Posts by Doctor Syntax 40557 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Perhaps Yahoo and Google should not be blamed for the problems with mainly fraudulent Flash ads to the extent as worked out in this excellent article."
Nope. They're part of the pipe-line. The whole foetid system, end to end, is the problem. Every part of it needs to do their bit, in fact needs to be made to do their bit.
An alternative - or maybe complementary - approach. The websites hosting the ads become liable. It's only fair after all, they want the income so they must accept responsibility. It would then be up to them to push the responsibility back onto the networks they allow to place the ads which then gives them an incentive to revise the whole technology involved so that either a kit approach, a trust system or whatever gets put into place. At present NOBODY has any incentive to do anything except the users who are actually aware of the problem. This needs to change and the only way to do that is to target the most easily accessible point.
Maybe it could be handled by civil liability, maybe by criminal liability but somebody has got to be held responsible or no changes will be made until ad-blockers kill the entire advertising industry. Actually I wouldn't shed any tears were that to happen.
"large spiders... the sort of terrifying, SAS-scaring man-eaters that appear from under the sofa on an October night"
They're males running round looking for a female to mate with. Don't you have even a twinge of fellow feeling for them?
"Technically, I, the site operator, would be breaking the law"
But are you under Russian jurisdiction? Assuming your business isn't in Russia and you don't have a branch office or subsidiary there then presumably not. So can you break a law that applies outside the jurisdiction you're in? (Other, of course, than USian laws where the default assumption of USian politicians and prosecutors is that they apply everywhere.) Where the parties to a contract may be in more than one country it's normal to specify as one of the terms of the contract whose laws should apply; presumably Fb's contract (T&Cs) specify the US.
Although at first sight it appears that this is the sort of thing we European users want to replace safe harbour it isn't. In the safe harbour situation we have someone giving data to a site in their own country, or at least in a country where broadly similar data protection laws apply and having exported to a country where they don't under an unenforceable undertaking to apply similar standards. In the Russian case we have someone voluntarily giving data to a site in another country under whatever DP laws apply in that country.
"They get around regulations by claiming it's a market research call"
AFAIK market research calls come under TPS as well. And as I operate a zero tolerance policy they will be reported no matter how much they apologise. The real problem here is those who call because they think I'm a customer & that's allowed (by the Blair govt so that that excuse is akin to taking business advice from the experts who brought you the big housing bubble and its consequences); these are dealt with by the simple expedient of ceasing to be a customer.
"That's assuming they don't simply base their call centres outside the UK, or not give their number and/or company name so you can't even file a TPS complaint."
The few I receive get the long weight treatment. It seems to be pretty effective as I don't get many. However I did have a missed call the other day which on googling turns out to be a number used for calls from "Microsoft". And I missed it! Colour me disappointed.
"Maybe the telesales are using the telephone directory. Should they delete you from that too?"
In the UK there is such a thing as the Telephone Preference Service. It's a list of phone numbers that shouldn't be called. If a telephone sales organisation is using the telephone book they should filter it against that list.. So in effect the answer to your question is "yes".
And a numbers not to be called list needs no other information than the numbers so your final statement, that they need to remember "you" is false; all they need to remember is a telephone number.
I may be old-fashioned here but in my book a theory is a hypothesis that has been tested by some means which would be able to falsify it and has so far failed to be falsified. A hypothesis is a proposition that is testable in that way even if it hasn't been so tested. "Supposed to" is a long way from either.
"One of which is the rise in the value of housing."
Do we actually mean value here? As opposed to market price?
The value of the house is in the shelter it provides for its inhabitants. House price inflation might push up the market price of the house but the shelter it provides is unchanged unless changes are made to the house itself, say by a developer splitting it into flats.
We really should have learned this by now. We've seen house price inflation put up "valuations" with loans taken out against the supposed new value but as soon as it becomes clear that the loans can't be serviced the prices collapse. Cue printing of money (under one name or another) to try to prop up the financial system. Maybe the "value" of that printed money should be included in the GDP, then the economy would really look efficient. Alternatively we should stop pretending that unsustainable house prices constitute wealth - but that would be really scary.
@Steve Knox
If you follow your own link you will see that E&W practice nowadays is that the if the state takes the land then it must provide compensation. If, therefore, the state wished to clear all existing debt by compulsorily acquiring sufficient property & reselling it it would have to raise an equivalent amount of new debt to do so leaving no reduction in the debt but a tidy profit to the solicitors who carried out the conveyancing.
Such poor reading skills.
From the article:
"Openreach is working with eight communications partners, which will then provide retail services to consumers. The trial is open to all communications providers on equal terms. This means people will have a choice of service provider and any technological developments will benefit the wider industry."
"I remember the 'joy' of using Windows 286...."
So did I. It came as a package from VisionWare which also included an Ethernet board with a BNC connector and an X-server which was, of course, the raison d'etre of the package. And on the other end of the net was an HP running HP Vue desktop which contributed to the subsequent CDE desktop.
Many of the ideas which went to W95 were in there*. Notably there was the start of the menu system but it was a bar with several pop-up menus. The major contribution of W95 was to condense these into a single button with cascading menus. As has been said elsewhere CUA principles were also followed - that's the File Edit etc menus. Those could be implemented in pure text as well as in GUI form.
What MS achieved was to combine a lot of what was already about in such a way that it hit a sweet spot. I've no idea whether this was good luck or good management but they did it. It offered some scope for refinement in implementation and a few features - auto-hide menu bars and multiple desktops for instance. But on the whole it was a feature set that was easier to bugger up than improve as a good many interface designers have proven in the last couple of decades.
*HP New Wave which was an interface revision dropped on top of W3.x also contributed to W95. It introduced the idea of an OO interface, namely that by clicking on a data file the OS would recognise the associated application and start that to open the file. And its text editor had a spill chucker. W95 copyright statements included HP along with the Regents of UCB.
@John 104
I just tried that. It does nothing. But then I'm using KDE on Debian. I don't recall it doing anything with SCO either. Why on earth did H/W manufacturers let themselves get talked into wasting keyboard real estate for a key whose use is limited to one particular OS?
It goes further than this. It's not just a matter of setting targets, it's use of resources. The profitability of a project depends on the number of customers who can be connected for the cost of that project. If resources are fixed then to carry out projects in non-profitable areas means diverting resources from profitable areas. That would mean that fewer people overall would get connected.
Living in a rural area myself I'm quite sensitive to the needs of rural areas but there has to be either a balance. If OR had concentrated on getting the far-flung premises online most people hereabouts would have been/might still be waiting for a connection.
If there is to be a universal service requirement then more resources are needed. That means either taxpayers money or raising prices so those living in easily serviced areas subsidise those who don't - and for the latter to work that would be the wholesale prices; if just BT end-user prices were to be raised the other providers would just cash in and nothing extra would become available. Cue more complaints about subsidies.
And just a reminder - any extra cash wouldn't go as far as might be naively expected as it would be being spent where the costs of connecting customers is highest.
"FTTP is a clear investment in the future"
And a remarkably expensive one compared to FTTC. One cabinet enables connection to a whole bunch of premises. FTTP would require each of those premises to have a fibre connection laid. In some cases there may be existing ducting, in others new ground works would be needed. How many premises could be provisioned in this way for the cost of one cabinet? Do you think any of the companies currently offering FTTP will ever offer services to the sorts of rural customers Bryant was concerned about?
I wonder exactly how much more effective a separated Openreach would be in rolling out FTTC in rural areas without BT's financial resources behind it. And as for the companies listed as offering FTTP it wasn't clear just what areas AQL & Gigaclear are operating in whilst Hyperoptic does show a map of S England the areas where it's registering interest seem considerably greater than those where it's actually taking orders.
I doubt that separating Openreach or bringing more companies into the field would help Chris Bryant's constituents. What's more likely is to find them all fighting like rats over the 10% most profitable areas.
"You were lucky."
It may not be luck. See the Rules post above. If you have documented what the current situation is, what's wrong (& what's right) and WHY (compare with currently accepted good practice) and what needs to be done to recover, complete with priorities, then it becomes difficult for them to argue. Difficult as in not having a legal leg to stand on if it turns nasty.
"I admire your courage in walking away."
I wouldn't usually walk away, I've invested too much time in picking the stuff in the first place. What I do is scoop it all back into the trolley & go to a manned till. But 3 items is about the max for a self-service till, more than that and the cumulative probability of one being queried gets too close to 1. And if you dump all the loose advertising crap out of a magazine before scanning it will fail to recognise it.
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