Posts by John H Woods
955 posts • joined Wednesday 14th November 2007 11:44 GMT
Re: ¡Hola!
Random hex is fine, as long as you remember it effectively shortens your password by at least 2 bits per char.
FTFY
"The people who say they’re for this bill need to look refugees, veterans, survivors of the holocaust; descendants and relatives of those who fought in WWII etc. in the eye and tell them why they’re prepared to give the police the powers they need to turn the UK into a police state"
In the UK ...
... you don't need a deed poll to change even your surname. You just tell everybody what your new name is, and that's that. There are circumstances where you might need evidence of a change-of-name, and then a deed poll might be useful.
"You know who gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks" --- Stewart Francis
@ForthIsNotDead
"Just try putting an egg on your mobile, and then call TalkTalk customer support (or anyone else that will keep you on hold for 30 minutes). Enjoy your egg."
I like my eggs cooked, thanks. But do feel free to try it yourself.
Posted in LG claims UK Ultra HD TV first
Porn ...
... will look terrible on this. It's bad enough going from SD to HD.
Update of old joke...
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess and a handsome prince. The prince asked the princess for her hand in marriage, and she said no. So instead of wasting his time on a quest to change her mind, he spent the rest of his life riding motorcycles; dating girls half his age; drinking as much whisky as he liked; [accumulating all the technological junk that he liked]; and generally having a great time --- and he lived happily ever after.
Was it ISIHAC ...
... where I heard, in a round called something like "Questions, that if they had been asked, would have changed the course of history", someone said:
Colonel Sanders: "Now, be honest, you guys will tell me if this tastes like shit, won't you?"
Re: This is a handy service for all sections of the community to use!
@graham
kudos for not putting in your URL :-)
Karen
Come on you guys, what about Bikini Bottom? Plankton, the microscopic nemesis of Spongebob Squarepants, has a Mk II UNIVAC which is his W.I.F.E. (Wired Integrated Female Electroencephalograph). She is bossy, sarcastic and belittling. True wifely badassery, and definitely deserving a HAL rating.
Almost beer-ware
A lot of the apps I have 'purchased' (like the excellent offroad/walking mapper Maverick) have no significantly increased functionality when paid for. But some of them are so good that you can't help but feel guilty using the free version when you can buy the author half a pint of beer for their efforts.
Re: Apple vs Android
markyj "As an Android user, I rarely pay for apps because there's no guarantee that the thing will actually work"
I think you're wrong. I have downloaded apps that don't work a few times and have had no problems getting refunds from the market.
Re: This is assuming the products are the same
Tin is still quite expensive. That is why 'tin' foil and 'tin' cans are not made of tin.
Explains why ...
... of about 100 words my dog understands, about 90 are foodstuffs. Although she's probably using scent as well as texture.
+1 --- Re: Dictatorships
Psy reference
Heuristics ...
... can be horrible. My wife had a stroke. I had to use a card that I hardly ever use while she was in the hospital and I was trying to get there in a hurry. Bought some stuff in the supermarket for the kids to eat - card ok. Hurriedly filled up nearly empty car before rushing off to hospital - card declined. Bank of course had my mobile, but they didn't ring it. And they weren't answering their phones either. Thankfully I found enough cash down the back seat to pay. In the supermarket you can blush, apologize and walk away, but at the petrol station you are out of options and immediately treated as a criminal.
Re: I still can't understand ...
Ah, sorry I explained that poorly. What I meant was:
If I, in the UK, buy a camera from a company in Singapore, they make some profit and I make a saving. Their profit is taxed in Singapore as corporation tax. I have to pay VAT on the camera, and that goes to the UK. If I am a reseller, I charge VAT on the sale, and reclaim the VAT on the purchase. I therefore pay UK tax at the UK VAT rate ON MY PROFIT, regardless of my revenue.
If, for taxation purposes, a virtual product were still a product, as in your example, the UK company would pay corporation tax, at the same (UK) rate, on their profits, regardless of where their sales occurred. The Australian buyer pays sales tax at the same rate he would if he were buying in a store in AUS.
Now, if a UK subsidiary company choose to operate at a loss by paying a huge royalty fee to a parent in a nation with lower corporation tax, that would still be allowed. But they have to pay VAT on the 'virtual product' which is a 'licence to trade under that name for one year' and, because they obviously don't sell this licence onwards, they have effectively paid tax, at the VAT rate, on all their profit. If VAT and corporation tax were charged at the same rate, it wouldn't matter whether they declared the UK operating profits as having really occurred in the UK or not, they'd still being paying the same amount.
Again I suspect my simplistic approach is due to ignorance, but I'm interested to know what I am missing.
Re: two types of avoidance - or is it three
How about: Amount of tax Rovio owe to Finland = (Amount of business done in Finland / Amount of business done Globally) * Global Profits
They are already paying for the Finnish education system by employing Finns, who pay tax to Finland.
ratfox: "Heck, for all I know, Rovio has a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands which is "managing" Rovio's intellectual property for the whole world, and Rovio is not paying tax anywhere because that subsidiary is their only profitable company anywhere in the world." But the Cayman islands would clearly not be where they are making that money, and it should be clear that a loss-making Finnish company whose principle source of expense was a royalty payment to the Cayman islands, is not really making any real loss.
I realize this is naive, but am too naive to see why it is. Can you explain? Is it because there is no real way for the Finnish government to look at that loss-making company and say, "that's really part of the same company that's making a huge profit over there"
I still can't understand ...
firstly, I don't understand the politicians calling it morally questionable. Listed companies have a *duty* to maximize their profits.
secondly, politicians write the laws, and it this case, it appears they are even thinking of doing something
Given those two points, why is it acceptable for UK politicians to complain about this sort of practice whilst they do nothing about it, preferring to enact more pettifogging unnecessary legislation on other issues?
And why is it so complicated? Take the example given by ratfox: " if an Australian resident on a British website clicks an ad for a German company brokered by an American company, where is the transaction happening?" To me it is clear that the transaction is happening in Australia.
If I buy something on a website in Singapore, HMRC will be after me for the duty as soon as it comes into the country. Surely advertising is just a virtual product? I get that taxing purely on transactions will hit low margin business, but don't understand why the amount of tax payable by a multinational to a nation state isn't just their global profit multiplied by the relative size of their business (i.e. proportion of their revenue) turned over in that nation state.
Hold on...
... you've just been giving thanks for everything you have, then the next day you try to kill each other over cut-price consumer goods?
"flatly refute"
is a contradiction in terms. You can flatly deny, or perhaps flatly repudiate, but refutation implies proof whilst flatly suggests none has been, or will be offered.
Re: Could be a result
Colin Millar: "Maybe the Guardian will wake up to how pisspoor some of its employees are..."
Doesn't matter: their online strategy (give away all content for free) is costing them so much that they can't afford to spend any more money on journalism - or even, I suspect, continue to spend what they are currently spending.
Yes ...
... and mine is still on the set of AAs that came with it, despite daily use.
me too...
... Wang, I mean. Paris is OK, but I wouldn't climb over swimbo to get to her ...
Posted in Autonomy to HP: bollocks
I remember ...
... the consensus here on the Reg was that the valuation was mad. Yet all the experts, KPMG and the usual suspects, and HPs own due diligence team, were sure that it was fine. More recently the commentard consensus seemed to be much more accurate than 'the professionals' re: facebook.
Amazing how the people who are paid to get it right can get it so wrong, often at so little cost to themselves personally, however much it costs their corporations.
@John G Imrie
... pretty sure you mentioned it twice.
Tick African ...
... and write "aren't we all" on the dots for 'Other'
Tony Chestnut
Excel is not even the best spreadsheet....
... fundamentally, the problem with spreadsheets is that you are trying to do matrix operations on a cell-by-cell basis. Lotus Improv had this sorted years ago. Instead of having, price in the A column, quantity in the B column and the 'C' column containing '=An*Bn', with a special case in row 1 which contains the title headings, you have columns called price, quantity and subtotal, with the single rule 'subtotal=price*quantity'.
If you want to see how a spreadsheet really should work, I exhort you to download a 30 month trial of Quantrix Modeller, the intellectual descendant of Improv, and blow your mind with it.
But it isn't just limited understanding of Excel that contributed to the financial crash. I have seen some amazingly stiff (in the technical sense) models using Monte Carlo integration (not in itself a bad thing) but which produced incredibly fragile results (where the outputs where extraordinarily, or even chaotically, sensitive to the inputs). And yes, they were used for trading decisions.
Qdir portable...
Not saying it in anyway means that the O/S provider shouldn't have had proper explorer functionality, but I get round it by keeping a copy of this handy. I think M/S and even some of the Linux Distros could learn a lot from how this great piece of Windows software works.
Pseudofeudalism
What on earth do the people who draw up these agreements think they're doing? They think they are our lords and masters, that's what. Do you think for a moment that we could tie CEOs to particular organisations the same way without a shitstorm about how the economy needs them to be free to move from company to company?
The fact that they realise how bad that would be for them, and indeed the very principles of free-market capitalism, means that the only explanation for them trying to bind us to our corporate masters is that they actually think they are a different class of people to us. Well, maybe they are, but probably not in the way they think they are.
Re: I dont know what is more disgusting
Straight marriage isn't that disgusting: mixing of bodily fluids usually becomes vanishingly infrequent a few short years after the ceremony.
Re: Sounds like revenge...
@John Robson,
It's only a joke, and I actually think it's that courses, both ways round, are a good idea.
BTW I've never had to do a speed awareness course, as I prefer mpg to mph.
That reminds me...
... I bought a stick-type deodorant and followed the instructions: "Twist off cap and push up bottom" Walking is uncomfortable but my farts smell amazing.
Sounds like revenge...
... for them making us do 'speed awareness' courses
Re: Personally
Opp... Opp ... Opp
Weren't the ancient Greeks ...
... mostly idiots?
Try Greek rather than Latin...
... how about panshambles? Although I think shambles is 15c English anyway.
Unecessary ...
... except as a bowdlerism of clusterfuck
Re: Well that and...
Oh no, there's gonna be a fusilli comments now.
Errmm...
"Office work is just about impossible under those conditions, though - guess he'll be spending a few years after school in one of the no-internet, unskilled labor professions."
I love the idea that office work is 'skilled'. I've met six people with real skills this morning that could easily survive with no internet: builder, plumber, electrician, saddler, farrier, agricultural mechanic. On the other hand a zombie apocalypse would expose me and most of my colleagues as having very few real skills.
Re: As they say...
"An idiot and his job are soon parted"
I think you'll find that only applies below 50k p.a.
KIK...
... is what all the kids seem to be using. Everything else seems to have become a desert. I used to use Trillian on Android to be logged into the dozen or so IM accounts I have collected over the years, but for 2 years I only got messages via IBM Sametime (work) or Facebook. Everything else, including yahoo, google talk, and messenger, went quiet over that period.
Criminal prosecution still required ...
... for the admins who plunked sensitive systems on the Internet with blank or trivial passwords.
Re: I swear to god...
"Gibibytes are like Mitt Romney, Red Bull, and getting your penis caught in your pants zipper - you'll never get used to it." -- David W.
I got used to it. But the Bi units are only really ever appropriate for stuff, like parallel addressed memory, where decimal units are a poor fit with reality. For serially-accessed storage, bandwidth and anything else you wish to measure, you might as well stick with the decimal (SI) definitions.
Re: And TimeSplitters too!
So glad someone mentioned TS2. Great music, brilliant sense of humour, huge replay value - especially with the mapmaker functionality. Every five years or so it comes out of the box for a quick run through from noob to 100%, just like every 5 years or so I have to read all of Jane Austen again --- because nothing else comes close.
Posted in KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds
Re: Opinions are like...
Some opinions are worth more than others ...
... but that's just my opinion.
Posted in Sony KD-84X9005 84in ultra-HD TV review
I regret the move to HD...
The girls on babestation used to look ok to me, especially if I'd taken my contacts out. I can't imagine too many actors are going to look great at this resolution without some serious airbrushing.
Insult to her culture...
... and if you disobey you get what ... a horse's head in your bed?
BTW there is a difference between good salt and bad salt. Try a double blind test between standard table salt and something like Maldon flaked sea salt.
