Posts by Harry

Banks, please take note ...

My bank insists on sending me *four* tax certificates every year. All together on the same day. On *four* separate A4 pages, each in a separate first class envelope.

Not only does it waste postage, it also wastes paper unnecessarily and means I have to keep four separate bits of paper and add up four sets of numbers when I have to fill in my tax form.

Once, banks would claim it was "too hard" to identify plural accounts belonging to the same person -- but that excuse can't be used now they have online banking and don't require a separate login to each account.

Yes banks, you *know* how many accounts we have and could very easily print just one tax certificate showing each of the accounts and the total figure as well as the individuals. So why waste paper and postage this way?

Isn't it time the law required banks to provide tax certificates online instead of by post? Some do, but not mine. And the law should also require them to keep statements and tax certificates available on line for seven years (mine deletes them after 9 months, which is unreasonably short) so you don't have to remember to make copies every six months.

" and paint the bottom to look like the moon "

Yes, but ...

... should you make it out of green or white cheese ? And does there need to be a man in it ?

It's very similar ...

... to a logo that British Rail used to use.

So perhaps they had better rip up all the UK railway lines too.

@Grease Monkey

"otherwise the courier will accept no responsibility for any damage"

Couriers will usually not accept responsibility for damage unless the damage is visible **before** unpacking. So there's no point in unpacking an item in the presence of the courier, unless it is clear from the *external* packaging that the item has been mishandled.

If the contents are broken but the external packaging is intact, that's a packaging fault and packaging is the responsibility of the sender, not the courier. Package testing (which I used to supervise, many years ago) typically requires the contents of the package to withstand being dropped from a height of 3 feet on all six faces and sometimes on all edges and corners too.

You should certainly ensure the recipient checks for visible external damage and logs it before signing, but there's no point insisting on unpacking an *undamaged* parcel.

"Transport For London would much prefer to collect the money itself"

Somebody not reading the Register then ???

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/14/oyster/

"London's Oyster Card system is now owned by Transport for London, which stumped up £1m for the brand as well as considerably more for the associated infrastructure."

Yes, but ...

"Queuing systems should be forced to tell you where you are in the queue #"

That's only half of the problem.

a) Queuing systems, and worse still those user hostile "please select one of the following options" should *only* be allowed on 0800 numbers. Companies should have to *pay* for the privilege of having inadequate staffing levels (and, ideally, they should additionally be made to contribute £1 to charity for every minute of a caller's time that they waste).

b) Systems which make announcements before connecting the call should either be confined to 0800 numbers or implemented in a manner which ensures it is the recipient not the caller that pays for the initial part of the call.

c) Companies that operate "dial 1 for xxxx" systems should be required by law to maintain a web page that displays up to date direct numbers for every department that is reachable through the system.

What really irritates me ...

... is stupid sites that display stupid messages that say "This site needs javascript".

Oh no it does *NOT*.

OK, you may have employed some incompetent web designers who don't know how to code pages without using javascript. You might even have one or two tiny "features" that you think (very wrongly I suspect) look fractionally better with javascript. But they'll be those nasty irritations like marquees and constantly changing images which add nothing but clutter and "nauseosity" to your site.

If you haven't been able to duplicate the core functionality of a site without using javascript, then there's only one word to describe you and your web designers, and that's *incompetent*.

This is precisely what is needed, but with two differences ...

Ebay mostly ignores violation reports, and it can do this safely because nobody other than ebay can easily prove that an item actually was reported.

What's actually needed is for the EU to set up a reporting system to accept violation reports and forward them anonymously to ebay. If ebay deals with the forwarded report, fine. But more likely than not, ebay will continue to ignore them. Except that this time, the EU has cast iron *evidence* that the problem was reported and wasn't dealt with.

Laws are only the smallest part of the solution. Proof of evidence and enforcement of violations are the more important part. But the proof could be obtained at minimal ongoing cost by setting up a trusted, independent web site that hosts the evidence that a seller was reported.

However, even more important is to vigourously clarify the law to ensure that people can't be stopped from selling genuine goods by over-zealous trademark holders who want to unlawfully restrict the product to a select group of favoured sellers. Such a restriction should certainly be prohibited in the case of second hand goods and should probably be outlawed even for unused goods.

Why does an electronic invoice need a signature?

Did you ever see a *paper* invoice that the sender had bothered to write a signature on?

Why does an electronic invoice have to be different ?

What's needed is not a signature, its the legal requirement that every business with more than say 50 employees *must* if so requested send only paperless invoices, and every business with more than 50 employees must send *only* paperless invoices to any other company with more than 50 employees.

There may be a requirement for electronic signatures on other more security-critical types of document, and widespread mandatory use of electronic signatures on email with automatic checking before delivery might eliminate the bulk of unwanted spam, but electronic invoices shouldn't be the main reason for electronic signatures.

I vote with my feet.

I used to be a Three Broadband customer and so did my parents. The service was acceptable for many months, but then we both found that despite apparently having apparently a full strength signal we couldn't even ping three's own nameserver.

I tried Three's forum and it was apparent that others had exactly the same problem but the support staff were just waffling and doing nothing about it. Presumably, they too knew that the network was grossly overloaded and nothing could be done about it.

To add insult to injury, they did an upgrade to 3connect which seems to have contained a purely-cosmetic fix to falsely show stronger signals (a former 3 bar connect immediately showed 5 bars after the upgrade, but there was absolutely no associated improvement in connectivity).

We voted with our feet and are no longer customers.

Good idea, but ...

... the default should be AUTOMATICALLY OPTED-OUT and only those people who, for reasons most of us aren't going to understand, specifically want to be tracked should be trackable.

That way, advertisers are going to have to come up with a very good explanation why being tracked benefits the end user -- and the silent majority who don't understand and don't care remain untracked.

In the UK at least, this should always have been the default if the UK Data Protection requirement not to collect "unnecessary" information had been interpreted sensibly as meaning that only information*absolutely* needed to do the job (rather than information that is wholly or mainly for making illicit profits) should be collected at all.

For most of the general public ...

... the main question that arises is probably : if I need to access a site that has *only* an IPv6 address, will I be able to do so using my present present browser, router and ADSL line with no changes at my end other than making sure I have the latest operating system and browser updates. And if not, what action will I have to take.

Perhaps somebody at The Reg could either create such a guide, or find a well written one and publish a link to it.

Its high time to make it illegal

There's only one *proper* thing to do about this sort of insidious spyware and that is to make it completely and totally illegal.

The concept of people being forcefully "opted" into something they probably don't even know about and almost certainly don't understand is totally wrong, has absolutely no merit whatsoever and should be very specifically prohibited.

Dabs *used* to be good before BT bought it.

Now all you find is that you log in at dabs.com and are quoted a decent price, but when you come to pay for it it insists on doing the checkout through BT Business Direct, where the prices seem to be less, but they're now vat exclusive so you're actually paying between 10% and 15% more once you add the vat back in.

No, unless you're adding a category for the worst possible destruction of a hitherto succesful company, its definitely *NOT* dabs any more.

Abuse of a dominant position ???

"Rumors have long suggested that Apple is building its own FM radio app for the iPhone"

Wouldn't that be even *worse* than Microsoft's default bundling Internet Explorer in Windows ... until eventually being forced to give equal prominence to competing browsers.

Banning competing radio apps would be far *worse* because MS wasn't actually *preventing* competing browsers, it was just abusing its dominant position by giving its own product a preferential position in its showcasing.

Maybe its time the anti-competition authorities took a hard hard look at Apple and set up an independent arbitrator that could instruct Apple to remove any of its own apps that are similar to those which Apple has prohibited others from offering.

Why ?

Why are so many laptops and LCDs coming out with those horrid, glossy screens ?

We've known since the 1980s that glossy screens are bad bad bad for the user, indeed it was a very specific health and safety rule that screens should always be non-reflecting. When you sit in front of a screen, you want to see the document you are working on, not the rest of your office or, worse still, the street outside. Your eyes and brain must both do significant extra work to distinguish your document from those unnecessary reflections.

Surely, its time it was made a legal requirement for the brochures of products with such horrendous design defects to contain a serious health warning or, better still, be prohibited altogether.

"a significant effort"

Oh really?

Almost nothing on a network should involve *any* effort, once the appropriate software has been put in place.

OK, so checking a mobile service is probably slightly more complex than the internet equivalent of a ping, but the principle is the exactly the same. You send out requests to strategically selected devices at regular intervals, and you log whether you get a reply. But the whole process can be automated, there should be absolutely NO effort involved. And indeed, they should already be doing constant checks to a selection of mobiles in each mast area to know the network status, regardless of whether they are publishing it. So, the "effort" is just the one-time cost of writing some software that presents the collected data in a user-friendly manner.

The only place where a significant amount of effort is involved is if you intend to manually *fudge* the figures to pretend that there's not a problem even when there is. And somehow, I suspect that particular part of the process will be the very first to be automated.

"Until the game has actually been played, they are not statements of fact."

I'm not sure that's completely correct. If it were, then magazines would be unable to publish TV schedules until after the programs had begun transmission.

By my reckoning, if team A has been scheduled to play team B on a certain date, then the time, date and participants *is* the statement of a fact about an intention to play, and can therefore be reported as news. Circumstances could possibly arise that change that later, but unless and until the circumstances change, the schedule remains factual.

But that's probably nitpicking. If a *list* of fixtures is published, the publisher owns copyright to THE LIST but not the individual facts contained within it. A third party can legally compile their *own* list by phoning each club and asking who they are playing and when. From that, they can legally compile their own list. But the cannot, legally, copy the original list -- they must independently compile their own.

"how about we make BT pay the fines on the UK taxpayers behalf?"

That seems like a *VERY* good idea.

As consumers, we get the choice whether we use BT or some other telco, so if BT's prices have to be pushed up to pay for BT's alleged involvement in an activity that certainly ought to be criminally punished, then its better-behaved competitors will reap the benefit -- which is precisely how it *needs* to be.

Just make sure the *whole* of the fine is levied on BT retail (or, better still, on the BT directors personally) and that the wholesale arm isn't allowed to increase its prices in any way.

"they've had BT.com for years"

Yes, because nominet didn't exist (and therefore, couldn't impose rules) when BT started using the bt.co.uk domain.

And because the COM domain is nothing to do with nominet anyway.

If Ofcom has any sense ...

... then how about insisting that every telco has an online-accessible cancellation process which issues some kind of official "receipt" proving cancellation, which is completely binding on the telco.

Its completely daft (and a blatantly unfair contract term) that a telco will let you order a service on line with no formalities, yet there's no FAQ on how to cancel and it apparently requires a snail mail letter to be sent to an address that can't be found by searching their help site for sensible words like "cancel" (that's Three Broadband in case anyone asks).

However, telcos don't always get it wrong. I recently transferred my voice line to plusnet and didn't even think about whether I might need to cancel the BT account. But to my surprise a couple of weeks later I received a BT refund for the outstanding line rental.

But will it start up in under five seconds?

That's the current downfall of firefox. Yes, it does its job pretty well out of the box and what it doesn't do can be sorted with extensions. But it comes with a hefty and excruciatingly s-l-o-o-o-o-w startup which surely isn't necessary if you save the program state properly on shutdown and resume from there rather than reading everything afresh every time.

and also ...

"remotely trigger the lights"

More usually done with the ordinary remote locking

"and horn"

That would also be illegal ... unless the phone was also capable of *moving* the vehicle at the time it sounds the horn. And come to think of it, there's probably also a law against remotely *moving* a vehicle, so sounding the horn wouldn't be legal even if you could move the vehicle at the same time.

Standards

"there are so many to choose from"

Yes indeed. But this has never stopped Microsoft from ignoring them and inventing a completely new SUBstandard of its own.

Did anybody mention Internet Explorer or Microsoft, the two worst SUBstandards ever invented ?

""unless otherwise expressly agreed in the contract"

Well, there's the problem. To be effective, any late-payment legislation needs to explicitly state that contract terms demanding later payment are unlawful.

It's time that legislators understood that "agreements" are never actually agreements, they are always *impositions* from a dominant party that imposes its will on the weaker party and the weaker party has no choice but to "agree" to it because all the competitors are likely to have equally unfair terms as long as the law allows unnecessary loopholes.

"Police stop man and find he is not wanted."

Please send our sympathies to the unwanted man.

"any quango had to pass three tests:"

I'd strongly suggest there ought to be a FOURTH test -- are at least 60% of its members annually elected by members of the *PUBLIC*

We have far too many organisations like OFCOM and ASA. I've no idea how or even *if* their senior staff are elected, but we know judging by their illogical decisions and wrong priorities that most of them are far too highly influenced by the vested interests of the industry concerned and pay little regard to the needs of the end users that they OUGHT to be set up to represent.

"you really do not want to know what Web 3.0 will be..."

Here's hoping it will be more like web 1.0 ... or even web 0.5 ...

How about starting with sites with information that's easy to read and relatively few distractions from that primary purpose.

They could re-use that old slogan ...

... powered by Google.

Agreed in spades

"Nothing frustrates me more than seeing an advert for a government service that has the phrase Search for 'xyz'" What's wrong with publishing the URL?"

Apparently, there's a government or local authority directive that says councils must NOT quote URLs or link to third party sites, even when they provide a service that complements or is even provided "in conjunction with" the council.

That's what my local council tells me when I ask for a URL to my site instead of "details on the XXX web site".

Its twits that make silly rules that need to go, not web sites.

So, in what way ..

"we're continually focused on what's best for children and not fighting for airtime amongst drugs, counter-terrorism, organised crime, guns and gangs,"

He doesn't explain In what way drugs, terrorism, guns and gangs (or indeed, any other form of crime) are *GOOD* for children.

If you devote massive amounts of effort to one small subset of crime, and especially when you start taking actions against problems that aren't yet proven to exist using methodology that isn't actually proportionate to the scale of the problem, then resources are taken away from a lot of other much bigger and much more important problems which aren't being addressed simply because they're not being so much hyped about at the moment.

"Maybe they should stop employing monkeys in call centres?"

Maybe they should *START* employing monkeys in call centres. They would presumably do a better job.

But a possible answer to the problem of goons that won't refer you to their supervisor (presumably, having also refused to disclose their own identity) is to call back and ask the next person for the complaints department -- who should, presumably, be able to tell who it was that was allocated your previous call.

That's because ...

"If the claims were groundless ... why did it take years of litigation to reach a decision?"

That's because the claims are handled by members of the so-called "legal" profession, who know that even groundless claims can cause lots of money to be transferred into the pockets of the lawyers concerned.