Posts by Yet Another Commentard

Re: Smart Lock rulez

I guess all politicians are safe then!

It would seem that BT uses its own incompetence as a defence against regulation. Which really is an odd old thing.

Re: See ...

Indeed it "proves" to a politico, or a tame journalist that the increased snoopage on the populous is required.

To me it proves the police can handle this sort of thing very well without those extra powers. They just made 660 arrests without it, right?

Maybe all MP's web-use and e-mail should be checked by the rest of us first as a 'test' of the new powers. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear after all.

Re: I wonder how they got this information?

It's called "security theatre" for a reason.

The TSA and others have to be seen to be doing something. All this is achieving is the removal of those who "may" have travelled to the US for tourism/work/whatever and adding to the pain of flying.

The TSA is always trying to stop the last terrorist attack, it can only guess at the next.

If the flight is suddenly terrorism proof, then the next best thing to do would be to simply destroy the airport. Not in an inept way like Glasgow. Airports are insecure land-side with thousands of people, all with a legitimate reason to carry massive suitcases.

It serves no purpose. It's the same as me saying that the Tiger repellent I have on my desk here in the West Midlands is awesome, I've had it on for three years and there has not been one tiger related incident near my desk.

Agreed, there must be some security, but there needs to be a balance. At the moment the terrorists have, essentially, won due to the way we spend so much money and time chasing shadows. Moreover some of this nonsense INCREASES the risk. I have to leave my bag unlocked if I travel to the US. How hard would it be for a nefarious baggage handler to pop a device, bag of cocaine etc into every bag passing through? When stopped by customs in the US and asked if anyone had interfered with my luggage my honest answer was "I have no idea, I have to leave it unlocked and out of my sight for hours. Anyone at start or destination could have put anything in there." Luckily nothing had been added, but the comment earned me a world of pain and a coincidental "SSSS" added to all my boarding cards after that.

@NoneSuch

Captain Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.

General Melchett: Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!

Captain Darling: And fortunately, one of our spies...

General Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!

Re: Well done

@Adrian 4

Well if you don't want stuff passed to your heirs, you say in your will "don't pass XYZ to my heirs". Otherwise what's in the will is your, er, will. If you die intestate, then there are rules about it, essentially it goes to your relatives in sequence of closeness. Not happy with that game, write a will so you are happy. Easy.

Small pedantic point, but under most circumstances you'd need a grant of probate to deal with the estate, not just a death certificate. The solicitors in this case would know the rules and have one if necessary. The Court gives probate once it's happy the deceased is dead and that his or her estate has cleared its debts with HMRC (Inheritance Tax), and the person claiming to be the executor is the right person. After that the very purpose of the Grant is to say to all and sundry "John Doe is dead, this proves I can act on his behalf" to save going through this court order nonsense Apple has decided it requires.

I think Apple's stance is that "We don't know it's her iPad, and under data protection we can't tell you that." which is an obtuse reading of the legislation at best.

Re: Wasn't it NatWest

@AC

I am sure they have sorted it. Or at least that impeccable holding company of theirs, the one with the perfect IT record, RBS, has sorted it for them.

Re: Futures

Maybe there's a solution that if you dabble in commodities you actually have to take custody of the underlying asset for a while. No worries for a farmer, (s)he has the grain/milk/whatever there anyway.

No worries for the supermarket, they get the milk (or whatever) at a fixed price.

Big problem for bankers, suddenly having 127 million gallons of semi-skimmed dropped off in central London, Skinny latte anyone?

Re: Google Glasses

Under most social circumstances my wriat is well and truly hidden and I never look at it for fear of being arrested.

Re: FX570 was a superb calculator

My fx-100 I had for my O Levels still works, and is sitting on the desk by me.

Re: OK

Oh, yes, and can we nominate others for blocking too, let's see mumsnet and the daily mail spring to mind...

Re: That reminds me...

For me it made me wonder if it was Andrex - Last Tango in Paris edition or something.

Re: Moral of this story: Don't handle pellets which give off a pretty blue light.

Yep.

Re: It was promising...

The way I read it the corporate veil would be lifted in these cases, so the owners of the company (shareholders either corporate or human) would become liable for the costs should the patent holder corporate be unable to meet them. That would be aimed to stop the exploitation of the veil in these circumstances. But IANAL and I have not read the draft bill.

Re: not just faults

"Too many outfits I've worked at regard "testing" as merely checking the known input produces the expected output. They don't bother checking boundaries, error handling, scalability or resource-hogging."

Indeed. During a SAP test at my old employer I was told off for going off the script and trying to break it by putting in stupid data (letters in value fields etc), or forcing it to do something it shouldn't. "We don't have time to test that" being the answer. Oddly enough, launch was an unmitigated disaster as the users all tried to circumvent the controls (successfully) or put in data in the wrong fields breaking reports and searches. Ho-hum.

Re: Very interesting!

It is difficult to agree to Google's T&Cs when you are blissfully unaware that its advertising cookies are busy pimping your data. Even the tech-savvy Reg-heads above seem to forget that even avoiding obvious Google sites Jonny Internet User still gets tracked and monetised by Google.

The Dutch have a lever here - Google's tax schemes rely upon the use of a brass-plate company based in the Netherlands, a company that can't easily be switched to keep those lovely tax schemes in place. Register in the NL, you play by the NL rules no matter what you claim about the internet not being bound by such trifles.

Re: Why City of London Police?

Fraud Squad based there, Wood Lane I think.

I remember the misquote was in (I think) the Level 9 text adventure "Snowball" and was a subtle cue to the player to hand over a particular item at the gate.

Re: Yes well...

On fixing the roads I seem to find that every patch or manhole (can we say that?) cover is in a position such that it's exactly where my tyres on the passenger side are if I am driving in a correct position on the road. Can we fix that too, as so many of them are ill fitting (I assume because world+dog drives over them) or raised it's dangerous in its own right. So to avoid them you have to pull out into oncoming traffic, or clip the pavement, which is even more dangerous and stupid.

Grrr.

The country roads bit is interesting, but I have no idea on bend related statistics. By us an alarming number of fatal incidents occur on a straight section of road where people seem to love driving into a "Bikers Beware" sign at high speed.

Utterly agree on roadsigns. Far too many, and there is no need for most of the brown ones which seem to proliferate alarmingly.

Speed is difficult, the issue is around "appropriate" speed, which varies by road, weather, other users, time of day etc etc. I mean on the same stretch of road you could do 60mph one day, but realise the next that even exceeding 20mph could be a bit dumb. Instead we use a blunt instrument because it's too difficult to deal with otherwise.

Re: Can we have .....

I think it went on to mention "synergies" and "paradigm shifts" before having some blue sky thinking out of the box giving a helicopter view of the hot buttons. Or something.

My old employer did this too. Instead of the appraisal (which everybody hates anyway) being over fairly quickly we had people gaming the system, and actively trying to sabotage rivals. Not exactly goal congruent. Then after we’d had our appraisals there was a moderation process to see if we’d been judged fairly. This was rubbish and simply down office politics, so if you were “in” with the manager who shouted and bullied you’d get a good rating because he said you were a “good chap” (or woman) and he would protect his cronies. Others doing a better job but with more moderate managers would suffer. This process took weeks, and removed senior management from the business for much of that time. All that to fit a distribution curve that some HR wonk said was how it should be.

No wonder people left.

I did see a fraud at a company that did “rank and yank” whereby the bottom 5% of rated employees would be removed each year. As it was so bloody stupid and morale damaging several enterprising managers put ghost employees into their team, paid them a salary and then sacked them at the end of the year. The salaries were collected by real employees and divided up amongst the team at year-end. The team was happy with this game, senior management not so much.

Re: Dr. Who + B7 video game...

Didn't the Liberator feature in the BBC/Electron game "Starship Commander"?

^^This

I could never see that either. I mean giving a reaction from Twitter is about as journalistically sound as hailing a cab and getting a quote from the driver. Or passenger. Or both.

Todays gushfest practically credits Twitter with the invention of the hashtag. I remember it in use on IRC before Twitter's founders were born (possibly) and it may well predate that too.

What amazes me most is that the BBC tech people can use Twitter - finding # on a Mac keyboard isn't all that obvious...

Interesting, BMI from the Isle of Man to and from the UK insist upon photo ID. I have no idea why there would be a difference.

Consistency - we've heard of it.

Re: Knowing the way beancounters work...

Nokia 3310s, surely?