Posts by Ptol

"Does any organization ever have any rules in place for differentiating between two people who share the same first, middle and last name as well as date of birth? "

Yes, I've implemented systems to automatically identify entry details against a person on the database. The approach I follow is this:

1. Have a long set of questions that will filter people such as first name, year of birth, postcode, etc...

2. Have a minimum number of questions that must be asked.

3. Work along the list of questions till there is only one entry in the database that matches.

4. Then ask one more question.

Its the most robust approach I've found sofar.

Re: "Hairy jumper"

never used to be scared of spiders, and then i visited Australia. Spiders the size of your dinner plate that don't spin webs, they actively hunt food. Cornering one yo catch it is a bad idea - they will run at you, they can jump and they also have a pretty nasty bite.

Re: Likewise, look at the mess of e-scooter hire

Scooters are perfectly legal in the UK. You just need to create a company, have the company buy a scooter, then rent that scooter to yourself at a rate per second, then pay VAT on the hire charge, and pay corporation tax on the revenue, and you can then pay the profits out as a dividend back to yourself, accounting for any residual income tax that may now be liable.

On the plus side, a 4000 watt scooter can easily out run a british bobbie.

Re: Is this your car, Sir?

In New Zealand, my car insurance covers the car for any driver. If i name a person as a driver on the insurance, it knocks NZ$ 400 off the excess in the event of a claim. Car insurance here is much simpler because there is no personal injury aspect to it, it is simply about repairing cars and stationary objects. ohh, and car insurance is optional. If i'm hit by an uninsured driver, then my insurance company will take them to court for the accident costs and collect the money from their wages over the next 5-10 years.

What about the personal injury and medical costs? In New Zealand there is universal accident cover for everyone in New Zealand. ACC will cover your health costs, rehabilitation and lost earnings - even if you stow away on a containership and break your leg jumping onto the harbour dock in Auckland.

There is no pain and suffering compensation, we are made of tougher stuff, and just get on with it. :)

You missed the point

Depends which choice you are talking about. I choose to buy an iphone because i don't want to make hundreds of little choices about which app is going to provide my keyboard, or handle my voicemail, etc. I don't want to have that choice because i will then start tinkering, and tinkering means that sometimes something gets misconfigured, and then I have to tinker some more, just to get my phone or my banking app to start working again.

No thank you. If these choices are important to you, buy an android phone thats designed to allow you to do this, rather than break my phone.

Re: NLRB one more reason voters in Muruca will crack down on UNION JOE

I think you are mistaking correlation with cause/effect.

I think its more likely its the industry mix that is defining the boom/bust difference, not the workers rights. If businesses can only survive long term by suppressing working conditions, then those businesses deserve to go bust.

Re: Feed the troll, Tuppence a bag...

He is informed.

The Russian state media has been feeding him information relentlessly for the last 20 years. It is not his fault you get your information from alternative sources.

Personally i find that the British TV Channel 4 provides the best curated news content, and it's often interesting to see the differences in emphasis provided by Al Jazzira and fox news on major stories.

I am most worried when all three are taking the same editorial line.

Parking law changes

Be careful about following advise from old forum posts about private car park tickets.

Many years ago, the law was ambiguous. Car park enforcement businesses were operating in an environment where a properly prepared defence and counter suit, well presented at court would defeat them every time. Then someone poorly presented their case, lost - and their case was taken to appeal, with a well funded legal team. That set a precedent that made it much simpler to present cases in district court.

However, some point around 2015-2016 a specimen case was taken to the UK Supreme Court to get an overall ruling. There were some aspects of the specimen case which greatly favoured the private parking lobby, but even still the judgement was exceptionally favourable to the private parking industry.

As a result, I would advise against following any strategies published from before the Supreme Court ruling, that have not been properly tested afterwards.

Re: Christian Militia Terrorist

I can think of a few... There was Guy Fawkes - a dangerous revolutionary catholic, motivated by a desire to restore a catholic monarch to the English thrown.

The KKK were / are a religious order that terrorised people that did not believe in their white racist view of god.

Re: Hardware on the Accounts

I think I'd walk away too...

Been there, done that, when its small bits of kit - and you make a few extra crumbs along the way. Generally for the customer they are wanting to buy something but the actual supplier is not a preferred supplier, so they come to you, their friendly prefered supplier, on the basis that paying an extra $50 saves them the hassle of spending 2 weeks getting yet another preferred supplier agreement in place through purchasing, and they want the kit this week. That makes business sense.

When its a $500k order though, that needs multiple layers of signoff and will have the purchasing team involved. they are coming to you because they cannot buy direct. Perhaps they couldn't get the credit terms, perhaps they have maxed their credit limit with that supplier. Without knowing with 99% confidence why they cannot go direct, this ain't a runner.

Finally, theres the downside consequences of doing the deal. As the smaller business, you will inevitably need to pay the 500K to the supplier before you receive the 550K back from your customer. Is 500K a small enough sum that it wont affect your cash flow? What happens if your customer then doesn't pay your invoice? can you swallow the loss?

This kind of a deal only makes sense if it's small enough that it can go bad with you holding the loss, and you can shrug your shoulders and carry on. Perhaps $1K at a time.

passport != citizen

Its common enough for people waiting trial for significant crimes to have to surrender their passport. By cancelling his passport whilst he was in transit in Moscow, the US made it much more difficult for Snowdon to choose his country of exile. The US seem quite happy for him to return back to the USA. in fact i think they have a bed waiting for him.

Re: If you're going to treat contractors as employees, kiss the VAT goodbye.

HMRC only receive VAT from the end sale to a non VAT registered entity. However that VAT money flows all the way back up the supply chain, as everyone pays the VAT on their sales, minus the VAT they paid on their costs to HMRC.

I've had a couple of bosses in my early career that would take me out for 3 pints before setting me off on some complex programming stuff. I'd consistently get the core of a complex problem implemented in an afternoon, and spend the following morning dealing with the compiler not recognising my genius (aka syntax errors)

"If the threee networks on the plane are physically connected in any way, then there is the potential for flaws that allow the isolation between them to be broken. This does raise the question of why you would have any connections between an avionics system, a business network, and an entertainment system. Surely the only cast-iron way of securing the avionics is to have that system completely isolated from the others. What are the use cases that require those networks to interact?"

My reading of this marketing fluff was that it was quite likely to be one physical network with VLAN tagging. and QoS to ensure priority for the mission critical packets at the switch. Hopefully none of the seat area wiring are connected to trunk ports...

"Who calls their child "Rob Mee"?"

-- Mr Blind?

Re: @AC

"the USA fingerprint all air travellers whether they have commited a crime or not"

"I don't know about international flights, but this isn't true for domestic flights. I fly on a reasonably regular basis and have never once been fingerprinted."

It is US immigration law, so it happens on arrival to the USA. However, the USA is unusual in that there is no concept of transit. Most countries you can fly into the country and remain air side -to catch a flight onto a third country without needing to cross the border. However, this is not possible in the USA. If you are on the Air NZ flight from london to Auckland, you need to get off the plane in LA, enter the USA (including finger printing, having a valid US visa (or visa waiver) and then leave the USA to get back onto the same plane to continue your flight.

Re: Governments don't like to think of themselves as repressive

"And finally, governments in settled democracies would have an awfully difficult time actually stoking up large scale repression. They'd need the police to go out and do something they'd know will be very unpopular"

The Miners strike in the 1980's showed that the UK police are surprisingly happy to be the government enforcers. Good pay rises above inflation, plenty of overtime, no accountability and a selective blind eye and media quite happy to tow the government story and respin stories in deceptive ways all led to a police quite happy to use violence against peaceful protests.

Re: Money Talks

If they really wanted renewable power that reduces CO2 rather than virtue signalling they would be pushing for nuclear power generation.

Nuclear power It has two desirable properties. The volume of fuel needed per megawatt of electricity is pretty low, and the pollution produced is easier to collect and put into deep storage than CO2.

However, it is not a renewable energy source. It takes a source fuel, converts it into a waste fuel, and produces pollution - not really the definition of renewable.

Re: Most powerful wifi?

Having been involved with city wide wifi for a short while, there were benefits in boosting the signal power on the mesh channel on both access points to obtain a higher bandwidth on the mesh traffic.

Doing the same for the access channel results in lots of people thinking they should be able to connect to this good signal, but the AP cant hear them reliably enough. Drains battery of devices constantly sending repeat packets that are never acknowledged, or worse, thinking it has a connection, so doesn't use your telco GSM, but is not reliable enough for real use.

Re: Make it attractive to pay tax

VAT starts simple, but soon gets complex...

All VAT Companies pay VAT on their purchases from VAT registered companies, and charge VAT on their sales. They then submit a VAT return detailing the total VAT collected, and total VAT paid. If they collected more VAT than they paid, then they must pass the extra to the tax man. If they paid out more than they collected then they get a VAT refund from the tax man.

Then there are a few additional rules to be aware of...

1. If the transaction is across EU member states, and you have the other companies VAT number, then VAT is not paid / charged.

2. Some things are zero rated, some things are VAT exempt. If you sell something thats zero rated, then you get to claim back the VAT you spent on producing and selling that thing. If something is VAT exempt, then you still have to pay the VAT to your supplier, but cannot claim back the VAT.

3. VAT flat rate schemes allow you to charge your customers VAT, but only pay part of that back to the Tax office. The assumption is that you have paid for some supplies, but under the flat rate scheme, you cannot claim back the VAT that you have paid for supplies.

Then there are the penalties if you get things wrong, combined with the enforcement powers when they think you got things wrong...

Re: Comparison

In the UK, there are some key differences. Our budgets are not about parliament authorising spending by government, they are just about how the government plans to tax us to contribute to the government spending.

The second key difference, in the UK we do not vote for our prime minister. We vote for a local MP, usually based on his party membership and the policies of that party. This means UK government MP’s are fairly closely aligned to our prime ministers policies. US politicians are elected seperately from the choice of president, often on a different time, and based on their own local platform.

Finally, in the UK, opposition parties will strongly oppose government legislation, if they think its a poor approach. However, in the House of Lords ( a bit like the US senate) there is a gentleman’s agreement to only amend, but not block laws that were part of an election promise.

In the UK, there have been occasions when budget announcements did not get the full support of parliament, but it would only prevent changes from occurring. Government carries on as before.

Im sure theres only one reason why a tourist would visit that town...

Have you ever been there? Its a nice enough place - but its not exactly a tourist honey pot. In fact, I can only think of one reason for a tourist to visit there, and thats to pose by the welcome to... sign.

"You mean that in the early days somebody actually seriously proposed 16-bit networking addresses for a networking protocol that exited a building?"

At the time, there were probably only 50 institutions in the USA that might have a big enough budget to buy a computer, so using the second byte was considered future proofing, 4 whole bytes was exceptionally extravagant!