Posts by Comfy Chairs

Tech titans demand free speech law to head off President Trump

Trump Weekly Amateur Tirade

<list of people Trump has sued or threatened to sue>

blah

</list>

I'll bet El Reg didn't independently compile that list through painstaking journalist research. But it does show that the mouthy hairpiece that is Trump isn't ready to enter the political landscape. If he was a true politician he'd never have tried to sue people in a court of law. He'd have taken a page from the Clinton playbook and paid off/intimidated into silence any allegations of corruption against him. Or made sure that any looming scandals were negated by the folk involved tragically committing suicide via 2 shots to the back of the head or dying in car/plane crashes.

Universal Credit slammed by MPs: Late programme branded 'unacceptable'

£15.8 billion spent to date

And that may not include the hundred-million pound write-offs where they've scrapped the system and gone back to square one. For an estimated £2.7b a year saving. Over 3 years they've spent £15.7b in order to save £8.1b.

So £7.6 billion down the drain, but at least now we have a single integrated system that meets the needs of a modern welfare state, just as they promised we'd have when UC went live across the nation when it went live in October 2013. Oh, wait...it's now 2016 and the system still can't cope with anything more than the simplest-case scenarios and still hasn't been rolled out nationwide.

Godspeed IDS. You've burned through almost £16 billion of taxpayers' money with absolutely nothing to show for it, but insist that your new UC scheme will revolutionise welfare and will stop all those filthy working single parents claiming benefits they may be entitled to.

The man could singlehandedly bankrupt the most profitable of companies through his utter ineptness. Rough calculation, the UC scheme has cost about £14.4 million a day since its inception with nothing to show. And the man who thinks this is value for money has the cheek to tell single working parents they should work extra hours each week to make up for the money he's taking away from them.

Three-years-late fit-to-work IT tool will cost taxpayers £76m

Re: Good joke!

" and once found 'fit' you are then at the mercy of the increasingly sanction-happy 'job centres' who have no targets except for the targets they are pushed to meet."

I had the misfortune of working as a temp in one of said job centres a few years back, and they are not at all 'sanction-happy'. Almost every member of staff was vehemently opposed to the sanction regime and universally critical of the fitness tests (which were being run by Atos at the time). Unfortunately anyone who wanted to stay in a job was required to implement the policy to the letter.

On more than one occasion I saw staff in tears because they had been required to sanction people who were clearly in desperate circumstances but had fallen foul of guidelines through no fault of their own.

Meanwhile the professional benefits cheats (and everyone working at the Job Centre knew who they were) went largely unscathed by the sanctions regime, as they knew all the get-out clauses and loopholes in the system that would allow them to keep on claiming.

As for disability assessments, at the time the Atos assessment centre was a few hundred yards up the road from the job centre in a nondescript building. People who had received their 'invitation' for reassessment often came to the job centre, thinking that was where they were supposed to be.

On numerous occasions, those people ended up being driven to the Atos centre by job centre staff in their own cars, because they were simply not capable of walking the extra distance and the effort made to make it to the job centre had already taken its toll. And once there, they'd have to be helped by job centre staff to make it up to the 2nd floor where the Atos office was, because the building had no disabled access.

After all that, the 'fitness assessment' would often last less than 10 minutes, and the same staff who had helped the person make it to the assessment would then be in the position of being told to declare them fit for work. It's a horrible situation for both the benefit claimant and the civil servants who are required to implement the policy. During the 2 years I was there the job centre was haemorhaging staff who simply couldn't deal with constant strain/trauma of making life-destroying decisions based on edicts from above.

So no, job centres aren't "sanction-happy".

Star Wars BB-8 toy in firmware update risk, say UK security bods

Re: Why worry about making BB-8 swear ?

Watching the originals with the mindset that everything R2-D2 bleeps is on par with a drunken uncle spouting obscenities and racial slurs makes for a very entertaining take on the movies.

Cache-astrophic: Why Valve's Steam store spewed players' private profiles to strangers

Refreshingly honest

I have to respect the folks at Steam. They fucked up, albeit for a short window of opportunity, and certainly not on the same scale as information breaches at many other recent high-profile targets. It seems more like a breach caused by unforeseen circumstances rather than an inevitable open vuln disaster waiting to happen (*cough* talktalk).

Their official statement breaks down succinctly into 1) here's what went wrong, 2) here's why it went wrong and 3) here's what we've done to mitigate the damage.

Microsoft U-turns on 'free' Windows 10 upgrade promise for ALL previewers

Read article before commenting

To quote Gabe Aul from the exact post this article is commenting on, "Once available on July 29th, you do not need an MSA to upgrade Windows 10 on your Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 PCs"

You don't need an MSA to use 8.1, and how you read the above as meaning you'll need one for 10 is beyond me. Clearly Microsoft would like to sign up for their cloudy bullshit, as would Apple and Google on their respective platforms, but it's not a requirement for 8.1 and it won't be a requirement for 10.