Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft and Oracle are 'not your trusted friends', public sector bods

Re: So give them the boot - use open source

"Office365 is now the mail of choice - Google can't guarantee to keep the data within the EU apparently."

Neither can MS if a NY judge says otherwise.

Try again.

No, really, the $17,000 Apple Watch IS all about getting your leg over

Re: Was it bling or power?

Gold chain in the neolithic? Nope.

Re: Not sure

Another possibility is that the successful males were those best at cattle stealing.

Not sure

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.

Ford: Our latest car gizmo will CHOKE OFF your FUEL if you're speeding

Re: Don't worry

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".

Re: Why does the UK pander dangerous drivers?

"either trolling or an MP"

Or a spokesperson for Brake.

Don't worry

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.

Document Foundation pledges Office 365 and Google Docs challenger

Re: A Hardware Alternative Too?

Any free OS would suffice as the basis.

YOUR DATA could be SOLD in RadioShack's bankruptcy auction

Re: Customer data, no problem.

01625 545 745 is a good number to give in such circumstances.

Favicons used to update world's 'most dangerous' malware

Re: What will the stooopid do?

"So how do they mastermind all this shit?"

I thought that had been explained by now. If you have to be stupid to reply then the scammers know the replies are from suitably stupid suckers.

"And what's a Ph: ?"

A doctorate that's been doctored?

Assange™ lawyers demand Swedish prosecution files or no London interview

Re: Statute of limitations ...

"Surely the Swedish system would be the same. I can't believe they have a fugitives charter ...."

Do they have provision for trial in absentia as a last resort?

"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.

Standard General bids to save RadioShack from oblivion

"In February, the company issued a release, which said:

...

To effectuate this transaction..."

Remedial English lessons needed..

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Not surprising

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.

UK.gov shovels £15m into training new quantum engineers

"There's a PM who's mouthing platitudes"

This is Vince Cable, not the PM. Former lecturer at LSE (London School of Economics).

It looks like someone has been at work with both smoke, through which cameras might or might not see, and mirrors.

More than 260 suspects charged in UK child abuse crackdown

Re: What does this mean?

"care homes that haven't yet been linked to paedophile celebrities"

Celebrities are irrelevant, both in the specific context and generally. Google Kincora Boy's Home. There were no celebrities there as far as could be determined.

@ Mine's a Guinness

As far as I can make out from the article this is current and from the reports on Dolphin Sq that seems to be historical. Different objectives, different enquiries. Trying to combine them wouldn't help.

‘Digital by default’ agricultural payments halted: Farmers start smirking

As any farmer will tell you

Bracken is an invasive weed.

Re: Oh Dear

I've got two pieces of news for you.

1. Whoever you vote for you still end up with a politician.

2. Whoever you vote for you still end up with the same Civil Service.

Another GDS cockup: Rural Payments Agency cans £154m IT system

There's an effective way to ensure these systems get delivered working on time.

On the due date senior staff in the govt agency/ministry or whatever stop getting paid. They only get paid again when the farmers or whoever get paid.

"So any chance we can take the real lessons stop this crap before we do the same to HMRC and destroy our nation's ability to collect tax?"

I think HMRC opted out of using GDS. Of course what happens when they go fully on-line remains to be seen.

Blighty's 12-sided quid to feature schoolboy's posterior

Re: And how long will the "old" coins be valid?

"Six months"

Sad, really. Pre-decimal coins could remain in circulation for a long time. In the mid-50s a pocket-full of change could include coins from 5 different reigns.

Re: This is a lovely story

Are there any metal-bashing shops in your area. If so maybe that's what they're bashing out.

Not in the Budget: Spooks beg UK.gov for £111m brown envelope

Re: £111m doesn't buy much surveillance hardware

It's just the extra they needed when they realised some people have two fridges to monitor. They'd only budgeted for one each.

We need copyright reform so Belgians can watch cricket, says MEP

Re: A simple solution?

@A/C

What part of the word "if" didn't you understand?

Vince Cable opens hipster-friendly London tech creche

"why...are so many of our cities lagging behind the rest of the country in terms of growth?"

Let me rephrase that: "Why is the rest of the country lagging behind London in terms of growth?" and the answer "because you keep putting all the money into London."

Internet Explorer LIVES ON, cackle sneaky Microsoft engineers

Re: Less is more, not

'the word should have been "fewer"?'

No, "worse".

Snowden tells tech bigwigs: It's up to you to thwart mass surveillance

Re: End-to-end and more robust encryption and security is essential

"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.

Re: Only for a limited definition of "secure"

"Alas, it shows sender, recipient, and subject line"

Well, one of those can be made unhelpful. Subject: Test or Subject: Stuff.

Improved Apple Watches won't get more expensive? Hmmm

Re: Gordon Brown

Thanks. I was being hassled to go & collect grand-daughter from school.

Gordon Brown

"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".

Inflating computers

"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.

Health & Safety is the responsibility of Connor's long-suffering girlfriend

Library

The other day whilst checking a physical library - the sort that has a door on the street & books, some not tatty, on the shelves - I noticed that the publicly available PCs are still running XP.

Data centre dangers: Killing a tree and exploding a UPS

Thunderstorm over new year. Did no damage to anything except for the big UPS in the basement. All the servers ran without backup power for months until it was repaired.

"In 1970 the 600mbyte hard disk units were extremely heavy objects."

I remember being told by an ICL engineer that the spindle had to be aligned with the earth's axis, otherwise the bearings wouldn't withstand the precession.

BBC websites GO TITSUP – Auntie blames 'internal system failure'

Maybe they should have shown a potter's wheel or maybe a small girl playing noughts & crosses on a blackboard.

UK call centre linked to ‘millions’ of nuisance robo-calls raided by ICO

Re: "four to six million recorded telephone calls a day"???

"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.

Ark scoops £700m to host ALL UK.gov's data centre needs

Re: Well

It looks as if several suspects might be on their board.

They could have a problem

If the lion's share of their income is with HMG, especially if it's all in one contract, times could be tough if that business gets switched elsewhere. That happened to my last client.

Mattel urged to scrap Wi-Fi mic Barbie after Register investigation

Re: Indeed...

"research purposes: voice recognition"

Hmmm. How about buying one for the daughter of a Welsh speaking family?

Bulk interception is NOT mass surveillance, says parliamentary committee

We object to..

Bulk surveillance

Bulk interception

Mass surveillance

Bulk surveillance

and any other synonym combinations you may wish to substitute.

Is that clear enough?

Kaspersky claims to have found NSA's 'space station malware'

Re: Late starts?

More meetings, please. Fill up Monday to Thursday with meetings and review them all on Friday mornings. So all the code gets written on Friday afternoon.

Hold on to your hats, we're ready to talk turkey on cybersecurity law, say ministers

What's missing

The list should also include governments and email and cloud service providers. And, of course, demands from police, intelligence, local council's cleaning dept. etc should all be included as incidents.

Clinton defence of personal email server fails to placate critics

Re: I don't think this is going to amount to anything illegal...

"juggling 2 smartphones and her infant grandson"

Is she going to join a circus? Other than the political one, of course.

iTunes snafu: DNS fail borked Apple's app & iTunes stores for 10 HOURS

Re: Won't cost them much...

"No one is doubting it will have cost them some money but I'd say most people will just delay their purchases"

Yes, but while they're buying what they couldn't buy whilst it was down they'll be too busy to buy whatever else they'd have been buying now.

Going on holiday? Mexico wants your personal data

Re: PNR Data

"the Aztec Toilet ruins around Mexico City". around Mexico City"."

Or "the Aztec Toilet runs"?

Mine's the one with the spare loo roll in the pocket.

BT inks deal with Williams F1 for go-faster cloudy goodness

"because Williams is British and based in Britain, their expectations can't be very high"

What an odd comment. AFAIK all the constructors except Ferrari are based in the UK whatever the flag that's above them when they're on the podium. The Mercedes engine? Built in the UK. Honda, I'm not sure about but they're opening an operations centre in Milton Keynes. The Renault engines are built in France - but they didn't cover themselves in glory last season.

In fact a huge proportion of F1 is based in Britain.

Re: They'll regret it...

"a fleet of Openreach vans digging"

Won't it be Murphys doing the digging?

The voters hate Google. Heeeeyyyy... how about a 'Google Tax'?

Re: Hmmm

" For example, I believe Ireland have a system where you only pay corporation tax on sales within Ireland, and none on sales elsewhere, and that's attracted many companies to operate there."

If that's the case then I'd have thought that a lot of the possible legal objections fade away. It's not that CT isn't being paid in the nation of residence, it's that CT isn't being paid anywhere. The whole thing starts to look like a complex structure whose purpose is not to pay tax and not for operational reasons. That, as I understand it, is something the tax authorities are entitled to take action against.

"If companies had to pay all their corporation tax to Ireland, it might be less attractive to move there, just for a couple of percentage points off their tax."

It's not just a couple of percentage points. Ireland's CT rate is much lower. When one regime starts undercutting tax to that extent any entity which can move there will do so; it's not possible for must of us to move to personal tax havens but for a multi-national corporation to move to a CT haven it's practically a no-brainer. How should other countries react? They could make similar cuts but the end result is that none of them win; businesses stay where they started and none of the countries collects much tax. If, however, other countries have the sense not to join a race to the bottom they lose the tax of the companies that head-quartered in the tax haven but are effectively conducting business in their territories. At the point where this becomes intolerable - politically if not financially - they need to find some other solution. If this looks like such a solution then it's unlikely to be a problem at an international level as there would be plenty of other countries looking to follow suit.

FREAKing hell: ALL Windows versions vulnerable to SSL snoop

"http://www.zdnet.com/article/mac-os-x-is-the-most-vulnerable-os-claims-security-firm/"

I think we did that one a week or two ago.