Posts by Doctor Syntax

Crumbs. Exceedingly good cakes, meat dressing price hike in wake of the Brexit

Re: stir and stoke

"England may or may not do alright"

Do you have similar predictions for Wales, Scotland & N. Ireland? - although we might be able to leave Scotland out of it after Indyref 2.

"Same applies to Walkers Crisps. ... Surely they don't import spuds!"

No, but they and the farmers producing the spuds buy the energy to fertilise, harvest and transport the spuds, fry them, make the packaging and distribute them at dollar denominated prices. They're realistic costs although there might be an excuse to increase margins there, which will probably be taken up in the longer run with wage rises when the employees get hit with all the other price rises consequent on more expensive imports.

Re: Clickbait

"The chances that the UK Government will roll back 30 years worth of policies promoting London and the South East as the be all and end all of world are rather remote I feel."

I think you're confusing two issues. Increasing concentration of employment in large cities is unsustainable - far too much time and energy is wasted on commuting ever-increasing distances.

On the other hand "the city", be it in one place or many, accounts for a large proportion of the national income and we'll be very much worse off without it. Especially if May wants to use some of that income as state aid to keep motor manufacturing from migrating to a bigger home market.

Re: Oh dear

"I live in a country who got fed up with the ten-yearly devaluation and joined the Euro hoping for a less easy and more intelligent solution to dealing with the reality."

I suspect one reason we kept out of the Euro was the realisation that it seemed impossible to set an economic policy that worked out right for all parts of the UK let alone a whole continent.

Brown thought he had a winner to end boom and bust: set interest rates at a level depending on inflation excluding housing inflation and at a time when a lot of manufacturing was being outsourced to cheap labour countries. It was going really well until the consequent humongous credit boom collided with reality.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

"When will this spate of Brexit hoodoo economics ever end?"

When reality catches up with it. By then it will be far too late.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

You pay something out of your wages called 'National Insurance' which are supposed to fund those...

"Supposed" is the operative word there. NI has been part of general taxation for many years.

The Treasury really, immensely, tremendously hates with a vengeance the very idea specific taxes going to specific expenditure as it wouldn't be able to get its claws on them. It invented an ugly word to describe them: "hypothecated". Would you want to pay something as nasty-sounding as a hypothecated tax? Of course if you knew that NI went to the NHS, pensions etc. or Vehicle Excise Duty under its old name of Road Fund was spent on roads you'd think it was a good idea.

Ideally NI would go direct to the relevant spending departments and VED would go direct to the DoT & Highways Agency and even a contribution to the NHS to cover the costs of treating RTA injuries. That would force governments to be a bit more upfront about general taxation levels.

And a final point about NI. I take it you pay NI as part of PAYE. Do you realise that you only pay employee's NI? Freelancers pay both employee's and employer's contributions. Maybe you didn't know that.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

It's only because the gov wants needs to clear it's debts that we are all suffering.

FTFY or nearly. Damn difficult to strike through an apostrophe.

Re: My toothpaste

"We really need to consign that completely illogical system to history."

Along with metric. Do things right. Binary would be a bit cumbersome but octal or hex would be fine. The evolutionary chance that gave us 5 digits on each hand is a pretty dumb basis for a numbering system.

"The biggest cost to most businesses is their employees, not the cost of raw materials."

So either the employees absorb the effect of rising cost of imports on their purchases or they get paid more. Either that biggest cost increases or employees subsidise their employer. Never mind, they're getting back control.

"Exports are up for the moment"

And yet...https://www.ft.com/content/2ffab0dc-d7dd-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e

New Windows 10 privacy controls: Just a little snooping – or the max

Re: Relevant ads?

No such thing.

Re: What about automatic updates, automatic drivers updates ?

"So more and more PCs with Windows 10 Home will go BSOD thanks to Microsoft"

In future they'll go GSOD. Green is good. Or did I mishear?

"And 'clearing' the data probably means hiding and definitely not deleting the data."

It makes no difference either way. Even if they are deleting it only the most brainwashed will think they are. In the future this has to be Microsoft's biggest problem: once you lose people's trust it's very, very difficult to get back.

Re: bah

"I'm sure Microsoft does indeed work hard to protect their users from malware and hackers, but who protect us against Microsoft?"

Or

"With friends like these, who needs enemies"

Re: Terry Myerson is the Endpoint Antichrist

"He does seem exceptionally full of it."

But is he exceptional inside Microsoft or just normal?

Re: Rule number 0

"Hows that work in the real world though? Does this not mean you have to reboot into Linux everytime you want to check email"

No. It means you boot into Linux or BSD in the first place.

If you need something that's Windows only and doesn't run under Wine you either reboot into a Windows partition or, preferably, Windows on a VM. And you'd be surprised to find out for how many people that evaluates to never.

Re: It's getting a bit warm in this water

"I'm sure it's buried somewhere in the 45 page privacy policy."

The trick of the privacy policy is that there's nothing buried in it. It goes to all that length to avoid saying how they'll limit themselves. They say they'll keep details of accounts, transactions etc. That sounds sensible - of course they need details of any accounts and transactions they have with you. But if you understand what you're reading you'll realise that they don't limit themselves to that, they don't limit themselves at all.

Re: Or... no snooping at all

"it may be worth blocking Win10 from talking to its masters but ... in both VM and "naked" version: you still need it to patch"

Why?

You don't need to protect against the big bad internet it doesn't see.

If it's working as you need it to work you don't need to change it (especially if, as in some cases, the patch makes it stop working as you want).

If it's not working as you want you should have installed something else that did in the first place.

"Trust must be earned, not dispensed from a mealymouthed blog post."

Or

"If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here."

Binary star bash-up should add new light to Northern Cross in 2022

“If we’re right it would mean the science is already done,”

Whether he's right or not the science is only done when observation confirms the theory - or otherwise.

This'll be the next thing Trump crows about: Apple assembling servers on American soil

Re: What's old is new again

"Actually, looking at the logic board"

I take it we're back to the Mac Classic. Is there any indication of where the board was assembled?

Back in the day the UK govt - I think it started with them but seems to have become an EU thing - had the Great Idea: we must have a chip industry. So they came up with the wheeze of imposing a duty on imported components - that's components imported as such, not as parts of assemblies. This would make it cheaper to buy components from this great British chip industry that would come into being.

If you actually looked at any board you'd see something like the Mac Classic - components from all over the globe. And even the marking on the packaging didn't necessarily reflect where the die inside it was made. It would have been hopeless to avoid duty on all the components to assemble a board by sourcing them locally because it would have required the UK or the EEC as it then was to be unique in being able to provide everything. However you could avoid the tax very easily by assembling the entire board overseas.

Any effect that had was to reduce local assembly of boards so there was no home market for the wonderful new industry which consequently never sprung into existence. I never realised this nonsense was still in operation - and at an EU level - until I heard that Raspberry Pi had run into it when they decided to assemble boards here.

If, as a government, you want to encourage manufacturing of any particular type of product, or manufacturing in general, it's a good idea to set about maximising the home market first. I'm not sure if it's an idea that's entered the minds of many politicians or would-be politicians.

How Apple exploded Europe's crony capitalism

"Today you can walk into a mall in Shenzhen, and half an hour later you are a phone OEM."

Or a front for a Chinese S/W company that wants to own your customers?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/15/android_phoning_home_to_china/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/20/more_androids_carry_phonehome_firmware/

Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

"Nokia's handset division failed because Nokia didn't have the technical ability to develop a useable OS and touch screen environment."

I thought it was more of a lack of ability to develop several successfully at the same time and a managerial ability to settle on just one.

UK Parliament suddenly remembers it wants to bone up cyber security *cough* Russia *cough*

Breeched

You keep using that word....

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/breech

Snapchat chooses London for international headquarters

So an business promoting itself on communication security bases part of its operation in GCHQ-land? Presumably its servers are elsewhere, or isn't it going to tell its customers about their communications being logged?

Rethink on bank cybersecurity rules might only follow major bank breach, says expert

Re: Smile/Cooperative Bank Poor account reset Security.

"I won't be the only one looking to leave the bank over this bullshittery."

You're not but with branches closing all over where do you go?

I'd been waiting for YBS to roll out their Norfolk & Peterborough (or whatever) current accounts to the rest of their franchises but it looks as if they're trying to phase it out; I was told they're not accepting new customers.

"High street banks, able to deal with issues in-branch"

What are these branches of which he speaks? "High street" banks are scarcely worth the name, they're closing branches as fast as they can and their approach to the "customer experience" he refers to is about the same as the "user experience" that you can expect when the UX folk take over your preferred software. The whole shower exist solely on the basis that we need to deal with one of them; I don't know that any of them could get customers based on customer service.

Is! Yahoo! dead?! Why! web! biz! will! rename! to! Altaba! – the! truth!

But..but..but Haven't comments on previous stories assumed that Verizon was buying the whole shooting match, Alibaba holding included and calculated the value of the rest as $4.8 billion - $Alibaba and come up with a negative figure? Now it transpires that it's that negative valued rest that Verizon are paying positive amounts for (assuming it doesn't all fall through).

Re: Does Flickr have a future in this brave new world?

"My advice: save your collection now, because it will probably disappear with barely a warning."

Applies to pretty well anything cloud-based. Even if it doesn't disappear entirely it might suddenly be truncated because you're using it too much.

What do you call a firm that leaves customer financials unencrypted on a hard drive? RSA

"Why was the drive not encrypted before it was deployed?"

Maybe they couldn't rely on a post-it note with the key staying stuck on.

Re: Contradiction

"the ability to know that its data has been stolen"

Hindsight is a very powerful route to knowledge. Presumably they knew it had gone AWOL because they couldn't find it when they wanted to use it. I'm not sure from the report that the disk wasn't simply reformatted & reused but they're not in a position to know that it was and had to take a worst case view.

“The ICO fined us for not foreseeing the risk"

Isn't foreseeing risks what insurance companies do for a living?

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

Re: S40 essential part of Levenson

The very notion that someone might be made liable for legal costs of an action that they did not start, and in which they are found blameless, flies so hard in the face of justice that "all right-thinking people" should recognize the iniquity that it embodies.

Indeed. Maybe that's why the Act says "the court must award costs against the defendant unless satisfied that ... it is just and equitable in all the circumstances of the case to make a different award of costs or make no award of costs."

Re: Unprecedented?

"Is this the first law that requires the party being sued to pay up, win or lose?"

No, because it doesn't. There's wriggle room to allow the court to make up its mind, even to the extent of making the plaintiff pay the defendant's costs if the circumstances justify that.

Re: There are two sides to this argument

What should we call it? The Press Council? The Press Complaints Commission?

As Smooth Newt says, it's been tried and we're at the present situation because of the way that turned out.

Re: re. Quadsys

"With the new rules, the journalists will pay the legal fees even if the suit is obviously frivolous."

Except they don't. Go and read what the legislation actually says; the article actually provides a link. If the circumstances are appropriate the court can make different awards or no awards at all. I can see nothing at all in there to stop the court awarding the defendant's costs against the plaintiff.

"If only this was about accuracy."

Indeed. In the interests of accuracy, go back to the article, follow the link to the relevant part of the Act and read 40.3(b).

Anyone thinking the Act allows them to start a frivolous lawsuit for free could end up with a nasty and expensive shock. If the court feels the circumstances are appropriate that provision enables them to dump the defendant's costs on the plaintiff.

"The legislation makes the assumption that fault will only ever be on the part of the publisher, and completely ignores the possibility that someone will try and silence a story they don't like."

Actually it doesn't.

From 40.3

the court must award costs against the defendant unless satisfied that—

...

(b)it is just and equitable in all the circumstances of the case to make a different award of costs or make no award of costs.

In other words, the court can take its own view if the circumstances make that appropriate.

Could the Act have been more open-ended about this? Maybe, but if it were the case of phuzz vs the Mail would you want it written any differently?

Verizon is gonna axe its 'unlimited' data hogs

When does unlimited not mean unlimited?

More to the point, when does it mean unlimited?

Re: To all the wireless carriers...

"It's simply infantile to say you're going to ignore contractual details."

It's infantile - or maybe some other word - to advertise "unlimited" without having first worked out what that might mean and whether you'll be able or prepared to deliver it.

If you don't mean it, don't advertise it.

UKCloud: We ARE cheaper than Microsoft or AWS online storage

"they are not a US company or have a US parent company ... I'm sure that despite Safe Harbour 2.0, they are making that a primary selling point when pitching to customers."

It depends on where and who those customers are. If they're in the EU or UK customers intending to hold data of EU data subjects it's not going to be good enough post May's reneging on ECHR.

Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

Re: Who cares?

"when did she realise her dreams were incompatible with supporting Remain....I'd guess a few days into the campaign someone smacked her with a clue stick."

I doubt it was as late as that nor that anyone had to alert her to it. I think she was a closet leaver all along but expected remain to win so nominally went along with that.

Re: If the UK doesn't, the US won't

4) 3 + repeated attempts to grant US adequacy alternating with trips to the courts to thwart them.

Would it be too much to hope that 3 brings about a final realisation that Brexit really wasn't a good idea with the electorate punishing those politicians who supported it.

NB there's no requirement for an electorate to remain consistent, especially when it finally realises which side of its bread was buttered.

Re: Who cares?

"Unfortunately this isnt a brexit problem but a politics problem."

The two are not independent. Brexit is a necessity for May's escaping international scrutiny on human rights by reneging on the ECHR. She is clearly prepared to chuck substantial swathes of the UK economy under the bus in order to achieve this dubious political end. The most charitable explanation I can think if is extremely blinkered vision.

Re: I'm not sure where the "We" is in the appointment process.

We as a nation. Wasn't that what Brexit is supposed to be about?

Top cop: Strap Wi-Fi jammers to teen web crims as punishment

"top cops’ trade union the Police Superintendents’ Association"

I think you're confusing them with ACPO.

Man jailed for 3 days after Texas cops confuse cat litter for meth

Clearly someone doesn't know what a presumptive test is.

It's a test which is quick and easy and responds positively to what you're looking for plus possibly quite a few other things. e.g. there are several presumptive tests for blood which are actually tests for peroxidase* activity, blood being one of several substances, including fruit juices, which have this property. So although a stain might give a positive result one would have to follow it up with a more specific test for blood. In my day it would have been an immunoelectrophoretic test which would have confirmed whether it was blood but also blood of the species (usually human) that you were testing for.

The key thing is that all it does is tell you to look further. It is not of evidential value.

*We discarded one of these as a component of the kit was known to be carcinogenic. I wasn't happy when years later I discovered from my daughter that it was still being used with enzyme-linked antibodies as a microscopy stain.

Re: Road site test?

"All the cop movies that I've watched have the cops doing on the spot tests by simply sniffing a little of the power or tasting it ..."

It's a reliable test for cyanide.

NASA taps ESA satellite Swarm for salty ocean temperature tales

Re: Hmmm....

Note how the proportion occupied by direct measurement is tiny compared to the rest - and how jittery it is compared to the rest.

"Conductivity, measured in siemens per meter"

Presumably a conductivity meter.