Posts by Doctor Syntax 40557 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I doubt any of then will be out of a job. I expect a show looking remarkably like Top Gear to show up on some other channel with the same faces fronting it. OTOH Beeb executives will be several 10s of millions short to spend on executive lunches etc - or maybe they won't, they'll cut a few costs elsewhere to make up for the shortfall.
"So why are we paying these buggers anything?"
Because it's the cheapest way of making them go away, otherwise they keep the case going through the courts for the duration of the next few parliaments.
Now el Reg has sorted out the links so we can actually get through to the report Tim was quoting (all these comments & nobody noticed the links were screwed?) I'm not sure what was actually being said. The report isn't the actual paper. It isn't even a review of the original paper. It's a write-up of what's best described as publisher's blurb for the original paper from the University.
The researchers seem to have taken a geographically wide-spread series of samples. What's not clear is whether all the geographic areas show the same restriction which would seem unlikely; there would be little gene flow from the Western European neo to contemporary Oceania, for instance.
Maybe they said that restriction took place separately in each culture at the time that it developed agriculture but if so this doesn't come through clearly in the report.
The mechanism of the restriction must also be open to doubt. It could well be linked to the way in which agriculture spread. If the knowledge & skills were largely passed down from father to son then the spread of agriculture from an area in which it had developed would be the work of a relatively small number of male lines originating in that area. Because agriculture allowed cultures using it to support larger populations those male lines would proliferate faster than those of the hunter-gatherers into whose territory agriculture was spreading.
OTOH, unless it's clarified by legislation or a Statutory Instrument the only way for you or I to actually know whether it's illegal would be a ruling by a court.
In the meantime, consider what might happen if you were to stand with a placard saying "Slow down" just round the corner from a speed-trap. And the efficacy of a defence of "I was only warning drivers they had exceeded the set limit".
If it cuts the income from speeding fines it'll soon be banned. In fact, it might already be illegal. Devices which detect speed-traps are illegal as is warning drivers about speed-traps. "Should travelling downhill cause the vehicle to exceed the legislated speed an alarm is sounded" - this would appear to fall into the same category.
"Of course if the ambassador is fed up with Assange and allows the Swedish police to arrest and remove him"
The ambassador doesn't have to allow the Swedish police to arrest him. All he has to do is to decide that Assange no longer qualifies for asylum. If the Swedish & Ecuadoran authorities are in agreement that the proposed interview is an acceptable procedure and he refuses to be interviewed then maybe that would provide the basis for terminating asylum.
I think this is a problem that's been brewing for years. How do you define and then establish identity?
If I produce a birth certificate and claim to be the person named on it does it prove that I am? No, in fact the certificates specifically say that they are not a proof of identity?
What about National Insurance Number? That is also not a proof of identity.
Some businesses want a recent utility bill or bank statement to prove your identity; the utilities and banks want to go paperless. And such documents would be fairly easy to forge. I had a couple of gigs at one time, one with a real security printer where all waste had to be securely destroyed on site with records kept and the other printing utility bills where waste was overflowing from a skip in the car park.
The identity card would have solved this wouldn't it? More likely it would have brought these problems to light a few years earlier.
Lots of organisations want verified identity but want to throw the problem of verification over the wall for someone else to deal with.
"So I feel somewhat bad for the former chief of MI6, but he failed to maintain proportionality in the activities of Britain's spooks"
In a democracy successful policing means policing by consent. And if you won't own up to what you want to do you have no means to ask for consent.
"Gordon Brown famously changed the method of inflation measurement that he was going to use to uprate benefits, tax bands and so on, from one that included housing costs (RPI) to one that didn't (CPI) in the middle of a housing boom."
The benefits part was only the minor problem. The big one was offloading interest rate policy to the BoE & then instructing them to base it on this same inflation measurement. So in the middle of a housing bubble interest rates were managed by a committee with their fingers super-glued in their ears going "Can't here anything. La la la".
"That XT that I first started on"
With a teletype and a bit of effort I could crash the whole roomful of 1907 that I started on. Now a skiddie can lock out whole gaming networks. That's a hedonic improvement. Somewhere in the middle came crashing a Z80 box by switching on the microscope's xenons. That must have been the low point.
"The solution is clear, make the telcos financially responsible for sustained detectable abuse of their systems."
Solution:
Principle: This is pollution and the polluter pays.
Method: Choose a number, say 147{$currently_unused_digit}. If the recipient considers the call to be spam they hang up and dial that number. The telco credits their A/C by a small fee, say £2 and adds it to the caller's bill plus handling charges. If the call came from a different network they transfer charge the fee plus charges to that network instead who can then bill their customer adding on their own handling charges and so on up the line. If a telco can't work out who to charge: tough and they'll quickly change their business model or keep on paying.
Issues: This would need compulsion from OFTEL: no problem, just make the telcos do it. It would need S/W development upfront which has to be paid for: no problem, the telcos do it and take the cost out of their handling charges. There's the possibility that recipients might mistakenly or deliberately try to charge a genuine call: this would need a bit of statistical work to weed out such errors.
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