Posts by Doctor Syntax 33095 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"With each passing day the opportunities are missed," said European Scrutiny Committee chairman Sir Bill Cash. "British institutions are left high and dry while science marches on without them and the returns on our financial contribution edge lower."
I suppose he'll argue it's nothing to do with him, hoping we'll forget his contributions to the car crash.
Shifting habitual thought is a bit like turning a supertanker. A pandemic and the consequences - problems it's raised with supply chains and discovering that having everyone in the office isn't essential - is probably starting to do that.
It's going to take time to work out that cities as presently used aren't sustainable but there's a lot of money invested in them, together with more than half a century's planning dogma, at least in the UK. Things might have to bite very hard to change that but bite they will.
"which means ensuring that OS, drivers and software will run on older kit"
The OS, drivers and software that ran on the older kit will continue to do so. If you want something he older kit didn't support then you will need something newer although the older products might need continuing security releases.
The real clash comes when the old kit has some very expensive, much longer life machinery attached, such as a PC running W7 controlling some expensive machine tool or medical diagnostic equipment. That case could be dealt with by requiring the source code to be placed in escrow and released if the software is declared EoL before the equipment it was controlling.* If the S/W vendor doesn't want that then they have to look on provision for continuing support as part of the original cost of doing sales.
"Escrow and release would also be the solution for security releases in general.
Interests can be steered.
In many countries a lot of equipment has to meet safety requirements to be placed on sale. Looked at in the broader sense repairability can be seen as a public safety issue.
If the choice is a longer life-cycle and selling of reasonably priced spares versus being not being allowed to sell products at all I'm fairly sure most companies would be able to decide pretty quickly to do the right thing.
Security of employment, e.g. being employed as a Civil Servant by HMRC, is also a substantial untaxed benefit in kind. An MP with security from only one election to the next would have much less security and a minister, at the whim of the PM even less again and possibly even less than a contractor.
Lower overall tax rates paid for by taxing these benefits should be able to get buy in from Parliament and ministers as they would gain accordingly. I'm surprised HMRC haven't suggested it as it would, at a stroke, get rid of the disparities and ensure everyone pays the right amount of tax.
The way it was presented was to prevent evil companies doing that to poor downtrodden employees, not well-paid media types.
Actually one of the classic precedents was quite an old one that of an actress who was ruled to be self-employed by virtue of the gig nature of that profession. I don't know for sure how HMRC worked their way round that one; it may be that the Beeb insisted on some sort of exclusive service contract.
"What HMRC perceived as missing was Employers' NI. But since the client is not an employer, this NI was never due."
The freelancer's company was their employer and paid employer's NI. The payment a freelancer receives has to cover employer's NI as well as employees - just one of the little details permies overlook when trying to make comparisons. I doubt HMRC perceived it as missing, given that they' been collecting it for years.
It was before my time but I understand that the use of companies was a response to IR discouraging sole traders where that might have been a concern but sole trading was replaced by the freelance company way before IR35.
"Woman haven't been required to wear hair coverings in the UK for as long as we have recorded history, which encompasses at least two and a half millennia."
Accepting "the UK" as shorthand for either the island of Britain, the whole archipelago including Ireland or anything in between: we have two and a half millennia of recorded history?
Even stretching "recorded history" to include the occasional reference as seen from the far end of the Mediterranean: we have recorded history sufficiently detailed to record requirements for hair covering?
The Robin Hood Airport case was a particularly difficult one. Whether one takes a bomb threat seriously is heavily conditioned by factors such as whether you have public safety responsibilities or whether you have experience of an environment where bombing were sufficiently frequent to make one inclined to take them seriously.
I've mentioned before something that highlighted to me the contrast between someone with NI experience (me) and someone with just English experience (facilities management). One of the other tenants in a glass-walled business received occasional bomb threats. They were taken sufficiently serious that the building would be evacuated but not, inmy view, seriously enough.
FM's idea was that people would walk round the end of the building, following a path very close to it, to the assembly area on the opposite side of the building to our exit.. Mine was that I'd exit the building and proceed in as straight a line as possible as perpendicular as possible to the facade until I'd reached a safe distance and if you want to walk past a glass wall with, potentially, a bomb inside it you're welcome. I'd seen what a bomb detonated a few tens of metres from my place of work had done and heard accounts from those who'd been there at the time.
"Death and rape threats are also illegal."
As is "threatening behaviour" in general, it often appears on the charge sheet. The courts are well experienced in dealing with it. Putting the decision in the hands of a regulator who isn't might be problematic.
We've been through the loop of trying to apply the existing law to threats made online in the past - e.g. the bomb threat against Robin Hood Airport. That didn't work out well. Have we learned anything since then? Do such threats, made in the heat of of the moment but not really meant, have cumulative effects on others who hear them and incline them to violence? If not, can we distinguish those which do or which are meant? If we can make a better judgement of what's serious and what isn't can we just apply existing law through existing means?
"The Minister rated the chances of such a kill switch being built as low."
Unlike ministers elsewhere who are convinced that saying they want it is all that's needed to bring it into existence.
Perhaps he had to put somebody's wish list into the speech to keep them happy whilst personally being realistic.
"If you give somebody your phone number and they store it in their phone, you don't each agree to a set of legal T+C's about what that person may or may not do with your number."
If I give someone my phone number it's for their use to contact me. There's an implied limitation there. I'd hope that if someone else asked them for my number they'd check with me first as that's what I'd do in the reciprocal situation.
As to your straw man argument - that would very likely be an offence under some aspect of common law.
I've always been in the habit of storing emails locally. It's very convenient. It means I've gone through several service providers, migrated from ISP addresses to own domain and switched the MSP for the domain. It still does work on a basis of a server - fairly unavoidable, I'd have thought, with the store and forward nature of email unless I were to run my own server. It means that I have a local archive of more or less anything I need going back years (and a lot of stuff I no longer need but don't have to waste time reviewing to discard).
My sister-in-law, however, has difficulty grasping the notion that the icon for her email on the desktop is just a link to her MSP, opened by the same application as her Google icon with saved credentials and that by going back to the login screen and entering her husband's ID they could use it to access his email instead of using his mobile. People like that would have problems making the switch.
When TfL introduced charging to enter central London my first reaction was to wonder what happens when a car transporter enters the zone. This was rapidly followed by the thought that a determined group of protesters could have rapidly crashed the entire system. Just make up a series of letters and numbers on some spiral binding arrangement so they could rapidly flip up random VRNs and show them to the cameras.
It seems all regulators have problems with fining multi-national corporations. It needs a bit of international cooperation. Perhaps the agreement on minimum corporation tax needs a rider to agree that fines should be set in terms of percentages of global annual turnover applied annually as long as the corporation is out of compliance. A corporation that's accumulated several fines of several percent each is going to start acting a bit more carefully, otherwise the shareholders and bonusocracy are going to start getting twitchy.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
