Posts by Doctor Syntax 33129 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"file with enough to get the ball rolling (in this case, the extradition request) ... Then file superseding indictments"
I wonder how well that will play with a UK extradition process. AIUI the extradition is allowed against a given set of charges and facts The court might not appreciate being on the receiving end of a bait and switch.
"The legal language of the law does not capture how technology works either"
If you try to capture how technology works in legal terms your laws become outdated very quickly.
If you applied such a concept to cars you might have to have separate legislation for causing death by dangerous driving for petrol, LPG and diesel ICEs, whether turbocharged or not, straight EVs, hybrid EVs and plug-in hybrids with Parliament being asked to find additional time to legislate on hydrogen powered vehicles.
Sensibly, that's not how it works. Legislation simply says what's legal and what isn't irrespective of the means by which an act is carried out. One of the functions of judges is to apply that in a changing world. Legislation changes only as new stuff makes new things possible or, as with the various DPAs, experience dictates that changes are necessary.
There's a very simple test as to how much these people would want it if they understood what it meant.
Would they be prepared to have all their online account IDs and passwords published for all to see, all their bank statements for, say the last 10 years, all their emails, all their other messaging device data, all their medical records? Ditto for family members.
It should be a required test for legislators proposing this sort of legislation to publish this up-front.
Put up or shut up.
"There's one seemingly obvious flaw"
Only one? For a start there's the other half of the system, the player or whatever it is that has to handle the material. That has to look at the the field and then do what it's configured to do - which it might not - and it has to be configured appropriately to the audience and who does that?
Then there's the notion that this is an international standard so how do you get different countries to agree on how a particular file should be rated? Or do different countries get to rate material to their own needs and how do you then enforce the distribution of files according to country (although big media marketing would love to have misdistribution enforced by criminal sanctions)?
"A decade ago global corporate profitability was $7.2 trillion"
Yes but countries are dealing with individual businesses. For a country with the UK's size of economy (as of a few months ago) one or two wouldn't be enough and it's still within the scope of Ireland, Luxembourg etc. to under-cut the UK although the fear has been expressed by other coutnries that the UK could try such a tactic post-Brexit. There's also a concern, of course, that the post-Brexit UK economy could be small enough to make it worthwhile.
"Personally I like the Irish model"
The Irish model is dependant on having a relatively small population and local economy. By bringing in multi-nationals a low tax rate on their turnover is large in relation to what the country would otherwise earn and the local businesses also benefit from a low corporation tax rate. Whilst you may personally like the Irish model it's not a model that's universally applicable.
We used to fax out work orders from a fax server to businesses who did installations for us. We came in one morning to a failed queue and a complaint regarding a number slightly different to the one in the failed faxes. It turned out that the destination had several fax lines and for some inscrutable reason forwarded overnight faxes from one line to another. That night, fat finger.....
The small subset of professions are very largely those commuting excessive distances to work in large city centre offices. Reduce their commuting and there's a big pay-off for the environment.
Let's also distinguish between working from home as opposed to working at home. For instance owner/operator taxi drivers obviously don't work at home but they may well work from home.
In this context I've previously mentioned my daughter; working in clinical trials she worked from home, sometimes at home but also spending a lot of time visiting the hospitals where the trials were being conducted. The office was only visited every few weeks. It was a hundred or more miles away but the hospitals were relatively local.
"team building"
Ah, yes, those and other "motivational" events. I found them thoroughly demotivating, culminating in an episode that lead to enforced early retirement escape into freelance. I also found myself remembering those jobs a decade or more earlier where I ended up in circumstances that needed an armed escort and wondered what sort of screaming fit those team building wonk conducting the course would have had if they'd had to do that without going on a team building event with their new colleagues.
It's worth standing back and reflecting if an entire operating system - not just a kernel but all the additional layers up to and including applications - can be built by globally dispersed teams with just the leading lights getting together at annual conferences.
On a smaller scale I worked for a body shop that had staff scattered in ones and twos, maybe threes, in locations across London but arranged an after ours get-together once a month by putting a suitable sum behind the bar in a central London pub.
It's not sustainable concentrating employment into cities so large that the employees end up scattered across a few thousand square miles of countryside and it's certainly not sane to tell those employees that they should be walking or cycling to work.
It's time businesses and the government woke up to the fact that big businesses have so many employees that they end up living in idely dispersed areas and looking to other solutions than the big Head Office.
Look to a number of smaller offices dispersed closer to where people live and let them commute into their closest one. That could well end up with a "team" spread between multiple offices but with individual members working next to members of other "teams"; it might even turn out better for cohesiveness of the business as a while.
Government's role in this would be recognising that a considerable part of the country's environmental problems stem from a decades long planning policy that separates work places from living places. This mess has been planned - not deliberately but nevertheless planned. They need to look at how they plan to get out of it.
"if testing is fast and provided to all contacts with appropriate delays"
The current plan seems to be that you don't get tested, you just get told to hide for a fortnight. At the point where isolation fatigue sets in, the alerts are ignored and there's a bit hooha on social media there'll be a U-turn that was, as ever, always the intention. But until then, just go and hide along with the rest of your household.
As you say the whole thing is probabilistic. It means (and this applies to the manual tracing) there will be false positives and false negatives - choosing s threshold will tend to tip the balance between them. But it does mean that a "contact" is really no more than an indication to test, not an indication to self-isolate. And the rate of false positives/negative is something else Hancock isn't releasing - assuming he knows - assuming he's even asked - assuming anyone's able to work it out - assuming anyone who should care does.
Presumably that's done by timing?"
Passive reflection.
The bluetooth system would reply on an active response. That active response takes processing. If the H/W isn't designed for that then it'll be handled in S/W. In S/W it might depend on either the scheduler giving it some time or on an interrupt and there not being a higher priority interrupt being handled when BT wants attention. At best if the trun-round time were consistent for a given make of phone phones would need to carry a database of the timings of other models of phone to work out how much to compensate.
The point is that the transit time at close quarters is a few nanoseconds. It's going to take a lot longer than that for the phone at the other end to respond and return the signal. It's not like radar which relies on a passive echo. What you end up measuring is twice the transit time plus the time taken for the remote phone to decide to reply plus some time lost in the local phone and not forgetting the length of the signals themselves. In relation to the rest the first element will be negligible.
Measuring stuff is hard, particularly when you want to do it properly.
"At the mandated 2m distance the round-trip delay would be about 7ns."
Surely that's the one-way trip. At any events the radio transmission time is going to be swamped by the variability in the time taken by the electronics to respond. It'd probably end up being 2 +/- 100 metres
"The reforms to the IR35 rules make large and medium-sized businesses responsible for determining the employment status of contractors for tax purposes, rather than the contractors themselves doing this."
It should be a fairly simple test: In the great COVID-19 debacle 2020 did you furlough them with the rest of your employees, make them redundant or push them off the sledge because they weren't employees at all and you owed them nothing?
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