Posts by Slx 745 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jun 2010
There's no such thing as a 'Commonwealth Citizen' the organisation has no legal powers at all. It's neither a trade organisation nor a political union. It's just a symbolic organisation for former British colonies and nothing more.
A UK resident (citizen of the UK or not) or, possibly someone resident elsewhere in the EU (until Brexit), if the UK could execute an EU arrest warrant would be under pressure, otherwise standard international rules of extradition would apply.
It's a bit of a genie-out-of-bottle situation though. I'm not really sure that you can put it back in.
On the other side of it, the UK's nice traditional tabloid media has also been hugely responsible for what's happened with Brexit and Fox News and others are deeply responsible for the rise of Trump.
Is the problem social media, or is it just a world where we've lost the ability to distinguish between 'content' and 'journalism'.
This has *absolutely nothing whatsoever* to do with EU policy. It's blatant opportunism by a Minister to blame the EU on poor rural broadband that has been entirely in the gift of the UK government i.e. him and his buddies, to solve for years.
There are tons of EU funded programmes, notably cap, but also lots of cohesion funds going into UK regions and rural areas, that will have to be replaced by money from the UK exchequer anyway. A lot of what you put into the EU actually comes back anyway in terms of regional funding.
Then there's all the added costs on the economy of increased export/import costs to access market i.e. possible tariffs and unnecessary bureaucracy and then if £ takes a hammering (which is likely when/if no deal is struck) then the cost of rural broadband equipment and onward connectivity will go way up in relative terms, reducing bang for buck big time as none of is likely to be built in the UK (and even if it were it would be using foreign technology and components).
At this stage, sure why not blame the EU for bad weather. It's utterly bonkers!
Perhaps the phone market is just plateauing in terms of features, but I'm not seeng any phone that I am rushing out to buy as my 'must have'. I have an iPhone 7+ and a Nexus 6P and I quite happy with them and see nothing that's convincing me that I need to upgrade.
A few years ago, display technology was changing very rapidly, screen sizes were increasing and there were all sorts of innovative camera features that actually made a difference.
On top-of-the-market phones, you just expect and get fantastic displays, really good audio, processors that can do most of what you want them to do, etc etc.
I really think this is the point where you'll get a lag as the products don't offer anything amazingly compelling to upgrade. There needs to be some kind of major breakthrough on battery and charging technology, beyond just rapid charge, or something like that before I would jump to an upgrade.
Otherwise, you're really just looking at incremental processor upgrades and natural produce lifecycles as they fail after a few years.
In my opinion, any site holding personal data would be required to use multi-factor security. These hacks are becoming too frequent, and it's fairly obvious that a significant % of users do not understand how insecure their data is, if they don't take adequate precautions.
Previously when we voted again, the EU added protocols to treaties to satisfy the Irish voters. We weren't just voting again on the same treaty without change. That's a total myth that's endlessly repeated by Brexiteers and others who want to make out that the whole thing was anti-democratic.
Irish protocol on Lisbon Treaty - have a read:
https://www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/treatyseries/uploads/documents/legaldivisiondocuments/treatyseries2014/No25-of-2014.pdf
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:060:0131:0139:EN:PDF
If we vote it down and they then address the problems and put it to me again, I might change my mind. Until then, it's getting a big fat NO!
Ireland has to have a referendum on harmonisation of European patents jurisdiction as it involves a court that is not described in our constitution.
In different circumstances, I might agree with the concept as it would streamlines development processes and opens up an easier path to market, but with this joke shop in charge, I will be putting my X right next to the big box marked NO / NIL !
I'm happy with our own patents process, until there's something properly organised to replace it. I would have no confidence in this body at all based on what I've been reading.
The European Commission needs to go back to the drawing board. This simply isn't good enough.
The reason for the delay was the Irish Government and Apple spending months putting legal and financial structures in place to allow the money to be invested in a mutually agreed way and in such a way that the Irish Government isn't left holding the can, should the value of the investment fall.
They spent several months basically crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's.
The issue is that they Irish Revenue Commissioners aren't simply collecting this as tax. They have to set up a special purpose system to hold it. You can't just put that kind of money into a deposit account.
Ireland = Ireland in English and Éire in Irish.
There's nothing any more complicated than any other country.
I say this as someone who lives in Ireland. I think some people are getting a bit too pedantic and looking to find offence when the country is referred to as Éire in in English in Britian. If is one of its official names.
Meanwhile, the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland.
The adjective used to describe its citizens is somehow "British" rather than UK citizens, even though that would seem to imply someone from the island of Britain.
All of its component nations are referred to as countries, even though they're comparable to states in a federation. It has some of the structures of a federation, but somehow it isn't really one. It's more like England and some other former countries that are still referred to as countries for historical reasons. Sorry Scotland, but unless you declare independence, you're still only a sub national entity that is referred to as a country for legacy reasons.
Then in sport they all play separately, and sometimes Northern Ireland plays with Ireland as Ireland in rugby for example.
Then you've Team GB which would imply the team that represents the island of Great Britian, yet it is actually the UK Olympic team.
Then you've the utterly unfathomable level of complication in terms of how the UK somehow controls a whole series of small islands (including several right next to it) as crown dependencies. These seem to basically function as a money laundering and tax haven system.
Yet somehow Ireland's confusing and complicated ?!?
I am getting a bit fed up with what I tend to see as "tech washing" or "app dazzle".
If you are using online technology to simply streamline an existing business and shake up an established market without really providing anything new, it is not a new business.
Other than a change of medium of communication and payment, I don't really see any difference between booking through an app with GPS location, using a phone and a radio cab office or using a telegram, a carrier pigeon and a chequebook and quill for payment. You don't get to just not be regulated because you're an app-based service.
I am also getting a bit sick of this 'gig economy' thing. It's piece work / freelance work and it's incredibly bad for society to start dismantling regular employment, deconstructing what it is and turning people over to what are effectively even worse than zero-hour contracts. The cab business has generally always been a bit like that, but I see other online companies pushing it out in other sectors.
There are tech companies out there who've pioneered entirely new business niches that haven't existed before, but there are plenty that are just shaking up existing markets with an app / website.
People need to start looking beyond the hype and finding the radical innovators that are really creating new markets.
I'm sorry but how can any supposedly modern democracy hold someone indefinitely without trail?
I find some of these cyber crime based cases in the US have punishments that are completely disproportionate. Actually, in a lot of cases US sentences are completely disproportionate. You'd wonder about extraditing anyone there at all.
Even just based on the fact that their incarceration rate is so high should be an indication of the kind of system they operate.
Prison population per 100,000
USA: 693
England/Wales: 146
Scotland: 141
Northern Ireland: 78
Republic of Ireland: 79
France: 103
Germany: 78
Netherlands: 69
Australia: 168
Canada: 114
Even:
Russia: 450
I'm not a big fan of iHype launches but I wonder about these reports. The screen tech isn't novel or unique and I've had issues using various manufacturers touch screens in very cold weather and in rain.
I think I'll just wait a few weeks before drawing any conclusions.
I find Apple draws both unhinged positive and negative reporting.
I wonder if someone could build a device to help certain politicians in the US (and the odd one elsewhere too) to distinguish between "verifiable scientific facts" and "stuff I made up, think or heard some guy say in the pub / on the golf course, it says in the bible etc etc "
With any technology like this, the proof is in the pudding and if it works, it works.
It needs to be out in the wild for a few weeks before I really take any reviews all that seriously.
Although, that being said, if Apple introduced ButtID, people would be singing its praises because it's Apple.
Incidentally, I hold similar levels of distain for some Google and Samsung fanbois' and fangurls' opinions on questionable designs.
These are consumer products, not religious cults.
If they work, and I enjoy using them, I'll use them. If not, I'm off elsewhere.
Given that it is almost inevitable that a % of people will hate FaceID or will have difficulty with it, who in their right mind would remove touch ID entirely ?!
They could have put a sensor on the back or the phone! Yes, it would be aping a lot of android manufacturers, but really who cares ?!
I have a feeling the PR will be very mixed on this one.
(By mixed I mean disastrous)
To be honest, none of those systems are free as you’d have had to pay someone for any of the privately developed ones and you’d still have had an administration overhead with OpenPostcode.
I don’t agree with the way it was rolled out and the tender was oddly constructed to eliminate smaller bidders, but I can’t really see it being totally free no mater how it was done.
Also we don’t have any universal voluntary ID
Driving licenses aren’t universal. A % of the the population doesn’t qualify for them - too young, too old, not drivers.
Passport Card is OK as it’s sort of universal but you can be permanently resident in Ireland and not an Irish citizen. So you wouldn’t qualify for an Irish passport card. EU and other nationals are entitled to a PPS and a MyGovID / Public services card.
I just think there are positives and negatives to having universal ID systems. They verify identify but if you accept them as the gold standard for proving ID, then the challenge becomes forgery or hacking.
No system is 100% uncrackable and it makes some sense to run checks and not totally rely on tech.
Not quite, I had to read up on this stuff recently.
Zip+4 only gets down to either a smaller geographic area, or an apartment / office building or a high volume mail recipient like a business that interacts a lot by mail. It's sort of assigned as needed by USPS rather than following any particular logic and is there to assist them with mail sorting.
Eircode is an actual geolocation service with an intention to be used for much more than mail sorting.
The main purpose of it was to deal with Ireland's issue with non-unique addresses and very verbose addressees that could cause a lot of confusion for couriers / taxies / emergency services etc.
Some of our addresses are basically a short sonnet rather than anything that would actually tell you where the house / office actually is.
Eircode looks a bit like UK or Canadian codes, but it's a different concept.
A12 A1B2
A12 = "Routing Key" (broad area. This varies from an area of a city to a large rural area)
A1B2 = quasi-random code that links to an exact delivery point and includes its map coordinates.
There's a fully developed API and all of that stuff to go with it.
So for example if you put in:
If you type in "K67 C3V1 Ireland" into Google maps it should take you directly to Dublin Airport for example.
In an office block with multiple companies or an apartment building, each unit has a unique code.
There are concerns over privacy as it's a unique code referencing every single address in the country and could end up being a bit like a permanent geo-cookie..
ROS has been upgraded and is being actively developed, so I would suspect it's going to continue on as is for businesses and self-employed tax returns.
MyGovID is being used for "myAccount" for personal tax and welfare services only. So it covers things like PAYE, shuffling tax credit assignments between life partners, PRSI, pensions, various tax incentive programmes for home improvements and all of that stuff.
Given that it's nothing to do with EU policy and you've elected a government that makes Big Brother seem fairly easy going and the alternative is a centre left party that also loves data mining citizens, I'm not quite sure how being out of the EU will help at all. It may actually become more extreme as any data gathered won't be subject to ECHR or EU data protection / privacy rules...
The original rationale in Ireland was that it would cut down on welfare fraud (popular amongst centre with voters) but then it suddenly seems to have morphed into a quasi-compulsory National ID card, just without calling it an National ID card.
The passport card is actually handy enough as it's genuinely 100% voluntary and just gets you around Continental European ID issues if you're spending a lot of time there. It's an absolute pain in the rear when you have to start bringing passports to access offices, or carry them around the place generally. The main reason the Irish Passport Office pushed the rollout was to avoid having to deal with as many lost passport books caused by having to constantly have them on your person on the continent.
There's some push back on it here on the "Public Services Card", but I don't think it's turned into a huge political issue. Although, Irish voters can sink governments over less. Water charges here turned into a massive political issue and have basically been rolled back upon and may yet even lead to constitutional referendum to prevent anyone ever privatising Irish Water.
Ireland's currently and rather controversially rolling out a "voluntary" electronic ID card which is required for claiming all types of social payment, applying for a driving test or a passport and a number of other things, including oddly enough operating as a public transport ID for old age pensioners who all get free travel.
It's a smart card that contains biometrics (facial recognition) and has good photos on the front. It looks for all intents and purposes exactly like Continental European ID cards and you register by attending an appointment at an ID verification centre.
The card also uses 2 or 3 factor (SMS verification) security and secret question answers to authenticate things online for access to sensitive personal information like welfare records though a service called MyGovID which grants various levels of access depending on how many layers of security you've setup.
At present the tax system (ROS) still has its own online sign in service using fairly complex digital certificates.
It makes sense in that it gives you a definitive form of ID for accessing stage services, which is probably more secure than the current Irish gold standard form of ID, a utility bill in your name.
We've also introduced a passport card as an extension of your existing passport. You apply this by downloading an app to your mobile, taking a selfie and that's then compared to your existing passport photo on file. They issue the card and you can use it for EU/EEA travel and as an alternative to ID cards so you don't have to carry your passport book while on the continent.
For practical reasons you do need some of these things. It's crazy having to provide umpteen documents to various public bodies to prove who you are and prove your address everytime you need to access something and it does improve security.
What worries me though is the potential single point of failure issues and also the possible function creep, if it's not tightly regulated. That's already happened with PPS numbers (equivalent or Social Security / National Insurance) where all of a sudden they're needed for everything from school registration to applying to University etc etc
Add to that Ireland now has a postal code system called Eircode that assigns a unique 7 character alphanumeric code to every address, not to a street / area like UK or most other systems.
It's incredibly handy for sat nav use when enabled. Like you can just whack in X12 A1B2 and Google maps will take you to the door. But it is starting to look like we are increasingly trading privacy for convenience.
I have to say I have no complaints about Virgin Media Ireland (formerly UPC).
Their *entry level* 240Mbit/s package. (Next residential tier is 360 and Business is 400)
Seems Liberty Global (UPC) did a better rewiring job over here than the previous incarnation of Virgin did in the UK. Fingers crossed their upgrades over there deliver similar results.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/6770238819.png
(with wifi overheads)
As someone trying to operate as a tax-compliant, self-employed contractor in Ireland, I end up paying rather a lot of tax.
Yet, if you've the right tax advisor and enough money, or you're a multinational, tax is clearly optional and that's far from unique to Ireland as you can see.
Basically we've two parallel global economies: one for those in the know with enough resources to use it and one for the rest of us plebs who pay for all the services.
"Traditional" car markers are some of the most automated production facilities you could possibly come up with. They require very few staff (compared to other manufacturing facilities e.g. electronics in Asia) and have always been at the forefront of robotic manufacturing. They are actually far ahead of the electronics industry in that regard, which still tends to rely on a lot very poor wages and hand assembled stuff. We've all read the horror stories of Chinese and other far eastern electronics production - basically using people as bio-robots. There are exceptions, notably the likes of Intel and other processor fab plants which have tended to go stay in the US, Europe and so on.
The car industry has tended to go towards full automation and has largely stayed in relatively high wage economies while the electronics industry mostly fled to low wage economies and exploited cheap labour, while ironically making very little investment in real automation, despite making the very components that should make it possible.
I don't really buy Tesla's hype on this. Coming from a background in IT/electronics would be quite a poor basis for production automation which is THE core competency of the car manufacturing sector. They are extremely good at this and have been for quite a long time.
I don't want to be unnecessarily negative about Tesla, as it's possible they could pull this off. However, there's a huge leap from small scale production to mass car plants and a lot of the reason that the traditional car companies survive and prosper is more about manufacturing prowess than technology.
The next few years will really decide whether Tesla becomes a serious player in the automotive industry or just a technology supplier to other companies.
I don't know about the USA, but in the UK (and to an extent in Ireland too) there's increasing use of APRN (automatic number plate recognition) cameras that scan license plates that could do just that without any access to GPS chips.
Every time a car passes a camera, it's potentially identified.
It's mostly used to flag up a wanted car and sometimes for traffic modelling - you can follow individual cars through a journey using the plates and then create trip models across a city and use that to plan traffic signals. Or, you can use it calculate journey times for display on motorway overhead signage.
It can also be used for average speed detection systems. So you basically log a car at camera position 1, time how long it gets before it pings camera 2, and camera 3... If it arrives too soon, you send a fine in the post. If it arrives far too quick, you alert a patrol car and pull it over and charge the driver.
Police vehicles are also fitted with it so they can automatically and continuously scan car plates as they drive around and if they happen upon someone who is a stolen vehicle, one flagged for being on the road uninsured, or some other suspicious plate, it will alert them in the car when it notices the number.
While it sounds great in theory, I would be very concerned that all it would take is someone to put a transmitter system somewhere that could send false information and you could cause at the very least a whole highway to jam on the brakes or all suddenly swerve out of lane.
I don't see how you could possibly authenticate that this was genuinely information from another car and that you should act upon it.
You would have absolutely no control whatsoever over the veracity and quality of the data your were receiving.
Even without any malevolent motivation, it's possible that a car could send a false signal.
Then from a legal liability point of view, would the driver with the faulty system then be legally liable for multiple road accidents?
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If you want to look at Trump deregulation impacting people, there are plenty of examples, but this isn't one of them.
It may be for the wrong reasons, but this sounds like a technology that absolutely does not need to be mandated in cars.
Frequencies don't necessarily make sense in brain tech.
Think about it: billions or processors operating at low frequencies and all subtly offset a little bit - gives you incomprehensibly high frequencies even though the speed or individual circuits might not look fast.
It could also be exploiting some biochemistry that is giving it very high speeds we can't detect electrically. We are just picking up the big snaps which could be resets or recharges or anything tbh ...
I think what we're more likely to end up with is a very cool processor tech, but not a brain.
I actually suspect that we'll mimic a brain probably using some combination biotech and nanotech, not traditional semiconductor technologies.
Neurology has levels of subtle control over signals that digital electronics aren't really near. We are still processing data with switches, while your brain is processing data with living cells and biochemistry.
Even the references to processor frequencies don't necessarily make sense as it's not necessarily using sampling of signals and seems to have an ability to deal with analogue inputs in pure analogue form without needing to quantising them.
It also isn't a general processor and uses specialist signal processing "technology" incredibly tightly adapted to handle specific sensory inputs.
There's a *lot* more research to be done to hack brain technology but I just think we have a history of assuming that brain systems and whatever the cutting edge of contemporary computer systems is should be directly comparable.
As someone described it before - it's a bit like being presented with an alien computer system and a multimeter.
Even though our brains are us, they're far more alien in technology terms as we didn't design or build them, they have no particular reason to be easy to understand or follow as they're not "designed" and they are self repairing / not repairable and they're painfully complex. The "wiring" doesn't even necessarily follow any logic that would make sense to someone analysing it as it "happened" upon solutions in evolutionary steps.
My view of it is that it's a problem that will be solved in a technology radically different to semiconductor switching processors.
I don't mean to be facetious and I'm delighted to see that there's investment in Athenry but I find the tales of misery, loss and emigration over a short commute slightly ridiculous.
Athenry us about 25 mins from Galway City and connected via a top notch, lightly trafficked motorway that links Galway to Dublin. Galway is pretty small but has a decent unoversity, a cluster of tech companies and a really nice cultural life and brilliant bars, restaurants and some of the best scenery in the world near by.
Commuting a few mins on that route, through beautiful scenery is an absolute pleasure compared to what many commuters endure daily.
Also it's only a couple of hours and a bit drive to Dublin too. You're hardly exiled to far flung part of outer Siberia by having to work in any of Ireland's cities.
The reason they're not accepting the €13 billion is they do not believe it is owed and they are standing over their taxation system as not having made a corrupt little deal with Apple.
If the Irish Government just accepted the ruling it would also be accepting that its taxation system was doing secret deals with multinationals. It is defending the integrity of its own decisions and also the position of its tax policies and its independence to make tax decisions.
You can argue the morals and the rights and wrongs of how much tax Apple paid in Ireland, but the Irish argument is basically that the tax was not due in Ireland and that the country is not obliged to collect tax on behalf of other countries.
There's also a huge argument about where profits are recognised. Given that Apple generates most of its IP in California and builds most of its products in China, one could argue that (other than R&D activity) their European operations are a 'cost of sales' retail and support overhead and they have actually made very little profit in Europe, just generated a lot of sales.
There are also concerns about the EU using a body of competition law to expand its role into taxation policies, which it has no legal rights to do under the current treaties.
The US has also weighed on this and on Ireland's side because it's seen as an EU attempt to gouge a US company's revenues in Europe when those should be being taxed in the USA.
Effectively Ireland's caught (albeit quite happily for now) in the middle of a tax problem that is being created by incoherence and inconsistencies in international taxation policy.
The risk of some of these EU rulings is a retreat of business back into the US and elsewhere. So goods and services would just be directly exported and European operations would be a hell fo a lot smaller.
If the EU wants to fix these problems, it needs to do so with progressive reform of international tax treaties, not by innovating competition law and going after smaller member states. It's really quite a kick in the teeth for Ireland, particularly after the way the ECB and Commission handled the banking fiasco by forcing the state into position where it couldn't write down bank debts and had to go into a 'programme'. Even the usually much maligned IMF seemed to think the EU and ECB were behaving very oddly.
On come on! The opposite is actually true.
The planning permission went through umpteen layers of appeals and the project was delayed for over two years and did huge damage to the prospects of the project even going ahead and may undermine Ireland's ability to even bid for data centre projects in future.
This centre's sister site in Denmark is pretty much ready to roll at this stage and the two started their planning process at the same time.
Ireland is the polar opposite to being rolled over by central government or politics. It was a case where a massive project was held up by two individuals and that is not unusual, given how the planning system works in the state.
If the state were trying to impress Apple, it certainly wouldn't have put their data centre through the planning permission mangle and delayed it to the point that it was nearly risking its viability.
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