Posts by Red Bren 1649 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2007
"collection costs are now less than 3p in every pound."
Is that a genuine saving or have the collection costs remained static (or even risen) while the licence fee has gone up?
How about telling us the collection cost per licence and how that has changed over time?
Not sure this "feedback" is feasible or legal.
Unless you're transferring funds to an account at the same bank, your bank is not going to know the recipient details. Adding this functionality would fundamentally change the transfer process across the whole industry from batch to real-time, which would cost a fortune.
It would breach the data protection act by sharing customer information with an unauthorised third party.
It opens up a new fraud opportunity: submit a sort code & account number, get instant confirmation of the account holder's name.
A better solution would have the payment system verify the supplied recipient name matches the actual account name. If you state your payment is going to the account of "Honest Bob's Solicitors", the payment should fail if the recipient account name is "Dodgy Dave Scammer"
See point 7 on How Faster Payments Works
"It's reminiscent of Marx ""From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" which sounds great in theory, but only works if people don't game the system, and people will always game the system."
The powers that be always make a big show of cracking down on people gaming the second half of the system, often spending far more than the crackdown actually saves. While at the same time, they turn a blind eye to those gaming the first half of the system, partly because they're at it themselves.
@veti
I used to work for a utility, so consider myself to have some knowledge of this, although it may be out of date now.
1. If you tell your supplier in advance of your move and take meter readings on the day you move, you can already do this. It was a regulatory requirement for suppliers to request meter readings when they become aware of a Change of Occupancy (COO) but most home movers don't tell them until after the event. Smart meters won't make a difference if no one tells the supplier of the change.
2. Many homes have meters located on the outside wall, so don't have to answer the door to a meter reader. There was also a health and safety requirement that meters were visually inspected at regular intervals. Smart meters won't change that.
3. Speedy reconnection means speedy disconnection in the first place. If your supplier wants to disconnect you, they have to obtain a warrant to enter your premises to do it. This takes time and money (hence the swingeing reconnection fees) so suppliers only use it as a last resort. If they can do it at a click of a mouse, then it will become far more common, and you can bet the reconnection fees won't get any lower.
4. As I said in point 3, you can bet the reconnection fee won't get any lower - they have you over a barrel as you can't just go to another supplier and ask them to connect you immediately, even if the reason for disconnection has been resolved.
5. I will concede that a sudden spike or change in consumption would be easier to pinpoint, but it still wasn't highlighted to the customer until she queried her bill, which could have been many (expensive) months after the the change. Now if you told me that the unusual consumption pattern triggered an alert on the system, prompting you to call her to check if there was a reason for the change, she could have taken action to put it right and save money. That would be a consumer benefit.
"The bottom line is, with smart meters you and everyone else will be billed accurately, for the power you actually use. You wouldn't believe the guesswork, fudging and compromises that go into reconciliation without them."
Actually, I would but, but this is a benefit for the industry, not the consumer, and there are other factors that cause inaccurate bills, that a smart meter won't fix, such as crossed MPANs.
No this is how you do it:
1. Get into the time machine you built in step four, taking the plans with you
2. Travel back to the beginning of the universe and measure the speed of light
3. Return to your own time frame, stopping off on the way to drop off the time machine plans to your earlier self
4. Build a time machine
Regardless of who does it, FTTP should be mandatory for all new builds, with infrastructure to support connecting to any provider in the market.
Last time I moved house I dismissed all the new build options because BT had an exclusive contract to install ADSL in every single development I saw. As VM were not permitted to run their cable until the development was finished, they faced the full expense of digging up the road, making it less economically viable, effectively handing BT a monopoly.
"Water is a random jumble of H2O particles and has no symmetries, but as soon as it turns to ice the molecules arrange themselves in hexagonal structure. It no longer looks the same in every direction – its rotational symmetry has broken."
I'm not a materials scientist but this statement is confusing. Surely the rotational symmetry is broken when ice melts, changing from an ordered hexagonal structure to a random jumble of molecules (rather than particles)
"How else do you explain the woman I saw yesterday slowly wheeling her bike across three lanes of traffic against the lights?"
If she's dismounted the bike, she's not a cyclist, she's a pedestrian. As I wasn't a witness to the event, I shall refrain from judging if what she was doing was wrong, or just inconvenient for you.
The autonomous car may avoid the collision, but what then? That autonomous vehicle is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, except for a red light, or a "Stop" sign, or a pedestrian crossing, or a cat!
"Driver speed isn't the chief cause of accidents"
Maybe not, but it is a major contributing factor. Approach an incident at a lower speed and you have more time to react and possibly avoid it becoming an accident altogether. Approach at a higher speed and the forces involved can turn a minor collision into a serious or fatal one.
Have an upvote for the rest of your post - especially the bit about indicators not describers!
"We cross the double yellow line to leave cyclists enough room on the shoulder." may not be hard to code for but it isn't the right answer. The correct answer is to wait for a break in the double yellow (or solid white) line and overtake the cyclist when it is safe to do so.
West Midlands Police are doing sterling work to highlight this - https://www.west-midlands.police.uk/latest-news/news.aspx?id=4942
"I'm genuinely puzzled by a downvote for this."
If you go around humiliating people by challenging their comments using facts and logic, don't be surprised if they retaliate; not with counter arguments, but by going through your comment history and downvoting all your recent posts.
Have an upvote and carry on!
"And yet the UK politicians still approve the 4th largest budget in the world for military spending. I'm not sure how much more committed you would want them to be..."
That would be great if the money was spent at home, rather than going straight to the coffers of US weapon makers.
Can't we adopt a Vendor Managed Inventory policy where we only pay for these things if we actually use them? It would make sense for Trident, seeing as the UK would need the Yanks' permission to launch its "independent" deterrent anyway
"If we don't teach kids about critical thinking, logic, complexity, negotiation and such, we can't expect them to elect good leadership in the future."
Which is why politicians are more concerned that kids are able to regurgitate facts and figures than have the ability to think. An educated electorate might not listen when told which section of the community to scapegoat for society's ills and might start to blame the vested interests holding the levers of power.
So every Italian who travels TO Dublin loses the ability to speak their native tongue on arrival?
I would love to be proved wrong but I suspect there could be more native Italian speakers in Dublin than native Gaelic speakers. I'd be prepared to put hard currency (so € not £) that there are more native Polish speakers.
My Dad has taught Irish language* classes for most of the 40ish years I've been alive, and his response when local Irish newspapers that started printing articles in Polish, having refused to print in Gaelic was acerbic, to say the least.
* But not to his own children. If someone said to me "Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?" I would probably respond "Póg mo thóin!"
Much of the EU's neo-liberal agenda was a result of the British Conservative government and they pushed it relentlessly in the UK, leaving us with a national infrastructure owned and subsidising the state owned industries of Germany and France. Similarly, many of the EU's social protections were watered down at the behest of the Tories.
Politicians have been happy to use the EU as a trojan horse to implement their ideological/self-enriching policies so they can say to the electorate with a straight face, "It's not our fault, the nasty EU made us do it!" They have also been very reluctant to take advantage of the social benefits of EU membership as it would lead to Monty Python-esque answers to the question "What has the EU ever done for us?" David Cameron had to be bullied with petitions to apply for flood relief funds. That's the equivilant of taking out home insurance, then refusing to make a claim so you can bitch about the poor service they give you. Only now is it becoming clear how much unreported support the EU has been giving to poorer parts of the country, and suddenly, special interest groups are all jostling for government handouts to replace what will be lost. Somehow I think it will add up to more than the £350million per week we were going to get back for the NHS.
And opinions can change:
http://metro.co.uk/2016/10/16/number-of-people-who-regret-voting-leave-is-greater-than-brexit-victory-margin-6195403/
Now that the claims from both sides can be compared against reality, we should run the referendum again but with 5 options and a transferable vote
- Hard Brexit (closed borders and no single market access)
- Soft Brexit (single market access and free movement of people)
- Soft Remain (carry on as before)
- Hard remain (adopt the Euro and join Schengen)
- Let Parliament decide
Clear majority (60%) required and abstentions count as option 5
The Tories have a slim majority in the Commons but they are bitterly divided over Europe. The pro-EU wing could join the opposition to block A50.
However the Labour Party are also bitterly divided. If Jeremy Corbyn announced he would block A50 on the grounds that he didn't trust the Tories to negotiate a deal that protected the working class, his enemies would be faced with backing brexit in order to humiliate him - the very thing they accused him of not doing enough to prevent.
I don't want an internet of things. I don't need every objec in my house to be able to talk to me or each other and most importantly to people who don't have my best interests at heart. They may be legitimate businesses, nefarious hackers, or state snoopers but my attitude is the same. If I'm given a choice between an IoT device and a dumb one, I'll take the dumb one. If there is no choice, I'll DOS attack it myself.
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