Posts by Pen-y-gors 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
In days gone by I worked for a large life assurance company who had a reverse-lira issue. Some of their 'Industrial Branch' old policies (life assurance collected weekly by agent knocking on doors) went back decades, and when they matured they need to be processed on modern computer systems - which had to handle weekly premiums of 1/5d or even some in farthings. So they multiplied the pounds by 960 and did all their sums in farthings.
either the jet (which is easily replaced) or the pilot (who isn’t).
For a given value of 'easily'.
As we aren't allowed to know the full cost of each of these white Dumbos, and we assume a conservative £100,000,000, that's a tenth of a DUPbung or a magic money shrub.
Or in real terms, about 30,000 people on £30K will have to work for an extra year to pay £100M in tax for it. So, not really 'easily'. Hands up who's willing to do some overtime.
Been there, done that, got bored filling in the form.
Yes we need a central team. But we need a central team that is actually equipped and staffed to take immediate action for 'crime in progress'.
I tried to report some live phishing attacks that seemed to be using live bank accounts (possibly). Hopeless. Used 'live chat' to communicate with some call-centre drone who basically said all they do is record things which may or may not be looked at by real police-persons, sometime. I ended up reporting the phishing domains to the registrar myself who killed them.
Remind me - which party of government was keen to support the police, and which Home Secretary cut 20,000 plods?
I remember a London-based friend explaining right-of-way on roundabouts and when lane-changing in the Smoke as being that the vehicle with the cheapest paintwork has right of way. i.e. if you're driving a Ferrari don't argue with a clapped-out old Cortina.
5 years is nothing like the acceptable lifetime of a TV or fridge, imho
And extending the argument a bit, or a car.
We have cars chock full of built in computers, including GPS etc. I have a car that is nearly 30 years old and still runs well, most of the electrics still work. It was made by a company in the VW group. Will VW guarantee that their latest in-car GPS and computer-controlled aircon will work in 30 years?
@Doug S
Thermal printers are bad news for historians.
I was recently working on a collection of receipts from the 1850s. Apart from being works of art in their own right (lovely engravings) they had all sorts of useful and interesting information. One was for a cast-iron stove and noted how it was being delivered - Rail, canal and cart.
That won't be available in the future - what's the chance of a thermal print-out not having faded totally in 100 years?
Bring back old technology! Ban e-mail! Print everything!
Okay, Amazon are a fairly large company, and can probably afford to set up their systems to cope, but the work involved with keeping up with all the global forms and rates of sales tax could be a nightmare. Having tried to work out the implications of doing e-commerce throughout the EU it would be 100x worse if they genuinely tried to do it globally (not just Australia - what if Nigeria wants the same, or N.Korea?)
I think possibly WTO need to get involved to come up with some general global scheme to simplify things, while not causing too many problems for local retailers. Perhaps a simple annual return by each retailer who has sold more than $x worth of goods to a particular country, with a flat rate tax on that total amount (a bit less than the standard rate to allow for differing rates on different products - e.g. UK might be say 15% instead of the standard 20% VAT - and the rate for the year is the rate that applies at the start of that tax year). And no variations for states or regions - it would be up to the national governments to divy up the dosh.
A simple list of countries and current tax rate would be very easy to implement, even for the smallest online retailer.
Can I please be appointed chief economist at the WTO? Happy to work for meals and $850K p.a.
Hammond: "“If that proves impossible then Britain will have to go it alone, possibly with other partners outside Europe and the US, to build a third competing system. But for national security strategic reasons we need access to a system and will ensure that we get it.”"
I may be confused, but aren't there already three competing systems? the US GPS, Glonast and Galileo.
So we have a chancellor who counts "one, two, many" - no wonder the UK budget is stuffed!
It's nice that we can afford $10 billion to build our own system (or $30 billion allowing for UK government project efficiency) - now we have a magic money forest!
"Pulling up the drawbridge"
Nope, the hard-brexit nutters do want to pull up the drawbridge, but want our former partners to keep leaving supplies of food and goods in a basket for us to pull up on a rope, without us contributing anything in return.
Leave means leave. Mrs May said so.
@AC
No, the implication was very clear - instead of the EU lets fund the NHS.
Or did they mean lets give the NHS an extra £5 a week, and spend the rest on tax-cuts for hedge-fund managers? Or £10 for the NHS and £349,999,990 per week to the DUP bribe fund?
Surely you're not saying that Leave slogans were meaningless and worthless? Heaven forfend!
Exactly. If you RTFA you'll see that there is no praying to Alexa involved. Alexa can be asked to recite prayers FOR you. Which is just the high-tech version of the prayer-wheel. Particularly if you can get Alexa to loop.
Rather takes the fun out of 20 Hail Marys and 10 Our Fathers, though. Bit like an automatic line-writing machine. Was it Molesworth who invented one?
@John Fen
I can't think of a single one that would cause much trouble if I couldn't access it.
Organisations or individuals who share files with you via OneDrive?
Yes, alternatives are available, but this is someone else's choice, so I can't tell them they're idiots and doing it wrong.
Security updates to Windows?
@JohnFen
Me? I block google at my router, and avoid using any Google service.
But, to be fair, not really an option for 99.9% of the connected population. Google has some really, really useful services: maps, digitised books, search, mail and lots more - alternatives for some, not for others.
It added that the data held by public authorities could be a potentially lucrative asset, urging the government to ensure it negotiates good deals for its use by private companies.
Why is government absolved from the GDPR?
I provide information to the government, when I have to, purely so that the government can provide me with a particular service. That's it. The government has no authorisation to sell that information to any third party, anonymised or not.
Stuff 'lucrative assets' - the Tories would (and probably have) sold their grand-mothers for catfood.
Multiple addresses?
Of course we all have multiple e-mail addresses. Probably thousands. This is El Reg. We own our own domains.
But, and this is important, although most of us avoid FB like the plague for personal use, sometimes we need to set up an account as part of a client project. At the last count I had six FB accounts, all dodgy and full of fake info.
But for fans of "Elvis working in a burger-bar" type theories, it could just be a cunning bit of research by El Reg, to see how many of us will succumb. They've priced the paperback so high that no-one will buy it, but many of us would like it. So, how far will we go? Will we invest a squid or two in a previously unheard-of crypto currency (I like the fake 'market price' site.). Will we go a step further and set up a FB account to get it for free?
We're just lab rats to the mekons at El Reg Towers!
Nice one. But no problem telling the Home Office. Their inability to successfully organise anything more complicated than a morning cuppa and a Digestive is well known. We'd end up with dozens of hungry asteroids in parking orbits, waiting for their thrusters.
The Home Office Christmas Party must be an absolute disaster!
We in the mighty and free United Kingdom will have nothing to worry about from alien asteroids. After next March we will have control of our borders, policed by the powerful RAF Air (and Space) command. Any cheeky asteroids trying to smash into the Home Counties will be turned back by our wonderful Border Force personnel and told to go back where they came from.
Of course they could sneak across the non-border into Norn Ireland and then take a ferry to Liverpool...
Magical thinking seems to be the fundamental basis of all Tory policies these days - unicorns, clever cameras that can detect a bottle of whiskey and a Polish plumber in the boot of a car, and now AI.
I wonder what would happen if we asked an AI about whether our politicians are fit for purpose? Smoke coming out of the back?
I can see where you're coming from, but don't entirely agree.
1) The bloke who designed the toilet, depending on the cleverness of the design, CAN get royalties by patenting the thing, and licensing its use.
2) The bloke who laid the pipes didn't invent the pipes. He offered to work for 3s. a day to do whatever work was required.
3) The bloke who laid the tarmac? Was paid his 3s. per day for the work, and no-one else (generally) charges you to walk on it, except sometimes on a toll road where the organisation that owns the land and paid for the tarmac may charge you. Copyright is there so that the author profits from their work, but also stops others profiting from the same work without doing any of the work in the first place.
As the article notes, the principle of copyright is simple. The creator should be able to benefit from their work. So the primary factor is 'is the creator alive'? It's perhaps not unreasonable to allow creators to leave their assets to others when they die (or before if they wish), but that should be strictly limited - so copyright should be limited to the life of the creator + 10 years. And if it's unclear whether a creator is alive or dead, and if they haven't been heard of for seven years they can be deemed dead, then some form of standard rate royalty paid into a central escrow system, which pays out if the creator turns up, or when they are deemed dead it's paid to suitable charitable purposes.
Stuff Disney!
Nope, they're step 4. A large team of consultants including M Mouse, D Mouse, B Lightyear, and S Vimes, all invoiced via Pen-y-Gors Holdings LLC of the Cayman Islands. Obviously my own time on the project will be charged at minimum wage, so as to avoid excessive impact on the public purse.
That's £1.5million per location. I think I could do it cheaper.
1. Put photobooth and postbox in each location.
2. Ask applicants to put papers in envelope and post in box.
3. At end of each day pay someone for a couple of hours work (minimum wage) to pop in, take the paperwork out of the box, photocopy it, pop a 2nd class stamp on and post it to the Home Office (who will probably destroy it)
3,000,000 stamps and envelopes = about £2million.
30,000,000 photocopies @ 5p/copy = £1.5Million
Labour: 5 x 52 days, 2hrs day, 60 centres @ £7.50 p.h. = £225,000 per year
Less profit from photobooths.
4. Profit!
@Mark 85
The question would be then are they ignoring these new designs or are they buying the patents and burying them?
I suspect neither. As noted in the OP, we get announcements every week about wonderful new battery technology. But most of them would require investment of billions to get them into large scale commercial use - not a problem if you know you can make tens of billions of the next decade or two. But sods law says that six months after you start building the factory someone else will come up with another even better brilliant idea, and will start building their factory etc ad infinitum.
The problem is there are *too many* great new ideas, all competing with each other, and generally all relying on private investment to make them commercial. Who will invest a couple of billion when they can make more money betting on pork futures or tech-bubble companies? It's only when you get someone super-rich who is willing to throw money at a battery factory (Tesla?) that things ever happen.
And another wonderful new technologogy:
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-self-assembling-d-battery-seconds.html
A self-assembling 3D battery, with
"orders of magnitude higher power density. In other words, you can access the energy in much shorter times than what's usually done with conventional battery architectures."How fast is that? Wiesner said that, due to the dimensions of the battery's elements being shrunk down to the nanoscale, "by the time you put your cable into the socket, in seconds, perhaps even faster, the battery would be charged."
It's a proof-of-concept, so no, we won't ever see it in production!
And of course, incredibly fast charging means much larger input power source - fine for pumping a few AmpHours into a phone, not so fine to charge a car in a few minutes!
We have some excellent universities.Also some souped-up Tech colleges that now award degrees in some very odd subjects. And the serious universities close physics departments because no-one wants to study physics.
So why import people? Because we need them now. Not in 20 years, after we've
a) reopened the university departments (probably have to staff them with imports)
b) got the first few undergraduate groups through
c) Let them gain postgrad degrees
d) Let them gain some years real-world experience
15-20 years min?
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