Posts by despairing citizen 290 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Nov 2010
if its banning companies from under biding and under delivery, can we start the UK "banned from public tenders" list with G4S?
Given the investigation of fraud around tagging, and the lamentable fiasco of the olympics, I don't see how any submission made by this company could be (a) taken seriously or (b) at face value by anybody evaluating a bid.
Business control of US politicians is why we have the DHS in the first place.
The september 1996 White House Commission on Aviation Safety initially recomended europe style secuirty for airports, airline companies whinge to their paid for politicians, secuirty recomendations get dropped by VP Al Gore.
and amlost 5 years to the day they removed the "expensive" secuirty recomendations, the consequence arrived at the World Trade Centre......thus creating the DHS.
WARNING: this make exceed your RDA of scarsam
OK lets look at this....
Broadband UK can not roll out connections to north yorkshire, and large chunks of bedfordshire can only get 56kbps dial modems, yet with the magic pixie dust of central government consultancies, we can get wireless access to every house, outhouse and barn in the UK, including sheep farms in outer-nowhere scotland, who can't even get radio 4 on FM!
If the national switch off grid is delivered, how many weeks do we think it is going to be before somebody decides to do the ultimate DDOS attack and switch of all the electric supply in the country?, it's not like we have been involved in unpopular wars abroad, proped up dodgy governments, etc., I'm sure there are no motivated and organised people on a planet of 7bn that hold a grudge and would view DDOS UK as the ulitmate payback!
I know for a fact that one major surrey hospital mis-filled heart testing results for one patient in another patient's medical records.
Fortunately the over worked junior doctor was awake enough to realise the results did not relate to the patient he was dealing with, and the actual patient was fortunate that she did not need a follow up from that test.
Word from retired staff at that hosipital is that given the trollies of unfilled patient records floating around, this is the tip of the ice berg.
The ICO needs to remove the fence post from it's rear and get out there and INVESTIGATE!, they are a F**ck@$g law enforcement body
"Do you have any information on the round reversal issue in the SA-80? "
As a Range Officer I had "hands on" experience of dealing with this, fortunately for me, none of them fired the round, my colleague had one that put the percussion cap into the breach locking lugs at an angel, resulting in the round firing backwards with the breach open, fortunately it was the far right lane, and there was no safety coach next to that firer. Firer somewhat shaken aprently, but no injury (obviously a good kama day)
" It is practically impossible to 'reverse a round in the breach'."
Not if you have a F**Ked up design. The SA80 was originally designed to take a high powered case, not 5.56x45, due to the rush to give RO a contract prior to privatisation, they slapped a 5.56 AR mechanism in, the long breach combined with crap magazine springs gives it the ability to reverse, and account for a goodly proportion of the jams. Answer use good quality mags to reduce this risk.
(PS it is also good at hiding rounds in there, hence the 7 point check on the unload)
" Sporting firearms are a far higher quality of weapon but the costs would be beyond the budgets of most countries."
Unfortunately the SA80 family is both expensive and badly built, civilian competition ammo is also cheaper than the junk they make at Radway Green (which at one point had a natsy habit of turning out rounds that on occasion had only having enougth propellant to get the bullet halfway down the barrel, you recocked and fired, assuming it a jam, and put a full powered round in behind it!)
Given the quantity of repair work the armourers went through to keep the damn things operationally (sort of), the service life cost was probably even higher than the original unit costs.
I understand from contacts that the weapon has been practically rebuilt since the 90', so some of this should have been adressed, but I personally didn't like the risks MOD(PE) put me and the people in my command at, this crap should have been fixed before going in service.
"Whether that will be as stupid as shooting the bullet backwards, or something more subtle (purposely weakened parts?) "
We already have an organisation that arranges that here in the UK, it's called MOD procurement.
The SA80's have a nasty habit of reversing the round in the breach
and we had a 7.62 rifle that blew the breach up because they "used the wrong metal"
and the Warrior can fire it's weapons "un-commanded", due to dodgy electrical switch, which is a bit of a bastard for the poor sod working on the deck when it goes off
I look forward to them MOD commissioning the new light weight liberator as our next new service pistol!
Unless their data centre was a smoking hole in the ground, outages of live systems are unacceptable.
Even if their data centre was nuked, the bank should have continued running it's live services from an alternate location, with minimal "down time"
The bank is paid very hansomly by it's customers for services, and "off lining" several Billion pounds of the UK economy for 3 hours is completely unacceptable.
Whilst normally I personally think less legislation is a "good thing", HMG really needs to kick the regulator to remind them of a "fit and proper" organisation to have a banking license should include can they actually deliver the service reliably.
The US rubber stamp office (sorry Patent Office) strikes again.
What part of these so called patents are not blindling obvious to a practioner in the field, and therefore fail the requirement to be inventive
Patents are suppose to be about protecting inventions, the only creative I see going on is in the patent application and approval process for big corp, et al.
When I was running an IT team supporting a large unitary, the reason that I would go to tender rather than build, is time, risk and cost.
Despite being an ex-coder myself, and enjoying designing and building stuff, as an IT manager my approach was always "can we buy" first, and only then "can we build it"
Off the Shelf kit is always going to be cheaper than DIY, usually between half the price, to 1/10th, dependant on the size of that market (i.e. Planning systems are only needed in planning authorities)
If you use software used by 100 identical authorities, all the "features" of the system have been found and worked round, and deployment time is constrained by duration of ITT, and availability of installers and staff for training.
My in-house team got used for stuff that was unquie, hence one of the selling points for working for 70% of what you could get at a comercial IT shop, was lots of different and interesting work, that makes a difference (on ocaasion potentially life saving differences)
Some times the UK/EU procurement rules get a bit daft if enforced to the letter of the law, and your head of procurement is unwilling to sign waivers, ie. you should not have to advertise for the better part of 3 months, when there are only 2 companies with the software ready to go.
No
The complaint was that they did lots of work to beat their competitors, and then had the government withdraw the stuff they biding on.
This is why when I have put up tenders in the public sector, I have had the budget codes signed for in blood, before going out to tender.
Where there has been speculative work, I have always made it clear, and answered any questions around the possibility of the work being canned, so that the vendors can make a risk management decision on how much time and money they want to sink into the prep work.
I'm sorry but the democratic process has eliminate accoutabliy.
Liebour got rid of surcharging councillors
ConDem got rid of the independant District Auditor, making Liebour changes irrelvant, as we can not now find any new Shirley Porters to surcharge.
PS
When in the last 20 years has a minister resigned because his department had dropped the ball?
You need to split this up, Central Gov Public Sector it, with it's regular political "improvements", as advised by Prize Wally & CockUp, et al.
And Local Authority Public Sector IT, which seems to work most of the time, the exceptions usual having the finger prints of Prize Wally & CockUp, et al. on it.
Given the amount of IT that central gov needs, I have never undestood why they didn't have thier own internal software house, to cover stuff they couldn't buy off the shelf, given profit margins, and lack of ownership involved in getting EDS, Crapita, et al to build bespoke kit?
The assumption of a vested interest, is the only people I have previously come across trying to claim that black is white when it comes to the SA80 shambles, either worked in the MoD, or where regurigating the PR crap MoD/RO//BAe put about, without having ever been in the room with any of the SA80's.
The US DoD procurement system has historically been as bent as a nine bob note, see Col Burton's book which touch's upon some of this. The UK now seems to be trying to follow, given the number of Junior Ministers and Senior Officers that have been using the revolving door into BAe, et al. (again would like to ask for Lewis to do a follow up to his book, and include the gerimandering drivers behind things like the Tucano contracts), but the bottom line is I don't care if the DoD buy crap, I only really care when I'm paying for it, and people I know are having to use it.
Fundamentaly our (UK) equipment selection is driven by politicians, both civilian and uniformed, resulting in most kit not being up to the job when purchased. The UK Tax Payer then gets to pay defence companies to fix their broken designs, while UK service men get to pay in blood for their own weapons and equipment trying to kill them.
To put it mildly I REALLY DO NOT APPRECIATE BREACH BLOWS CAUSED BY THE WRONG F'*!@ING METAL BEING USED IN PRODUCTION, I then get very agiated as the company then gets millions to fix breaches that where shattering. (X-rays showed that every weapon suppled had micro-fractures in the breach). in 6 years as an RCO, my life was at serious risk 3 times, and on 2 of those occasion it was a failure in the weapon, not the user.
For me the Colt mags worked a treat on the 80's, never had any problems with them, just with the junk from Nottingham. Colt used more and better quality metal and production, as demonstrated by the fact that their magazines did not "flex" as much as ours, and don't get me started on the Radway Green ammuntion.
Your comments about Sten's is spurious in the context of modern military procurement, we ain't got the german army poised to invade, with most of the weaponary left on a french beach. In that situation fast & cheap is better than nothing, whcih was the alternative.
Bottom line in this day and age, we should be able to build, test and delivery good quality equipment to our service men, at a sensible price. We don't, we get shoddy, what's my margin, kit at vastly over the odds prices.
Which part of check the F***ing weapon is empty prior to entering a building, is difficult, hard, or memory oversight, if you are trained firearms user.
Never did it once in a couple of decades of handling and instructing on a range of firearms.
Anybody who does not follow standard safe handling procedure, has a demonstrable lack of regard for human life, and hence by definition is a nut.
It might be understandable as a mistake if the operator had only 2 hours sleep in the last 36 hours, and that was huddled up in the lee of a bush with the rain going sideways with the high winds. Walking into a prepped instructional session with a loaded weapon.... well just beggers belief if not for the evidence of the crippled victim whoose only mistake was to turn up to work.
I'm guessing you work for MoD (PE).
In the real world, you get to be an instructor on the most scariest f*!king piece of junk every to be given to a soldier.
Crap build quality. e.g. Sight fitting so bad that if you crank the ironsight over as far as it can go, to the state you can't lower the rear sight, and you are still having to aim off to be able to hit a target at 300m in zero wind. (I also qualified as a marksman, so weapon error, not operator error)
The TMH attached to the weapon with a bolt that is so easy to accidentally remove, because of cheap crap clips, that the only way to return the weapon to use is to ram the bolt back in on the otherside, and leave the armoury with a cutting tourch to sort it out afterwards.
The magzines of such poort qualifty materials and construction, that using 30 in a mag rather than 28, crapped out the spring in short order, and the burrs inside the mag caused frequet jams, hence why colt did a roaring trade flogging mags of decent quality to the services.
I could literally write a book on the design defects, and crap build quality on SA80 family when it was issued.
MoD (PE) then spent more tax payers money getting the damn thing fixed to a serviceable weapon, but only after enough casualties that even Sir Humphrey couldn't turn a blind eye.
and it's not just the small arms, the Warrior has had a known problem since the turn of the century with uncommanded fire, due to a cheap crap electrical switch that can short. MoD's answer ignore problem, pay BAe to build new 40mm turret to hide safety defect............
I do wish Lewis would do a new Lions, Donkey's and Dinosaurs, there is still a lot of material out there that he hasn't touched on.
"Nice bit of kit? No it has a nice sight. Cleaning is a nightmare when it is wet. Dry pull through in sand at the cost of carbon build up. My dad had a better deal with his fn fal"
I do believe the poster was being sarcastic.
....and your grandfather had a better weapon with the Lee Enfield, which also could be used as club when you ran out of amuntion, and did not auto-disassemble by being dropped on to a hard surface.
Probably not an issue with modern tech for a low impact civilian cargo shifter, but not ideal where people will be actively trying to make it not fly, by using tracer & incendiary ammuntion.
I would also be concerned that these are large, slow, and not particularly manuverable targets, so forward support might be a "bit risky", and the concept of "rear areas" has not been seen to exist for some time, hence the flying styles adopted by C-17, Hercs and Chinook pilots.
Low signature loitering radar platform for blue water surface combantants might work?
I wouldn't worry about that.
When I checked out the site to see what it was like, my personal conclusion was of another well spent set of £m of tax money on a Gov.IT, to the usual "standards".
1. You couldn't verify the cert for revocation, so no way to know if you're connected to HMG Server or some Scammer in Nigeria, et al.
2. UI design and functionality, well one quick comparrison with Jobserve highlights the lack of basic functionality. most obvious of which is the Industry selector, hence I'd suggest 9/10th of the results are totally useless, hence the job seeker spends time filtering junk, instead of productive job hunting time.
3. Social Engineering. It took me about 10 minutes (literally) to find a "new" job advert for a company that had ceased Trading over 12 months ago. This combined with the ability of "employers" to hide their ID, means that anybody using this £14m boondoggle is wide open to ID Fraud at the least, and if the can convince a despeserate job hunter into parting with bank details, etc. (oh we need to set you up on the payroll after your telephone interview / undertake a background check), real fraud against people who can least afford it.
So personally I'm expecting the TCO for this to rise rapdily in the next 12 months, with the £500k fines from the ICO.
The Housing Benefit system and other benefits are actively rigged to penalise the sensible person who puts something aside for a rainy day.
Given you have paid tax and NI on your earnings from which the savings where created from, why should these then exclude you from payments from the "national insurance" operator? If a real insurance company did this, the directors would be in court for the criminal offence of fraud.
An interesting set of figures was published in Private Eye after "call me Dave"'s rants about HB just prior to the last election. The bill for the UK was approx £21bn, but if you multiplied the number of claimants by the average claim amount, you got to roughly £7bn in payments, meaning that the complexities of the system (means testing, etc.) result in £2 to administer every £1 of claim payment. (For ref, insurance companies spend 10p to 25p doing this on the highly subjective and argued motor claims)
"MP's said......that while their actions might be perfectly legal, they're also immoral."
As opposed to twisting the letter of the expenses rules into a pretzel to claim as much money as possible from the publc purse (legal, bot imoral) or fiddling their expences claims (both illegal and imoral)
Personally I don't really expect many CFO's to take any notice of the moralility lectures from 650 members of an organisation that has a severe credability gap when it comes to probitity in public office, especially when membership of that organisation is based on winning a popularity contest in which the majority of eligible voters either didn't vote, or voted for somebody else, and have no way of removing unfit members that, for example, go off moonlighting on reality TV shows, rather than doing the job their paid (along with expenses) to do.
China
spy planes, UAV's ect.
If the indian squady does not know what the flying vehicle is (because china has kept it's mil/spy tech secret), by definition it is an Unidentified Flying Object.
As for taking photos and film footage, I'm sure their are a lot of people who will pay well to make it disappear.
"This is in rural areas where you cannot get BB at speeds of more than 0.5Mbps"
This also includes areas 5 miles down the road from major urban centres (e.g. Luton is not exactly outer mongolia), and if you can get a line they use the lack of competition to keep the prices over inflated, one only has to look at the underhanded tactics BT has used where villages have got together to set up their own netrwork, and lo and behold, BT start offering a service in the area they previously would not touch,
BT since it was privatised has been crap, it takes 90 days for BT Openreach to put an additional line in to your office in a major urban area (lords knows how long to get a cable for outer no-where UK)
When it was the old publically own GPO, everybody in the country who wanted to be connected to that new fandgled telephoine system had the option, and it cost the same, regardless of it being central london or central hebredies.
If you live in central bedfordshire (not the middle of nowhere, just outside of Luton and Dunstable), the only option for 2/3rd of the population if 56K dial up.
So if BT and Virgin are so crap at delivering service availability in the middle of birmingham, to the state the councilors think they have to spend public money to meet the cities business and domestic goals, this says tons about the private company's management teams.
So personally I think that unless the BT-VM duopoly can show that BCC is taking away customers that would otherwise have used the service they had in place, the judge should bounce them out of court and award costs to the tax payer, for trying to use the courts to protect absymal customer service, and crap business offerings.
One thing to watch for in public bodies is that responsibility doesn't always equate with the authority to require action.
For example the DP Officer in a local authority is normally a secondary role to their "Day Job", and they do not have the authority to require a department to do or stop doing something. (i.e. crap data handling procedures) Unlike the "Monitoring Offcer" (usually head of legal), who has the authority to insist on compliance to the law.
Given where intel's design and manufacture is scattered around, anybody want to put money on mossad, et al. having suborned an employee and had their own back door put in, or mearly documented and failed to report hardware level security weaknesses for a Zero day attack? (i.e.. stuxnet the next generation!)
ID Card the next generation!
At some point even the clownservatives have to figure out that this scheme only serves one purpose, to line the pockets of the ACPO and consultants.
Any criminal/terrorist/next weeks excuse, is going to circumvent the system, the only people who will have their lives fully monitored by the state will be the honest law abiding citizen. (to be subsequently resold by PC Bent of the Met to NewsCorp!)
A message from an internet cafe to an e-mail account saying "I will visit my new friends on 9.11" could be terrorists co-ordinating their attack, or more likely somebody off to meet new friends. This is useful intel HOW?
One would additionally suggest they have a problem with the concept of randomness, in that in a true random system, all 4 numbers could be the same, just an rare (random) event!
Suggest they might want to try running the generator a few million times and check the spread.
Yep, there's a reason aircrew practice touch and go landings (e.g. getting your arse over the obstruction on the runway)
The basic physics of momentum also constrain how fast you can get a jet back up and running, after it has spun down, and fitting "OH SHIT!!!" rocket motors to the plane (as a one shot get out of jail free card/into the air) kind of defeats the fuel/weight saving, due to all the fuel needed to lug the motors.
Wonder if they asked any pilots about these ideas?, or if only the airframe and aerodynamics chaps got allowed to contribute?
Warning >>Sarcasm Alert<<
under "Met Management" 75 is the same as the acts of a a few rogue individuals, and therefore their is no corruption cases to answer
This is the same as under "Met Management", a dozen burglaries in the same block of flats is ONE unsolved crime.....
....because then they can spend more time on selling data off of the PNC to reporters, rather than doing the job they're paid for, solving crimes, rather than commiting them
That will be the Proceeds of Crime Act.
Which following a conviction of any newscorp journalist for CMA90 offences, NewsCorp and it directors become eligible for.
However whilst they may eat humble pie over their staff going to prision, I can't see them letting their bought and paid for politicians permitting CPS to have millions of pounds of profit from their sales being taken off them.
Look forward to words like "not in the public interest" being used when somebody suggests using POCA.
The ministerial "put an end to local bureaucracy" actually means put an end to local democracy.
The average planning application goes through in a couple of weeks, it takes BT Openreach 90 days to planning the procurement of toliet paper, let alone put stuff in the ground.
Additionally if the cable co's cant get a PM that plans to have to submit a planning app, suitably in advance the date they need permission (along with all the other paper work for Highways to know you want to block the street with equipment, etc,) then they should sack them and get somebody competant,
The idea of the planning system for the last 50+ years, is to make sure that appropriate, thought through development takes place, and that the local comunity that is impacted by the development can have it's say.
One would suggest that if BT, et al, spent half as much money engaging with the local comunities that it did in wine'ing and dining ministers and party functionaries, they probably would have less planning objections!
"Yeah! Let's penalise the IT managers that can't protect their network because of across the board cuts to budgets meaning they can't afford to put in the correct Security Controls to protect the data."
Actually a lot of these are related to stupidly using fax machines to send S2/DPA98 data to wrong numbers, delivery of paper documents to the wrong address, etc.
DPA98 is NOT an IT thing, it is a Business thing, with an IT component
The fines make the budget holder, or more importantly his/her replacement, take the issue of compliance seriously.
Having seen this in action with a copyright liscense that was abused, the fine from the liscense holder not only made the fool's replacement more careful, but it made all the other managers more careful.
I suspect why the councils are reporting more now, is that the potential £500k has focussed minds, and people are looking more carefully, and thus discovering stuff that previously was missed.
Whilst I am personally not a fan of moving wooden dollars around, this is actually an exception that proves the rule.
Nobody has mentioned that regardless of whether what the officer did was legal or not (court yet to decide), should a serving police officer allow himself to be in a position where this charge was even possible?
So how did this officer end up in this position?
Was the candidate a "bit of a hot head", and the selection process missed it?, or is it an officer that has become unstable afterwards?, and the management are missing this on review?
The answers to these questions are interesting, because if the system missed the officer's behaviour patterns when driving a keyboard, what are the traffic officers like when wound up chasing crooks, where a failure of the ability to keep control over behaviour can come with a body count?
With police management time being increasingly focused on paperwork and targets, how much of their man management (look after the team) work is being overlooked?
Given the ever increasing number of charges from what the original inspector dismissed as one off, lone rogues, etc., prior to leaving the police and being employed by the people he was previously investigating, isn't it time this officer was seriously investigated for his behaviour, to indentify whether he was truly that incompetant, or if there is something more sinister behind why he dismissed the original investigation?
"so stick a bloke in the goods receiving part of the 10 or 11 factories globally that can handle it and you're done."
A good common sense solution, you'll never sell it to the politicians.
Also doing this is not a "big thing", so they can't get their sound byte quota from it in front of a camera
Here in the UK, I wonder how many "not insured" stops are being undertaken by the police, despite them being warned at outset that the motor insurance data always has a lag (24hrs for most drivers).
I would also note that the survielance uses of the system were never discussed when it was being set up, under the auspices of the 4th EU Motor Directive (speed up cross country insurance claims, and make a dent in uninsured drivers)
"....have at least twice the combat capabilities, as they have surface combat capability...." Ignoring the Sea Viper's ability to hit surface targets, the Type45s have also got the ability to fit Tomahawks if required, which is far beyond the capability of the Horizon class and their anti-shipping only Exocets.
Any ship can be refitted to carry just about anything, given enough time and money. But sailing back to a friendly dock yard when the war has just kicked off is not really a viable option. The Harpoon launchers should have been fitted, but were cut to "save money". Which means that, for example, Irianian navy China Cats (a realitive peanuts cost ship) are more of a surface threat than a "as patroling now" 45, and given the Irianian military penchant for doing stuff without authorisation, something that the RN and MoD should have thought about, like wise other potential military hot spots the RN could find it's self patroling in (Korea, Spratly Islands, etc.), the options to withdraw and refit are likely to be limited and too late.
""....sorry BAE deck guns don't count these days...." The 4.5in deck gun is not only a proven weapon for surface engagements and anti-air, it also supplies a better land bombardment option to a longer range than the 76mm Otobreda on the Horizons."
The cannons on Victory are a "proven combat system", doesn't mean they are relevant for modern engagements. In a war zone (i.e. dealing with a real military force, not the RUF), a ship sailing into range to use it's deck gun, was in missile range a long time ago for the well camoflagued launcher, a lesson the RN and MoD apprently have yet to demonstrate they have learnt from the Falklands war. (militaries have traditionally equiped and trained to fight the last war, not the next, but we appear to be still preparing to refight Korea/WW2)
Personally I would believe the best argument for continuing to have a deck gun is policing/enforcement peace time ops, such as convincing pirates, drug runners and embargo busting ships, etc. to stop, even if a lot of these ops are actually carried out by the Helo. Thus a lighter calibre gun enables more space for other systems, for example more missile defences.
IMHO the US LCS-2 concept is probably the right way to go, where you can fit out the ship prior to deployment with mission specific modules, based on the planned mission, the risk assesments and the contingency plans.
"We spend incredible sums on our armed forces, and get shite in return. As a taxpayer, I expect more"
Practical example French/Italian Horizon frigates are half the price of the identical looking Type 45's, but have at least twice the combat capabilities, as they have surface combat capability (sorry BAE deck guns don't count these days), and a co-operative engagement capability, meaning that the frogs and italians can engage air threats beyond the horizon 20 miles away, that are spotted by their carrier AEW (french) or air force AEW (italian)
So the tax payer has spent £1Bn+ per ship to build a floating coffin for the crew in the event of a conventional war
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