Posts by Rikkeh
44 posts • joined Tuesday 30th June 2009 19:23 GMT
Re: Don't buy an Xbox One
Sounds like there's no real difference between the control you have over the library sitting on your hard drive and the control you have over the cache you built up while using a streaming service.
What we thought was a download and buy service actually turned out just to be a really inefficient streaming service.
Why would a first class graduate ever settle for the £22k....?
The only way would be if he/she felt like a valued employee, had a share of the equity and/or got something else that working for your own startup traditionally is supposed to offer over working for a big company.
Suspect that many of the real life Lord Bongs might have different ideas on how to treat the people who merely "implement" their "vision".
Re: London centric obsessing
Indeed. In some ways, the last thing the UK needs is another industry firmly rooted within the North Circular.
OK, you're closer to the banks and the venture capitalists, but presumably they can afford to get on a train. Cambridge, Manchester and Edinburgh have much more space and (especially for Manchester) much more of a need for Westminster to take an interest in somewhere outside the South East for once.
Re: Also consider
Then again, a couple of months ago I visited some friends who live in Mountain View (one works in tech, the other at Stamford) and the rent is similarly crazy in what (at first) looks like a much more suburban area. When you factor in the telephone number healthcare costs (given that you're fired at will and insurance won't cover an awful lot of stuff, they've also been cautious and set aside a big wedge for unexpected crises in this area) and surprisingly similar overall tax rate, the cost o' living as a function of the salary isn't all that different.
Not saying that the rent isn't too damn high (as a Londoner, I can assure you that it is), just saying that Silicon Valley (if that's who we're trying to benchmark against) seems to have exactly the same problem.
Oh dear, does the site have a helpline listed that you can call instead?
Re: @ First Direct have it right...
This is when you deploy Plan B- use linkedin to look up senior management and then work out their email addresses on a firstname.lastname@domain basis.
The other week a friend of mind did this with a well-known UK retailer and found to his surprise and delight that the CEO had left his mobile phone number on his vacation response.
Funnily enough, the friend's complaint was sorted out very soon after.
Re: Nice work!
Has El Reg determined whose shirts he wears?
Re: Not just Apple
Purchases of assets in a single transaction or linked transactions totally over €15,000 trigger anti-money laundering rules (as you can launder your dirty cash through buying up shiny things and then selling them on eBay etc). Once that happens, you have to check up on who the customer is.
I suspect that someone at apple (and your charm company) has overreacted to the theoretical risk that someone might buy an iPhone every day for a month without the company noticing and decided to go overboard and check *everyone*.
Sadly, whoever has made this decision has calculated that they'll suffer less for inconveniencing everyone and grabbing their personal data unnecessarily than they will in the unlikely event they get done for failing to prevent money laundering.
Re: Its time to celebrate!
I came here to drink milk and kick ass. And I've just finished my milk.
[There's no milk icon]
I suspect that they're merely humouring each Home Secretary each time this comes up, safe in the knowledge that each minister won't last long enough in the job to chase them up on it.
Could've been worse, Theresa May could well have demanded Batman's sonar phones from the Dark Knight.
Re: Argos catalogue is a great example of something that should be archived
IMHO, it's the most mundane stuff (at the time) that tends to be the most interesting now. The BFI projected some films of London streets 100 years ago a few years back at Trafalgar Square. The way the streets have changed and not changed (tram tracks, horse drawn buses and signalmen on every corner have vanished without trace, other things remain virtually unchanged), was absolutely fascinating.
It was also something that people at the time tended not to bother filming because they considered it so ordinary and so the footage is extremely rare. There was an El Reg article a few days ago about how we don't have the very first version of the very first website (although still an impressive effort retrieving what they've found given the circumstances) and have to make do with a later iteration. I guess we just don't appreciate history while it's current.
Re: Warning, Rant incoming...
I don't think that site is being preserved for its value as a historical account. Instead it sounds like it's being preserved as an example of biased history-telling from our period.
Our knowledge of the period and how things developed will change as more comes out of the archives and we're able to get some distance and perhaps a bit better perspective on the era. What won't change however is how that story was told in 2013 and how it had a bearing on the contemporary culture. In that respect, I wonder if the Derry website is in fact more valuable for preservation than the University of Ulster's.
Re: Death of investigative journalism...
Demands of the news cycle I think- it has to be got out quickly and it has to be got out cheaply. When those are the primary goals, taking the time to investigate goes out the window. TV overcomes it occasionally with programmes that specialise in in-depth reports (e.g. Panorama) but occasionally they get it really wrong, partly I think as a result of a lack of specialist knowledge.
El Reg sometimes breaks the cycle too, e.g. with Lewis' articles on military spending. I suspect however that this is more of a happy coincidence and that he wasn't originally employed to write these articles and might not be paid extra to take the time to do the research. (I hope I'm wrong- Reg, give him money if I'm right!)
One interesting thing happening in the legal world at the moment is that a lot of barristers (partly to market themselves and partly because they're pissed off with the seemingly deliberate misinterpretation by the MSM of certain cases) are writing some really good explanatory pieces on legal news. Trouble is, they're not journos by trade and have an insiders' perspective (you won't find a single one examining possible merits of cutting legal aid for example).
Re: American jobs
Would certainly explain why it's sexy, goes fast and often requires repairs.
Re: the one thing that we are doing right now, which is to go global.
To be fair to Netflix, they're trying- when they made House of Cards, it was released everywhere at the same time. I suspect that the need for DRM comes more from whoever has the right to license the content in a particular territory, not on Netflix's need to compete with a genie that's already out of the bottle. Streaming providers have probably got to go to at least a token bit of effort to demonstrate to the licensor that their website does more than seed the perfect torrent.
School requiring degree level content or above...
Speaking from only my own experience, my school was desperate to get as many of us as possible into university and then into as "good" (defined as highly ranked by the Times) a university as possible. That was the thing that bumped their stats and rankings and encouraged the middle class parents to send their children to the school.
What degree you actually did when you got to university was by the by as far as they were concerned. If you could go and do Anglo Saxon* at Cambridge with no hope of getting more than a third, it was better in their eyes than going to Bath to do maths with all signs pointing to your doing amazingly well.
Our interests diverged enormously from the school's and I think that as a result of this a lot of people were pushed into doing degrees that weren't necessarily the best thing for them to do (both for their careers and for their own personal fulfilment- the latter an often-underestimated component of what path you start to forge for yourself upon finishing school).
I started University nearly 11 years ago, so I'm no spring chicken, but it wasn't too long ago. I imagine that, if anything, things have gotten worse since.
(Me? I did political science, followed by a law conversion and am now a lawyer- the "irrelevant" degree worked out pretty well for me as the skills learned fed heavily into the postgrad and my day job).
*Nothing wrong with choosing to study Anglo Saxon, I'm just saying that it's a non-vocational subject and if you get a bad mark in it, you're very unlikely to be able to do anything with it, and it certainly won't help you in life as much as a good result in Bath Math.
Yes, but
The report seems to suggest that HBOS's failure was similar to the failure of Woolworths and Comet- all three were bad businesses that were giving the killing blow by the downturn. That downturn was partly down to the high finance-related credit squeeze. Saying that HBOS going down wasn't down to high finance gone mad is true, but misleading as high finance played a role in the squeeze and subsequent downturn that caused all of these sick businesses to go belly up in a short space of time.
And while HBOS would still have gone bust with tighter capital controls, it *wouldn't* have been in a hole nearly as deep as the one it ended up in. Also, in a more benign economic climate, fewer of its loans would have gone bad, making the hole smaller still.
You can't use the reasons for HBOS's failure as an argument to regulate high finance, but then again you can't use the reasons for HBOS's failure as an argument not to regulate high finance either.
Thumb up icon, because there's no gif of a thumb mostly up but wavering slightly.
Yes, that is a question. Given El Reg's (rightly) pointing out that not charging for content has been hugely damaging for newspapers going online, is it 1) experiencing the same* and 2) is it planning on charging for its news content?
*Probably none of my business, right?
Re: Rikkeh
Should probably start by saying that I appreciate you taking the time to do a substantive reply and go "off badge" to do so.
The Civil Procedure Rules (the laws governing how litigation in the English Court is conducted) already have a provision that hammers people for costs where they unreasonably refuse to engage in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). In many cases tried in this country, judges will pause claims for weeks and send the parties out to try and solve their dispute through mediation or another form of ADR, sometimes without either of the parties really wanting that.
My point is that laws just like the Royal Charter being proposed have been here for years and the sky hasn't fallen in (nor have the UK press complained about them nearly as vigourously). The point I made in my previous comments is that (barring crazy amendments- but one runs that risk with every bit of legislation every day) nothing will be unlawful that wasn't unlawful before.
You're just being pushed into ADR, in the same way that UK litigants generally are pushed into ADR every day, how is that a change to how you will operate day to day? The costs consequences I talk about above aren't the same as exemplary damages admittedly, but that's more a feature of who wrote the law, rather than the law's effect (and, I suspect that if the lawyers in parliament get a good grip on the Bill, costs consequences will replace exemplary damages).
I (and I don't think I'm alone here) think the press is blowing the issue out of all proportion because it doesn't want to be regulated, regardless of the actual merits of arguments for or against that regulation. This is causing them to reach for old school "freedom of the press" and "stalinist" dog whistles that look ridiculous when (as many others have pointed out) broadcast journalism has done amazing work in a much more tightly regulated environment.
Re: @diodesign
My understanding is that defamation (a person saying something that lowers another's reputation in the eyes of a reasonable third person) through libel is actionable per se in the UK- i.e. you don't need to prove any actual damage to bring it to court (slander you do, which is why people are so keen to have internet forum rants seen as slander). Truth is a defence to a libellous comment (i.e. it gets you out of paying damages and costs), it doesn't stop the comment from being libellous and you have to go to the expense of proving in court that your comment was true. Opinion is similar.
The upshot of this is that your U-turn example would be something that a vexatious person could bring to Court under the present system. Even if it was a flimsy case, you could easily be bullied into changing your headline by an angry letter and the thought of all the legal fees. I don't think you're losing anything.
This is especially so as, having (albeit quickly) read the legislation, it doesn't seem that there is anything in there (malicious falsehood is already a tort) that you can sue for under the charter than you can't sue for already in the Courts. The Royal Charter for the press hasn't yet been finalised as parliament will doubtlessly amend it, so that's not for certain but then again, it could conceivably also contain a requirement for El Reg to keep a gibbon on the premises at all times (I would support this amendment).
The two main flashing lights of the Charter don't seem to be being addressed by anyone are:
1) Parliament isn't constitutionally supposed to be able to bind itself- the whole 2/3 majority thing can technically be overturned by a simple majority and
2) We just don't know- nor do we know what other Royal Charters the government will sign in (that's the *real* scary thing, not regulation of the printed word to a miniscule extent compared to the broadcasted word).
*Contempt of Court not only slaps down inaccurate reporting, it also slaps down anything prejudicial to the case, e.g. if someone had a history of unrelated offences, you wouldn't be able to report them before the verdict came in.
@diodesign
>Because it will be down to a state-crafted regulator to decide what it true and what isn't.
Er, that already happens when people make a formal complaint about the media doing something unlawful. The place is known as a court and the person who mades the decision is usually referred to as a judge. The judge is appointed by the government.
It's just that complaining has gotten easier. That's the route of your actual complaint- all of this hyperbole about how there's been a fundamental change to free speech is misconceived.
Re: Remind me again...
Much of the problem was the fact that ordinary people didn't have a hope in hell of funding a private civil action against a tabloid that had defamed and harassed them for a quick story. That left them with the PCC as their only alternative, and it demonstrated in spades that it didn't have the backing it needed to deliver justice to the victims of big press bullying.
The Royal Charter appears merely to sponsor a cheap and quick form of alternative dispute resolution for complaints against the press as an alternative to taking them to Court.
I'm slightly mystified why El Reg would be so violently against the Royal Charter in its position as a tech journal. I would imagine that it's only likely to be taken to task by IT companies and execs with deep enough pockets to subject it to protracted and expensive litigation. If anything, the Charter would protect El Reg (if it signed up) from a Lord McAlpine claim-type situation where a rich victim of its alleged defamation launches a broadside so well funded that it knocks out its reserves.
On the one hand....
...I'm extremely impressed with its ability to predict what I'm going to type. On the other, I'm depressed that I'm *that* predictable.
The next version of Swiftkey will log into el Reg and make that comment on my behalf.
Posted in AMD: Star Trek holodecks within reach
Safety protocols
Hopefully, they'll make it harder to disable to safety settings than it was in TNG.
Posted in Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range
Re: *splutter* How much??
Indeed. Whatever happened to the pricey and cheerful "budget" range of macbook whites? A comparative snip at £700!
Beat me to it- you'd never be able to do it solely off GPS, as unnotified roadworks, obstacles in the road and (snigger) apple maps would mean that knowing where you are on the planet would only get you so far with where on the road you should be.
Re: Flat tax
@James- there is no VAT on basic foodstuffs, VAT is only charged on "luxuries" (a biscuit is a luxury but a cake isn't, apparently).
Re: Flat tax
Yeah, because people will really dismantle a tax planning strategy that costs thousands to set up and saves millions if lower taxes mean it saves them fewer millions.
Sadly, some (maybe most) big companies and high net worth individuals are so blind to anything but the short-term* persuit of profit that if they can spend £1 to save £1.01 in tax, they will. The only thing to do is to make these people pay is to make such strategies not worth the money: through a mix of closing loopholes and making avoidance taboo and a turnoff for customers.
*I say short-term, because the fact that they're in an environment that they can make money in is dependant on a large amount of public spending (on things like roads and other infrastructure, health of employees, education of employees and customers, rule of law to keep your profits and enforce your contracts). I've yet to hear of an overregulated entrepreneur going to Somalia and making it big over there.
Re: So let's get this straight
"Expected" is probably too strong a word. It's fairly common practice in the components industry for buyers to overestimate deliberately the amount they're going to buy from their suppliers, so they can be sure that the supplier has got the capacity to fulfill the order if it comes.
Apple are renowned for winning favourable terms with their suppliers, so it's very unlikely that they've lost anything by cutting down from their "forecast".
Even so, I'd imagine that they haven't done as well as they expected to with the 5. There's only so much "it's slightly faster" upgrades of the same model that people are prepared to shell out for before they get wise and hang on to their old kit/buy the 4S instead. And while Apple may have seen that coming, the ballsup with Maps has really hit their repuation hard. But I still suspect that the shortfall on their *actual* expectations is nowhere near as bad as the cut in their orders to suppliers suggests.
Re: Impartial much?
Not really- as the head of the Commission's competition wing, he's more of a prosecutor than a judge. If google challenged the decision and went to the European Court and a judge came out with that, then you'd be right.
Re: @Rikkeh
See link below and enjoy your trip next year ;-)
http://ec.europa.eu/budget/explained/budg_system/financing/fin_en.cfm
Re: Genuine question
It gets discounted from the amount that member states pay to finance the EU. Assuming you're a British taxpayer (and therefore one of the net contributors to the EU budget) it's worth a lot more to you than €3.
Re: You have the right to remain silent...
The problem with saying that you were advised by your lawyer to remain silent is that you've waived your attorney-client privilege over that part of your advice, meaning that your lawyer can be compelled to confirm/deny that he (or she) gave the advice.
Re: "abuse of dominance"?
It's not a crime in the UK as such, but abuse of dominance in a market is prohibited by law in the EU, UK, US and pretty much every other developed country and has been for well over a decade. Developing countries have also been getting in on the act, having woken up to the damage that a monopolist can do. The gigantic level of fine (up to 10% of turnover in the EU) for doing it has also been in place for years.
Thanks for saying what I was about to - I imagine it makes quite a lot of sense. Let's do the maths- my office printer charges 7p per sheet of paper printed. Colour is a lot more. Even in black and white, £700 for an iPad will only cost you the same as 10,000 sheets of paper- seems like a lot but that's only a small shelf full of lever arch folders, which given the size of your average White Paper, consultation or policy doc an MP would get through in no time.
And that's without factoring in the value of the time saved for the Parliamentary Research who'd otherwise have to print and bind it all together.
As for leaving on a train- at least you can lock and wipe your iPad remotely.
Chances that any of these arguments will be rationally evaluated in the Mail or the Express? Zero.
No case in law, I'm afraid
You can't just grant pardons willy nilly in the UK to the extent that you can in the US.
My understanding of the concept of pardon is that it is applied to situations where the person is somehow "morally innocent" of the crime he was found guilty of (essentially, being guilty... by the letter but not the spirit of the law- given the context of his conviction and the standards of the time, this isn't Turing). This was also used as a way to give plea deals way back when, but probably wouldn't be allowed today.
It's also what's called a "royal perogative" right, i.e. something that is at the monarch's discretion. The scope of the perogative has been cut down over several hundred years by parliamentary sovereignty. To extend the perogative would (in my limited understanding- it's been years since I did constitutional law) almost certainly be unconstitutional. And, unfortunately, pardoning Turing would be such an extension.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be some kind of law which retrospectively annuls all convictions for homosexual conduct (I think there probably should). However, what they were asking for was, strictly speaking, illegal without a new law being made. What Brown gave in 2009 was probably the limit of what you could do without a new law.
More info on the concept of pardon (and how the UK and US systems apply it differently) can be found here in an article by the late great Lord Bingham: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n06/tom-bingham/at-the-white-houses-whim
A worrying picture
I'm more worried about the 5/6 who *don't* stop having sex when they answer the phone. I'll never be able to call my parents after Emmerdale again.
Here's a question, reg cloud
Is there a reason why no one's thought to do the batteries for e-cars like barbeque gas cylinders- i.e. you pay a big deposit the first time you buy one to "hire" the cylinder and then bring it back when empty and pay to exchange it for a full one?
This would seem to solve the long charge time and degrading problems (the main reason it seems why people aren't keen on electric cars) at a stroke.
Posted in Arab conned into marrying bearded lady
Moral Damage
Moral damage in this case is likely equivalent to what we would call damage for pain and suffering over in the UK, or "emotional distress" in the US.
It comes from the French, where the word for "mental" in certain circumstances is the same as the word for "moral". What is sometimes translated from French cases as "moral damage" is actually damages awarded for emotional distress. It seems to be the same here.
How do I claim my pint?
Posted in Speedo Aquabeat
I've got one of these...
....and I didn't pay nearly anywhere near £80 for it- it's much cheaper elsewhere
While it's really good for fighting off boredom while you do lengths, I've found that it's not good when your ears are under water (say, during front crawl) for listening to podcasts and the like where you need to make out words - the sound of the water going past drowns out the detail.
So no Mark Kermode film reviews in the pool.
Irony
So, the guy who made getting other people's work for free a philosophy is whining that no one gave him anything in return for all his hard work?
I'd be playing the world's smallest violin, but I've put it down somewhere and can't seem to find it..
