Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"You can play the same game with real cars, by strapping a flashing blue & red light to your car roof. You'll quickly discover that it's illegal."
What about a flashing white light? Through red and blue filters it looks red and blue. They'd also need to check for green as a control.
"These are interrelated from different government or business offices which have separately identified you. Your passport, license, birth certificate, a document addressed to you."
All from different places and all forged before uploading.
"If two or three trusted samples are held in different organisations and can be cross checked there is improved trust"
...and a potential offence under the DPA.
"That aside, their internet banking does work on Mozilla on Linux - not only that but I find it works *better* on Mozilla on Linux than it does on Windows."
It worked perfectly well for me. This came when their clunky arrangement for online payment from a current account to a credit card fell over in the middle & I got in touch to give them a friendly heads-up. I couldn't get past the "what are you using bit". They repeated this in writing. I didn't even want them to support my software - I just wanted them to support their own.
Last time I looked at HSBC group in the form of 1st Direct there was the admonishment that you shouldn't use it on a LAN. Now I can see that they were probably thinking of "don't use in in an internet cafe/public library/office network". But without digging out an ancient dial-up modem - if I could find one, I couldn't use my home laptop because it connects to the net via a TCP/IP connection to the router which I reckon makes it a LAN. I told them about it. Months later they were still saying the same thing and, of course, it gives them wriggle room if anything goes wrong.
"You're lucky to have a local branch, ours closed in July, so our "local" branch is now 20 miles away."
When I told HSBC I'd be closing my account (as they'd closed the most convenient local branch) they asked me to come in to discus it. I offered to come into that same branch. They failed to take me up on my offer. As to internet banking - that was the other reason: they insisted they didn't support Mozilla on Linux.
"That only happens when senior manglement is capable of looking beyond its own nose."
Been there too. Repeated requests for more memory turned down until an OS upgrade put the system into severe thrashing at which point the vendor was summoned to add more memory PDQ and promises made to be more responsive to requests in future. Yeah, right.
"Of course some argue that the informal, ad hoc approach is perfectly adequate, and that getting too ‘procedural' is more trouble than it's worth. Fair enough if you have a modest and relatively slow-moving IT environment, and a small IT team in which everyone always knows what everyone else is up to."
I once had a gig providing 2 weeks holiday cover in a very small DBA team with a week either side handing over. Most of the 2 weeks was spent on the paperwork to add another 2Gb chunk or two to the database. As far as I know the entire machine was devoted to running the database and the applications running on it. I don't suppose the operations team which had to add the space from the LVMS was any bigger than the DBA team but I never set eyes on them. I don't think that buseiness exists any longer.
"However, suspect currently ARM's IP is assigned to a UK entity and hence all profits that accrue are subject to UK taxes."
I'd expect it was assigned to a UK entity, ARM. ARM and its assets are now owned by a non-UK company. If it was assigned to some entity other why would SoftBank have bought ARM?
"Isn't it amazing that poor uneducated oiks tup north think democracy is more important than money - unlike so many wealthy toss pots sitting in their metropolitan echo chambers."
It would be well to remember that once we had a home grown motor industry. Its workers largely wrecked it in the '70s. Far Eastern investment gave us a second. It looks like its workers are now doing the same thing. Do you think anybody's going to give us a third?
"Apparently SSP has a mirror data centre and it could have switched its operations there, but the decision was taken to try to repair the main one as the mirror was some 15 minutes behind"
Did they take time to think what the mirror was for?
It all sounds like a PHB stepping in and deciding what was the best. The fact that the underlying problem recurred suggests they didn't get to grips with what it actually was before going ahead with an attempted restore.
"including the pensions trainwreck which is slowly unfolding and will result in stupidly high income tax levels within 15 years simply to pay Boomers who didn't bother saving enough"
You could look at a few other factors there. Such as Brown's changing the taxation of dividends received by pension funds which was quite obviously a form of taxing the future. And such as pumping more and more cash into the economy, lowering interest rates and hence returns on savings hence ensuring that nobody can save enough. "Enough" is moving further and further out of reach..
"And that last point is important. Leavers may have 'won the referendum', but that does not entitle them to dictate how things will be."
I wouldn't look at it like that. It was their idea. It should be up to them to make it work - or not. In fact they've been tasked with just that. They should, of course, be given criteria as to what would be acceptable. I agree that their efforts should then be put to a final vote once they're able to confirm they think they can meet the criteria.
"They may not even be the majority now."
I tend to agree with you although I noted an item on the Beeb's news saying that 2/3 of adults are positive about Britan's future post Brexit. However it was an opinion poll so to make sense of that I'd need to know what the questions were.
"innocence until proven guilty has no veracity in a court of law, the onus is upon you (that being me) to prove your innocence by disproving the statements of the police officers"
That sounds like instant grounds for appeal. It also sounds like a magistrate not a judge.
[Edit. Just seen your response; it was a magistrate. This is a real cause for concern.]
Apart from anything else, in a jury trial the jury is the tribunal of fact, not the judge. It's standard procedure for the judge to tell the jury that they must be convinced beyond reasonable doubt, that it's up to the prosecution to prove its case, not the defendant.
In the so-called Diplock courts in NI (i.e. trials without jury) the judge does become the tribunal of fact. In that case the judge gives a reasoned statement of how he reached his verdict, something that juries don't do, and in those I've heard the accused having to prove innocence wasn't a factor. And to forestall any comments on that I've heard both magistrates and judges dismiss cases.
"Corresponding with The Register, Sir David explained how in his experience such bulk hacking powers were necessary for law enforcement purposes on the internet, rather than just being necessary for national security reasons."
His experience clearly doesn't include such legal concepts as the presumption of innocence or due process of law. Bulk surveillance runs counter to both. If we chuck them away just what sort of society are we supposed to be protecting? Not a free one.
"The fact is, Windows is and always has been a failure that needed re-writing but Microsoft has spent 2 decades trying to cover it up."
Somebody will be along shortly to tell you that you can't say things like that because Windows is wonderful, object-oriented, more modern in design than all these Unix-derived OSs and that drive letters aren't in the least clunky.
Nevertheless you might have a point.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing to a previous winning streak of 1500 days of 100% uptime. It's not the same as promising 100% uptime in future."
It's also not the same as continuing to claim 100% uptime after that streak had come to an end even though it might have been a far better record than some others. And then there's always the traditional "small number of customers affected".
"Unfortunately the party that wanted brexit is not in power"
The EU has divided both major parties for decades. Cameron's problem, as with his predecessors, was a bunch of vocal anti-EU MPs who had been threatening to split the party for years. The vote was an attempt to silence them which back-fired.
Now they've got what they ostensibly wanted. The more senior of them have now been given the task of fronting it. Personally I think a few more of them should have been added to the punishment squad. So although there isn't an anti-EU party as such (other than UKIP) the anti-EU faction of the governing party has been given the job of clearing up its own mess which is about as close as you can get.
@Commwsonk
As you seem to realise, there are areas where business and workers' interests align and some where they don't. On the whole EU membership belongs to the former - it has brought businesses and hence employment into the UK which might otherwise have been located elsewhere. To vote against that as an expression of justified dissent against zero hours contracts brings to mind sayings about nose & face.
"What has this do with factories?"
ITYF that the letter from which the article quoted selectively dealt with this issue as well.
Brexit affects industries across the board and Japan has investments in many of them. What Leave voters have managed to ignore is that those investments, and others, were made on the basis of the UK being in the EU. Once the UK is no longer in the EU that is no operative. The question then becomes how closely the UK shadows the way the EU does things and how good an access it gets to the single market (which, of course, is going to mean accepting things like free movement of labour).
The letter is a reminder of this. The irony, for want of a better word, is that some of those investments were in the heartlands of Vote Leave. All those Leavers there who thought they were sticking to the EU are apt to find they were sticking it to themselves.
" I am really sure that all the people which voted Leave in Sunderland will love being shown the door when the Nissan plant there shuts the doors. Because that is _EXACTLY_ what Leave means economically."
That's OK. They'll be able to get seasonal work in Lincolnshire picking potatoes when all the eastern Europeans have been thrown out.
"Like it or not .doc and .xls are the defacto standards and have been for, what, 20 years now."
Apart from the move to .docx & .xlsx these formats have been a moving target, ensuring that users had to keep repurchasing what they'd already bought if they needed to open files of allegedly the same format written by later versions of the S/W.
They never were open standards. Open standards for files are even more important than open source for the applications that use them.
"So the Irish Government are forcing austerity on the public, and refusing to take due taxes from Apple."
The Irish government may have calculated that the Irish economy might benefit more from having Apple operating in the country and maying minimal direct taxes than not operating there at all and paying none.
"As I said nobody is even taking Ireland to task on this (they should be though) - just simply that it's anticompetitive for companies in their own state."
You've almost got it. They're not taking Ireland to task on tax evasion. You've nailed it in one word: anticompetitive. Anticompetitive for companies in another state is state aid and that's exactly what they're being taken to task over. I said "almost" because you still think they should be being taken to task for something different.
"One state is sponsoring tax evasion in other states."
In what way? Apple aren't being accused of evading taxes, not even in Ireland so how can anybody be "sponsoring" them to do so - whatever that might mean?
"State aid" and "tax evasion" have specific meanings in law. You can't successfully accuse someone of one thing when the circumstances that define it don't fit that particular case. You should at least consider the possibility that the EU's lawyers understand the definitions better that you do.
