* Posts by jonathanb

2530 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2009

What's ordered in Vegas, doesn't stay in Vegas? $6.7m of printer ink 'stolen by office worker'

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: accounting 101 anyone

Printer ink, yes that's something that businesses buy, and they have lots of paper bills to send out. Have we got the invoices, yes. Have we got the delivery notes, yes. Are the payments on the bank statement, yes. What more is an auditor going to do?

Yahoo! She said yes. Verizon confirms $4.8bn acquisition

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Mayer In Leaving Fail...

Are we on Chapter 10 at the moment?

jonathanb Silver badge

Yahoo! Mail. It is still one of the top three email providers.

GMB tests Uber 'self-employed drivers' claim at London tribunal

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: It depends a lot on the driver:

"If a person has a full / part time job in another business, but is prepared to pick up and drop off an Uber client as part of their journey, and reap the benefit, then that is equivalent to car sharing, and they are clearly not an employee in any meaningful sense."

You can't do that on Über. They could, and probably will, send you fares that are going in a completely different direction.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: VAT

They claim to be providing the service in the Netherlands and as it is B2B advertising services, it is subject to reverse charge rules, ie the driver is supposed to declare the import and pay VAT on it.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: SIC 62090 - Other information technology service activities

They tell you there is no such thing as an Über hire vehicle and you should deal with the driver. There are news reports of this happening.

HMRC research finds 'resistance' to proposals to shift contractor tax compliance burden

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: A bit of history

My source at HMRC tells me that most IR35 cases involve people working in pubs serving drinks.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: HMRC = Ignore ethe big guys

If they are employed by the big consultant, it isn't an issue.

Microsoft wins landmark Irish data slurp warrant case against the US

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: non-US citizens on non-US servers

Your data is as safe with Microsoft Operations Ireland Ltd as it is with a small Irish hosting company with no international presence.

TP-Link abandons 'forgotten' router config domains

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Name Server in the Router?

I use the domain controller on the network for my DNS. Things work more reliably when set up that way.

Thunder struck: Apple kills off display line

jonathanb Silver badge

Or more to the point when USB 3 came along. Firewire was a lot faster in real life than USB 2 even if the nominal speed of USB 2 was higher.

Apple's 'lappable' iPad Pro concept is far from laughable

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: file

I use Synology DS File for that sort of thing. The files are saved on a Proliant Microserver located under my desk, not in a cloud, but it does mean I can save things on one device and pick them up on another, same as with cloud storage.

Lycamobile offices 'raided over fraud allegations' – report

jonathanb Silver badge

I thought they sold through the retail channel, and on their website, rather than from their own shops. That would mean that the retailers would pay the cash into their own bank accounts, and transfer the money less their commission to Lycamobile. Direct sale from the website would arrive in their bank account via Paypal or whatever they use to collect the money.

No 10's online EU vote signup crash 'inevitable' – GDS overseer

jonathanb Silver badge

I already have my polling card, it arrived just after the council elections last month.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Legal challenge to extending the deadline

If you want certainty that your name will be on the polling list, you have to draw a line somewhere.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: “I am very surprised that it crashed” - Liam Fox MP

It is a relatively quiet period for HMRC, their busiest times are the deadlines of 31st January for Income Tax, 31st December / 30th September for Corporation Tax, 7th February, May, August & November for VAT, and the days that employees receive their salaries for employment taxes, usually the last Thursday or Friday of the month. The rest of the time, that is a lot of spare capacity that could be used for other things.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Still don't understand how this happens

We didn't have a tax return deadline at that time, so in a sensibly designed system, the capacity that isn't being used to receive tax returns could be used for voter registrations.

Thief dresses as Apple Store drone, walks off with $16,000 in iGear

jonathanb Silver badge

They can also stop the phones from being registered with iCloud, which would make them pretty much useless. Surely a thief would be better off stealing the Beats headphones. Not something I would want to buy, even for £5, but some people will, and they can't be remotely identified.

Computerised stock management? Nah, let’s use walkie-talkies

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: 9 1/2 shoes

A barleycorn is 1/3 of an inch, and shoe sizes do theoretically go up in increments on 1/3 of an inch. However, Euro sizes are paris points, which is 2/3 of a cm, and in China / Japan, shoe sizes are the length in cm. A lot of shoes are made in either Euro or China/Japan sizes and rounded to the nearest British size and US size.

I always go by the China/Japan sizes where possible because a cm is a less subjective unit of measurement that the others.

Who's to blame for the NHS drug prices ripoff?

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: I've read the original article

If you want to make a generic copy of a drug, you need to get approval for it which means demonstrating to can make it correctly, and part of that process means holding a batch of them until the expiry date so you can show that they are still effective and safe at that time.

Winston Churchill glowers from Blighty's plastic fiver

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Legal tender?

Yes, if the bill is presented to you after you eat the food, but not if you pay on order, like at for example McDonalds.

TeamViewer denies hack after PCs hijacked, PayPal accounts drained

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Rise of the Machines?

The free version is probably safe. The relative needs to run the software and read out a code over the phone to enable access, and likely won't leave it running all the time.

Are EU having a laugh? Europe passes hopeless cyber-commerce rules

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: looks good to me

You can pay a courier to go to their warehouse and collect it. It will cost more per item than if they are going to collect an entire lorry load of stuff every day for all their customers, but it is doable.

The place of supply for VAT purposes will then be the warehouse door so you pay local VAT on it rather than it being subject to the distance selling regulations for VAT which may require them to register in your country.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: They aren't entirely mad.

I'm surprised that it is as low as that, given that a well known Luxembourg retailer, Amazon, is the market leader, and they have shipped stuff to me in the UK from warehouses in Spain, France, Germany and Slovakia.

French authorities raid Google's Paris HQ over tax allegations

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: SOP

In the UK, if all your income has UK tax deducted at source, and your total income is less than £100,000, you don't have to file a tax return. You are also allowed up to £300 of foreign dividends without having to complete a tax return, this was introduced because lots of people have shares in Santander, a Spanish bank that took over two demutualised building societies that gave people free shares when they converted to banks.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Google doesn't have sales in France

If Google Ireland hired an external marketing agency in France to bring business to them, they would have to pay for it, probably a commission based on the sales leads they generate. Google France should expect to earn the same amount of money as a third party.

Don't tell the Cabinet Office: HMRC is building its own online ID system

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Holy crap

Except that sitting in an accountant's office, it is a computer that logs onto the gateway, not an individual. We use the permissions facilities supplied by Sage to control who can use it to file returns. The Sage programs, Payroll, VAT, Corporation Tax, Self Assessment and so on each have their own logins and email addresses.

A UK digital driving licence: What could possibly go wrong?

jonathanb Silver badge

The Congestion Charge and Oyster Card systems in London were relatively successful as government IT projects go.

Politician claims porn tabs a malware experiment, then finds God

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Stats

20% of men don't look at anything online and get their porn from the top shelf of the local newsagent.

IBM invents printer that checks for copyrights

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Won't sell may of these

It detects the Eurion Constellation, an arrangement of circles that many banknotes from around the worl feature. If you made your own vouchers with that feature, it wouldn't print those either.

ICANN in a strop that Intel, Netflix, Lego, Nike and others aren't using their dot-brand domains

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Proof that it was a shakedown all along

So I can't take on Youtube with video.cat?

Gov to pull plug on online ID verification portal Gateway in 2018

jonathanb Silver badge

We push a button on Sage to file the tax return once everything is done, and it is different buttons on different Sage programs depending on which type of tax return we are filing.

Microsoft boots fake fix-it search ads

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: A classic case of Driving While Blonde

They do. Their number 1 search term is "Google".

EU commish: We smacked down O2/Three but we didn't take it 'lightly'

jonathanb Silver badge

Before the merger, BT had a very minimal presence in the mobile market, and Orange was not that big in the fixed line market. They used to be the largest ISP back in the dial-up days when they were known as Freeserve, but they weren't so successful in the migration to broadband.

So, after the merger, does it reduce my choice of fixed line providers? Not really.

Does it reduce my choice of mobile providers? No, because nobody really seriously considered BT as an option there.

jonathanb Silver badge

"Is four some magic number that protects consumers then?"

The evidence appears to be, yes it is.

Kill Flash now? Chrome may be about to do just that

jonathanb Silver badge

It replaced Real Player as the de-facto standard for web video, and it was a major improvement at the time compared to that POS.

It should be a crime to install spyware on phones, thunders Plaid Cymru MP

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Actually

You get alerted every time someone uses it to locate the phone, so it isn't any use for finding a cheating partner even if you do have their iTunes password.

Brits who live in 'smart cities' don't really know or care

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Too many marketroids

Rome is way ahead of Edinburgh for potholes. How the buses manage not to disintegrate into a pile of vehicle components, I've no idea.

Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Too Many bad Movies

I use [password_string]may16. Next month it will be [password_string]jun16.

I am Craig Wright, inventor of Craig Wright

jonathanb Silver badge

Is he in any way related to the former owner of a second tier football team in Glasgow?

A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Strange outfit...

The Argyle St address is a mail forwarding service. The Woking address is residential, so probably a real address.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Strange outfit...

The Regent St address is a Regus serviced office building. They also do mail forwarding.

Chap runs Windows 95 on Apple Watch

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

I installed Windows 95 on an IBM/Cyrix 166+ running at 133MHz with 16MB RAM back in the day. That was a reasonably high-end spec.

Samsung's little black box will hot-wire your car to the internet. Eek!

jonathanb Silver badge

All cars registered after a certain date are required to have it. Eventually all the old cars will be scrapped.

Czech Republic to rebrand

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: kidding aside

Also Slovakia and Slovenia.

You won't believe this, but… nothing useful found on Farook iPhone

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: jonathanb

Contacts, yes, if you save them to an Exchange account. The phone company will have a less accuate version of the GPS log. The other stuff won't be on a work phone.

jonathanb Silver badge

On a work phone? Not surprising. It will just be boring work related stuff that is already on his employer's Exchange server.

Bundling ZFS and Linux is impossible says Richard Stallman

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Question

I don't know if rms has contributed any code to Linux, as far as I'm aware he hasn't. But a Linux contributor could sue for copyright infringement, and possibly Oracle could as well depending on the terms of their licence.

Uber hands over info on 12m passengers, drivers to US officials, cops

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: High Speed Bus

Well if they found that lots of people were making Über trips that would require three different buses if travelling by bus, they might change the bus routes or add new ones. In the UK, most buses run from suburbs to city centre, however, increasingly, trips are from one suburb to another suburb, as businesses are moving out from the city centre to industrial estates.

jonathanb Silver badge

Re: Taken for a linguistic ride

"The CPUC regulates privately owned electric, natural gas, telecommunications, water, railroad, rail transit, and passenger transportation companies. The CPUC serves the public interest by protecting consumers and ensuring the provision of safe, reliable utility service and infrastructure at reasonable rates, with a commitment to environmental enhancement and a healthy California economy. We regulate utility services, stimulate innovation, and promote competitive markets, where possible." - http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/

I would say that is a law enforcement agency. They are after all the agency responsible for ensuring that Über complies with state law relating to passenger transportation companies.