Posts by Jason Bloomberg

Re: Not unusual

Am i missing something?

Date of birth including year, rather than day of birthday celebration.

Re: Pot -> Kettle

My VM bill has risen 34% in 4 years.

So a compound rate of increase of around 7.7% per year. If it stays the same, next year it will be 45% more than you were paying.

Social media bots. Which are clearly not real. And yet millions of upstanding American citizens follow blindly, without thought or care.

Some people I have encountered on-line are virtually impossible to distinguish from bots. They come up with some crap, they are corrected, their nonsense is debunked, but they simply keep repeating the same crap, over and over and over. Facts and truth simply don't matter.

But it's a fundamental principal of the global tax system that profits should be taxed in the country where they're generated

And there's the problem; profits are taxed. I can take £100 million in the UK, send £99 million to my HQ in another country for licensing, services and anything else I can think of, and I am left with just £1 million profit which gets taxed.

Hodge can look all she wants but there's nothing illegal being done, it's all by the book, all within the rules; I am paying all the tax due on my profits.

Re: So...

Fire, underwater ... I don't care how it's done so long as it can be controlled from my smart phone, I can watch its progress in my browser, and can be emailed reports of temperature and ferocity.

If we could extend the deadline next week, and again a week after that, I might have a paper ready on that.

Re: Huh?

We have had a vote and the people have given their opinion and we were told it would be carried out.

Actually it was an advisory vote. But let's take it that, yes, people made their desire to leave perfectly clear.

So we are leaving. That seems an inevitability. But we didn't ask what form our leaving should take, we don't know what form the electorate would prefer.

You mention North Korea. I am saying give people a vote. You seem to be the one against that.

Re: Unhappy luddite

I am not sure we are heading in the wrong direction, more walking a path without fully realising we need to redirect that path. Such realisations only come with discovering where one has gone wrong.

History is littered with 'good ideas' which turned out to not be such good ideas until we got those under control, figured out how to do them safely, and sometimes abandoned those ideas. Getting it wrong, not having as much foresight as hindsight would like us to have had, seems a part of human nature.

One day we may improve on that, may learn the lessons of history, but it seems we have a long way to go. We can't even agree on what are best 'safe practices', when something is safe to release; only when it's proven safe to do so, or it can be released unless proven not to be safe.

When we tend towards the latter there will be cases where what seemed like a good idea turns out not to have been. We have to accept that if we follow that course.

Re: Entrapment

Evidence gathered via entrapment is inadmissable in court.

I do not believe that is true in the UK. The courts have long held that "evidence is evidence", no matter how obtained. If there has been any crime or abuse of process involved in procuring that evidence it is a separate matter which can be dealt with independently, it doesn't invalidate the evidence.

It is up to the court and jury to determine if the evidence presented is an indicator of guilt or not, whether it is genuine sentiment or came about simply through that entrapment.

Re: Network security fail

But if they blocked PornHub some First Amendment advocate might threaten a Second Amendment solution and they would probably be backed by Net Neutrality advocates as well.

Or perhaps this is simply an example of what happens when America hands over control of the Internet :-)

Re: FFS not scrapped

No one is scrapping line rental. It is being included.

I don't have a problem with that if it brings the total package cost down.

My Virgin package is £24.49 plus £17.99 line rental, £42.48. If that dropped by any amount I would be happy. I wouldn't really care what BS they came up with to justify that decrease.

Re: 150% authentic Sinclair

Not only replicating the Spectrum experience but the Raspberry Pi experience as well.

Re: 1.5 Million pounds to an AMERICAN "Ha, Ha!"

An inescapable fact is that Clarkson did step over the line. He wasn't just being 'excusably offensive' on air, he went way beyond that.

No employer can turn a blind eye to that. There are enough people who want to crucify the BBC that he put them in a position where they really had little choice. I don't think there was the possibility of 'one more chance'.

Re: VM Television is fairly pants

VM TV offering isn't that bad, neither is the TiVo, though it is true that UI responsiveness has slowed ridiculously in recent months and is getting quite annoying now.

The price increase is just over 8% for my package. The cost of USD priced items have risen around 15%. I expect 'VM UK' will be paying for using 'VM US' sourced services. I don't know if that's a fair increase or not but it's still cheaper for me than what others offer.

At least they didn't spin the latest increase as if it were 'great news' for customers which they have had a tendency to do in the past.

Re: Hackers? What hackers? I see no hackers.

So in the mind of ThePress, the word "hacker" has now come to mean "criminal", and the two words can be used interchangeably?

That is not a new thing, has been the case for at least a decade. And that's the perception implanted in most of the minds of the public.

"Up to" is okay, just not very useful. It tells you what you might get, possibly could get, but no indication of how likely you are to get it.

"From" isn't very useful either, because that's going to have to come with a cart load of caveats because sometimes things do just go slower and it's not always the fault of the ISP.

Some sort of average seems better but still isn't a guarantee of anything, nor an indication of what others may get.

The problem isn't so much what claims say but what they mean.

Re: "previous tenant had taken the wiring with them"

Some commercial tenancy agreements require those departing to return the building to exactly how it was when they arrived before leaving. That can be quite a shock for the new arrivals when everything has gone - including internal walls.

Re: Loop until... Loop until...

An autonomous car should do what the law and any Highway Code demands and not do what they preclude. It should in such a situation behave just like a human driver should.

But I would bet that not many people know what they should actually do in such a situation.

In the UK, going through a red light is an offence and one can be prosecuted for that regardless of any mitigation for doing so. The lawful thing to do is to sit it out, as extremely uncomfortable as that will feel.

Take solace in the knowledge that an emergency vehicle driver should have a full understanding of what the law is in such a situation and, if they don't; that is their problem, not yours.

If traffic lights are not fitted with systems to expedite an emergency vehicle's passage then that is not your problem.

If there is an adverse outcome from your obeying the law that is not your problem.

It takes nerves of steel to hold to the letter of the law when it goes against one's own instincts, but that is what is demanded by the law. If it ever happens it will likely be one of the worst situations you have ever found yourself in. It was for me.

Re: Wrong question

IT WAS NOT THE QUESTION which was put to the vote.

- It was

The question was whether we should leave the EU or not. Only that. It did not ask what form such leaving should take, or what we should aspire to once we have left.

We do not know what leavers think on either of those issues because we never asked them. We can suggest they want one thing or the other but have no idea of numbers or what represents the will of the electorate as a whole.

And that last point is important. Leavers may have 'won the referendum', but that does not entitle them to dictate how things will be. They may not even be the majority now.

Re: It's not what you say but the way that you say it

as Apple is the benefactor of the subsidy, it's up to Apple to challenge it.

I do not believe that is correct. The EU are not telling Apple to do anything, they are only telling Ireland that they have done something wrong and must correct that wrong. It is for Ireland to argue the case they did no wrong.

I do not know what the mechanism would be but I expect there is some channel for Ireland to argue that (1) the determination that Ireland gave 'illegal state aid' to Apple is wrong, and (2) the amount Ireland is being asked to recover from Apple is wrong.

Re: This:

Europe is a failed experiment.

Assuming you mean "EU"; did you read that somewhere and now parrot it as a hollow sound-bite or can you justify such an assertion?

Just saying it's so doesn't make it so.