Posts by pop_corn

> "getting someone to merge against the contact list you've bought, and remove the relevant entries."

That requires spending money up front on someone with half an IT brain. I would hazard a guess that such a step is not high up on the list of priorities for people in this business.

Yes I was assuming step 0) is you have a right of substitution.

IANAL however I don't believe a fettered one would matter as you have actually exercised it. Fettering only is an issue if you're arguing you have a right, even though you've not exercised it.

Exactly, the contract is with your LtdCo, that's the whole point. Most of us have the Missus (or whatever) on the books as well, so they're perfect for this.

Re: Mgmt

> "Staff: How about a salary raise so we can pay our bills/mortgages, hiring more staff so there are enough people to do the job and not setting ridiculous deadlines?"

Most companies that did that would go out of business.

For a question that you claim is poor, or uninteresting, you certainly seemed to enjoy devoting 3 paragraphs to its answer. ;)

I happen to agree, given my quote, there is no such thing as magic (by which I mean some spooky unexplainable power) only a lack of scientific understanding.

I also agree with you about worship, the use of that term was deliberately inflammatory.

> "transport"

The promise of hydrogen fuel cell powered cars, is that the garages can generate their own hydrogen in situ, without the need for fleets of tankers transporting fuel from big refineries.

Re: Team America: World Police

I completely agree. They can have this douche bag when we get Anne Sacoolas. Extradition is as much about politics as it is about justice.

Yes I accept the point that Anne Sacoolas fled for next to no reason. She may have been done for 'death by dangerous driving' or 'death by careless or inconsiderate driving' and likely wouldn't have served a jail term, probably got community service or a suspended sentence, but that's not the point. Justice wasn't served. Due process wasn't followed. Harry Dunn's family didn't get the closure of their day in court.

Re: IT skills are fungible

> "Make it unattractive to employ you and companies will find more attractive options."

Agreed. Whilst unions may have started out with laudable goals and were useful 50 years ago when there were few employers in town and workers had little choice and fewer options, that's not the case any more for many industries, IT especially.

Any form of protectionist interference in a labour market (which is what the unions exist for) is anti-competitive, anti-business, and ultimately anti-worker. Why do you think China has become the factory of the world with a positive balance of payments of around a $Trillion (with a T!) every year? Lower regulation / less red tape, it's as simple as that.

Unionisation is short term gain for long term pain, as evidenced by this story.

If you don't like your working environment / conditions / pay, then either make yourself indispensable and renegotiate from a position of power, or vote with your feet and leave, retraining / up-skilling as you go if necessary.

Unionisation will not only work against you in the long term, but it's a lazy move, abdicating your individual bargaining power to someone else, hoping they negotiate in good faith on your behalf.

Re: And nobody at Apple spotted this massive attacks on their systems?

I would imagine they get millions of hack attempts every day.

My insignificant little wordpress blog was hacked 3 times in 3 years before I figured a fool proof way of locking it down (putting a .htaccess file in the wp-admin directory to block all ip addresses except my own).

But last time I looked, the site was still getting attacked dozens of times a day. So often that I have to sporadically clear out the error_log as it grows and grows due to hack attempts.

Re: Quite close to home

I had a similar problem. Someone registered a domain name in my company name, setup a pukka looking website, and registered an address at a serviced office site. Then they ordered 10 brand new iPhones in my LtdCo's name.

I only found out when my normal £50 pcm phone bill suddenly jumped to £850, as they'd managed to get their order added on to my account!

Fortunately it was stopped before any phones were sent out, my bill was sorted, and I successfully seized the domain. But it wasted about 10 hours of my life.

Re: One wonders what the future of satellites and space explorations is going to be...

> "We clearly need to build an orbital tower."

I assume you mean an orbital tower with space elevator? It's a fine idea, that will never happen.

Even assuming it could be physically built (extremely unlikely) when the risk of it breaking leads to it whipping around the earth, destroying everything it collides with, it will never be acceptable.

Re: Defensive Coding

> "The interpreter didn't cache values, it was all immediate by reference therefore there was a distict difference between the two statements:"

That's a shocker! And people wonder why programming is a lot harder than it should be.

I gave up coding when I realised I was still solving the same problems that I had started my career fixing 20 years earlier, e.g. writing a UK formatted date to a database, and reading it back later only for it come out in US format!

Even this very week I've come across the same issue using SharePoint. *facepalm*

Re: Self-employed!

10 months. He'll be out on parole after serving 50% of his sentence.

How did the victim manage to prove it was him though? I know the blockchain is visible to all, but how did he determine the thief's wallet belonged to this guy?

Re: Maybe the FBU shouldn't have sabotaged FiReControl then

Can you explain how 46 CEO's is necessary replication? Or 46 HR mangers? How about 46 procurement managers? What about 46 differently specified IT suites, complete with 46 admins to manage and upgrade them?

Re: Ireland's taxes are within it's [sic] remit

> "in short - it is the EU interfering in a sovereign tax matter"

And that, in a nutshell, explains Brexit. The 1975 referendum to join the "European Community" of like minded but independent sovereign states, in a loose trading block, was never about handing over that level of control.

Talk to the old timers who voted in it. They'll tell you they never voted for the EU as it is now, and would never have voted to join if they'd been told the truth about how it would turn out.

Or indeed dig out old TV footage of the original EC referendum for & against debates. The Join side explicitly denied it would become what it has.

That's why so many older people voted to leave, because whilst they voted to join, they never wanted nor voted for the EU, and the Brexit referendum was the first proper chance they had to say so.

Re: Well, you're leaving

Errr did you read a different article to me?

> "The number of EU academics in all disciplines working in the UK is still growing"

E.e.: they're not leaving faster then they're still coming; net growth; numbers going up. Which bit don't you understand?

Re: Discovered 'simoultaneosly', or leaked?

Given that the estimate is $1.7 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen just in 2018 alone, there are people with very deep pockets, who would likely pay very handsomely for as yet unreleased vulnerabilities.

It's already been done with the satellites now orbiting the moon:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.html

Not to mention that we can and have double checked by bouncing a laser off the reflectors they left behind on the moon:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mlszp

Re: Incomplete

> "its when you kill other road users that the shit will really hit the fan"

Tesla's will always kill other road users, as will all self driving type cars. As long as they kill fewer road users than humans (approx 5 per DAY in the UK!), that's an improvement.

Re: Mumsnet penetrated

Hmmmm, is this dodgy reporting by theReg? I got the mumsnet email about this and it clearly says:

> "How many people are affected? We're confident that number of users affected is 44 (2 accounts were breached twice, bringing the total occasions to 46). We have emailed these users directly. "

Re: Hmmm ...

At 24% it's a GINORMOUS profit margin. Compare to say Tesco for 2018:

Group Revenue: £57.5Bn

Operating Profit: £1.6Bn (before exceptional items)

Margin: 2.9%

Source: https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-presentations/financial-performance/five-year-record/

Re: More likely hypothesis

Dressing up correlations is "science" really annoys me. Isn't it far more likely that the majority of people don't drink alone (your A), and that drinking alcohol is a social activity (your C), and that being sociable with people prevents dementia (D)?

Re: What can save us from this malicious computer ransomware infestation

Yeah, because the death penalty has done such a good job of stopping all violent crime in the US hasn't it? Oh, wait...!

The issue with the death penalty, is no one doing a crime that calls for it (or pretty much any crime) believes at the time that they're going to get caught, so the ultimate sanction, is ultimately useless.

Re: Not in IT...

> "And most HR departments pretend they care for the employees but they don't. They are their for the company and that's it."

The hint's in the name. When "Personnel" departments became "Human Resources" departments, humans just became resources to exploit.

Re: The Swiss are in it

Agreed, ESA has nothing to do with Brexit. From ESA's own website: https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Welcome_to_ESA/ESA_and_the_EU

> "The European Union (EU) and ESA share a common aim: to strengthen Europe and benefit its citizens. While they are separate organisations, they are increasingly working together towards common objectives. Some 20 per cent of the funds managed by ESA now originate from the EU budget.

> "ESA is an intergovernmental organisation, whereas the EU is supranational. The two institutions have indeed different ranges of competences, different Member States and are governed by different rules and procedures."

Re: Crowdfunding

> "or that the Earth is getting warmer, so it must be stopped!"

That's a new one, I've never heard of stopping the earth as a solution to global warming! ;)

Re: 15.5 percent and Apple Incentive

So that you can return that money to the shareholders, i.e. the people making the decision to repatriate the money.

Re: Don't call it Autopilot, for a start

> "... accidents like this will happen."

What's your point? Are you saying that "autopilot" or whatever you want to call it, is only worthwhile if it's 100.0% perfect?

Of course not, it only has to be better than humans, and as the article says, it's already 40% better than humans, a figure I expect to improve as time goes by.

If we put self driving (or whatever) on a pedestal of perfection, it's doomed to fail. It's the very fact that it's already very good, in that accidents like this are rare, that make them newsworthy. If Tesla's were crashing like this every week, we wouldn't be reading articles like this.

I typically translate the national debt interest repayments (approx £43Bn*) into Wembley stadiums (appox £800M).

Roughly we could build a new Wembley stadium every week all year long, a new one in every city in England (51) in a year. That's how much money the gov't gives away servicing (not decreasing) ours, our parents', and our grandparents' debt.

How much debt interest will we saddle on our children and grandchildren I wonder? An aircraft carrier (£6.2Bn) a month perhaps?

*When interest rates were higher, IIRC this figure was over £50Bn pa.

Re: Enigma

Don't forget the very small matter that the Polish intelligence enigma breaking efforts were disrupted somewhat by the rather inconvenient invasion and occupation of Poland by German right near the start of the war!

Which is why (so I believe) that all their enigma breaking material was rushed out of Poland to England, so Turing et al could continue their work.