Posts by Andy 18

Nuke the MPs

I still think that nuclear reactor under the house of commons would be a great idea. A huge cellar right below the debating chamber which would fit the nuclear pile and I can't imagine a more secure location (see Guy Fawkes). The waste heat can go into a nice CHP scheme for Westminster and, if not, there is a huge source of cooling water flowing right outside. It would be a great test of exactly how safe the technology really is nowadays. Once that is up and running, the turbine hall at Tate modern doesn't do much apart from collect ceramic beans and Battersea power station is just waiting to be turned into, well, a power station.

Bait and swtich

Darnit, I saw the headline and was intrigued as to how Orange had produced hacker protection that killed people (Black Ice presumably being the cyberpunk reference). This is a complete let down.

Browser Plugin vs. Server

I wish these articles would specify whether the fault is yet another browser plugin loophole or a real server problem. It only takes a few words and would convert the various scare story headlines into something useful.

No-one I know uses the Java browser plugin or ever has (Cisco kit admin is the only reason anyone would install it and it's easier to just use an F5 instead). Like ActiveX, it's a fundamentally dumb idea from a security point of view. However, server side Java is just a big heap of loveliness that has never let me down.

HMRC?

Presumably the employees receive a payment for doing BYOD so I do hope that will be investigated as a benefit in kind along with all the licensing of the Microsoft software (Office, Visual Studio etc.) provided by the council and deal with Microsoft querying that every six months because you changed your laptop. After all, their son, daughter or spouse might have used it to do their homework, which would break the license Ts&Cs. Plus of course each employee will have to keep full call records for their mobile phone for 7 years and prove exactly how much of each bill is personal and work use. Then they will have to deal with HMRC querying everything you receive even if the cost to the business is exactly zero and somehow prove it wasn't a benefit in kind in the same way as in the real world.

Bitter, me?

Shock horror!!

This is a research for marketing/lobbying purposes only. Most people buy organic food because it is less likely to have pesticides, herbicides, added hormones, GM residues not because they think it is healthier in itself. My home grown tomatoes are delicious because I pick them 5 minutes before eating but I don't seriously expect them to be different nutritionally from the same seeds grown elsewhere and sprayed every week. I just expect them not to be covered in pesticides and preservatives.

This is a repeat of the GM research that says eating GM versions of food crops isn't bad for you (also done purely to provide marketing sound bites) . Big whoop - we have a couple of million years of evolution to stop us being damaged by odd DNA in food. What people worry about is GM crops that produce dangerous chemicals cross fertilising with food crops or GM plants with pesticide immunity cross fertilising with native weeds.

yeesh

This thread is a perfect example of why I've moved to a house at the top of a hill, installed a hurricane proof roof and bought a shotgun.

Confused

I may be missing the point but it seems like this report saying that people who are starving to death are more likely to die than people who are well fed?

Interesting

Enjoyed that - thanks.

Now could you explain why buying corporate debt is better than buying back national debt (as far as QE is concerned).

Free contraception?

The biggest factor in increasing consumption is that more people use more electricity. Maybe we should just stop encouraging breeding quite so much.

Make contraceptive dispensers in pub/club/restaurant loos mandatory and free; rescind all maternity/paternity leave allowances; make it legal to promote/pay people who to turn up for work every day and work late when required in preference to those who only turn up for 8 months in two years and have to "pick up their kids" whenever there is a deadline. It might also be an idea to stop pregnancy being covered by the NHS. After all, it's an optional, lifestyle choice. It would save about £30 billion from the NHS budget. Do all those things and the country's carbon emissions would start to fall pretty darn quickly.

At the risk of repeating myself...

I'll be happy to go with nuclear power when it's so safe that Battersea power station is converted to nuclear generation.

Not a good programme to pick

Strictly already suffers from too many pointless cuts, zooms and general rushing about of cameras. I can't imagine the 3D experience will be too pleasant to watch as it needs a steadier picture for your vision to adjust.

Goose, gander

Would it be reasonable for the ISP to apply the 3 strikes principal to the content lawyers i.e. If they falsely accuse someone 3 times then all future requests for information or action will be ignored.

Couldn't agree more

The EU has legislation about personal data that say all personal data from or passing through the EU must be handled to the same level of security/privacy as data held in the EU. Almost no US companies (or outsourced call centres for that matter) comply with that one either.

One day an enterprising lawyer will realise and we'll have a nice bonfire of the outsourcers. The NoTW invaded privacy actively, but there isn't much difference in the final result between going through someone's bins for personal information and leaving personal information insufficiently protected on the internet.

Seems like a good idea

Presumably as server hardware costs a fraction of the power it takes over the servers lifetime you can do a literal "follow the sun" virtualisation scheme with several data centres around the world. All the racks have to have UPS battery backup anyway so short periods of no sun aren't a problem. Add in a local swimming pool or town to take the heat extracted by the AC systems and you are onto a really good thing. I'm not sure exactly how much heat a fully populated blade enclosure chucks out but I suspect it is enough to supply hot water to several houses.

Wow - biased much?

"market-rigging mechanism" as opposed to incentive is just the start

Boycott East Texas

Surely it's not beyond the wit of man for Cisco, MS, Google, Redhat and Apple and a couple of others to just exclude east Texas from their terms of use. Add a condition that any patent infringement due to ignoring those terms of use is the users responsibility and you are away. Pretty sure the Texas voters would demand a change pretty quick after that.

2 small points

Some interesting points. However:

Wind Power and Solar Power complement each other nicely. When it's not windy, it tends to be sunny and when it's not sunny it tends to be windy. So, if you are looking at the big picture and get the mix right, the variability of output is less of a problem.

Also, the report gives numbers for output to the grid, not for generation. Few installations of wind power are just for power generation for the grid. It actually pays better to generate the power and use it yourself. For example, the 3 big turbines at Bristol docks export very little to the grid. Most of their output goes to power the docks.

Of course, if you are a nuclear power lobbyist (albeit unpaid).....

Under great heat and pressure diamonds are formed (!?)

Personally, I find 1st class seats are too narrow to get comfortable in so this is just insane.

For empirical testing, I just stood next to my training partner after a swimming session. Two slim men with a total shoulder width of 110cm. The person in the middle seat with the remaining 19cm (7.5") to sit in is going to have a really tight time of it. If we attempt to actually do some work or read a paper then we are going to be bumping elbows even if there is no-one in the middle seat.

Side effects

Apologies for the serious comment, but isn't that blocking the same chemical that reinforces memories of bad experiences (i.e. makes you learn from your mistakes). So, we will end up with lots of soldiers/bankers with full heads of hair but no common sense.

Policies and procedures

So I send my new employees an email with a link to a folder containing 20,000 pages of policy documents, which no-one actually reads, one of which has a list of crimes I shouldn't commit. By doing that, any offences committed are the fault of the employees and not the business (as per the landmark Tesco case).

Unemployed nuclear physicist (will build bombs for food)

I would be more interested if they had broken it down into people doing jobs related to their degree. Is could just be that people with Sci/Tech degrees have no compunction about taking a crappy job if there is nothing else available? Well at least until the next Dictator with big ambitions comes along.

WEEE stops the skip approach

I worked with a large company in the UK who had the same problem. Tax compliance and book-keeping effort meant that giving them away or selling them to staff would cost more than the new PCs. Their solution was to recondition the old PCs (make as many working ones as possible out of the pile of parts) and then allow it to become common knowledge that they would be disposing of them in a skip on site on a certain day (a health and safety email to be careful while the PCs were being loaded into the skip was usual). The next day the empty skip would be used to dispose of the non-working PCs and parts.

Unfortunately, this is no longer possible as you have to get an WEEE certificate for every PC you get rid of.

Why do I get the urge to sneak some Viagra into the airport coffee?

Embarrass some law enforcement folks!

Legal process is there to avoid cockups

The US government doesn't have a reputation for accuracy or independence so the fact that they are closing down sites makes people think "I'm not doing anything wrong (as far as I am aware) but I could be next because of a typo or a snarky corporate lawyer. Then what would I do?". I doubt many people would object to the seizing of a site proven to be selling unsafe counterfeit electrical goods or insecticide ridden counterfeit clothing but without real information the assumption is "US government starts shutting down sites because big corporation asked them nicely".

Arrrrgh

Please get yourself a science reporter with an O level in something other than hyperbole or stop reporting on it.

Must reproduce quickly

Unfortunately, our exchange has less than 1000 people so I guess we are doomed. I'm sure they picked that limit to ensure no one really rural had a chance.

I never expect anything good from BT. They have been and continue to be the biggest source of downtime after Incapable and Witless. But what should you expect from an effective monopoly.

Spot on.

I've struggled repeatedly against the quirks of different phone implementations of J2ME and MIDP and eventually given up. When you have code that has a 1000 case switch statements in order to cope with all the different phone models you want your app to run on, you know it is never going to get through testing.

Vue auto-termination

I regularly go to the cinema with my Android phone. I often take my whole team. We rather enjoy a decent break in the Directors Suite when coding becomes too much or we just need a break from the office to do a time boxed discussing of something with the rather handy deadline of "the film starts in 20 minutes". We have Nagios set up to priority text us (on vibrate) if anything goes squiffy and if it does we can VPN and SSH to any servers we need.

I wouldn't trust a minimum wage hot dog wallah with my sparkly new phone or to fetch me if it received a text and the disturbance if they did would be far worse than me looking at a text message and thinking "not a problem".

If I can't take the phones, we'll have to find the Nerf guns again and just won't go to the cinema.

Measure the darn things or you'll never know

I got myself a lovely little power meter (http://www.thegreenstoreonline.co.uk/default.aspx/Page/97/Product/546) that goes in between the socket and the plug. Having tested everything in the house, the biggest electricity users were:

1. Garden lights - these used 200 watts continuously whether they were on or off due to the abysmal design of the transformer. They were plugged in and switched on all the time (with a light meter to actually turn the lights on at dusk for a couple of hours) - 5kWh per day

2. My Old PC - 5 year old box that I use for XP/IE6 testing. This used 400 watts when shutdown and only 50 watts more when in use. Again, horrifically bad PSU design - 10kWh per day

But, by far the worst culprit was my cat, which managed to turn on the immersion heater on our hot water tank. It was on for 6 months before anyone noticed i.e. the electricity board did a real reading rather than estimating. We got a electricity bill for over £1,000 and the cat got spayed for it's trouble - about 70kWh per day

Waste of space

Presumably, they just reclassify Android phones as desktop Unix boxes (admittedly very small boxes) with a mobile card. I can plug an external monitor, keyboard and mouse into mine, it has a couple of gig of memory, the internal screen is the same resolution as my old desktop and it has a faster processor so I don't really see the difference.

Getting rid of IR35 anyone?

http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/cutting-business-and-third-sector-regulations/end-ir35-immediately

Ah, I see - Lewis Page

I was reading this article thinking "wow - this guy really has some issues with electric cars - did his mother do something unfortunate with the milkman?" - then I realised it was by Lewis "my middle name is Texaco" Page and it all made sense.

Just for information, I drive a Vauxhall Astra with just over 100,000 miles on the clock. Most of the components are on their last legs. The suspension is going. I've already replaced most of the engine and air-con. It spends most of the time with its engine management warning light on, burns nearly as much oil as it does petrol and the likelihood of a winsome young lady asking for a ride in it is practically zero. I would much rather be the owner of a Tesla which might need its battery pack replacing.

Given that I get feed in tariff on all the electricity I use to charge it up (yes, I get paid for filling the tank/battery) and my company can buy me one tax free, I'm just waiting for my solar roof to be installed and the price to come down a bit before I get mine.

Couldn't agree more

The problem is not the amount the business has to pay in tax (20% small business corporation tax is not unreasonable, VAT is paid by the customer in the end and NI is manageable or zero depending on how you remunerate people). The problem is the amount of time and effort it takes to pay it and the barrier that makes to growing from a few directors to anything bigger. The chap saying he pays £7 in tax administration per £1 profit is probably about probably right once you include opportunity cost, lawyers and accountants.

A couple of examples:

1. Corporation tax:

Excluding day to day record keeping, it took two directors and an accountant 2 weeks to finalise our company accounts last year. That was just going from accurate up to date electronic accounts in 2008 format to the same thing in a format acceptable to the HMRC in 2009.

Cost:

10 days x (£500 per day + £800 per day + 8 x £200 per hour) = £29,000

1 new starter I won't be employing.

2. IR35

It took a director and a lawyer to check all our new contracts for IR35 compliance and negotiate any changes required with the customers. Roughly a day of the directors time for each customer (excluding travel expenses) and an average of 3 hours of a contract lawyer.

Cost: 10 new clients x ( 1 x £800 per day + 3 x £200 per hour) = £14,000

Another half a new starter I won't be employing.

I have plenty of profitable work for an extra member of staff and would love to stop working weekends but I'm unwilling to do so because I would also have to pay for extra accountancy, lawyering and a clerical assistant (all of whom are pure cost) to handle the tax and other admin involved. I haven't included time for training and mentoring on the downside as I secretly quite enjoy that bit. However, I would have to spend a bunch of my time sorting out H&S policies, employment contracts, pensions et al. At a point when the directors are the main contributors to the company profits that is problematic.

But the biggest factor by far is that I do IT because I enjoy creating systems and getting a team of very bright people to build something we are proud of and that does what the customer wanted. I don't do it because I enjoy paperwork.