE Enterprise IT event, do'’t forget to register for your FREE pass," stated the email from Sophos.
"We will also be giving away a pair of free Sophos socks to every 10th person that registers through our registration page."
Oh well, at least the reminder ads nestled in the elReg headline page don't threaten socks. But we do see where you got the idea.
"There won't be POTS, instead fibre to the premises with a battery backed Optical Termination Unit."
You really think there'll be a 100% FTTP roll-out in that time period? And if there was how do you think it'll be paid for without dumping costs on people who didn't even ask for it and see no benefit?
"with BT FTTP (Infinity), there is no option to ditch the line rental, even if you don't (want to) use their phone service."
You still have the line, it's just made of a different material. It still needs to be provisioned and maintained. If someone else allows you to not pay an explicit rental you can be sure they've built the costs in elsewhere.
"When I do a search on Google for the name of my company, I get a plethora of websites with an info page based on data scraped from Companies House."
Much the same here for a company closed 10 years ago. And for take down in some cases their required information is more than required, e.g. email address and telephone number. Could be fun coming up in a month or so.
"If it finds unpleasant articles get those taken down rather than the search, then the search cannot find them."
The articles themselves are reports of then current events published from newspaper archives under journalistic protection.
All you have to do to accomplish your objective is get yourself elected to Parliament, put up a private members' bill to remove that protection from the DPA while simultaneously getting into the EU to get it removed from the GDPR as your amended DPA would cause grave problems if it didn't reflect GDPR.
An essential aspect of the court hearing was to establish what the law is in this regard. If you think that's in some way wrong you need to change the law.
@ markr555
When the Welfare State was set up NI was added to taxation supposedly to cover the costs of this. Likewise road vehicle taxation was introduced, in the form of the Road Fund Licence, to finance road construction and repair (the clue was in the name). The Road Fund, incidentally, was a solution to a problem that had plagued England and presumably many other places sing the middle ages.
The problem with this is the Treasury. It really doesn't like not being in control of all finances. It simply treats these as part of general taxation and doles out as little money as possible to the originally intended recipients. In the case of vehicle taxation it really did have to change the name - people might have started asking awkward questions such a show much money's in the fund and how's it spent.
In each case I think the solution is to tell the Treasury no. DVLA gets to keep the money and spend it on roads. It might make a payment to the NHS to cover the costs of dealing with RTAs but only when the roads are up to an agreed standard does any left-over money go to Treasury; if they're not up to standard then it goes back to the original tax-payers as compensation. A reconstituted DHSS would collect NI directly. NI could be set according to requirements, not according to what proportion of total taxation Treasury wants to shove under that heading.
This would bring transparency to large areas of taxation. NI could be set to meet requirements with a good deal more acceptance than at presence because it would be clear as to what it was being used for. The incompetence of DWP as it currently is would be an issue that affected taxpayers in general rather than just benefits claimants and get a much higher political profile.
"More than a third of bank account takeover victims were over 60 years old. That was put down to the increasing popularity of online banking, and more fraudsters phoning victims claiming to be from the bank and asking to "verify" online passwords."
It's not necessarily popular. It's just enforced by shutting down more and more branches.
