Posts by Doctor Syntax 41742 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Sounds like it's not been thought through. At all."
Sounds like you haven't read the comments where this has been dealt with a number of times. No, I'm not going to explain it to you now. All you have to do is go back up thread and read the several quotations given from official sources.
Short memories. A week ago we had this article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/07/data_protection_bill_draft/
In that there's a link to https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/635900/2017-08-07_DP_Bill_-_Statement_of_Intent.pdf
In there is a brief description of what's proposed which includes the following qualification: as long as it is no longer necessary or legally required for the grounds on which it was originally collected, or there are no overriding legitimate grounds for processing. (p13 for those who want the entire paragraph).
That should cover the requirement to retain data for HMRC. It's a basis for at least arguing that the difficulty of removing from backups is an overriding legitimate ground for not doing so but you'd then need to have a plan for removing the data after a restore - retain the script for doing the original removal might be a start. It might be a good idea to look at just how many generations of backup you really need.
OTOH is you're retaining data about previous customers to sell on or pester them you have my complete lack of sympathy.
"Just remember burglars are more agile than developers."
Not always. A few have got stuck in the windows they were trying to climb through (splendid recent example http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/burglar-jailed-after-getting-stuck-in-bathroom-window-a7562221.html ) and a few have fallen through roofs or roof-lights.
"Ever gone away and not been sure if you remembered to lock it?"
1. What Roland6 said.
2. The door has a glass panel on either side. Therefore with a cylinder lock (AKA Yale* lock) latch it can never be locked at all. If the back of the door is accessible from outside then it can't be locked without a key or combination on the inside as well as the outside. A glass panel in or beside the door combined with a cylinder lock is a gift to B&E merchants.
Some of the comments in this thread reveal a worrying naivety about keys. Does nobody change the door lock when they move into new premises? A few years ago my daughter moved into a new house having received "all" the keys from the previous owner. As she was moving in a neighbour rolled up with another front door key that she'd had for some time that the previous owner had forgotten about. I'd have changed her lock anyway but it moved things on a bit.
* Yale don't just make cylinder locks. In fact my mortice lock was made by Yale.
"So why is a locksmith needed as this is exactly what the smart lock became after it was bricked by the bad firmware?"
The whole selling point of this (apart from being a cool IoT cloud thingy) is that the property owners don't want to give out the physical key. Unless a temporary lock is fitted, for which the key can be considered disposable when the original is refitted, then this is just what they have to do. If the repaired lock doesn't also have a change of physical key, their $469 has been wasted.
"a temporary replacement would therefore likely be just some common conventional lock. The lock is still functioning as a conventional lock anyway"
One if the issues cited was giving the physical key to the AirBNB customer. If a conventional lock is fitted once the repaired original is in place the conventional lock can be removed and the physical key for that ceases to be of concern to the owner.
"With only a short window"
That's 5 to 7 working days. Add in up to 4 calendar days to cover weekends, i.e. up to 11 days elapsed time. If you think that's short then you have a point but maybe their customers wouldn't agree with you.
"That points to a seriously well-organized company that is probably intent on keeping its customers and showing how professional it can be in handling issues."
No. If it really cared it wouldn't leave the lock unusable for days or even weeks. It would have paid for a local locksmith to provide a same-day service to replace each customer's lock with some temporary arrangement and then replace that it in due course with the official replacement - if the customer still wanted the official replacement.
Owning up to the mistake is not customer service. Even fixing it in the way they have is not customer service. Customer service is ensuring that the inconvenience to the customer is minimised.
These UK-based AWS data centres that HMG are so keen on using - when do they get built? In advance of being used, obviously (I trust MPs can work that out for themselves without expert help).
Does that need money? Yes (same proviso).
If, instead of borrowing money Amazon pay it out of existing sales on other business what does it do to the profits on which tax is paid?
What seems to be suggested in TFA is that rather than expand their business with money taken from their own sales Amazon should build up a big debt mountain in order to pay UK taxes. The distressing thing is that this probably makes sense to Hodge. After all when she was in govt. her party proved pretty adept at encouraging the building of debt mountains. Maybe she forgets that it didn't work out well.
"Where did I suggest that?"
Maybe he assumed you must have defined it. Given that the scheme made no sense to the rest of us it we couldn't even begin to work out how it could have been fair.
I think you may have mis-remembered what you read. Turnover isn't a company's equivalent to salary. As a taxable figure it means nothing until you know what it cost to produce that turnover.
"Sorry to correct you, group traits are one thing, however they are totally useless for finding the specific profile(s) you might need to perform specific roles."
Which is what you said first time round and with which I agreed.
The point is that when you've made a series of such individual selections for similar roles you shouldn't be surprised to find your group skewed on some criterion or other as, in fact, you found in the example which you went on to quote.
Having obtained your result would you then have felt there was something wrong by having a predominantly female programming team?
"These days you look around and see a lot of bright people from all sorts of backgrounds, and if they're choosing not to work for your company, or worse still not even choosing to specialise in your field of business, learn it at school, etc, that's probably because your corporate culture is unattractive."
Maybe you should go back and reconsider this paragraph. You're saying that some people will actually avoid a field of study because a particular employer in that field has a corporate culture that they find unattractive. Do you really believe that school children not only have a concept of corporate culture but that they know the corporate culture of a particular employer in that field and take that as a basis for choosing what they study?
I studied what interested me and what I thought I was good at. There are a number of things I'd like to have done but which I'm comfortable acknowledging I'd be useless at. These are the factors that guide educational choices, assuming choices are available.
Even as one gets older and comes to grasp the concept of corporate culture why on Earth would one avoid an entire field on the basis of the corporate culture of a single employer within it?
"One thing I have learned to reject is the simple minded belief that individuals can be assessed by looking at a group and guessing."
You are quite correct in this. That's because individuals vary quite a lot, one to another.
However this does not stop you being able to look at groups and discerning that individuals in one group are more likely to display some traits rather than those in others. Your group assessment will be better than your individual assessment.
That's what statistics is all about; ask your scientifically inclined daughter. BTW she will also explain to you what's wrong with the phrase "science and genetics".
"we use it to predict future values of key business metrics"
And how did reality match prediction? Or are those still future values and hence untested? Or are the circumstances such that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because the business works towards those targets in which case there's no evidence that that was the best use of the effort dedicated to it.
"Why?"
So that potential customers get to hear.
"If you want to have it out with Talk Talk, then do it on their official Twitter and Facebook feeds, and then everybody else can enjoy it, and it'll be in Talk Talk's face."
Tempting, but not tempting enough for me to sign up to either Twitter or Facebook.
"At the end of the day people who use ad blockers don't generate us money, and we don't give a shit about your user experience."
I think you've got that back to front. You don't give a shit about our experience so that's why we use ad-blockers. If you want to know why we make it more difficult for you to take your punters' money, go find a mirror.
"When they'd businesses clean up their act and take responsibility for the crapware they peddle, then things will improve."
There's a risk that even if they cleaned up people wouldn't notice because the ad-blockers will hide that. The big question is whether we've already reached that tipping point. I'm surprised that Google haven't put their foot down some time ago. If online advertising implodes they have more to lose than anyone else and a greater ability than anyone else to strangle the crap slingers to stop it imploding.
"Im open to suggestions on how to earn circa £150-200 a month without anyone having to pay a bean."
TL;DR beyond this point.
Presumably every page on your site has useful content other than, maybe, navigational pages. So there's nothing difficult about working out what those reading the page are interested in: they're interested in whatever that page content is. So what you need is a way to get businesses who are in a relevant line of business pay a small amount per month for a static ad to take an interested viewer to their own web site. You could try approaching such businesses directly. It could save them money - at the cost to you of some effort - because it cuts out all the middlemen making and distributing the often irrelevant, punter pissing off, bandwidth hugging crap.
"I'm not sure how the business is going to continue."
That's easy to understand. The advertising industry keeps selling advertising to the advertisers. The fact that everybody hates it making it counter-productive is kept well hidden. The advertising industry is very effective at selling. But what it sells is its own product, advertising. Nothing else.
"Do all the fancy stuff to select which image at the server end"
It doesn't even need to be fancy. You know what page the user's browsing. You know what's on the page because it's your page. So you know what he's interested in. After that it becomes easy to add the relevant ad to the page. So easy, in fact, that the advertiser and publisher need very little in the way of middlemen to take a profit from. Now why do you think the advertising industry doesn't try to sell that solution instead?
"If someone has gone to the trouble of blocking ads and they find a way to get round it, then they are likely to be pissing people off and losing all goodwill, so there is not really any benefit to doing it surely?"
You need to distinguish between the advertisers, those with products or services they want to sell and the advertising industry that delivers advertising to potential customers.
The latter want to push the adverts at you regardless of whether or not it injures the reputation of their clients because they're not selling their clients' products, they're selling their own which is advertising. For them it's profitable to get round ad-blockers. For their mugs clients it's money spent on alienating existing and potential customers but don't expect the advertising industry to tell them that.
John Wanamaker, one of the pioneers of marketing is reputed to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”. Presumably he'd have welcomed ad-blockers because they'd have instantly cut out a lot of his wasted - and very likely counter-productive - spending.
