Posts by Moultoneer
72 posts • joined Tuesday 8th December 2009 19:05 GMT
Re: News Flash!!
Would that be the same corrupt European club that has just unveiled a 10 year long price fixing scam in the UK oil fuel industry?
Re: Smoke and mirrors
To put that £1 bllion figure from Sky in perspective in 2010/11 the UK government raised £43 billion in Corporation tax, which was 8% of the gov't's income.
By contrast income tax raised £153 billion, National Insurance £93 billion and VAT £84 billion.
So the true figure should be substantially less than that punted to the media.
Sources - http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/5885 and http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/tax_receipts/tax-receipts-and-taxpayers.pdf
Pointless argument
Come back when you can print a bullet cartridge, or in some way put the propellant behind the bullet.
Any gun without a supply of ammunition is nothing more than a glorified paper weight.
Re: God I hate politicians...
America is a big country but just how far away are the local shops if you need to drive there?
Nice bit of revisionist history, but no dice
You're missing the elephant in the room that is linked to casino banking, Collateralised Debt Obligations or CDO's*.
HBoS was selling mortgages twice, once to the person(s) wanting to buy a property and then bundling that debt with bunch of other mortgages to create a CDO to sell on the financial markets. This raises money that can again be loaned out as mortgages, which are bundled and sold on to raise more money and so the process repeats itself. Commissions get paid at both ends, but especially when the CDO's get sold.
It reached the point where HBoS and the like were not especially interested in the ability of the mortgagee to re-pay the loan over the next 25 years. They just wanted the completed mortgage transactions to bundle and sell on, at which point re-payment becomes somebody elses problem.
* - CDO's were sold as bonds to supposedly sophisticated buyers such as pension funds and the local German banks mentioned in the comments earlier. CDO's are structured to pay varying rates of interest depending on the level of associated risk. The top tranche was highest rated and was paid first, the lower tranches cost less for the same % return, but crucially didn't pay out if there was a shortfall because one of the mortgages defaulted.
Penguins surely?
Because only one in a thousand fly!
Potential problem for the Mod Plod here..
If failed officer recruits in the RAF and the Navy are offered an alternative employment stream where will the Ministry of Defence Police, aka Mod plod, get their staff?
Re: Voicemails
I'm not sure that using the default passcode to access a voicemail box requires much ability.
It is possible that the Surrey police deleted the messages, but we will not know because the NotW compromised the situation.
Voicemails
Just one small point on your aquittal of the NotW regarding the deletaion of the Milly Dowler voicemails.
The Police statement was that:
"There do appear to have been two messages missing that should have been present when Surrey Police carried out their second recorded download on April 17.
"It is not known why that happened and it will not now be possible to provide an explanation."
We cannot say that the NotW definitely deleted the messages, but we do know that the NotW, or people in their pay, had unauthorised access to the voicemail box at the time that the messages were deleted.
So at the very least the NotW muddied the waters so badly that it cannot be said who deleted them and there remains the distinct possibilty that they did delete them.
Re: Too late...
Bonuses were paid in December and they went bust in January. That just soesn't sound right does it?
Re: I seem to recall...
Do you have a source for those numbers? The road spend looks pretty low compared to what is spent by the Highways Agency alone, the bulk of the road network managed by local authorities which is funded by our council tax.
http://www.highways.gov.uk/roads/road-projects/
To pick two projects at random, widening the M25 came in at close to £1 billion, or 10% of your suggested spend.
He's missing the real point, cyclists cycle because they're too lazy to drive!
The way that it actually works...
In reality you have an idea, work as a contractor for three or six months to raise some money, then eek out the money for as long as possible while working on your own project, before taking on another contract to raise further funds. While you're contracting someone else is liable to have a similar idea / better execution, it really sucks.
A better idea for the UK gov't than Tech City would be to copy a successful sheme from Chile, http://www.startupchile.org In their own words: "Start-Up Chile is a program of the Chilean Government to attract world-class early stage entrepreneurs to start their businesses in Chile."
The scheme works by offering $40K to start ups that are willing to move to Chile for six months. That is not a loan, there is no transfer of equity, its a grant. In teturn you have to agree to share the knowledge, take on some local interns and train them up.
Smashrun.com is a good example of a site that benefitted from the Chilean scheme. Similar in some ways to Strava, its for runners and more concerned with how often you run rather than Personal Bests and local KOM's.
I have to dispute your claim that 'MasterCard comes late to e-payments', back in the late 90's it purchased MXI, which had created the Mondex e-wallet, MultOS for smartcards and a host of related technologies.
Mondex died off, along with VISA Cash, but anyone using an Oyster PAYG card on the tube is walking in their footsteps.
Who is paying for the devices?
Are firms really going to rush out and buy enterprise level tablets when with the BYOD model the user buys the device themselves?
My firm is supporting iOS and Android via MobileIron, something that I am a huge fan of. The MobileIron server automatically disables services if any non-compliant software is installed or if the security features are compromised.
I can't see any of our business managers signing off on new tablets while users are bringing in their own kit for configuration.
Hopefully the company will survive their absence.
But the fraud doesn't make much sense, the firm was turning a profit and a competent accountant could have legally reduced their liabilities in a 'tax efficient' way.
Re: Pay
That does sound good, can you tell your colleagues which team or product group you work for?
Does anyone know if the out going Finance Director Simon Burt was told to sign on at the job centre on his way home two weeks ago?
Or, just possibly, did he get paid his notice period, pension contributions, etc ...
Actions speak louder than words
So Dyson says that "Engineering postgraduates need to be encouraged with generous salaries." Very nice, and how much are Dyson paying engineering graduates this year?
Well the careers site http://www.careers.dyson.com/jobs doesn't specify, but for the Graduate Design Engineer 'immediate start' it does say that " Many staff members lift-share from the nearby cities of Bristol and Bath..." which speaks volumes.
Re: It won't happen again
As I recall the accounts were on services such as hotmail and gmail. He requested password re-sets by answering security questions such as DoB, mother's maiden name, etc.
Once into the account he configured it to forward all e-mails to himself, so when the password was changed again by the legitimate user he continued to receive the e-mails. Which in turn gave him fresh celebrity e-mail addresses to play his trick on.
Re: @Steve Crook
The BBC reported something similar in the Summer, Http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
Their take is that Turing was careless and that the investigation was half-hearted, possibly due to homophobia.
Posted in Review: Mio Cyclo 300 cycling satnav
Alternatively cable tie a large bulldog clip to the handle bars and use an OS map from the library. Pocket the £200 for tea and cake stops.
I raised a glass to his memory
Anyone wanting a introduction to why the bikes are so special should listen to the Bike Show podcast: http://t.co/i1bdpB9f
You can still buy an F-Frame bike for circa £100, the space frames are a lot pricier though my TSR9 cost me less than a zone 1-4 travel card in 2009 and is a lot more fun than the Central Line.
Don't write RIM off yet
You can create a reasonably secure BYOD enviroment for iPads and iPhones using MobilEcho and MobileIron over a VPN. We use these two app's primarily to support native e-mail on iPads which allows the bankers to view their pitch books on the move.
My firm will be sticking with RIM for the vast majority of users though because we already have the infrastructure to support it. That reason can also be called inertia but in the current climate we are sticking with what is known to work.
As for the kids, I thought that they were all over BBM?
Re: ah well
Hmmm, BNC connectors, I was glad to see thin ethernet go but RJ45's just don't compare to a bayonet fitting.
The Bank that I'm currently working for has moved to its third out-sourcing partner in less than ten years. The same staff are TUPE'd across each time and, funnily enough, the level of service never seems to improve.
To my jaded eye the changes have little to do with the quality of service delivered and everything to do with keeping the ITIL project managers looking busy and providing a few good golf days for the decision makers.
The phrase "basically delivering what you got in Windows NT but better and two years earlier." reminds me of the rows we had when told to upgrade from Novell 3.12 server to NT 4 rather than Novell Netware 4.11
By the time Windows 2000 Server appeared trumpeting ADS I remember thinking that NDS was doing this four years ago, but knew to keep schtum.
A spinning in his grave Steve Jobs icon for all the future Apple going down the pan news reports.
A pigeon icon for all the vacant minded London stories. Yeah, I'm looking at you Techcity.....
Re: seems reasonable
In London it would certainly not be reasonable to assume that. In Operation Rize the Met opened almost 7,000 safety deposit boxes and sent the directors to prison because some of the boxes contained contraband.
Strawman
"Armchair environmentalists may romantically imagine..." That's quite a strawman, is there any chance of naming one of these individuals?
George Monbiot, the only named environmentalist in the article, is a convert to nuclear power which would be pretty difficult to run if you didn't have piped water.
Quid pro quo
Setting aside the legal arguments, if the UK is going to act like America's poodle in this whole affair can the USA administration at least say something a little supportive of the UK's position in the on going spat with Cristina Kirchner?
The UK relationship with the current US administration is a case of we scratch their back....we scratch their back....we scratch their back....we scratch their back........ you get the picture.
"Steve's Infeasible Third Coming"
Nuff said
Re: Oh Danny Boy(le)
Your link does not suggest that the NHS cancer survival rates are absymal. It says that the rates are worse than some of our neighbours, carries the caveat that the data set is incomplete and concludes with the line that "UK's performance is variable – from very good to very bad.".
A better link for survival rates than your suggestion is - http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/12december/pages/cancer-survival-rates-compared.aspx
At least you weren't asked to write up a ticket for each of these shoulder taps.
The IT management at my current site are obsessed with ticket numbers, the higher the better. No attempt to weigh them for time/ difficulty has been made either, so a cherry like an unplugged peripheral is valued as much as recovering user data from a failed W7 laptop.
In theory it should balance out but some folk always seem to end up with the Sybase re-installs at 6PM on a Friday and they never seem to to be the permies....
Re: Yup
You are partially right, most of our existing cycle lanes are rubbish. We need proper cycling infrastructure like the Dutch have, not a bit of painted tarmac that peters out at every pinch point.
On my commute down the A11 (Stratford High Street) there are at least three lanes in each direction, a stretch of on road parking and a central reservation, so there is room for this infrastructure.
Back in the 80's scaremongers were claiming that the cost of fitting seatbelts was going to price cars out of the hands of many people. The same occured again when airbags went from being a paid for extra to mandatory.
Despite those dire warnings the number of registered cars in the UK, private and company, has grown from 20 million in the mid-90's to over 30 million today.
Re: Union reps and other points
Taking legal advice about an issue as serious as your continued employment is a matter of competence. If you are not earning then mortgages, school fees etc don't get paid. If you resign under a cloud you will struggle to be re-employed and for an added kick in the teeth forfeit any income protectection insurance that you have in place.
Dominic's examples are unusual in that he is talking one on one. More often there will be a technology group manager, business manager and an HR rep trying to browbeat you into accepting a decision which was made before the meeting. You will be made to feel in the wrong, that you are holding back your colleagues and that it would be best for everyone if you quit without making a fuss. Having an external ally in any such meeting will massively reduce this peer pressure.
Finding an employment lawyer is not diffcult (Yellow Pages if nowhere else!) and you might have legal cover bundled with your household insurance.
All this will not guarantee your continued employment but at minimum you will walk away knowing that you didn't just roll over.
Management foibles
After a major mistake why should management get together to brain-storm an approach to a solution when they can have a blame-storm instead!
It comes with the added advantage that they don't require any competence in the technology being discussed.
Greece can exit the Euro but it is very unlikely to bring down the whole currency, the € is just too useful to the rest of the trading block.
Take away the € and you're back to second guessing the future value of a basket of currencies and their potential local interest rate movements. You will also be paying a mix of commissions on exchanging those currencies and you will have to purchase futures options to hedge against those risks.
None required
We will all happily buy milk, beer or red wine in whichever standardised unit Tesco's chooses to stick it in, be that metric, Imperial, US or Sumerian Ducks.
The advantage of switching to metric is that producers only need to only conform to one standard of measurement for the whole of the EU market. Consumers benefit because it should be easier to compare prices within that same single market.
These days the only numbers that I ever get to work with are hexadecimal and that's only thanks to IP6.
Baroness Warsi for Pope!
Please read her article in today's Telegraph if you're wondering why.
Wrong job
If Marriott spent between $400,000 and $1m in consultant expenses (plus some other stuff) he should have been angling for a consultancy role, not a BoFH slot!
21 miles in nine years, I had a Rover car like that once....
I'll get my coat.
Not in the UK
The Indian Supreme court has ruled in their favour but in the UK it was a cosy deal arranged over dinner between Dave Hartnet, head of HRMC, and his former colleague John Connors, an ex-senior HMRC staffer who had moved Vodafone.
In fact the UK Court of Appeal found against Vodafone by ruling that British regulations ruling out the use of tax havens for avoidance schemes did not conflict with European law.
Dave Hartnet then went against against the advice of his own lawyers, who he told the FT were "too black and white about the law".
Many of these jobs are better than the local alternatives but when the jobs were exported they should have exported the same working conditions. Simple things like rotating staff round the work stations to avoid crippling RSI etc.
The old first world spent the better part of a century improving working conditions for the vast majority of the population, the populations of the rising economies should not have to re-fight these battles
The costs, particularly waste disposal, are low enough that this will have little impact on the affordability of the end product.
'The ASA said the advert was a "light-hearted play on the fairy-tale theme" that most readers would recognise as a reference to an old myth.'
Which myth, Trolls or Christianity?
Its only economic growth if the savings are spent on buying new services, such as air con etc not on bonuses to management for cutting costs.
And if the redundant staff struggle to find work it will be the dear old tax payer who'll be paying their job seeker allowance, housing benefit and, eventually, pension credits.
Hang on
Bob Crow is the elected leader of the RMT. The members of which have joined voluntarily (closed shops have long been abolished) and pay their sub's to remain members. Plus, if those members are unhappy with the RMT they can vote with their feet and leave, or join ASLEF instead.
Bob Crowe was voted in to protect and improve his members conditions of employment, something which he has exceled at and explains why he has been re-elected.
So with that in mind, how do you expect him to re-act to any suggestion that his members lose their jobs?
