Re: British oil company Shell
I think on the whole they prefer to be referred to as Anglo-Dutch, they are incorporated in the UK, HQ in the Netherlands, primary listing on the FTSE. They pay tax here as well.
453 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2012
I'm not sure that's wholly true, as it was sold off in 1995, and has subsequently passed through many hands, but Network Rail may well have created a new network, or bought back some of it from Thales in 2009.
Radio signalling has been used for years in the UK notably on the Far North Lines, ETRMS is already in use on the Central Wales lines to Aberystwyth and Pwllheli.
Of course the simplest hack would be to radio jam the system, which would fail safe and stop the trains, but hacking the system and making trains crash would be a lot more difficult.
Talking of autonomous cars, I wonder how well they handle level crossings? Especially the ungated kind.
A recent conversation I had with a wide area network vendor, who is by the way installing their own dark fibre, lead me to believe that any spare dark fibre BT has, either does not exist, or they aren't even using it themselves, as I was informed, BT's fibre network is, in many places oversubscribed. (Pinch of Salt?)
But having worked in a large technology company where assets were not released, just in case someone important wanted one, I can well believe that one part of BT isn't releasing dark fibre, just in case someone important needs it. It will be very interesting to see the outcome of Ofcom's ruling, I can't think of any outcome that would surprise me.
If BT really do have a lot of spare Dark Fibre capacity, then it may very well have a catastrophic impact on smaller competitors, as the wholesale prices will drop considerably.
Why would you compare it to the Mac Book, iPad, yeah, but a laptop? I have a touch Laptop, and, I have to say I still use the mouse and keyboard, to the extent that I'm wondering why I bothered with touch at all.
I'd also wonder, if you already have a slate, Android or iPad, why you would even bother looking at a Surface, let alone buy one. As a business user, I use an MS Laptop, and less so a Note, as I've found my notebook (paper) far more versatile in meetings than anything electronic. There still isn't a killer app for any slab. I need to run project and visio, and using the cloud is not an option, I'll stay with my lightweight laptop. BTW. With the legal status of MS and any other US cloud provider still in the air, why would you put data on their clouds?
At home, I'll stick to my Air as well.
Mrs. Bear has a habit, when in a hurry, of taking the car out of gear before it has come to rest, so in reverse this turns the reversing sensors off. BANG! at least twice, and she ain't alone in this habit.
I'd hope that in these auto stop vehicles the sensors work, regardless of the position of the gear leaver.
BTW: This is true for both manual and automatic vehicles as you can slap either into neutral whilst they are moving in either direction.
Me, I wait until the vehicle has stopped before I attempt to power off in the other direction, and my clutch loves me for that.
But then if you don't need lots of CPUs, you can always use Standard Edition, or move to Postgres. SQLServer Migration is only a no brainer if you have very little PL/SQL to migrate, and don't happen to use any of the other Oracle Database modules that don't exist in the Microsoft world. The costs of re-writing triggers and procedures can easily exceed any licence savings you might make for quite a few years. Postgres, on the other hand, can actually deal with PL/SQL, and is cheaper than SQLServer.
If you need a basic SQL database, even high availability, then Open Source is the way to go.
What gets me is that both Microsoft and Oracle want you in their cloud, they already lock you in to expensive software stacks, that give poor value for money, just think how much more they can lock you in, if it's into their clouds, and then hike those costs when you can't go elsewhere.
If we are talking mobile device entertainment, then I foresee an upsurge in upper back problems for the younger generations. Watching my fellow commuters hunched double over their phones and pads on the train and tube (subway), let alone how they might work in the office or at home on their laps.
At least the Old PC Monitor or Telly across the room allows you some relatively good posture and comfort.
Mines the Icon for the chiropractor and migraine pills.
I suspect that if they had frittered it all away, he might have difficulty paying up. Alternately if he pays up then you have to wonder how much else he has acquired.
As for the lady's £1M, I would guess the bank is on the hook for that. They changed the access details, probably without informing the original address, which my bank does.
Do we know what the hacking group actually did with the information?
Not that it really matters the US system seems to be based on spectacular vengeance and lawyers making money. The loss has probably been the cost of Microsoft's lawyers working out that there was $1's worth of IP loss. If I was the defence, I'd consider billing Microsoft for the Pen Test.
Mind, you, put AMD out of business and their Intel stocks will go through the roof, perhaps that's the plan.
IT in general has in the 35 years I've been working in it, managed to continuously over hype and under deliver at all levels, it would be more realistic to sue when the get it right against all expectations.
Oh, I don't know responsible dog owners do and most cats prefer to bury their output in your petunias as a surprise for you later.
Anyway soil based kitty litter, will break down in landfill, and helps landfill sites to generate gas for the grid. It just becomes biologically richer in the process, although perhaps not in the way the soil cycle usually works. Ask any geologist.
It could be man's way to the starts, after all, it must have been going at one hell of a speed for them to have all those adventures. I wonder how much energy you would need, and for that matter, an older and wiser me wonders why the inhabitants didn't end up as amusing smears on the floor when the moon accelerated.
The general opinion of GDS is that they live in a bubble of newness, without much reference to the real world.
Whilst the digital only channel approach is a good aspiration, the previous 1990's strategy from the Major and Blair governments was to maximise the channel availability. To allow the citizen the choice of how they communicate with government and maximise inclusion.
Digital only does not do that, in theory, it means less civil servants, and less cost, easy and quick service for the taxpayer. As always politicians forget that we are virtually all tax payers, and those who are not, are on low incomes and benefits or pensions. There may well be a good many silver surfers out there, but not in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and even those with access to IT kit, do not always have the confidence to negotiate forms.
The idea is right, it's just 30 years too soon, and there will always be people who can't access IT.
Psychologically, if you have a problem, talking face to face with another human being is the way to solve it. You can't communicate with a form, and a lot of people will give up if they don't understand the process. GDS do not understand this, any more than they understand the demographics of the citizen. The government serves the citizen, not the taxpayer. Somewhere are politicians seem to have forgotten what universal suffrage means, and who they work for.
I have to agree the Autonomy product was very good, had some draw backs, like the amount of customisation needed, but it was used by some blue chip clients very effectively, I believe the BBC used it for driving their associated news stories features, and finding those embarrassing quotes that people make, and then try to pretend they never happened.
I suspect it's all six of one half a dozen of the other, HP wanted the company and didn't look closely enough at their market and business, which was really quite specialist, and Autonomy probably didn't disclose what they weren't asked. This kind of thing is rife, the duty of the management of Autonomy and any company in the same position, was to extract the best price for their shareholders.
If when they find you are over licences they refund you for all the unused licences. In Oracles case they'll tell you that if you get rid of the unused licences, then you loose all the volume discount for the support contract, so you pay more anyway.
The moral of the story, is never be dependent on a single supplier, and use open source wherever you can.
I'd go for something slightly stronger than cock-up, more a failure to learn from a project that was canned for political reasons, that had run into exactly the same problems.
It is very difficult to absolutely verify a persons identity, funnily enough the electoral role is one of the sources of identity that you can use, but it does get very cyclical, and it was found that there are more people out there than you think that do not have:
An NI Number
A Passport
A Driving Licence
A Permanent Address
The NHS Number would be great, but a lot of people have no idea what it is, or how to find it, and it wouldn't matter because the NHS won't let you use it. It's great because it's a service that everybody wants and needs, so they don't tend to lie too much when providing personal details.
That leave the credit reference agencies, who want paying.
But then, if you fill in the form, they only have your word for it, you don't need to supply anything else to get on the role. If only we had a, oh wait. The only way you can get a true representation of the population on the electoral role is, if it provides a continuing service that people want, and more and more people don't give a &*££ about voting.
Those sales boys at ICANN are the smart ones, create some FUD in a celebrity and sell lots more domain names than you would if you left it alone. I wonder if they have a group that thinks up the domain names first, "D'ya think we can get Taylor to buy this one......"
Should I buy lots of Bear domains to protect my reputation, but may be not, after all what could possibly be misconstrued about Bears.
I was just wondering what Mr. Lawrence would consider as valid past times for adults that offeres value for money. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a cheap past time, nor for that matter is there one where someone doesn't consider you a twat for following it.
So gentle readers, what's a cool and cheap past time.
We just let the Tories increase them in exchange for a little power, thanks Nick.
It was Mad Maggie who deregulated the banks, not Gordon Brown, he just didn't have the stomach to reign them in. Most of the wonderful little product ideas that caused the banks to crash were originally thought up in the early 90s as well. I remember being told by a friend in compliance that most banks' managements didn't understand the products or the risks, but they made loads of money so they didn't care.
In my day, when Babbage was young, and the UK had a computer industry, (Sheds nostalgic tear) we used to optimise our code for speed and size replacing cumbersome C with tight assembler.
Does anyone code in x86/64 assembler any more? and before you ask, yes you can, whatever the question was.
Well, it's interesting that they mention Hawala banking, though I'd have thought that the IRS would be most interested. In the UK HMRC keep a close eye on it, but the I expect so do the Police and Security services, so that's not really a surprise, any more than the fact they use iPhone apps to do it, and governments want to crack them. Do something illegal and you can hardly be surprised if someone takes an interest in you for good or ill.
I also suspect that, actually it's criminals that use it the most, as it's underground, but a lot of ordinary, not just rich, Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani families do too, to avoid tax and currency exchange regulations when visiting into or out of those countries.
But lets be clear, so do terrorists, and it's very easy to pressure Hawala bankers into transferring funds for them, as it's basically illegal, on several levels.
Forgive me, but isn't EFF basically a US organisation, and here they are railing against state surveillance by the US government, a subject close to every red necks, survivalist and NRA member, and here they are suggesting that the UN, the only organisation that said groups hate more than their own government.
One has to admire their bravery in the face of an absurdly heavily armed group of $%£%&!£^s, not know for their tolerance of liberals and foreigners. I suspect that idea will loose them some funding.
Mine's the armour plated SUV.
In the West, you can generally trust your government to do what you voted them in to do, as well as the things they have to do, to protect your nation from inside and out. All Snowdon has done is shown that they are doing just that, and that it has scaled up in scope to meet the modern era.
It is not the fault of the Governments that mostly we don't chuck them out often enough, and allow parties to become embedded, and similar. Vote for someone else, even in the US there are alternatives to Democrat and Republican.
No, but they might well see you as an intelligence asset, you have broken the law, thus you can be blackmailed, and the fact that it was a back door in your security software could easily be circumvented. Once you know someone has done something, it's possible to prove they did it another way, or at least to appear to do so.
Personally, I wouldn't touch a Russian sourced IT security product, or a Chinese one, Ah.........
Let alone the disputes process.
Mind you I used it, the seller said, oops my mistake, keep the goods and I'll send the right stuff immediately, and they did.
I see this as being a great opportunity for Capita/Serco/G4S to make lots of money, to win all you need to do is buy their shares.
I also think the digital advisor who thought this one up knows sweet FA about the management of evidential data, and has no idea how easy it is to fake digital documents.
Lets face it Intel is to all intents and purposes a monopoly when it comes to chips, if you want to beat them, then you have to beat them on price and innovation. In the full knowledge that they have the research muscle to close any gap you open up within months and the financial muscle to undercut and out market you. IBM Power looks secure, but you have to wonder how long for, and how long for the Sparc CPU ranges as economic products, before they join the Itanium, transputer, microVAX and others, if I were a betting man, I'd say SPARC will go first. Mind you, the Zilog Z80 is still out there in the embedded market.
I doubt AMD will ever be able to fund their market share in the way Intel can. The light for AMD is that, should they fail, Intel would have a big problem with the competition authorities, not just in x86 but the whole market. So I'd expect Intel to "Invest" in AMD if things get really bad, just as Microsoft did with Sun and Apple.
We should not forget though that we build Intel and Microsoft in the 80s & 90s, sacrificing the others on the alter of low cost and standardisation, which was then a belief rather than a reality. If we want other companies products to do better, then we need to buy them, but with some, it's just so hard to justify the cost, Larry.
You also have to wonder, on those kind of sales, what a Qualcomm, Apple or Oracle would charge in device royalties if they chose to "Invest" in ARM.
I did like the BBC guy this morning who was pushing the ARM spokesman on how much of their profit was down to Apple, and what would happen if Apple went away. Now there's a man who's done his research. Ah, ARM make record profits, ARM gets revenue from Apple, Apple made record profits, therefore ARM's performance is down to Apple's.
You do have to admire the logic, all bears are otto.
Quite apart from the conundrum of GCHQ admitting they have a record of you, after all, you actually wouldn't want them disclosing the fact they have a record of someone who actually is of interest, and by disclosing they have records of those who are not of interest, you could engineer a method to find out who is of interest.
Card organisations are very good at deducing the existence of a person through the transactions you make, I'd suspect security organisations have similar capabilities, so, you may, although not know it yourself, be in contact with a person of interest, and thus need to be there to say you are not a person of interest, otherwise you become a hole in the data and become a person of interest because no one knows who you are, to say you aren't a person of interest. It could also be said that to delete all your data, you would actually have to delete data about other people related to you, and so on.
They may have big problems deleting data, after all, what is the definition of delete, we have spent years making sure that data can't be accidentally deleted, and that deleting a record won't suddenly invalidate a whole load of other data, through logical deletes, that yeah you can delete the data, but then go and restore it from backup. You really can't delete the data from backup, because then it wouldn't be a backup, and to delete the data you would have to restore the backup, delete the data and back it up again however many times a person appears on a backup, which might be years.
Also they don't have to delete data that is a matter of public record, so exactly what data would you want deleted, you exist, therefore, you are.
If you are the subject of a lawful investigation you have no right to privacy, nor should you expect it. You do however have a right to expect that the investigators keep private any information they discover that is not pertinent to the investigation, and only make public that information used is any resultant action. The investigators have a legal duty to do that, and protect your information. You have the right to sue them if they don't, and they are also liable to prosecution under a whole raft of laws up to and including the Official Secrets Act.
Thus, regardless of what you might think, scanning communications looking for evidence of serious wrong doing, is generally legal, disclosure to third parties, generally isn't. What the state considers serious wrong doing depends on the type of state you vote for. At a guess, maybe 0.0001% of communications between people are ever genuinely intercepted, and even fewer are actionable, the rest is never seen.
Our brave correspondents are referring to the Sopwith Camel and Pup aircraft built by the British in WW1 and used by many other countries including the US.
Both have the advantage that taking selfies whilst flying one would not be possible, although double joined pilots might have a chance.
If you have the time, and the local branch of MegaMart hasn't taken them all out, along with a host of other useful specialist retailers that lost their business because they couldn't by for what MegaMart sold for on the top ten best selling products. Amazon have only completed what MegaMart started.
It's worth remembering Tesco's clubcard knows more about you that the government, and should Amazon or Google get that information, well you can guess how much more product spam you'll get.
What this means
"...that the company has a “strong record in cost transformation”, and that the “synergies are focused within OPEX”"
I mean I speak English, I know what the individual words mean, but the whole seems well....
Does it mean we're going to make a lot of people redundant and sell off a property we can and lease it back?
I'm sure Douglas Adams wrote those lines in "Hitchhikers", but perhaps I'm just counterpointing the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.
One purpose for holding images of innocent people is missing persons. Another is searching for wanted people who haven't been convicted, or persons of interest (suspects), how would ports and airports know who to watch for without their photo. There are lots of legitimate uses for photographs, and the MK1 eyeball is also employed. Don't forget the Police also have access to the DVLA database so they can match your face to your driving licence if they stop you, amongst other things.