Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I was grinning along as I read this until I got to the bit about the drum of telephone cable."
On one of our house moves one of the juniors in the removal team admitted to being an apprentice joiner. And that he was scared off spiders and even disliked their webs. I think he was training for the wrong job.
"I was grinning along as I read this until I got to the bit about the drum of telephone cable."
I have a drum of Cat 4 (yes, that's right) if you need it.
The best stock of telephone cable was taken when a manual switchboard was decommissioned in 1976. Not very long but a really thick bundle of tinned single cores with all sorts of different coloured insulation. It solders beautifully. I've been snipping bits off to hook odds together, repair PCBs with broken tracks etc. ever since.
"I can claim fair market value for everything I donate, which is invariably far more than I could have sold it for otherwise, & get a fat refund cheque back shortly afterwards when the taxmen realize I've just donated a small fortune."
That's the US version. In the UK it's the charity that gets the refund. It was, after all, the purpose of donating it.
A client had one of these http://www.constructor-storage.com/Global/Constructor-Group/Images/Products/Storage-Machines-and-WMS/Vertical-Carousell-Paternoster/Vertical-Carousell-Paternoster_6_large.jpg in their despatch area. It would make the perfect kitchen accessory for storing the other kitchen accessories.
I'd need another in the study/office/computer room/storage area for all the computer stuff.
" Basically, Gaia juggles the CO2 content to maintain room temperature, and last time round that was achieved by evolving grass"
Not a very effective juggle. Plants remove CO2 to convert to sugars to respire which converts sugar back into CO2. More fixed carbon is recycled by animals eating the plants and by other animals higher up the food chain. The only net removal of carbon from the atmosphere is by saving some of it as a standing crop which is recycled more slowly by death and decay of the plant. A very small proportion gets stored away as fossil forms of carbon.
Grass supports grazing animals very well (note the common origin of grass and graze) and the ungrazed vegetative parts don't live long. Apart from on peat lands trees do a much better job than grass of maintaining a large standing crop per unit area. And even peat can be formed from mosses and sedges as well as grasses.
"Even Amazon hosts its stuff in the cloud and not onsite - Albeit the Amazon AWS cloud"
Remember the essence of cloud: somebody else's computer. If Amazon are running Amazon on Amazon Web Services (spell it out for clarity) in what way is it somebody else's computer.
"Meanwhile, IBM said that it could damage US cloud providers' business prospects."
Or just tell it like it is: it could damage the US's ability hang on to large parts of its tech industry if the companies that make up that industry are forced to conclude that they can no longer operate from US soil.
"Seriously more reliable than BT - the only reason the fund is in deficit is because the took a pension holiday where they stopped paying into the pension fund 'because it didnt need the money' "
That sort of decision is made by the tax man. He counts such payments as tax evasion. It's not the tax man's problem that a decade or two later the fund is in deficit.
Actually that's a thought: could the pension fund sue HMRC for having made a defective ruling?
"The pension benefits and fund contributions were calculated based on expected market returns on investments 40 years ago, and the market isn't giving those returns."
In the interim, when things were going well or high interest rates had raised projected returns on annuities, IR/HMRC would have declared the scheme to have been over-funded and ordered a contribution "holiday". Continuing to fund an over-funded scheme is counted as tax evasion. Not avoidance, evasion. Civil Service pensions, like the state pensions, closely resemble Ponzi schemes in that they're paid out of current income, in this case tax income. That means that tax officials never have to think seriously about the real long term of funded pension schemes. (My own declaration of interest here: both BT and CS pensions.)
"That won't matter significantly to BT, but it will matter to all the other pension funds who have invested in those shares."
It would matter to some extent to BT as harming other pension funds would require action that could then harm the companies those funds serve and in which the BT pension fund is invested.
It's depressing, however, how many people commenting here never seem to catch on to the simple fact that share holders are very largely institutional and they probably have a direct personal interest in them; they are amongst the "fat cats". The education system really needs to look seriously at how it teaches (if at all) the basics of finance.
"Binary blob patches can be issued ahead of the vulnerability disclosure. This happens all the time."
Yes. They can be issued ahead of the disclosure but this requires time for development and testing. The complaint seems to be that the disclosure wasn't made immediately, neglecting the time needed to do things right.
The correct procedure must surely be that the finder of the vulnerability discloses it confidentially to the vendors who then work out mitigations which can be released along with the disclosure. Anything else gives the opportunity for malware to be developed and released first. Given that we're dealing with kernel level stuff here errors in the patches can have effects on users right across the board so thorough testing and optimisation is going to be needed before release. Malware developers aren't going to face such constraints and would probably win the race. There is, in this particular instance, a real but limited cause for complaint - the BSD authors weren't included in the initial confidential disclosure.
"Apple hold lots of personal data in the cloud that they suck up from iPhones. This suckage is enabled by default, so Apple is now the de-facto data controller."
You'd have a point if the suit dealt with data taken from the Apple cloud. I may be wrong but I don't think Apple is running that on an array of A6s.
I migrated my Dad to Linux last weekend, (from Win XP and Office 2010 to Linux Mint 18.3 and LibreOffice) you'd have thought his world had ended "because the font in my email signature has changed"
You should have waited until he'd had some particular software nasty encrypt his files or whatever.
"No chance while a neoliberal government runs the UK."
Would you explain this further, explaining what neoliberal means with a detailed argument as to (a) how it applies the the present government (this would involving how the current occupants of Downing St and surrounding area could be construed as a government in any meaning of the word) and (b) how this influences the situation described in the article.
Or should we just assume you're spouting some word you read somewhere?
"Can someone sub-edit this article so it's actually readable please? I got fed up with trying to decipher the typos, misplaced apostrophes and general misspellings halfway through."
Seconded. I was thinking about emailing my local MP and sending her a link to this article but given the mess it's in I doubt it would be a good idea.
"So unless Apple guy want more USA designers, USA Apple campuses, USA Apple servers, or USA Apple buildings, there are little reasons they would bring all the profit back."
Surely all these things you list are expenses which would be set against tax. Paying out money in this way reduces profits on which the tax is due. The reason to bring back profits is to pay dividends. In the past Apple has borrowed money to pay dividends. Now they can repay those loans. They'll have time-shifted the tax liabilities on the profits distributed as dividends from the past, when the tax would have been higher, to the present.
"Apple’s announcement also explained it will use lots of the cash in the USA on things like a new tech support center that will contribute to 20,000 new hires it plans to make in the Land of the Free. It’s also promised to build another campus somewhere in America, given its staff a $2,500 bous and tossed another $4bn into the fund it’s using to help US manufacturers innovate."
I'd have thought those were business expenses to be set against tax. Couldn't they have done that without any tax liability at any time?
"The ad companies want our profiles by hook or crook, and they're getting VERY good at finding ways to sniff us out without having to ask. They're also probably much aware of laws and sovereignties, meaning any attempt to push would simply see them pack up and move someplace friendlier. It's not like they have a whole lot of physical real estate to move around, is there?"
Whether or not the ad companies are located somewhere legally accessible there are other entities at the ends of their chain who might not be so mobile.
In order to do any profiling they have to get access via the web sites. If a web site allows some profiling link to be installed on it I think it likely that the operator could be classed in the EU and the UK as a data controller and the hosting company could also be classified as a data processor. At the other end of the chain the company whose products or services are being advertised is also likely to be scooped up.
Where the web site is being run as the window on some business such as an estate agency or a car dealership they can hardly avoid having a legal presence in the countries in which they operate. The same applies to businesses placing adverts. A small business engaged in selling by post might be able to avoid these constraints; even so such a business with ambitions to grow might foresee the need to establish such a presence in the future.
Hosting companies, however, are likely to have interests in the EU and/or UK. Running a web site on Amazon's infrastructure? If they think they're likely to get roped into this you're going to find they are pretty insistent on what you can do in terms of placing trackers on your pages.
I think I can guess where Schrem's new organisation is going for its initial targets.
It would help if email clients flagged up emails with From addresses different from their actual source addresses.
Yes, I know it would put a crimp in some businesses which their owners consider to be legitimate. Too bad for them but it would be for the greater good were they to go out of business.
I think that would work fine if it they could be deactivated or "muted" for clueless users.
It points to the need for training of those who report too many false positives and, if they prove untrainable, flagging up the problem to HR. (OK, it's quite likely HR will include more than their fair share. Their problem.)
Having said that I'm in the habit of sending false positive reports. I send them to my bank in response to their train-our-customers-to-be-phished emails. Which reminds me, when I sent the last one I told them I'd discontinue that particular email address in the new year if they hadn't responded. Time to to that.
"I'm thinking that the only way to properly secure a remote connecting device is by some sort of secondary physical device that acts as a key"
Many years ago I remember reading about the Olivetti (remember them?) lab in Cambridge which had a system whereby when a user walked up to a terminal it would display their personal desktop. That, IIRC, used their security badge. I never read what happened if two users sat down near the same terminal.
The relationships are more complicated than equating the Normans with the French. They were at loggerheads with the French kings who were nominally their overlords. This situation continued over the centuries. I've seen it expressed that Henry II was spending Christmas "in his private two thirds of France" prior to the murder of Thomas Becket. Eventually they started thinking of themselves as English as the French made fun of their old-fashioned provincial accents. Eventually, however, they lost out to the French by the end of the Hundred Years War, not that it stopped them styling themselves as Kings of England, Ireland and France at least until well into the Tudor period.
"but they had gone a bit native once they settled in Northmandy - even started speaking some funny Romance language."
They seemed to do that wherever they settled - although they loaned English some words our Viking ancestors who settled in England eventually spoke English. Likewise those who settled in Russia ended up speaking Slavic.
