Posts by Mark 65

Re: What evidence do you have?

Surely nothing "of itself" will stop terror attacks? Kind of a hollow burned out straw-man.

Re: How hard can it be?

@d3vy: From memory, depending on how hard you push the boundaries, typical tax yield from contract income (going back a few years) is 15-35% with 35% being damn safe (i.e. you get 1 - tax yield in your pocket). Not 40% by any means. Whether it affects your personal income tax or not is irrelevant as we are comparing the spend of pre-taxation money versus post taxation money i.e. £1 vs down to £(1-0.35). The money you'd have to spend personally (rather than corporately) to get the ticket is money taken out of the company remember, and that gets taken out after personal tax is paid as well as corporation tax.

Still, I consider the perks of pre-tax travel to be minor compared to redundancy, pension provision, holidays etc etc. If permies think contractors have it so damned easy and it's such a life of coke, hookers, and unicorn tears then perhaps they should STFU and try it.

ShitHouse

Re: re: Neoc: No, no, nope.

if you're on a 2 week road trip, you won't want to occasionally check with your house and verify everything is good? maybe look at your security cameras, verify the temp/humidity is in range, etc?

Same way I access my computers from outside - VPN back into your own network. It can be done by phone, tablet, or PC. Then you use the App, web page or whatever control mechanism as if you are on your home computer. That particular access problem was solved a long time ago.

Re: Exactly what defines 'serious crime'?

What defines serious crime you ask? Crime >= dog shit and dodgy parking.

Re: A legal work around?

Moral: Do your own encryption.

Not in the literal sense hopefully. Use something like gpg but certainly never "your own encryption".

The whole thing is just mouth flapping nonsense from people who have zero understanding of IT.

@DAnny 14: +1 for the F18s, the fact they should have been nuclear powered, and fitted with catapults so we didn't need the shithouse version of the F35 if we eventually went that way. One of those carriers full of F18s would be good enough. I'd even go as far as to say we could have bought French carrier fighters or Russian ones but there's no US pork in those deals.

Re: Female Privilege

I wonder if Hillary got off because Bill splashed out on an expensive lawyer?

I see what you did there. No, not you Bill.

Re: Lazy or Paid Off

I used to think incompetence now I've started to think "never attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to a TLA"

Re: Ha ha

"No. Not on the table right now. " TFTFY.

Wait until the Yanks get involved and see where negotiations go, because they will be getting involved like it or not. I doubt there'll be much punishment and more likely an agreement that the UK was always a "special case" as it was never really "in" what with all its concessions, hence no need to disincentivise other countries who have the issue of the common currency to get past and whom are a different kettle of fish entirely. When it comes down to it this will be a tripartite deal between UK, Germany, and the US.

Re: Outdated?

I can think of one reason - because it'll be a pain in the arse to support. VB6 was always a bit of a c*nt to deploy and I'm pretty sure that nowadays nobody wants to drag their CV that far backwards to take on a support contract unless it is at exorbitant prices. So few people are able to support it (plenty think they can code VB, less know of its myriad of shitty bits) and less would want to go back to doing it. Quite aptly for the Liberals this would then be the 1% of the 1%.

Re: "A UK citizen is a UK citizen irrespective of how long they've been out of the country. "

Oh how I wish you were right. But Parliament has already made UK citizenship (and hence EU citizenship as well) revocable at the whim of the civil service. Source? I was reading my UK citizenship papers (not quite there yet) a few weeks ago.

That's for someone becoming one. If your family has a long history of being British and you were born in Britain to British parents (non-naturalised) then I think there's fuck all chance of that being revoked. Those laws apply to people that come in, get citizenship, then commit crimes etc. IANAL.

There's a difference between regular Americans and the ones who get on American TV.

Don't forget the ones you get in politics too. Truly special form of citizen that they are (in most countries) - fuck the country up and generally get paid for life.

They played the all-things-to-all-men game brilliantly while Remain simply forgot about the EU and concentrated on telling us that Leave were liars and scoundrels.They played the all-things-to-all-men game brilliantly while Remain simply forgot about the EU and concentrated on telling us that Leave were liars and scoundrels.

If the benefits of staying in the EU were so clear and so numerous it may have paid for the Remain camp to tell us what that are rather than adopt the "sky will fall in" tactic. People do not like chicken little campaigning as it smacks of desperation and I believe it's part of the British psyche to rebel against foreign leaders (Obama et al), big business and the 1% telling us we shouldn't do something as if we're naughty children. Treat people like idiots and that's how they'll end up making you look.

I think Remain should have been able to win but that their campaign was full of contempt for the common man and it cost them dearly.

Re: Murphy's Rule of Personal Data

Once they have your personal information, they will ignore laws and EULAs and exploit it at will.

Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission

Re: From The Independent newspaper:

But to answer your post seriously an ambulance crew's first reaction on being called to a man going bezerk with a knife is supposed to be to run away ("stand off") and wait for Police help.

...wherein they are no longer required and the coroner is called.

Re: Case sensitive for now

Talk about adding 2 to 2 and getting 5. The lack of [fact checking] around here is getting beyond a bit daft.

Yeah, but look at how many comments it garnered.

Re: Some Department of Commerce weather alert systems use Fortran

There aren't that many COBOL and Fortran programmers left, and no one is learning those languages these days

Also worth noting that Fortran tends to be taught as the programming language of choice to physics undergraduates - apparently it's quite popular in that area - it has an international standards body and is targeted at scientists. It is also pretty damn fast (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/sp/2014/870146/abs/) and, to emphasise a point made above, it is used for large numerical calculations (http://www.moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/)

In the field of high performance computing (HPC), of which large scale numerical simulation is a subset, there are only two languages in use today — C/C++ and “modern Fortran” (Fortran 90/95/03/08).

Re: Snowden isn't an academic by any means.

@ Aodhhan: university education or not, he's a damn site more eloquent, articulate and intelligent than you are. Not everyone wants or needs to piss 10s of thousands of dollars against the wall for a think by numbers university education. If he doesn't have one then he's demonstrated they really aren't all that necessary these days. Some of the World's larger employers are starting to see it that way too.

You might also want to note in your empty headed rant that one of his major points is the shithouse and missing legislation that enables the political classes to shit on anyone at any time in Australia. The gist being that, even if it's meaningless, the US still has controlling legislation versus the Australian free-for-all.

Re: Corporate networks decrypt SSL

HTTPS everywhere and SSL observatory, courtesy of EFF. Always be wary of free wifi - I certainly wouldn't use it unless I was using laptop with a Live CD due to the possibility of malware let alone MITM. Plenty are poorly setup, maintained and secured. Think of using it as being like having unprotected nooky. You may get away with it quite a lot, but then again....

Re: That's just cover

The only thing that changes here is what a Judge can determine at the end of a trial, after the jury has returned a guilty verdict. A Judge is still free to determine what ever sentence he sees fit, but it can't be longer than 10 years.

What twaddle. If the ceiling is raised from 2 to 10 years then Judges are going to use that extra headroom - they certainly aren't going to keep giving out no more than 2 years are they? This law change has bullying and usage creep written into it.

Sizzles I think you misunderstood me. When I say pre unity I am talking about why use mint vs Ubuntu and the chief reason was installed codecs out of the box - it just worked. Post unity, and without codecs, the chief selling point is just it doesn't have unity. They are undermining their advantages.

Re: To be fair...

Perhaps you didn't notice the scuffle in the Balkans? The odd touch of genocide occurring on the EU's doorstep? Strictly speaking not the EU but pretty much Europe. If you're basically stating that the Germans haven't started another war then you've obviously missed the economic and political colonisation that's been going on. They just got a bit smarter over how they ended up ruling Europe - why use tanks when politics and promises will suffice.

Re: Speed tiers killed FTTP

Well Mathew only 7% on FTTN are choosing 100Mbps would that be becuase they are unable to receive such a speed.

That's more likely because of:

1. Poor backbone infrastructure struggling to serve the speed

2. Shit links off the rock. If there's poor links to the rest of the world then your speed matters less. I'm starting to struggle to saturate my 30Mbps cable connection, so why try for 100?