Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10158 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
My tea cosy is far superior. It protects my head from frost, mind control rays and physical damage, due to being padded.
Plus I can use it to keep my tea warm.
Oh and it's the same shape as the Pope's hat, so I can blend in if I'm ever required to hide in the Vatican City.
VAT isn't a tax on revenue.
VAT is a tax on consumption.
This can be easily proved by the fact that no company with a turnover larger than £50,000 pays VAT. What they do is put 20% on top of all of their invoices and pass that money to the government, less a deduction for the 20% VAT they pay on other people's invoices. This makes VAT completely revenue neutral, minus the cost of the extra paperwork.
So the people who actually pay VAT are the last person to pay an invoice in that chain who isn't VAT registered, and so can't claim the VAT back. Which will either be a very small company, like say a painter/decorator, or an ordinary consumer buying something in a shop.
There's lots of tax dodgers, no doubt. But that's still no excuse for doing something so economically illiterate as turnover taxes. They're disastrous.
And if you want to put this in terms of class, they are absolutely fucking awful for the working classes. Because highly automated / higly profitable companies can cope with turnover taxes, it's the kind of low profit / low margin companies that can't - because as I said turnover taxes are economically illiterate and would put that kind of firm out of business. The alternative being to set them so low that they don't raise any money. And they're the kind of businesses that employ lower skilled workers. This is basically a recipe for forcing manufacturing jobs abroad.
Not to mention that you'd get no more highly automated companies either. Who'd invest in a company where you have to pay tax on turnover, so can't offset that investment (a cost) against that tax?
Tax is never free. Tax will always have costs and downsides. That's not an argument for not raising taxes, but you have to realise that someone is already using that money for something, and if you take it off them - you'll lose whatever they were using it for. That's called opportunity cost. So any tax policy needs to be designed to do the minimum harm to the economy compared to the money it raises.
Probably the best way to avoid corporate tax avoidance is to reduce corporation tax to a very low level and raise income taxes, dividend taxes and maybe property/and taxes.
Radio 4 had a great program on the UK Supreme Court earlier this year. I don't know if it's still on iPlayer or not. But it was interesting on the processes they've developed - as of course it's a very new court, brought in to replace the House of Lords.
So they discussed how they came to decisions and then who got to write them up. And how sometimes they'd have on person write up the judgement, with input and comments from others, and sometimes they'd separately have the dissenting opinion written by a spokesman for the dissenters and the majority verdict from one of them.
What I know about the US system comes mostly from Alistair Cooke. The BBC made a huge archive of his Letters From America available a few years ago. There's more than 900 of them, in groups and series. The early ones are all good - but given he started in the 40s, he was starting to repeat himself a bit by the early 90s. Which is only fair. And still may of the later ones are interesting. The Nixon ones are great, particularly in the light of recent Trumpy events. God he'd have been incandescent about Trump - Nixon actually had some redeeming features. I was surprised by how sceptical he was about Kennedy's foreign policy, for example. He covers the Surpremes in a few episodes. Worth a look, even if you only select a few - at mostly 15 minutes each I went through them over a few years of walks to work, interspersed with much other stuff. Mike Duncan's 'History of Rome' and now 'Revolutions' and David Crowther's 'History of England' are my podcast time-sinks now. Along with 'More or Less', 'Fighting Talk', 'Infinite Monkey Cage' and a few others.
Sorry, gone waaay off topic. But I love 'em all, so I'll plug 'em anyway.
Jellied Eel,
I believe that lower courts can ask for a ruling from the ECJ on a point of european law impacting on national law. I'm pretty sure the High Court and Court of Appeal in the UK have done it, before the case even got to the Supreme Court - but I'm not sure if lower courts can.
Everyone's legal system is different too. So in some cases you have to ask for a lower court's permission to appeal, in others you can do it anyway as a matter of standard procedure. And that isn't even standard in any single jurisdiction, let alone internationally.
In the US it's even weirder. As their Supreme Court look at the cases that have been submitted for their attention, have a good old think for a couple of months, and then announce which ones they'll look at and which ones they're not interested in. But then the US Supremes and the ECJ both tend to rule on the point of law in question, give their guidance and then throw the case back to the lower court in question - who then get to do the actually judging on the individual merits of the case.
Law is complex.
The decision to fight in Germany seems utterly perverse to me. Much better to win a few cases in other jurisdictions and try to crack the German nut later. Not that I think their case ever had a hope anywhere. The GDPR is pretty clear on a lot of this stuff, and just whining that you should have an exception because you wantn one is going to piss off most judges in most places. They're liable to think that their time is being wasted.
Why the German courts? Of all the countries in the EU, why did the idiots at ICANN decide to fight this in Germany? Being the country where data protection has been a high profile political issue since at least the early 90s. I can't think of any worse country in the world for them to have picked this fight. Surely they could have found a nice friendly court somewhere else in the EU? Anywhere else.
We are the pastry of the working naan. We believe that the government has an important sausace roll in the life of the country and that it is important to have a general confection free of bake news.
We wish to give the opposition party a bloody good choux-ing and to totally batter them at the next confection. The cream will rise to the top.
W eclair about you, the voters of this great country slice, so vote for us and dough not be tempted by the false promises of those other bastards.
Our policies are to have our cake and eat it, to slice taxes and have jam tomorrow.
Pudding the people first!
Moon ice is vital for space gin & tonics.
Tea is only a secondary application, as they can already bring that with them in a thermos. Or alternatively by means of something like the ISS recycling toilet, i.e. "Yesterday's Coffee".
Now NASA need to find a non-terrestrial source of lime wedges...
I'm sure 4D printing is a thing the BOfH came up with to befuddle his buffoon of a boss before buggering off for beers and bhajis.
So I think Gartner have been pranked by a 1st April press release. But of course they'll never admit the mistake - it'll just diappear again either next year, or the one after.
Although I'm prepared to believe that current printers have achieved self-awareness and control of time. But clearly not in order to help humanity. They're probably being controlled by a capricious GCU in orbit around one of the gas giants. Just waiting to see if we get the hint.
I heard an interview with an old actor who did some TV in the early 60s. Back when all TV plays were broadcast live, as recording was fearfully expensive.
So the director is doing his final pep talk. Firslty the helpful, "Remember if you fluff you lines just keep going, there's no time to stop." Then the less helpful, "and anyone who dries up will never work for me again!"
Because I'm sure that helped with nerves... What an arse.
I think that world championships is for the Pokemon trading card game, not for Pokemon Go.
Not that I've played either, but it's important to get your nerd categorisations correct... I have played Magic and Netrunner a couple of times each, and enjoyed them both (but not enough to play any more), so I wouldn't dismiss Pokemon cards as rubbish. The Go thing seemed to interest people for a couple of weeks, I guess because the idea seemed so novel to them, and then disappeared due to lack of interest. However I can imagine some sort of treasure hunt based partly in real locations and mostly online could be a popular smartphone game for a long time, if it was made to work well.
In the UK the law is now that ongoing credit card payments must be cancelled if the cardholder says so. Admittedly last time I heard a BBC consumer program go at one of the banks on this, the bank were still trying to claim that this wasn't what the law said and refusing to comply. But then some banks still try to claim that you have to get refunds for incorrect Direct Debit transfers from the company that took it. Which is also a lie. The banks must refund you on the day you ask them to, and then sort out who the money belongs to later.
I've not used Android in a few years now, but I'm sure there's another breach in the design unless they've changed it. It used to be that if you turned off location services except when Google Maps was running, then Google would disable aGPS.
I guess you could argue that them being unable to slurp your data to build that global WiFi SSID database should mean you don't get to share in the benefits - but I'm pretty sure that the GDPR doesn't allow you to do that trick with disabling services if you don't give consent.
You're allowed to refuse to deal with people if you won't give up neccessary data, but that's using the provision of gathering required data to run a service. If you use consent, you're specifically not allowed to refuse some services if consent is not given - you're supposed to use a different justification to gather the data, if that's the case.
But I'm so out of date on Android, this could now be irrelevant. Also it sounds like they've made the location data controls a lot more complicated since the last time I was using it.
nuked,
Not only is the law on turnover - but I think the UK is one of Google's top markets.
I admit I'm going from 5 year old memory here, but when they moved the advertising sales to Ireland it was over £6bn of UK advertising sales, which was not that far short of 10% of global turnover at the time. That's quite a lot of leverage.
Remember that Microsoft's devices are at the top end of the price range, whereas a lot of the Androids are at the bottom end. So MS could be taking a large share of the profits, even on low sales - like Apple with mobile phones. I don't think the Android vendors take the tablet market that seriously any more.
I met an old acquaintance at some event or other last year. Back in 2005 I gave him my old Sony Ericsson P800, as his was knackered and I'd given up and gone back to a dumbphone. His current smartphone had just broken, so he had taken our two old dud phones and created a frankenphone. It worked. Nice burst of nostalgia. The funny thing was to realise how small it is in comparison to modern smartphones. It felt huge at the time, though I suppose that was mainly thickness.
To get back to the article he was on his last plastic stylus. Both our phones came with 2, and I'd bought a pack of 5 spares. So that's an average of one lost every 9 months...
Yes. The C5 electric motor could only go relatively slowly. If you wanted more speed, or if you hit a particularly steep hill, it also had pedals. I don't think it was actually powered by a washing machine motor, but I think it was a similar size/output.
They were actually terrifying. You'd have thought that something that low to the ground would be stable, but even cornering at a brisk walking pace had it leaning over. And because there was no wheel, but steering levers behind your seat - you were in a very unatural position and felt horribly unbalanced. Being so low and so off balance on a road with real cars must have been horrifying. I've only driven one round a carpark. You'd have to offer me serious money to dare take one on a road.
Bureaucratic inertia and sheer size I think. Most countries that have Marines tend not to have very many of them. From memory the UK only has 3 active battalions, and a much larger army. But if you look at US history - they've gone through large chunks of it with a tiny standing army which often wasn't that much bigger than the Marines. Also the Marines were getting regular combat and the army wasn't. Don't the US Marines still have something like 3 divisions? There's an awful lot of the buggers...
Even when you get to post WWII history (when the US army got big and stayed big), there weren't that many of them in the US. They were mostly deployed to Germany and Korea. Apart from light/airborne units, most formations back in the US were mostly incomplete and needed to be reinforced by the National Guard to be deployable. Those were the guys to go to Europe if WWIII kicked off, but the regulars based in Germany (along with the Germans, UK and maybe French) would have to hold the Soviets up long enough for them to actually get there.
So it's mostly been true up to the end of the Cold War, that if the US wanted to deploy a division of troops right now, it had to be the Marines.
They're called a separate service, but do come under The Office of the Navy in the Department of Defense. But historically they've been as important as the army for a lot of the time. In the Pacific in WWII they even split it into two theatres, with MacArthur and the Army running the battle in the South from Australia - and the Navy and Marines doing the rest.
The US have a Marine Corps because the Army and Navy can't seem to cooperate. And the Marines have their own air power because the US Airforce can't even cooperate with the Army, let alone the Marines.
But then that's OK, because in the US the Marines and the Navy don't cooperate either...
Scotty Bones,
Nope. The EU are trying to impose their laws within the EU. And succeeding so far. Which seems entirely fair enough. It's not like they're unreasonable demands, so ICANN could just have mandated them for EU registrars and then either ignored them elsewhere or made them a "global best practise" or somesuch.
But they chose to stick their head in the sand. They haven't yet really tried the approach of saying you can't tell us what to do we're in California. They've tried to negotiated (badly and stupidly) and then to use the courts in the EU. And they can't try the extra-territoriality approach, because they have to enforce their contracts with the registrars in courts in Europe. Which they can't because the damned contract is blatantly illegal. Which any lawyer could tell them.
So it's all basically fine. There's no drama here. ICANN are proven to be incompetent. Again. EU law will get enforced by the registrars operating within the EU. And ICANN can't do anything to stop them, because obeying the law trumps contract clauses. And would do so in a US court too. In an ideal world ICANN would have complied with the law as written 20 years ago - as they've been repeatedly told. But now the new versions of that data protection law have much scarier fines, big corporations are jumping right smart to do it. And because the law isn't unreasonable, there's now starting to be political pressure even in the US to give their consumers similar protections. This is a case where I think the EU have got it broadly right, and this kind of law will be non-controversial in a decade's time.
I loved my 2 Motorola RAZRs, 15 years ago. The best ergonomic mobile I ever had - because they could be thinner and wider as they folded in half. Microphones that reached your mouth for less external noise and no accidental dialling. Sadly after that flip-phones became rare and I went for Samsung slider. Which I reallly liked.
Except I dug it out of a drawer a few years later for Mum, and it was bloody impossible to use. Well OK, I exaggerate, but it took quite a while to set up and get her addresses into it, and it was actually quite hard to show her basic stuff like changing volume and ringtones. The later Nokia dumphones were also pretty shit in UI terms, compared to the old classic green screen ones. But not as obscure as that old Samsung. which was even worse than the RAZR it replaced. The RAZR's shit software was forgiven for how great it felt in your hand.
Interesting. This is what I thought I wanted for a while, something to act as a hotspot for my iPad when required, but let me use the phone for mainly talking. But I think I'm now used to being able to check satnav, bus/train times on the browser and email on the phone. So I guess I'm now hooked to smartphones.
Which is a shame. I much prefer the ergonomics of a flip-phone / slider.
Robert Carnegie,
It's just house style. Trying to keep up the irreverent atmosphere. After all, Storage vendor brings out new product that's 5% better than last years', ain't exactly thrilling and wonderful It's dull. But if your job involves IT storage, then you might want to know it. So El Reg's style is to mix industry news and comment with a bit of purely silly stuff and some interesting science and a bit of vaguely tech related politics - to make itself more attractive to its readers.
The silly headlines appear when the subbies have the time and inspiration to do so. And long may it continue. Though I confess to being bored of the SuperCali type ones. But I wouldn't wish that personal preference to come between a Reg subbie and their right to twist that particular trope just a little bit more.
onefang,
It's the shit that turns up with lots of pictures at the bottom of articles on better sites. Usually very focused on clickbait headlines about celebs and bullshit medical/diet info.
I barely register it, because 20 years of exposure to the internet has caused me to go ad-blind. My brain has leared the bits of the pages not to look at, and now doesn't see them unless I'm looking for them specifically. Also I try to avoid clickbait headlines as a matter of principal.
I picked up much of my knowledge about their shit from the brilliant Dave Gorman's 'Modern Life is Goodish'. Apparently one of their tricks is the clickbait headline, "You'll never guess which celebrity has got [insert horrible disease]." Illustrated with a picture of someone properly famous like George Clooney. Only when you click on the article it's some nobody from "reality" TV. I think he even showed versions of this where it was "You'll never guess who just died!" with a celeb photo and then the article about someone entirely different.
Anyway they're the pond scum of the internet - and sites who use their shit should be ashamed. They flog dodgy diet pills and crackpot, unscientific diets - so I suppose they're a perfect fit for the Daily Mail...
jake,
I agree that timestamps would be good. I used to use them for replies to ACs, until they took them away.
I know we've got an anonymous cowherd (or is he anomolous?) - but I'm pretty sure we're bereft of aardvarks.
Of course, my preferred solution would be proper threading. Everything else is just papering over the cracks for the lack of that obvious answer.
Anon Coward + number is quite a mouthful. So how about we assign them a random dictionary word for each thread. Then we've got one word to call them by in replies. So you could have anonymous aardvark, anonymous banana, anonymous custard etc. Obviously this risks confusion, if discussing different versions of Ubuntu - but should serve perfectly well otherwise...
Is the BBC show you're on about 'Mastertapes'? Each episode had an A side and B side aired on consecutive days. The first where they were interviewed and played a bit - the second where they answered questions from the audience and played a bit more. I think all still sitting on the iPlayer.
Radio 4 have surprisingly good music programmes sometimes. It's an odd station. There's a lot on there that I don't like, but I'm always being surprised and coming across something totally odd, that's also great. There was a series a couple of months ago on musical instrument makers, or 'Tales from the Stave' where they discuss the history of a piece of classical music and composer over the original manuscript.
Plus I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, More or Less and Infinite Monkey Cage.
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