Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Let's try another scenario: You buy something for work. The vendor's computer, pretending to be a till should print out a multipart invoice/receipt but fails because it's just been borked by and update. Your expenses sheet for reimbursement gets bounced by the bits of paper wallahs because you failed to provide a suitable bit of paper.
Not everything bought over the counter is bought without the need for a receipt.
"Anyway drivers are up to the HW maker, you can't really expect an OS deliver drivers for each and every device ever produced. Especially complex ones like scanners or printers which may have very specific functions."
What you can do is ensure that the driver interface is stable. If a new driver interface has to be provided then ensure that some means is available - a shim or the old module - to enable the old one to be used even if it's not the standard.
The functions of an update shouldn't include breaking things that are working legitimately.
Unfortunately this has become forgotten in the IT industry to the extent of various comments here to the effect of "so-what". Then there are complaints, maybe even from the same commentards, that essential medical diagnostics of whatever are still running on XP. And, no, you can't reasonably expect that the customer will just go out and buy the latest whatever the chunk of hardware is. The old one may not yet have performed the body of work for which its purchase was originally justified.
Essential step needed: the moment an investigation* starts the company's bank account is frozen. When unfrozen (it doesn't need to take long, just enough to tell the bank the conditions) no payments can be made to the shareholders or directors or close relatives of the same without the investigator's express permission and to get that permission there needs to be a very good explanation; an explanation so good that it's unlikely ever to be good enough. Any other payments also need to be run by the investigator to ensure they are essential to the running of the business.
*Investigation means an investigation by any regulator, ICO, OfCom, Trading Standards or whatever.
"The advantage to the Government is that the cost of admin falls through the floor and far fewer administrators are required at DVLA"
What makes you think that? They may up the tax on fuel but they'll not scrap the VED. Your zero-rating OTOH...as soon as that makes a significant dent in VED, that will get scrapped.
"The speed limits haven't been reduced massively as an 'experiment'"
It's always an experiment - an experiment in what they can get away with.
I remember the "experimental" variable speed limits on the M25. I didn't drive there regularly but certainly drove there often enough to have been through during a control day if such a thing had existed but never saw any.
"Except to remember not to use the colour that makes it look very like a Guinness bottle label."
Or very similar in colour to another disc in use at the same time. There was a case where the car tax disc and a much cheaper one - I think for tractors - were used at the same time. A clerk in the taxation office was issuing the cheaper one and pocketing the difference.
"Looked at that way, everyone should pay tax for the roads so just increase VAT."
Why do people not grok that taxes do not get abolished by such schemes?
The VAT may go up but "road taxation" will not come down. Apart from anything else it's not road taxation, it's just taxation. If it equated to what was spent on roads we'd have much better roads and pay much less road taxation.
"No one pays Road Tax, it's call VED"
Actually DVLA now seem to be referring to it as "Vehicle tax" in their reminders.
What's more, the Treasury won't thank you for reminding people that it's not a road tax; they prefer that people continue to think of it in that way; it makes them think they're getting better roads for what they pay although applying common sense to what they actually get in the way of roads should disabuse them of that.
"And then in 10-20 years they'll realise coal fired power stations are bad, and increase the price of electricity / VED on electric/hybrid cars."
Your time frame is probably optimistic. As soon as any tax incentive is effective enough to cut into the takings it will be removed. Emissions might be used as an excuse but the Treasury wants its pound of flesh (but will take cash as a preferred alternative).
"Abolish road tax and put it on fuel instead. It's done elsewhere so why not here. You pay more or less according to your road usage. Simple, fair and no way of avoiding it."
I'm not sure where your "here" is but in the UK something like that happens - they just replace "instead" with "as well". However, your "here" might raise this money as a means of paying for construction and repair of roads. In the UK this connection is tenuous to say the least. It's all treated as general taxation with a little doled out for road expenditure.
"this money goes to fixing the roads."
Sort of good idea but here's a better one.
All money paid in VED goes primarily to fixing roads. If and only if there's any left over does it go to the Treasury.
This was a tax previously known as the Road Fund Licence. That, obviously, was embarrassing once the Treasury decided to use it as a form of general taxation.
@X7
Thanks for the last paragraph - until then I thought your posting was ironical.
Such companies are in the business of protecting their customers from threats. Knowledge of such threats is a company trade secret. No successful business is going to share its trade secrets with anybody, not if it wants to remain successful. And I doubt the local state security organisation would ever consider reciprocating.
"Going against his own received wisdom of not buying stakes in companies he doesn't understand"
Received?
Disregarding that, presumably the crux is that the only judgement he - or anyone else - can wield is that they think they understand a company. The evidence in this instance is that he may have thought he understood it but didn't. This seems to have been an exception for him.
An exercise for the reader: what would markets look like if everyone really did understand all the companies all the time?
"The article states it was the "decommissioned" website that was decommissioned back in September. So if it was decommissioned before the breech, why wasn't the data removed? Or was it breeched before it was decommissioned?"
It might turn on what's meant by "remove". If the database is simply dropped the data's still sitting there on disk. The next DC/Cloud customer who acquires that partition takes a look and finds it. Not a problem if the disk was encrypted but if it wasn't...
I've seen this on leased kit - the previous user's data was sitting there. I've also spent time ensuring that borrowed kit got scribbled on before returning it.
"At some point during the genesis of the universe, there would have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and they should have annihilated one another."
We live on a planet that clearly consists of matter. I don't think anybody has suggested that odd bits of the solar system that come crashing into us are antimatter either so it looks as if the rest of the solar system is matter and probably the rest of the galaxy as well. But if one looks at other galaxies is there any way of determining that they're all matter other than assuming uniformity? Is there any basis for knowing that half the galaxies we see aren't entirely anti-matter?
"There are wide variety of independent observations which all lead to the same conclusion that there is some matter we can't see."
But don't these all add up to much the same thing - observations failing to confirm one theoretical prediction or another?
There also seem to be a variety of independent experiments that have failed to identify what it might be. At the very least there ought to be some consideration that the observations are falsifying the hypothesis or hypotheses on which the predictions are based. Or is it going to be a case of science advancing one obituary at a time?
"If dark matter exists (i.e. if our current understanding of gravity is correct) there must be about four times as much of it as ordinary matter."
And given that dark and ordinary matter interact via gravity then surely gravity should cause them to clump together. I should weigh even more than I do given that some dark matter should have attached itself to me.
