Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Why would the ESA want this?

Ah, yes, EU negotiation. "Do it our way or else."

Who asked to leave? And who still wants to trade with the EU? Negotiations are always give and take but even if the EU wasn't in the stronger position, it would help if the UK team turned up with a clear mandate on what they're allowed to negotiate on. Time is running out, particularly for the UK. Don't get any deal ratified before the end of the year and it will be an unholy mess.

Re: Why would the ESA want this?

The UK might get to stay in ESA but it might find itself restricted on what it has access to, especially anything that receives EU funding.

Why is the EU doing this? Well, there might be genuine legal or security concerns, but the main reason is because it knows how to negotiate. Hardly suprising given the army of mandarins it has that do little else. And, given that the UK government's policy seems largely to be based about appeasing the hard-liners, also hardly surprising that the UK has no counter. All hail Captain Beaky!

Re: Hmmm..

and potentially a few opportunities.

True, but it's worth thinking about what those opportunities might be. There will no doubt be some in subsitute products and services that are currently imports (fruit and veg, farm workers, hospital staff, etc.), some in taking, ahem, advantage of deregulation. But it also has to be remembered that the UK struggled to find many of those workers in the first place, which is why it accepted so many from the EU. So there will also be opportunities in circumventing any restrictions on migration and trade (smuggling especially across a putative leaky Eire / NI border), as well as providing alternative services: private medical and elderly care as the NHS and care homes struggle to find trained staff. In summary the opportunities are unlikely to be evenly spread or provide adequate replacements for any jobs lost. NB. this will apply to a lesser degree to the rest of the EU and we can expect the Germans particularly to finance schemes to soften the blow.

Re: 'Gyimah – who is Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation'

Studied PPE at Oxford.

Not another one… is there anyone in the cabinet who didn't? Not sure if it matters what BoJo officially studied as he was too busy with the Bullingdon Club…

Actually @Lost all faith the students we train still have to pay back their earnings wherever they are on Earth.

Good luck trying to enforce that.

Re: supercycles

Supercycles is an established term for commodities (ores, coal, oil, etc.) which have long investment and hope for longer boom periods. It does make no sense for consumer electronics.

Re: In defence ..

but was instead 'forced' by O2 to take on a £43 per month iPhone X

How does this work? Do they come round threatening your life if you don't agree? That's more than I spend a year on my phone.

The I-Phone X is a great phone, no doubt, and the facial recognition may be useful for some. But the notch has all the hallmarks of a solution in search of a problem. Time will tell.

Re: No permission is needed

No permission is needed - as things currently stand - to post content such as photos of other people - on to Facebook.

This depends a lot upon the jurisdiction but in most countries people do have rights to their own image and not just the weak as piss US DMCA safe harbour stuff.

However this case isn't about user generated shit, but paid for adverts where Facebook engages in a contract with the advertiser. The AGB's will almost certainly stipulate that the advertiser has obtained the necessary rights for the content and Facebook has a duty of care, after all it is being paid.

No wonder you got ridiculed.

Re: Much needed lawsuit

I'm inclined to agree and think that the choice of a defamation suit, over which UK law is notoriously strict, is interesting. Nice way to set the precedent of liability.

It has been mostly replaced by the Euro over time in both Russia and neighbouring states.

True: dollarisation is usually aligned around trading industries, and oil and gas aside, Russia isn't commodity heavy and even oil and gas are partially traded in other currencies to remove that element of currency risk. Dollars are more important in Latin America, South East Asia and much of Africa. As most of the currency is circulated locally it doesn't even matter that there are a reasonable amount of it is forged.

If America ever does decide not to be the reserve currency of the world, it's going to have a fun time finding people willing to buy its debts. However, this currently isn't on the cards yet, though China is cautiously building out Renminbi based contracts.

The only value add that ZTE provides is no-longer cheap fingers

You seem to be misinformed: ZTE is much more than the manufacturer of cheap phones.

Re: Self Promotion

I think the author isn't sure at all as is suggesting it's a PR stunt by Guo.

Re: Which is Which?

The point is moot: ECMAScript is the name of the standard that browsers follow though they refer to it as JavaScript.

Re: It's not the size that matters.

Presumably there must come a point where a large stomach and large buttocks prevent any penetration at all.

Not sure if buttocks are that important, but, yes, people can get too fat to fuck… which is curiously enough what some men known as "feeders" get off on. Channel 4 documentary on this particular codependency.

However, I've also seen a woman saying that a man with a bit of a belly is more likely to stimulate the clitoris…

In return, we are the dominant species on our planet.

Sort of depends how you define dominance. I thought there was research indicating that our gene pool isn't big enough for us to be around much longer. And that's assuming we have a planet that's still habitable for us.

Just do it!

Official LOS builds are rock solid and you can always install them on Sammys.

Yeah, sure ... where do you get that from ? daily fail or fox ?

You can do it on the back of a fag packet: average roaming surchage per user per year. Around 400 million people in the EU so that's € 3 - €10 per user per year, pure profit split between two networks. Sounds about right and puts the number in perspective. Some networks in some countries (Spain, Greece) used to rely on inward roaming for up to 20% of their income but that was a long time ago.

Still expect the networks to continue to hold their hands out for whatever's going. Along with the car makers for the hard work of simplifiying cars.

Speaking of the UK telcos, how would it be possible to have less onerous regulation than Ofcom? Can you have "negative regulation"?

How about the FCC?

French finance magazines estimate that losing roaming income will cost EU telcos between €1.2bn and €4bn a year which they have to get back somehow.

€ 1.2 bn/year across the whole EU is small; the loss of revenue to OTT services is (SMS to WhatsApp) is much higher.

They ramped up charges to non-EU destinations years ago. What they will do is reduce the number of shops selling phones to reflect falling demand. This will do more for the bottom line than any notional loss of profiteering. But I fully expect them to hold out their hands for subsidies or "less onerous" regulation: if they could achieve a similar level of competition as in the US, I'm sure they'd be happy.

I wonder if the drop in income due to the enforced free EU roaming has upset the business models for some of the traditional suppliers

Virtually none except for some very popular holiday destinations (Spain, Greece): ARPA has been on a slow downwards trend for years. The existing networks have been built and amorticised. We're just looking at a mature market.

Re: really? 5G as the big draw?

Because 4G was such a big draw over 3G?

I'm still on 3G because my provider doesn't do LTE. Apart from the increasingly obese "single page apps" that developers seem so keen on, I don't really notice the difference.

Re: Iron fire curtain!

I just thought Pootie had his panties in a wad, after that little business in Syria recently.

What, the one where the US telegraphed an attack eatly enough for all the Russian "advisers" to get out of the target area? Presumably they told the Syrians as well. The whole thing was yet another made for television demonstration of strength that was in reality just another expensive (those missiles aren't cheap) waste of time.

Re: Solution...

It's already planning to implement some kind of VPN directly in the app. But it probably needs to make the servers a bit more robust: they went down for a couple of hours the other week. For Russia it probably doesn't need to do much as the Russian internet is deliberately lax. Russia has more than enough spooks for spying on people it doesn't like and doesn't worry too much about due process (Nemtsov) but it does like to maintain at least a veneer of respectability.

Interestingly Telegram is currently based in Dubai, a country which happily blocks lots of other messengers.

Re: Please no

Discoverability is important. But I think its reasonable to have a few platform wide gestures.

I'm not against gestures per se – Opera introduced the swipe for the browser years ago and I miss it – I am against gesture only.

The research demonstrates that some monkeys never learn and, depending on the context, those monkeys are us…