Posts by Doctor Syntax 42273 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Unfortunately - unless you rewrite huge swathes of company law, you will have a problem."
Leave company law alone but amend insolvency law to prevent a company being liquidated whilst criminal proceedings or fines are pending with the body issuing the fines joining HMRC in getting first dibs at the assets.
"almost all PCs still have slot-like 16:9 display aspect ratios"
So, you assume that everyone else ought to have your preferred aspect ratio? Why do we keep getting this stupid pattern of "I prefer/need $OPTION so everyone else ought to have it too"?
"How, then, did we afford to get electricity and water to just about anybody who wants it, even in our relatively impoverished past?"
Gradually. I grew up in a rural house that initially didn't have mains water (actually when we got it we still preferred the spring for drinking water anyway) nor electricity until after we left in 1958.
We're looking at a copper network that was installed over decades. Replacing that with FTTP would be a huge investment. Deciding who'll do that is secondary to finding the money. As you point out the cable installers lost money even though they were able to cherry pick the compact high density urban areas. Then there's the rate at which such a replacement might take happen; and hence working out how large a workforce might be or could be assembled for the task, how many roads could be dug up simultaneously etc.
And now we have muppets thinking that all it takes to roll out FTTP to the whole country is the right wording in an OFCOM report.
"the futility of doing something like this on a Friday"
This is actually OK. You just have to budget for spending your entire weekend fixing it. Providing you do that either (a) everything will work just fine or (b) you'll still not have everything fixed by 27:00 hours on Sunday evening. This is the consequence of the uncertainty principle running into time dilation.
" Security staff could get in the way to prevent the trolley going, but not stop him."
I find that odd.
Many years ago I met an ex-SOCO, now local station sergeant in the local supermarket. He told me he was following the store detective. He suspected she was slipping stock into customers' shopping baskets and then detaining them and getting them arrested for shop-lifting when they left the store. I think he eventually caught her.
I can never understand what anyone's saying on my mobile nor, indeed, on my landline if the other end of the call's on a mobile. Except - when I get into my car the built-in phone does a remote SIM connection to the mobile and all calls are clear as crystal. Weird.
Also weird is the fact that I had "Home" as a phone-book entry and the carphone wouldn't recognise it. I got it to read out the phone book and it pronounced it as Hulme. Very odd. Do the manufacturers think that a lot of customers need to call people called Hulme-spelled-Home but rather fewer need to call home?
"This made it possible to measure call handling time, time spent talking, time spent on hold and time spent wrapping up calls, metrics call centres love to harvest"
Metrics which have a common factor of being easy to measure. Calls closed to callers satisfaction? Far too difficult to measure, possibly too embarrassing for management to be aware of but the only real measure of a call centre's effectiveness.
"anyone who says back pain doesn't affect productivity has never had back pain!"
Very true. My back pain was the result of a single ill-judged movement when stretching to lower my car off its jack and had dogged me on and off for years. It's aggravated by standing for any length of time. Standing desks & stand-up meetings would have resulted in a lot of time off sick followed by resignation.
"I think it's fucking pathetic that most people can't wire a plug, or do up a compression joint / taped thread."
Given the way plugs are moulded on to mains leads these days the first of those seems to be obsolete these days and sooner or later there'll probably be regulations preventing it. Knowing how to choose the correct replacement fuse is another matter although again that might be regulated into the hands of the sparkies.
I have serious reservations about making things compulsory. Maybe it's a hangover from compulsory games and Latin at school. Having said that I have to admit that my experience of programming was a much resented compulsory course in FORTRAN. Mind you it was only 5 days of which I managed to miss the first by being out of the country doing field work - whatever they did that day it can't have been much as I wasn't disadvantaged.
I don't think it takes much exposure to a subject to discover that it is or isn't something you'll be good at. The field work for which I missed that first day of the FORTRAN course had been in a subject that grabbed my attention on a single day on a field course whilst at school; a day when the weather precluded the scheduled activity and its replacement was largely a matter of luck.
In fact, longer suffering of a subject being badly taught may well be counter-productive and, as others have said here, where do you find the (good) teachers?
Maybe the best approach would be to start with short taster courses concentrating on structured problem solving as much as coding. Provide short teacher training courses for this. If necessary some of the best teachers could work on a peripatetic basis to get it off the ground. It would increase exposure of the subject to the teaching staff so that hopefully more would be drawn into the short course and some of the initial batch could be trained up to offer a fuller course to the pupils who have an interest and aptitude for it.
I refer the hon. gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago. A summons requires a witness to produce some evidence they might have. Apple have the backup which might be evidence. This is a demand for Apple to produce something that they don't have and which isn't evidence.
Yes. I've had plenty of those. They're called witness summonses. A summons can also call on a witness to produce in court some item of evidence that they possess. What's being attempted here is to call on someone to produce something that (a) isn't evidence and (b) they don't possess. That's a radical departure from standard procedure.
"The big question is why the judge and FBI went to such great lengths to pretend this was a one off when they full well knew that was quite simply impossible in the US legal system."
According to a previous report here the answer to part one is that the FBI assured the magistrate that it was a reasonable demand and Apple's view wasn't asked for. The answer to the second part, why the FBI did it is pretty obvious to most of us.
@ Peter R. 1
From long experience in N Ireland - where, incidentally terrorism was substantially financed from N America with the US govt apparently turning a blind eye:
1. In the event of a suspected booby-trapped device the usual response was to disrupt the device which could be anything from a robot-controlled shotgun to a controlled explosion. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
2. Yes, there has been experience of getting useful information out of a car used in a crime. I've examined a few vehicles myself back in the old days. But the value was almost invariably in terms of whether there was any evidence that could connect the suspects with the vehicle. After a few successes in court torching the vehicle became normal procedure so no evidence was left, One of the first things you have to learn about criminal investigation is that you use what's available and not what you wish you had.
Concerning your straw man. Let's say the manufacturer has produced the key for you. The car is still potentially booby-trapped. Are you going to be the one who goes forward to check? Better go ahead with the controlled explosion.
" the latest Adobe Reader DC (the "up"grade from v11) ALSO supports ads. As a matter of fact, it seeks to cut out the middle man from what I could find in the Terms it wants you to accept (which is when I started to pay attention - previous Reader updates did not ask for new Terms to be accepted)....And I don't even run Windows."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okular
"a cramped and unpleasant 16:9 screen"
Aspect ratio snobbism.
A wider aspect screen allows me to compare two documents side-by-side. It's also a help in transcribing very wide documents. Just because it doesn't fit your use case doesn't mean it doesn't work for others.
SWMBO prints out multiple copies of handouts for her patchwork class every week although, to be fair, it's mostly a case of me photocopying them as she insists on writing them by hand.
This is accomplished on an HP 3020, years old, still going strong. If I'd been tempted to replace it by a colour version I'd be put off by the experience of my daughter's work-supplied all-in-one HP with its paper tray which jammed partly in after she took it out to refill. It was difficult to believe that the two machines were built by the same company.
BTW, when I looked at the pre-release W10 last year it didn't, at that time, have a driver for the 3020. But the HP site had a W8 version which worked OK.
HP seems to be an odd hybrid. It used to build stuff really well and at least some of that old stuff is still supported but new stuff reminds me of some of the domestic appliances of the '70s - well enough built to get out of the factory door.
"My institution is blocking access to webmail, and there are strict rules against storing material on the hospital system"
Two networks, a secure one and one with internet access. I've worked on such a site - not medical but the production network had data that had to be secured, the office didn't.
"The bottom line was that the Doctors put their convenience above everything else and they were supported in this by the senior management."
And what about the letter that you asked them to sign? The one that started "I confirm that I have been warned that..." and ends "I have evaluated the risks and have taken the deliberate decision not to act. I accept complete and personal responsibility for the consequences of any IT security breaches including, but not confined to temporary or permanent damage to equipment, breaches of the Data Protection Acts and patient privacy and injury to or loss of life of patients. I agree that this letter may be produced in evidence to any subsequent inquiry including Coroners' courts.". The one you offered along with the draft of an affidavit that you'd made an appointment with your solicitor to swear out if they didn't sign.
"That would need the government to find a very large sum of money to buy it from the pension funds that mostly own it today."
And that's only the start. The government would have to find funds for all Openreach's investments. After a while all the whiners presently calling for it to be nationalised would then be wanting some further change on account of the lack of investment.
Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In this case, queue up for your party line. And that's not a political term.
"And if you are altering the schema often enough for that to be an issue, you have other problems."
This is the problem with the code first, design* later approach.
However you should have taken whoever told you that to one side & explained views - although it sounds like the sort of shop where that approach could lead to a tangle all on its own.
*Design? You should be so lucky.
