Posts by Alan Brown

power attracts the corruptible.

And in the case of US law enforcement, it's not just "one bad actor". There's a systemic problem.

"He is not personally liable for the debt."

As a shareholder, perhaps not.

As a DIRECTOR, deliberately engaging in criminal activity, _yes_, he is.

Limited liability only shields the shareholders and only if they don't know what's going on.

Re: Consumer refers to who's paying

"It's patently obvious that Microsoft actually wants everyone on 10"

As long as they're on 7 or higher to start with. I have a bunch of older kit and they won't accept those serial numbers.

Re: Consumer refers to who's paying

" If you buy a computer from an OEM or retail and it has Windows installed then part of the price that you pay goes to Microsoft for the Windows licence."

Having just had to do this for a bunch of desktop machines (where we had the choice between Freedos or "some flavour of windows"), it's about £80 for Windows10 home and £87 for Windows10 pro. The retail price is about £110

It's slightly cheaper for laptops, presumably because they tend to have fewer cores.

Re: Consumer refers to who's paying

> Consumer versions of Windows 10 are "free"

Except they're not. They cost about £80. All the "free" deals went away a while back.

Re: Driverless cars.

8 seats is about optimum for an autonomous vehicle to act as scheduled and hailed transport. You're going to see a melding of "bus" and "taxi" functions.

Busses are only (barely) economic in peak periods and they do levels of damage to roads that's wildly disproportionate to their carrying capacity (road damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle pressure). The rest of the time they're a subsidy pit, so if you can have a fleet that breaks off into taxi mode outside of peaks and during peaks doesn't hit every stop because it doesn't need to (you'd need to have vehicles staged and ready to jump in/out of service but at the inner end of the journey that is taken care of by varying endpoints). For commuter-style services in peak periods where the busses run nearly empty they can entrain themselves out to the service edge in order to achieve best speed/throughput, breaking up at the points where a normal bus would start filling.

If you can make busses/taxis convenient then noone feels the "need" to have a car. I found that out living in a number of asian cities where taxis and minibuses were at most a couple of minutes apart.

Re: To Arms My Brothers

"Let us take hammers to these deceitful weaving machines"

The issue with luddites was that a rapid change resulted in massive unemployment.

This time around there's a shortage of drivers and to be honest the way it's rolling out means that they probably won't be replacing humans as fast as they retire.

"Driving" on a nice road is fun. "Driving" in city traffic is a tedious and stressful pain in the arse, exacerbated by selfish cunts who cut up everything in sight and trash smooth traffic flows. Such twats should be strung up by the toes from a streetlight on the second offence and by the nipples with fishhooks for the third.

Re: A lot of 'hot air'

"String wires above the road ?"

Why not?

Re: A lot of 'hot air'

"The only thing that TfL wants is to have ZERO privately owned cars on the road in Central London."

True, but they also want to extract their pound of flesh from those who ply for hire on that road.

T'aint gonna happen.

One thing worth noting is that despite the horrors of the Ringways plan execution(*) and the Central Box, the original (1950s!) plan was for everything inside Ring 1 to be car-free and as pedestrianised as possible.

(*) The real problem was cheaping out and not taking account of the effects on the neighbouring properties. They should have been buying up 100metres each side.. Outer rings (and the new south circular) were planned to be in trenches to keep noise levels down. If you ever wondered why the M25 is so bad, it's because it's carrying _all_ the traffic intended for Rings 2,3 and 4, plus more besides.

Re: 2 birds one autonomous stone

" there is someone to blame when it crashes into a queue of nuns waiting for a bus"

At the average london traffic speed that would play out like the steamroller scene in Austin Powers.

"I'm pretty sure that while a Ltd company limits shareholders risk it doesn't shield against criminal behaviour."

Correct. The limit is on financial risk to shareholders, NOT risks to directors for knowingly engaging in illegal activities.

"Have even reported the mobile number they apparently use to call back if you press the "contact" button"

I'd arrange for someone to come visit. Then "deal" with them personally.

Re: Bigger teeth

The reality is that if you refuse to take a job because you are being required to break the law then you will be sanctioned.

This kind of thing will only stop when JC employees start facing criminal charges for forcing people into criminal activities.

Re: Bigger teeth

"This is supposedly a review of the place"

"Supposedly" being the operative word. More likely a schill review.

"The ICO has recently been informed that the company has applied to go into liquidation"

The ICO and insolvency service need more powers to not only veto liquidiation of such companies but also to ensure company directors are prevented from phoenixing anything.

Re: re:The only way that we will see an ad-free internet

"I wasn't talking about an "ad-free" internet for everyone.

Just for me."

If you go to places like Thorpe park, you'll find that so many people are now paying to skip the queues that there's a substantial queue in the queue skipping queue, so they're offering a premium service to skip the queue skipping queue.

"I tolerate their presence if they are tolerable, much like I used to tolerate newspaper ads (don't read newspapers any more, but same principle)."

Interestingly, I found a Punch cartoon from around 1905 which showed complaints about advertising plastering every available surface were around even then.

Perhaps we had a Golden Age of reduced ads in the latter half of the 20th century.

Re: Genie....bottle

"The content also relies on users wanting to use the internet."

'Do not piss off the customer, for they are your source of income'

The question I'll ask: Are you the customer, or are you the product?

Re: Static ads good, javascript baaaad

"The agreement you accept during install is allows them to monitor "all" activity within the browser. "

There's no such agreement in Chromium however. :)

Re: Static ads good, javascript baaaad

"For this reason I don't block ads, but I do block javascript."

Ditto.

Although I do have ublock, I hardly ever activate it, except for the most annoying stuff that gets past noscript (which to be honest is few and far between)

Re: So did the accused admit his guilt?

Less like an open window and more like failing to retrieve all the keys from the Ex.

"over here you can be fired with several weeks notice, and can be expected to continue doing your job and set your house in order for a smooth transition"

The difference is that here, if you're being made redundant (vs "fired") you're going to be given a severance package and a reference which are both at risk if you do anything stupid.

If there's a hint that you won't play nice then your notice period will be spent at home, gardening, with all access codes having been changed before you were told about it.

The USA in particular has this peculiar concept of "at will" employment (which the tories keep trying to introduce here) which means that noone's job is secure from one day to the next - and one of the favourite manglement tactics when firing a lot of people is to parachute XYZ inept manager into the location with promises of long term upgrade to start sacking people ("hoorah", he thinks), and then push him out the door with no compensation when the dirty work is done.

"after I would then have a chat"

This is _why_ you need documented procedures for these kinds of things.

It doesn't just mean that corporate memory is preserved across staffing changes, it means your ass (and others) are preserved in the event that someone doesn't bother following them.

Re: What would happen if Assange stepped out ?

"but the charge would be skipping bail. This seems to carry a penalty of 3 to 12 months inside. "

Not for a first offence and certainly not for charges which no longer exist, especially as he's not been found guilty of anything. Causing the state to spend shedloads of money staking out the embassy isn't grounds for a harsher penalty.

Local habitual bail breachers get a £100 fine and told not to do it again.

If he got more than a suspended sentence or an afternoon in the cells he'd have grounds for an appeal.

Re: The landline is now a liability

> the very first call I got (FSM's honest truth) was "We understand you've been in an accident".

I had the same experience with my latest mobile phone contract. Within 25 minutes of turning it on.

Re: 60 calls a person

"My clever Fritz!Box router handles all my telephone calls. "

So does mine. The good part is that it has a seamless SIP facility that will link into various providers.

I have a 070 number with charge rate set to £1.50/minute that forwards to a SIP account that forwards to Fritz. For the most part if businesses insist on a contact number, that's the one they get.

If I get an unwanted marketing call coming in on that SIP account, its gets strung out as long as possible. I don't get any income from it, but I'm an evil bastard. The 070 providers laughed when I explained why I wanted it set to the maximum charge.

Re: 60 calls a person

"Trouble is, when you get a new landline number all your friends, acquaintances and other contacts lose touch unless you notify them all."

They have my email, that's all they need.

Re: Fines

They've been taking steps to prevent companies phoenixing over the last 12-18 months, so "more than last report"

Re: Brought to you...

"the country that exited the EU because (in part) because it didn't want to be forced to follow its human right standards."

Which were mostly written by the country that is now exiting the EU.

Re: But does it actually save time?

"for the unlikely event that a copper (or someone else) might object to me taking a photo."

In my experience the "objector" is usually either a PCSO or someone caught doing something naughty.

They object even more vehemntly when being told they're actually being videoed and "I can, I have, I will continue to do so and you have no power to stop me" - once at which point the smirking policeman standing next to the now-fuming PCSO burst out laughing and said "He's absolutely right, now stop being a twat"

Re: But does it actually save time?

"There is no requirement to carry your driving licence with you."

No, but if you don't then you must produce it at a station within 7 days if asked to do so (and that's despite them being able to bring up a copy of it in the car to verify you are who you say you are)

It's usually easier to have it.

Re: But does it actually save time?

"A quick finger print check and ten minutes later, and the subject is issued with a summons for three offences"

The way the system is currently setup the fingerprint check will only tell that the person is not already in the system (ie: Known and wanted.)

About the best use for this is dealing with people who give false names/IDs when questioned at the roadside because they're wanted for other things (there are some locations/situations you must provide ID to the police - a wharf, when driving a car and a few others. For the rest you're legally allowed to decline to do so)

At best it's an elimination tool (which may be useful in any case). There are too many false positives to work the other way around.

I'm not entirely sure why this is a news story. These things have been in use by traffic police for over a decade. The bigger deal is how secured they are and what they're actually comparing, which isn't gone into at all.

Re: Not on IDENT1

" I can't tell how many stories i've hear of musicians getting their guitar back in splinters here in the US."

The applicable song is "United breaks Guitars"

And the response to that was to get "Untied.com" shut down for trademark infringement - Only in the USA (actually, only in canada)

"Fingerprints, or more correctly the methods and algorithms used to compare, are not that unique"

Exactly - and this has been known for some time.

Then there are people like my wife whose fingerprints simply do not register in scanners (She has them, but the ridges are so slight they don't get detected). This raises merry hell at immigration.

Re: Don't load third-party scripts

"hand code it in plain HTML."

Yes please.