Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"When you travel as a holiday maker the chances of you needing to renew your passport are pretty small."
But not zero. Accidents can happen. However if the system is being developed by Agile coping with it can be left to a later sprint and it's just tough luck if your passport gets stolen before then.
"This is what got Boris Johnson to be denied entry to the US a couple of years ago as he tried to enter on a British passport which clearly stated that he was born in New York."
His real problem was probably talking to the immigration officer who promptly decided he couldn't possibly be a native English speaker.
"Good luck tracking me."
Presumably your name and date of birth are unchanged?
Name is a variable, not a constant. Date of birth is a constant but (a) although you were present at the time you have no recollection of it and are dependent on what someone else told you* and (b) what you inform someone as to your date of birth is also a variable. Those are the realities of those who don't want to be tracked.
* There are exceptions around adoption etc. where not even the person doing the telling has no direct knowledge of the DoB.
"Physical stamps on paper passport pages are a very outdated mechanism now, I suspect they're only there as a backup to the electronic controls."
As far as I can make out from TFA that suspicion seems to be founded on undue optimism - and likely to remain so until the Home Office get a clue.
"My rule of thumb, then, with outsourcing software development, is to ask the outsourcer what their plan to fire themselves is. How long will they need to be around, exactly? If they don’t have one, then they’re likely planning on sticking around for a long time."
More likely is that they've got the measure of your scope creep.
"We are on a call with just about every VP in Boeing."
My first reaction was about the naivety of thinking that the VPs would be those with the skills to fix it. Then I realised that tying them up with conference calls keeps them off the backs of those who actually do have the skills. So it really is the right thing to do.
"care to guess why the fuel quantity indication in your old vehicle varied significantly as a function of road grade and your new one is rock steady?"
One reflects a physical reality, the other some abstraction. Care to guess which one would I prefer to see based on the fact that my car runs on physical real fuel, not on an abstraction?
"Ok, I am being unfair, not like there are any bees left to do proper research around Sheffield nowdays."
You are. There's a fair amount of Peak District not that far away. Sheffield used to pride itself on being one of the greenest cities in the UK until the council decided to start felling so many trees.
"I still can't work out why this is privatised."
Because over 3 decades ago it became all too obvious that successive governments hadn't been and still weren't prepared to make the required levels of ongoing investment in the old GPO network. The only way to get adequate investment into the network and to recover money from such previous as had been made was to privatise it.
"Just 21 per cent of UK Blue Chip businesses regularly share security updates with the board at least twice a year"
Or to put it another way, 79% of boards don't demand regular security updates.
I'd like to think that this level of neglect would raise questions from the big institutional investors but clearly not.
"We all know no-script is cool, but as a user experience it's rubbish. You have to care enough to put up with it constantly breaking things."
Wrong way round. I regard a website that can't function without introducing lumps of code from sources over which its developers have no control as being already broken at best and potentially dangerous at worst. All NoScript does is reveal that this damage.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Yes Minister...it's satire, not a "how to" manual.
Satire is humour applied to criticism of that being satirised. The foundations are reality, without a real subject to examine critically there can be no satire. YM was generally reckoned as being particularly well founded. A boxed set of YM and YPM together with a copy of "How to lie with statistics" should be the basis for any education in civics.
"I can't see why primary school pupils require homework....My primary school was rural , four pupils in my class."
My primary school wasn't much bigger than yours. My grandchildrens' primary school, only a couple of miles away, is probably at least the same size as a whole year (four classes) was at my grammar school. Rural schools are bigger, and maybe a bit less rural than they were. And they do have homework.
“Consumers prefer a personalised experience,...“When you walk into that restaurant they know the food you want to order, they know your drink."
Actually, when I walk into a restaurant I want to read the menu and wine list and order what I want depending on what's on there, what I like and what I want to spend. Providing that, that's personalised service. The alternative sounds too much like foisting on to me what the restaurant wants to sell.
"Being a collaboration with ESA and Canada it may be more difficult to shelve it, but with a Trump administration scared of every foreign country, who knows?"
The ESA and Canada might be asking for their money back if he shelves it. If that turns nasty they could always distrain him by a few Trump hotels and golf courses.
"It should be noted, however, that the FBI has not given up its efforts to be granted access to every phone. It appears to be simply bidding its time until the next San Bernardino tragedy."
This should make it a bit more difficult to pull this trick. And not just the FBI.
But as you say, full marks to someone near the top of the FBI for showing some integrity.
"We kept the pound. Well I did."
Getting rid of the pound, more's the pity, will be the price of getting back into the EU to rebuild our economy. That'll happen in a few years time when the referendum will appear to have been an extraordinary counting error on account of the fact that nobody will admit to having voted leave.
"Sounds like someone is still bitter about how democracy works... Shame on you."
It's more a case of having a good understanding of how reality works.
BTW, where's the Irish border going to go and what will it look like? And what will HMG do if the DUP don't like it? Remember, your idea of democracy depends on the approval of the DUP!!!
"Note to self... Make sure my grandkids keep well away from IT as a possible career as there won't be one in 5-10 years"
It depends on the age of the grandkids. At some point the backlash will come. A few service providers who fail to provide service get sued for board level visible sums with a few more in the pipeline and CEOs get told to put their best staff on the case or else. And then they discover they don't have any best staff. They don't have any staff. Then the panic recruiting starts. The question is, when and does it fit the grandkids' timeframe?
