Posts by Alan Brown 15046 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"The police, in this instance, prioritised public self-congratulation over their responsibility to protect a private citizen."
The interesting thing about slander is that everyone who repeats it, is liable for it - and "I believed it was true because N told me" isn't a defence
This is the kind of case where not only the department, but _every single individual_ who made statements on the department's behalf to the press can be taken to court in a personal capacity, along with the media which repeated the claims.
"It's not using them that's the problem, it's relying on them."
Relying on them AND issuing press releases vilifying people based on the results before trial.
Innocent until proven guilty and all that kind of thing.
Many compensation claims are ambulance chasing, but in this case he really should be taking them for everything they have and then some.
"Amazon appears to have a growing problem with policing dodgy sellers in general, and in particular counterfeiters which appear to be out of control. "
Counterfeiting on Amazon is a major problem and has been for a while.
The vast majority of counterfeit stuff for sale _isn't_ suspiciously cheap, which makes it a lot harder to identify. It most cases it's the same price as the real item or only a tiny amount cheaper.
Amazon are completely useless at taking action, and notifying trading standards might as well be a black hole.
> They didn't have the biggest reseller of the planet telling them how a computer system should sell, ehm, work...
I used to think that Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was a description of MS, but these days it's clear that all of them want us to stick our heads in a pig.
"Got to wonder if the staff in my local branch of Enterprise aren't doing a little light data skimming?"
Notify the ICO.
My experience of these kinds of scams is that it's seldom confined to one or two branches. The gangs will systematically attempt to subvert staff at as many locations as they can.
It explains where the scammers got some of their data from - and in one call where I decided to play with them to waste some time, it became clear that they have direct access into the DVLA's live database too.
What I don't understand is why the ICO seems unconcerned about this aspect of the scam operation.
"the US telecoms laws have seem like some dodgy cartel where each player has their own turf and God help anyone trying to muscle in."
It IS a dodgy cartel, where the players have legally mandated monopolies and it may well be a crminal matter for anyone trying to compete. The telcos generally have a 100% monopoly over DSL services and competitors get no look in. This has systematically put almost all smaller ISPs out of business because the telcos were generally also able to introduce charges for modem calls on the basis of "system load" (which is bullshit as an established PSTN connection generates no load - that only happens in setup/teardown phases).
You frequently have the situation where towns/cities trying to setup their own systems are being sued out of existence by the incumbents - with state backing.
The USA is a "free market" - a good example of what happens when the big companies are free to make up the rules as they go along and buy the rulemakers. The country is almost as corrupt as Nigeria or other countries floating around the "Most corrupt" index, with crumbling infrastructure due to decades of economic mismanagement, but inertia means that things haven't started collapsing - YET.
Being a major military power means the collapse may well be messy.
"In the US the concept of LLU does not exist."
In the US, the concept of LLU _did_ exist and got systematically legislated out of existence by sweetheart deals between the incumbents and state public utility commissions on condition of infrastructure investments (which also allowed mergers).
Those infrastructure projects usually never materialised or were aborted after a few months but the telcos kept going back to the PUCs for more deals - and getting them, no questions asked. Money or other considerations may have passed between PUC members and the telcos but if so, it's all off the books.
The result is that the AT&T Borg has been reassembled from all the baby Bells back into 2 parts (east and west of the Mississippi to avoid the antitrust action of the 1930s), all the LECs and competing ISPs are gone and that pesky "univerasl service" obligation from the 1930s antitrust settlement is gone.
It's known as the $10 trillion swindle and worth looking up.
"The smoking ban was entirely driven by the desire by anti-smoking campaigners to have a tobacco free environment on flights. "
Ironically the smoking ban led to more fires, because of smokers stuffing butts in the toilet bins - which already had paper in them.
That said, I enjoy my tobacco free flights and remember what it was like before them. I also remember coming home from the pub in the days before the ban and having to have a shower plus toss all clothes in the laundry, or deal with an unholy reek of other people's stake smoke in the morning.
> The Russians played this prank on the Americans in the 50's with the "nuclear powered bomber"
That "prank" might well have some unintended benefits (which should have materialised about 40 years ago) as it directly led to the development of LFTR technology in the 1960s.
The ironic thing is that it's taking the chinese to take up a technology the americans explicitly threw away despite the obvious safety improvements over conventional water-moderated systems for the sake of congressional pork - and turn it into a viable commercial "thing"
"Don't assume electric vehicles have no wear components, because they do. Lots of them."
And EVs are _heavy_. I noticed this when testing a Leaf. Took it to my local mechanical wizard and we stuck it on a lifter - the body is based on one of Nissan's lighter vehicles and the suspension hasn't been beefed up much to cope with the extra 300kg of mass.
"In the USA, maintenance of the Federal interstate highway system is paid for by a tax on gasoline (about 18c per gallon). States add an average of 30c/gallon on top of this, with varying percentages of that going towards road infrastructure."
Road infrastructure may be used by cars (and mostly paid for by car drivers) but the _vast_ majority of damage done to them (requiring repair) is done by HGVs.
A 8 ton rigid body vehicle (ie: An average 40 seater bus) does a LOT more damage than 40 cars.
The damage done by a vehicle is more or less proportional to the 5th power of axle weight multiplied by the square of velocity. It's one of the reasons that HGVs are speed restricted and banned from light duty roads.
"Newer batteries are constantly being invented and I am not convinced that the poisonous components are truly being completely recycled on a global basis. "
The material in the latest promising LI technology is "olivine" - if you haven't heard of it that won't be surprising unless you're a geologist, but it's one of the most common minerals on the planet and comprises about 1/3 of what comes out of the average volcano.
" They weigh an absolute ton and I've certainly seen lead-acid arrays explode in the past."
No need for an explosion. All you need is an out of control charging circuit boiling the things.
Suphuric acid fumes turn most PVC black. Have you ever tried to tell the black wire apart from the black wire (which was red when you installed it) from the black wire (yellow) from the black wire (green) ?
Not to mention what happens to any exposed metals in such an event.
"(Wait, you thought that auto manufacturers actually make money on selling cars? "
They never did., It was all about selling parts, which is why japan managed to upset the applecart so badly by making reliable cars - even in the 1970s an average japanese car needed 1/4 the servicing of anything from Europe/USA (AND was easier to work on)
These days Ford makes a loss on cars, breaks even on parts and makes a stonking profit on finance agreements - which gives it major incentive to make reliable cars, given the way US consumer protection law works. GM and a few others have yet to learn that lesson and unsurprisingly Ford was the only US maker that didn't need bailing out.
As others have said, this is about Farm Machinery (and other offroad equipment) being subjected to major levels of vendor lock-in for parts and servicing - something that both Europe and the US effectively made illegal when automotive makers attempted the same tactic in the 1980s-2000s. The whole thrust of ODB was to standardise things and encrypted protocols were outlawed (My older Nissan's CAN ODB port is encrypted - the following model year was supplied with decrypted bus. What that means is that whilst I can get a lot of data out using K-Line data it's both slow and a limited subset of everything that's there, with a special Nissan tool (expen$$$ive) needed to get all the other stuff.
VW and BMW are amongst the makers still holding out on this stuff and their contempt for customers has caught up with them in other areas.
"It seems to me that the huge upsurge in electronics in vehicles of all types is to make it as difficult as possible to service by the person whom purchased that vehicle"
That has a HUGE part to play in what's panning out here. Europe has made encrypted diagnostics illegal, etc.
John Deere (and others) sell extremely expensive diagnostics systems which are only able to be used by authorised repairers - who usually charge a fortune just to plug in and say that XYZ wotsit is broken. A large number of owners are increasingly suspicious that they're being charged for parts and labour that didn't really need to be done, but because the management and diagnostics systems are entirely proprietary there's no way of auditing that what the repairer _says_ needed to be done actually _is_ what was needed to be done. The other side of this equation is that it locks out 3rd party parts suppliers, which drives the cost of ownership up even further.
"It seems Brexit may not happen"
Seems??
Given who Comrade Theresa has put in charge of making it happen, it's pretty much a certainty. This has been setup to fail from the outset.
From a political point of view she must be seen to say that brexit is certain and happening until the moment she declares "we tried our hardest and it's just not possible". Exit the political careers of the 3 clowns and she comes up smelling of roses.
In a jury trial, this is where the defence lawyers bring up exactly these points. The state can't D-notice telling the juries about the existence of legislation which enables the "authorities" to tell lies and the moment that's done, the seeds of doubt are sown, especially if parallel construction is explained - and the prosecution can't prevent a defence lawyer explaining how it's done.
Unlike some other countries, UK juries tend not to be stupid and they don't trust untrustworthy organisations just because they happen to be "the law"
The urban legend that the Metropolitan Police flying squad was so distrusted that in the 1970s they wouldn't be able to secure a conviction for a set of bank robbers caught red-handed in the act isn't far from the truth.
The other urban legend that the Greater Manchester Serious Crime squad was disbanded because it was found to be responsible for performing most of the serious crimes in Great Manchester also isn't far from the truth.
The result is that after a few such cases the "authorities" will attempt to move such cases to the "secret courts" - where the judges tend to be more sympathetic, but the state also has to prove its case to a much higher degree.
"or you've a source prior to Grimm."
I'd say the former.
Those tales pre-Grimm didn't have happy endings or happy middles.
The Grimms did a LOT of cleaning up and reworking of tales which originally made it clear that the world was a big bad _dangerous_ place where you needed to be on your toes and _nobody_ was on your side.
That's the one you don't hand back to the user and keep around for when manglement show up demanding why they need to pay you so much.
The worst such case I've encountered is when I was asked to sort out a friend's PC after her son had been using it and managed to infest it with crapware - to find a rather large set of explicit pictures onboard, many featuring another friend's daughter.
Some things you just absolutely wish there was mind bleach for.
GPON is only asymetric if you want it to be asymetric. It's perfectly feasible to offer 1GB/s symetric to every house on the street on one piece of fibre. (although inadvisable: For the same reason 10base2 is inadvisable in a classroom and why cable TV ISPs were spam nests in the late 1990s/early 2000s)
One of my suppliers has a large selection of fibre mux/demux FWDWM equipment. Not one of the transceivers on offer is asymetric.
"if Openreach are unbundled, VM reason that there's a real risk of their network having to offer local loop unbundling."
VM haven't been sucking on the public funding tit to have an obligation to unbundle foisted on them.
More to the point, an unbundled OR will see VM as a customer and start selling them cheaper access to the other 70% of the country. It's much cheaper to shove a duct down existing groundworks than to have to dig your own.
An unbundled OR _can't_ compete for endusers - wholsale-only and "no entity is allowed to have a controlling interest" is the key - see NZ and "chorus" for what's happened in the last 5 years.
"I would suggest that if you deal with BT it is best to go via the options team, I have had problems in the past with sales where they sell me a package and then charged me more than we agreed, also a bad employee who took exception to the low price I was paying now I insist upon email confirmation of what is agreed and have needed it to prove that they had made the mistake before it was resolved."
Record your calls. When they dispute things ask them if they'd like to listen to your recording or would they prefer it was played back in court and you will be ensuring they're summonsed as a hostile witness to verify it was their own voice.
Don't rely on a DPA request to get the recording. I've run into a number of telcos and banks who've conveniently lost their recordings. It makes it even more amusing when they do this (the courts and ombudsmen take this as all-but-explicit admission of guilt) and you're able to play your recording at odds with what they claimed was the content of the conversation.
"I complained to the Ombudsman about BT this year. They misinterpreted my complaint (deliberately, as I corrected them twice and they ignored me)"
There is zero legal requirement for you to use the ombudsman. Just go straight to Small Claims - although having had the ombudsman ignore you won't look good for BT in court.
The £25 is almost enough to pay the filing fee to get properly sorted out.
" Nobody gets attached to a fridge or a washing machine or even an ISP. Buy cheap, buy multiple, chop and change as they perform differently."
It takes 14 days to change to another ISP. It's not like the old days where you could just dial a different number.
and yes A&A is silly expensive. I could justify being a customer if it wasn't for their data caps.
"But if things go wrong and you have to rely on their customer service they are horrible"
And THAT is exactly what matters when i comes to customer service.
Helpdesk and faultfinding is not a cost centre.
It's a critical customer-facing operation which if done wrongly WILL result not only in losing that customer's business, but also poisons interactions with friends of that customer (who will have been informed in graphic detail of the company's failings) and makes it harder to sign up new customers.
" I miss the days when I could dry my cycling shoes on top of a toasty warm CRT."
I know someone who insisted on doing that in an open plan office.
Shoes disappeared one day (dumpster), and every subsequent pair he left to dry on top ended up mysteriously falling out of the window on the other side of the room.
"But these last two - especially R1 - are just too infested with PC messages to allow me to enjoy it properly."
This is Disney in action.
Disney himself is attributed as saying more or less that he knew what he sold was corny and fake, but corn sells very well, thank you very much, so keep cranking it out.
"the 3 we don't talk about and the original 3"
I may be a heretic, but the original star wars was conceived as a homage to 1930s space operas, with their 2 dimensional villans, heroes, sidekicks and strictly black/white morality tales.
Remember: when they first read the Ep4 script the cast asked if they were meant to camp it up. It was seen as cliched even then. The surprise was Lucas telling them to play it straight.
1,2 and 3 all follow that same ethos. The cardboard cutout villains of the first scenes of Ep1 are virtually exact clones of the villains of 1930s horse, spy and space operas - as was Jar Jar Binks and the other quite painful characterisations (Who didn't spot the Idi Amin references?). Once you understand that, the movies are fairly enjoyable, but don't expect the Star Wars universe to be nuanced or subtle. They were never intended to be, much like the movies they pay homage to.
Unless the contract contains severablity clauses then an illegal section renders the ENTIRE contract void.
For egrarious violations the court may strike out the entire contract in any case - and the wild inconsistencies within the contract's sections (in one part saying that changes may only be made with both parties' agreement and another saying HRD may change things unilaterally) means that any competent contract lawyer would fairly easily have the entire thing torn up for ALL customers and dumped on HRD's head.
" HRD would not communicate and hurled racial abuse at me. I had to make a complaint to PayPal to get a refund."
Erm, you should notify Paypal (and other payment handlers) about the racial abuse.
Paypal's policies about such things are clear. HRD would find themselves looking for other payment handlers.
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