Posts by David Roberts

Plain English?

When I read the highlighted text it seemed to mean roughly:

"If we decide to buy back shares and raise the share price and this accidentally triggers the bid rules, the person with 5% of the shares will only be considered as a real bidder on the purchase of more shares."

This seems a very sensible precaution before buying back shares and increasing the value of individual shares. I thought this was quite common where a company had spare cash and grumpy shareholders. Part of "returning value to our shareholders" or similar.

It doesn't seem to relate to the explanations given.

Chicken/egg?

We hire immigrants because there are not enough local skills.

Or.

There are not enough local skills because we hire immigrants.

.

If there was a true labour shortage then there would be more incentive to hire locally and train.

There might also be an incentive to improve working conditions and pay in the current zero hour seasonal minimum wage jobs.

This might, of course, cut into supermarket profits and increase the cost of the very cheap food.

The choices then would probably be to scrap the Uk farming industry and import everything or perhaps impose an import tariff to prevent the dumping of cheap food from low cost production areas on the continent.

EU migrants come here because despite working conditions and accomodation possibly being worse that they might see at home the overall package is better. Else why move? Economic slavery is probably marginally better than unemployment.

Shit! I'm sounding like a Brexiteer.

Sell off Openreach?

Making Openreach a separate company independent from BT is surely an invitation to global players to buy it and then saddle it with debt to get the maximum yield from it.

This does not necessarily mean that there will be any incentive to undertake massive capital investment against uncertain future returns.

The most successful financial strategy would be to milk the cash cow to death because of lack of competition from any other source due to the high cost of capital investment for new (copper, fibre, whatever) connections to premises.

Of course, this may be an attractive strategy for any government focussed on pleasing global corporates.

Anyone else old enough to remember the hoary old joke

If you are walking, all alone, late at night, down a deserted country lane and you hear the phone ringing in a telephone box, DON'T ANSWER IT!

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It's an Oracle salesman cold calling.

Inspired reuse?

Perhaps they are developing a cloud offering utilising redundant data centres?

I think I'm joking, but.... ->

Trafficking in stolen materials?

Wheras previously it was doing what, precisely?

Dream on

The vast majority of social media users haven't been attacked and probably never will be.

This is why fish shoal. Although they provide a bigger target the odds of being missed are apparently much better than if they try and lead a solitary existence.

A nice chat about profiling a target (although the bit about getting access to a Linux server sounds illegal) but the target showed up as potentially wealthy as well as vulnerable.

If you uncharitably assume that the majority of SM users are dead eyed mouth breathers living at their parent(s) home on benefits with a poor to terrible credit record then you should see that they have a built in natural immunity. The profiling would have been abandoned very early on as not worth the effort.

If enough people are conspicuously targetted then the SM platforms will up their game. If a massive threat is publicly identified then users will demand action. Until then the predators are only picking off prey from the fringes of the herd and the herd won't even notice.

TL;DR I'm on benefits with two maxed out credit cards. Go on - steal my identity.

Spider doodles?

A quantum leap in both content and complexity, then. Showcasing advanced design skills and imagineering. Publication imminent as soon as they decide the colour and font of the Dev-Ops logo on the headed paper.

Traditional cipher?

As far as I can see the underlying agenda is to provide the ability to read all information in transit and not worry too much about warrants and stuff.

This also gives the ability to extend "terrorism" to cover minor civil alleged misdemeanours. For an illustration of feature creep, check out the UK RIPA.

For those trying to pretend that having electronic encryption is something special and new and prior to this a search of a premises would reveal all the information required, I would point to the long tradition of keeping secret (paper) diaries in code. Some substitution ciphers are difficult if not impossible to crack without knowing the source text(s) used. So you have to pressure the owner (if still alive) to assist in the decoding. Sound familiar?

Applications

You buy new hardware to run new applications which won't run on your existing kit.

These days that is probably games or high resolution video editing.

If your main work involves email, web browsing and word processing then why would you need new hardware?

Memory requirements keep climbing but memory is cheap compared to a new system.

Apart from the eventual physical decay of mother boards and PSU what is the reason to replace a PC?

I've recently helped two friends move from XP desktops to laptops (one W8.1 and the other W10) and with Classic Shell the interface is sufficiently similar to cause no major problems. The migration tool is pretty good as well. (Hint - if the desktop background is the same that is seen as making it just like the old system.) However the main reason to move was that a laptop suited their current needs better than a desktop.

I do have an old AMD 3000 system which is struggling but that is very old. It ran (I think) Ubuntu 12 without complaint but this is long out of support and the latest mainstream Linux builds seem to be far more memory hungry. Shades of XP running happily on 512k until about SP2 when it started to struggle on less than 1GB.

Ramble...ramble....so what are the new "must have" applications which need the latest and greatest hardware?

Bootnote: I have a Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad both hapilly running W8.1 64 bit (cheap upgrade from Vista 32 bit). I use desktops for real computing and a 10" tablet for reading El Reg and laboriously posting rambling crap like this :-)

Another confused person

My limited understanding of Bitcoin and the like is that there is a permanent record of every transaction which can be read by all but not changed, just added to.

Anonymity is preserved by the user being a crypto signature with no personal details. However this relies on all transactions being on line. As far as I know you don't walk into the bank with a Bitcoin card, or pay in a shop with a Bitcoin card because then you create a physical link in the real world between yourself and the wallet.

Once you have tied the real person to the crypto id then you can look back at history and know more about the real person.

I assume that this Benefitcoin would be used to pay rent, utility bills and other outgoings tied to a real person and a real address.

The information in the blockchain could be encrypted, but what use is it if you can't decrypt it to authorise payment or administer it as the government issuer?

The only reason for this that I can see is to control what the money is spent on. This does not tie in with complete confidentiality. It does give the government enormous control over claimants and the ability to impose policy at whim. It does not seem to provide complete anonymity for the claimant.

TL;DR Police State

For sale on the Internet, but...

...currently sold out.

Listed as a "cool case" for the encouragement of the terminally stupid.

I just wondered where on earth you would get such a thing in the UK. Shipped from Hong Kong apparently.

Still, if you can buy realistic looking plastic guns for "dressing up" from eBay I suppose there is nothing illegal about it. Although you would have to be an even bigger idiot (assuming that is possible) to try and take a plastic gun on a plane.

Too scared

To click through the many links.

Perhaps tomorrow on a burner Linux PC........

Not on my tablet.

Have an upvote

Came here to post much the same about border checks.

There seems to be an entire industry growing around spouting Brext bollocks.

Good arguments, but.......

.....who is going to implement the changes if we leave?

Noting, of course, that the whole thing is just a political barney amongst the rich and that any vote is not legally binding on the Government.

The article seems to be a call for the workers to rise against their rich oppressors but doesn't explain why we have to leave the EU to make this possible. Or provide any evidence that this will happen if we do.

Most of the issues quoted by both sides seem to be solvable inside or outside the EU.

The big problem I see is the lack of viable alternatives in UK politics. Cameron, Boris, Farage?

It should be noted that despite the left wing claims in the article, the lefties lefty Jeremy Corbyn who has my approval (for the little that it is worth) for sticking to his long term principles seems to favour Remain.

TL;DR our problems are due to our Government not the EU. The referendum isn't going to fix this.

Explains the name

Blue Origins

Lack of qualified people

Coupled with a tale of qualified people being replaced by (cheap) unqualified people.

Does not compute.

Perhaps instead the education system should focus on lying about your abilities and purchasing bogus foreign qualifications. Knowing that then you would be eminently employable and also be paid whilst receiving one to one tuition from an industry expert. Far more effective than an abstract degree course.

A backup isn't a backup

Until it has been successfully restored?

Or does this involve too much hard work?

No gong

For !Bong!?

[No, I don't know how to do a reverse bang on this bloody tablet.]