Posts by Alan Brown 15053 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"It is not illegal to modify a car so long as it does not fail MOT tests."
Wrong
"EGR blanking and rechipping for economy and high NOx is perfectly legal."
No it's not. You'll find that the law says that you are not allowed to circumvent factory installed antipollution devices. As another poster pointed out, that invalidates the Type Approval for the vehicles, making it illegal to even _park_ on public roads.
"Uber lost its licence for not adequately following up on reports of passenger assault and rape, and not providing evidence of adequately screening drivers for prior violent offences."
In many ways it's good that TfL has drawn this "line in the sand" that Uber has fallen foul of.
_Other_ companies have worse records than Uber (including a number of Black cabs). If TfL doesn't enforce to the same standards against those outfits too, then TfL management are about to have their heads handed to themselves on a silver platter by the courts.
"negotiate their cars to be chipped/ECU reprogrammed to turn the EGR and other emission control off. "
That's an automatic vehicle impoundment if it happens to come to the attention of the DVLA. Just saying....
And those three garages could find themselves the focus of some interesting attention too.
> "I need an initial password to give to the user before they change it" password.
Only acceptable if you ALSO set "force password change at next login"
Personally, I do that every time I have to set a new pass for a user, even with some randomness in it.
It means they can't blame me for the non-secure password they _do_ choose.
"Had this with TSB "
Rule one: Always get everything in writing. If you can't get it in writing, RECORD the meeting/call (because they will if there's anything in it they can use against you, or will mysteriously lose the recording if it's something you can use against them)
"Why were you looking there?"
If your job includes making sure security is managed, you look for such things - including under the keyboard/back of the monitor/in-out trays/top drawer (which is slightly excusable if it can be and is habitually left locked) or on the inside cover of a book on the nearest reachable shelf (usually the one that looks the most handled, surprise surprise)
Our standard policy is to lock all the accounts and replace the postit or whatever with one that says "Come and see security. NOW"
" I think you're probably introducing more issues for "honest" companies there without actually doing too much harm to the trolls."
There may be some "salvation" in the works anyway.
Copyright trolls should have taken notice of a few USA judges who've refused to allow trolls to file legal fees against defendants and only allowed the statutory minimum damages (https://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2016/08/21/magistrate-judge-declines-to-award-copyright-troll-attorney-fees-because-copyright-trolling-fees-does-not-advance-the-purposes-of-the-copyright-act/) and more recently a ruling that a trolls who cut and run must compensate the defendant. (https://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2017/09/21/magistrate-judge-to-copyright-troll-you-may-cut-and-run-if-you-want-but-first-compensate-defendant/#more-15870)
Patent trolls are slightly lower on the judicial radar, but this kind of thing does get noticed and is likely to start being applied generically to troll-like behaviour.
In particular the USPTO has been granting patents for XYZ well established idea/process, "But on a computer!" and more recently "But in the cloud!" and this is the kind of grant which deserves to be struck down with prejudice against the examiner(s).
If the examiners defend the grant with "I was ordered to do it" (which is apparently the case) then USPTO manglement should be hauled before the courts to explain themselves.
"China's labour is cheaper than ours because they're massively poorer than us as a country for example. They've also got lower employment and environmental standards for much the same reason."
Actually that advantage went away years ago. Chinese workers are about as expensive as those in Europe or America, but China wins (briefly and only a small amount) on environmental compliance costs (which are rising rapidly) and extremely effective logistics.
"So it operates a lot more simply than a VAT system, but has roughly the same effect."
It's also far more vulnerable to tax fraud and evasion.
If VAT is paid and reclaimed at each step along the way (and vat for business services tend to be the same rate, none of this 5% stuff), then each business pays the goverment the difference between the VAT it's collected and the VAT it's paid - which is far smaller than the VAT on any given item.
The result is that if a company goes under or engages in VAT fraud, or sells its products to an enduser at wholesale level, taxes still get paid and the government isn't left out of pocket
In countries with sales tax only on consumer sales, buying from a wholesaler is frequently difficult because they don't want the hassle and sometimes impossible without a state-issued permit, that has the effect of increasing the overall costs of collecting tax. VAT reduces compliance and collection costs.
Yes, carousel fraud is a problem, but it was a problem under the old system too. the values of such frauds are generally small pickings as whenever you have more than 2 people in a conspiracy someone blabs eventually.
"However if it is over a certain value, then an import duty should of been paid."
This, in spades.
But the problem with setting the threshold too low is that the government ends up paying more in administration charges than it collects - and that's despite the likes of royal mail deciding to extort £100 or so from the recipient as "handling fees"
"No most of them come down to the fact the value of the Euro is too high for the southern states of the EU so they can't export their wares, and the fact it's too low for states like Germany. "
The same thing happens in the USA - places like South Dakota would be a 3rd world shithole if not part of the union.
Rich states subsidise poor states in the USA - and the poor states usually resent it.
"HMRC is actually relatively effective at collecting tax"
There are a few variables at play but it comes down to:
How much tax is collected.
How much it costs to collect it.
New Zealand dramatically simplified its tax structure in 1984-5 and lowered most tax rates, the government expected a lowering of overall taxation take by about 20%
The simplification removed a LOT of exemptions and various shit which was tying up tax staff in knots and made for a 40 page tax return. (The new one was 5 pages). Higher income earners ended up paying more tax as most of their loopholes were closed whilst low-middle earners paid the same or less (many low earners ended up paying none at all)
HOWEVER, the cost of collecting tax was reduced dramatically, as was the number of staff required to collect it - resulting in the tax department of 1991-2 being 2/3 or less the size of the one of 1984, and that reverses a problematic trend in government departments where they keep accreting staff over time no matter what their function is, but treasury-related ones are never cleaned up.
The interesting part was that by making things uncomplicated the government had more to spend but so did the majority of the population and they did so.
(NZ has undone most of the simplification since 1998 thanks to special interests, but a point has been proven.)
In the UK, there are something like 30-50,000 people chasing far less than £1billion of benefit fraud, whilst HMRC only has 1500 chasing £30-150billion (depending whose figures you believe) of tax fraud.
What's the cost-benefit of that?
"So, Alan, I humbly disagree with your slur on sodium."
Tell that to the nice folks at Monju, and whilst you're at it you might like to suggest ways of removing several tons of sodium from their basement. Perhaps your seawater method might work.
In isolation, sodium seems an ideal coolant, however using something which burns furiously(*) when exposed to air has turned out to be "not a very good idea after all" - on multiple occasions at multiple sites.
(*) Solid sodium is bad enough but at least it only reacts when exposed to water.
> As noted by others, sales tax/VAT makes up a lot of the difference between the US and UK prices. The rest is usually put down to "regionalization"
There are still a lot of items where the US$ price (ex tax) of $N is matched by a UKP price of £N(plus a bit).
In most cases, that's attributable to the UK importers believing they can charge what they want as they have a monopoly - it's been interesting telling them their prices are silly and I can get the same item 30% cheaper from Germany, to have them tell me I can't do that as they have an exclusive distribution deal.
The phrase "single market" and questioning if they're admitting to illegal activities usually has interesting effects.
In one egrarious case (Serverlifts), the UK importer managed to grab EMEA distro rights and was charging an insane markup - resulting in an extremely useful device with reasonable sales volume in the USA being bloody expensive here - to the point that the importer was making a big deal that they'd sold ONE in London (to the met police) and a couple into Australia. (I had a discussion with the manufacturer, suggesting that "exclusive distribution deals" were counterproductive for sales and quite possibly illegal under EU law. The prices demanded by said importer suddenly dropped dramatically)
"It doesn't matter how the Brexit will actually turn out what matters is what investors will believe the Brexit will turn out."
Actually it's even simpler than that:
"Any currency is only worth what market confidence says it is worth"
Hence why bitcoin swings wildly whilst larger fiat currencies are less inclined to be volatile.
And before you all shout me down, here's why:
If your pound is worth 2 frobnutz and it falls to a value of 1 frobnutz, the value of your currency may have FALLEN 50%, but anything imported which used to cost 2 frobnutz, and therefore 1 pound, is now costing you....2 pounds.
That's a 100% increase in COST for a 50% fall in the value of the currency.
A 30% fall in the value of the pound translates to a 50% increase of costs
A 25% fall is a 33.3% (1/3) increase
20% fall == 25% increase.
etc.
The simplest way of working this out this is to invert the divisor
IE: if your pound is worth 2/3 of what it used to be against XYZ foreign currency, then anything which is traded internationally in that currency will now cost you 3/2 of what it used to be.
when comparing on the money boards, it's (currentvalue / oldvalue) to get the fall in value and (oldvalue / currentvalue) to get the increase in costs.
I've had to explain this a number of times to management who have been loudly griping that "the pound has only fallen 30%, why are these scalpers charging 50% more?" - bringing to mind the adage that those who can't do basic algebra are doomed to bankruptcy.
"A lot of countries can't/don't/won't supply CLI last I heard."
About 35-45 years ago, the same was true of barcodes on groceries. When the large supermarket chains in various countries announced they wouldn't handle products without barcodes, "too difficult to implement" was invariably solved within weeks.
If the larger telcos announce en-masse that CLI data must be presented or they won't terminate, the recalcatrant telcos will step into line pretty quickly.
"the telco's just make money from both sides by charging for nuisance call blocking services and caller ID."
A large part of the reason why Telcos started to take action against the fraudulent calls was that they fraudsters started injecting fraudulent routing information into the network - meaning that the telcos didn't get termination revenue anymore.
Or in other words, they only care when they're not being paid.
"Another newer version is they use the last number that answered their call for the next call."
If "over here" is the USA, then notifying the FCC should have "interesting" results. Spoofing numbers is explicitly illegal and american LEOs have kicked down doors in a number of countries over this kind of thing. (So have German ones for that matter. It seems to only be the UK who refuse to follow the money if the trail leads out of the country)
"Now Ofcom need to get this adopted by the EU, as the real problem is with calls originating overseas."
Not overly.
As well as the call presentation number, there is always accounting data routed in the call showing the true origin. Telcos _could_ use this to filter bogon caller-IDs and ban traffic from persistent fraudulent telcos, however they have substantial financial incentive not to do so, as they receive termination revenue for each completed(*) call.
The entire world telephone call routing infrastructure is built on the basis that those with access to the engineering layers of the network are inherently trustworthy and that's been provably false since at least the late 1980s when call routing scams were used to hijack Chilean and Nuiean number ranges for sex lines.
(*) Completed or terminated in this context means "something or someone picked up the phone"
" a spurious number presented which is always one digit short of what a number might typically contain"
Which at least is filterable.
The insurance claim ("your car accident") scammers were spoofing real Manchester numbers a few months ago, including ones which belonged to an estate agent and a dentist - who when I called back, were both wondering why they'd had a number of abusive calls and "rather irritated" to hear that scammers had been spoofing their numbers.
There need to be criminal penalty provisions for unauthorised number presentation, ideally with $LARGE penalties allowed to be applied to telcos who let them through.
"Invoking it would be the one thing that would force them to confront reality."
This reminds me of a Civil Defence exercise many years ago. Partway though the weekend of the exercise, the hilltop radio repeater systems failed.
The people working in the exercise immediately wanted to cancel until they were fixed and demanded techs be sent out immediately (expensive overtime and a road dangerous to drive at night). the local CD boss had other (far more pragmatic) ideas: "Unforseen complications are part of life. This is now part of the exercise simulation. Not only are the repeaters down but the access road is out so nobody can fix it for 5 days. Work around it. That's what these exercises are for."
The following Monday I got sent out to fix the repeaters (hit by lightning) and CD had workable contingency plans written up to deal with the problem ever arising in the event of a _real_ emergency.
"I had to tell him to fuck off and raise a CR"
You can be more tactful than that.
'That isn't in the original spec. We might be able to do that in a new software version, but there will be significant costs involved for both R&D and deployment. You'll need to raise a CR for it.'
I know many managers will hear it as "sure we can do it", but you've given the warning and if they press ahead you're justified in demanding more resources.
On the other hand. "No, fuck off. The release is already locked in" might gets back up but it's short, to the point and within the attention span of most managers.
"Because they make various people do management studies as part of their course, I'm often teaching people who are studying STEM rather than business."
The advice you're giving clearly isn't being given to actual business managers.
Or they're sociopaths who are doing it deliberately.
"The request to "do more with less" is akin to being given the finger"
Yup. And if you manage to achieve it, you can expect your budget to be cut as a reward, as you obviously have too much money.
On the other hand if the project turns into a clusterfuck, money trees magically start bearing fruit to the value of "We don't care how much it costs, just make it work, now"
"Of course some businesses have their whole profit margin based on Design creep, mostly those who do large Government projects. "
As someone I know once said - "those businesses are fantastic. After their project craters, we get called in to clean up the clusterfuck. The fact that we can usually produce what was actually originally required, quickly and for one-tenth the original contractor's price makes us look like gods!"
"Now, if only the Govt. would do something about the multitude of Curry/Pizza flyers shoved through my door on an a weekly, nay make that daily basis."
There are a number of things that you can do about that:
Start here: https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/293/~/how-do-i-opt-out-of-receiving-any-leaflets-or-unaddressed-promotional-material
And then proceed to: https://www.mpsonline.org.uk/
And finally: Put a "No unaddressed mail" label on your mailbox.
Yes, in the UK those pizza leaflets are almost entirely delivered by Royal Mail.
Having it illegal in law is plenty.
AS LONG as the law also has statutory damages and a right of private action.
This kind of provision means that instead of _maybe_ facing investigation and $FINE from $GOVERNMENT_DEPARTMENT, firms which play fast and loose with privacy will find themselves facing the much more painful prospect of the death of a million papercuts, via small claims courts.
These provisions are why the USA's TCPA effectively stopped marketing faxes cold in the 1990s (the remaining outfits like fax.com were flat-out criminal and spent most of their time trying to evade the FCC, meaning they spent less time selling services to gullible customers) - it also turned out to be extremely effective against telemarketers who wouldn't stop calling and eliminated prerecorded calls almost entirely (there were exceptions for religion and charity calls).
The law made the marketers and the people hiring them joint and severally liable for breaches, which firstly discourages XYZ widget firm from simply finding another marketer when the one they use goes under, but also means that in the case of forged caller data (which is a wilful violation and triple damages), there's still a locally identifiable litigation target.
All of this stuff is illegal in the UK too, but with the chances of actually appearing in the ICO's crosshairs, businesses treat any fines as a cost of doing business.
The most telling part of the ICO's real stance is their pointed silence when people start raising the issue of private rights of action and statutory damages - which would help them in their own cases as at least one fine they imposed was slashed on appeal, specifically because the judge agreed with the marketer that the levels of distress imposed were unproven, therefore could not be valued monetarily.
"Understanding your product and your likely customers is conceptually not very difficult."
Even in businesses which do both well, only about half of ventures tend to succeed (at best).
If it's done with wildly inspired guesswork then the figure is much lower.
It's a bit like drilling for oil. Wildcatters might find something (about 1 in 10 by the 1970s) but if you crunch the geological datasets and pay attention to the results, your chances improve somewhat - (about 1 in 4 in the 1970s).
The reason I chose the 1970s is that I suspect the actual functionality of the data and knowledge of how to use it for business is akin to the geological knowledge of that period.
"I don't know how it works in the rest of the world but in the fine ole UsOfA the first suspected perpetrators of arson are the firefighters. Wonder why?"
For the same reason that the Greater Manchester Serious Crime squad was found to be the perpetrators of most of the serious crime in Greater Manchester.
Without wanting to sound more than a little geeky, have you ever tried rolling a D20 (or a d100) and charting the results?
Physical dice do tend to have a bias towards one point thanks to moulding flaws and it becomes more obvious the closer they get to "ball shaped".
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