Sir
That Blunkett fella, he must be blind as well as stupid.
5770 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
"Or perhaps you can't..perhaps you're not good enough."
I doubt that is his problem, after all, we've all met really shite contractors who somehow manage to hang on for 3 months.
No, I think his problem is a complete lack of BOLLOCKS. Simply because there *is* no security, which is why we are *contractors* and NOT *employees*.
Hang on a minute. I take your point about public sector chasing something down because 'it is written' (probably in the book of Cyril) but the *entire* point of IR35 was to claw back taxes that HMRC thought they were owed.
As a taxpayer myself (yes I do pay a lot of taxes as a contractor, probably more than that fuckwit AC above earns in a year) I would expect a scheme whos focus is on recovering money to not only fund itself, but to actually show a return - that is why it was set up wasn't it?
I'm not talking about spending 10 million pounds to catch a murderer, I'm talking about spending £100 000 to claw back £20 000 from some contractor - what is the point?
""Each contracted worker was fundamentally insecure, having neither a specified role in the company nor a particular line of duty beyond what was for time being allocated by the permanent staff."
It's about time this piece of shit legislation was binned. With the above statement, so many people that hmrc deem to earn enough to go after are now pretty much in the clear as far as IR35 goes. The people that the legislation was originally targetted at don't earn enough as individuals to make it worth their while to chase.
How much money does HMRC lose by trying to enforce IR35 again? I thought it was supposed to make a profit and pay for itself.
I used to work on the help desk at a major Uk ISP in the 90's and there were regular periods when there were route flaps on the network generated in US which would result in the eventual melt-down of the entire net.
It used to take around 4 hours to sort out. This was plenty of time to head to the pub for an extended lunch.
However, after about 6 months of this the peering operators got so practiced at sorting it out we eventually got a phone call to come back to the office just as we were about to order our first pint. In the end they could sort it out in about 20 minutes (this was before route flap damping btw).
This whole situation led to one of my fondest memories of the period when someone on the helpdesk stood up and announced (in a VERY loud voice) that 'They've got huge flaps in the States!' (Will you ever live that down Sam? :)
"Far more important than AV is making sure you are applying all the relevant updates for your OS and software, especially adobe flash and acrobat and your browser."
Absolutely agree. I have been running PC's without AV on the net since 95 and haven't had a single virus. Co-incidence?
(I do religiously update my O/S and other software of course, I'm not _completely_ brain-dead)
Absolutism is complete bollocks.
You know, I currently work at a bank, banks process money, some of the groups using this service are almost certainly involved in the war industry as it involves lots of money.
OMFG I'M A MURDERING TECHIE CHAIN-LINK THINGY!!!
I'd go and hand myself but that would be murder.
ps the first line is a joke in case you missed it :)
"Had the allies in WW2 progressed technology and weapons at this peacetime and pathetic snails pace, we too would have lost that conflict."
I reckon that H&S is to blame. Sending troops out with experimental weapons every couple of months is going to back-fire on you in the form of casulaties non?
from the bbc link..
"The law on this is vague but the police can - and do - use their discretion in judging these cases. "
I thought it was the Judges that judged, not the Ge^H^HPolice?
If the kid left in charge was 14 and deemed too young, can anyone tell me if the couple of 11 year olds who recently had a kid now have a criminal record? (Apart from making the front page of The Sun)
It doesn't help that M$ won't allow you to remove a credit card from the gamer account once it's been used. They only allow you to overwrite it with a new (and currently valid) one.
I had let my CC card company know that the card details had been cloned and to get a new number issued when they refused to remove it.
NEVER PUT YOUR CARD DETAILS ON XBOX LIVE!
"The point is that the Swedes have already answered this point and they do intend to charge him."
At the risk of sounding uninformed :P I was under the impression that an EAW was only valid if someone has actually 'been' charged (past tense) as opposed to 'going to be' charged.
I've seen a lot of rhetoric and quoted legalese, yet this point still remains to be answered does it not?
It doesn't matter 2 shits that the Swedish Police *might* have enough evidence to charge him or not.
They HAVEN'T charged him, so no-one should be going anywhere.
As for the spurious 'we'll know what to charge him with when we question him' line,
what, as they say, the fuck!
If they have evidence, they can charge him in absentia, issue a proper EAW and then he will *have* to be extradited I expect.
But they don't seem to want to do it the 'legal way' do they? Whyever not?
I may be jumping to conclusions here, but your post reads like you condone rape of young boys - and you want a _hacker_ locked up!
I wish El Reg would change the AC handle to Anonymous Arsehole, because that seems to be the main* reason people post AC - i.e. to post something they are ashamed of admitting to with their regular handle.
*Unless the article is about privacy of course, and then it's de rigueur.
"please do not fire the automatic weapons at the THERMONUCLEAR WARHEAD!!!!"
I never quite got that one, unless he was worried about richochets. How the hell are you supposed to set off a nuclear warhead with a bullet? Does the bullet come fully loaded with an activation key for the device?
Bit like the diesel 4x4 that Morpheus blew up in the follow up film to The Matrix. Mind you, I wouldn't put it past the yanks to build a 4x4 that was petrol and nitrous injected!
Internet Kill switch, just let some muppet loose in MAE EAST with a bgp update routing everything to Null0 and you're done.
Oh, they mean the 'ENTIRE' internet? Well, fuck the US. Who died and made them God?
They already have the ability to blackhole all US bound traffic at the perring points, just as long as they leave everyone else's advertisments alone. Still, there is a fair amount of stuff on US address space I suppose.
Seriously, if they are 'under attack' it would be simpler to have a protocol to pull the frigging wires out of the wall at the sounds of the siren yeah?
" as each unit pirated is a sale lost"
That's a very crude assumption.
When I were a lad, I used to obtain copies of games to play because I didn't have enough money to buy the games, so there was no lost sale, just someone playing their stuff for free. If you could have taken those copied games away from me, it wouldn't have generated a sale.
When I earned enough money, I bought the games - no need to pirate.
Your statement is an incorrect absolute I'm afraid, as I am the exception to the rule, and I'm sure there are others.
Yarrr.
I remembered the 7up and need another 7 astronaughts jokes, not so sure about the 'over there and over there' joke, although I did hear that the crew of Challenger went on their holidays, destination: all over Florida.
Oh, and the last thing said on the challenger?...
What does this button do?
"If there was a middle-class white guy singing lyrics like "that stupid nigger with his gold and his baseball cap" (when *meant* and not some sort of irony or parody) do you think that would be deemed to be acceptible for airplay? Of course not - people would be offended, and rightly so."
So, it's ok for a black person to use these words in a song then?
By that Logic, if Mark Knopfler is a faggot*, then he has every right to use the word he did, yeah?
</IRONY>
*In the UK this is also a term referring to a meatball.
"why would wikileaks be concerned about his defence costs ?"
Um, because that's what they said they would do? $15k isn't going to go very far, is it? hence the 'paltry' term.
Completely numpty celebrities offered more than that for Assange's bail ffs.
And although it does seem that Assange == Wikileaks, this isn't the full picture, even if he does seem to use the wikileaks pot'o'cash as his own personal fund-bag.