In part yes. But faced with a diet of Australian TV anybody would choose to go outside regardless of the weather.

Re: Oh, I love this!

I'd never use Opera because of their constant whining to the EU about Microsoft's "monopoly". Perhaps if they weren't charging for a browser back when everyone else was already giving them out for free they'd have less problems today.

Well you'd probably be pretty cheesed off if you coded a product for some years as a means of earning a crust, and then a competitor ripped the rug out from you by giving away a vaguely similar product free, on the back of a monopoly in another business line.

And arguably the reason why IE is so insecure is because nobody pays for it, and there's no commercial market for browsers - so if people don't pay, who's willing to invest in improvements? "Free" software is good because you don't pay for it up front, but you then live with the downsides for some while. Look at how sparse the market is for good email clients - they're mostly free because Outlook Express was given away "free", but there's now not much choice or innovation (even Mozilla parted ways with Thunderbird). Acrobat Reader is another example of "free" meaning "not as good as something there's a market for".

Re: I want to remain anonymous when I travel

"This is still possible with my Oyster if I always top up with cash"

Depends how anonymous you want to be. In terms of privacy of an innocent person of no interest to the police, you've got that with your cash paid Oyster. But if they wanted to trace you then it's easy to tie your Oyster transaction times to CCTV, so a matter of minutes to tie a face to your card, a matter of seconds to collect your journey history. Electronically that's still anonymous without face recognition and a national identity database, but if so minded I suspect they could correlate the card movements with (for example) mobile phone records and if you're on contract that links to all of your electronic identities via banking records. You could argue that you've got a PAYG sim that is only ever topped up in cash and you never have switched on in the car (easy to link to your registration plate via ACPO's NPR), but even for a cash paid SIM the network records would still probably identify your home and work locations easily enough, and then they know who you are, and where and when you've journeyed on TfL.

Rather than being anonymous, you're making snooping more difficult, and maybe that's sufficient.

Re: Fascinating but..... (@Spearchucker Jones

Having a go at Nazis or Hitler doesn't bother me. The fact that innocent people get killed along the way does.

How naieve. When has war ever been some polite, military only sporting event? The whole fucking point is to attack the "enemy" population and its economy. Killing the enemies troops serves no function other than enabling you to then attack their homeland. Your own military are merely the means of doing that, their military are their defence.

And why are conscripts in uniform (by your implication) a legitimate target? Whereas women working in a munitions factory, or producing food for the war effort, again by presumption they're "innocent civilians"?

Re: Fascinating but.....@madra

Actually, Churchill instigated the carpet-bombing of civilians during WW2

You really know jack shit about this don't you? Try searching on the term "Guernica" to see who pioneered the bombing of civilians using relatively modern heavy bombers. Or, before that, the use of Zeppelins in World War 1, again by those fine German chappies. Even in WW2, Churchill only ordered raids on Berlin on 25 August 1940 after the Luftwaffe bombed civilian areas of London the day before.

But don't let that get in the way of your bitter post imperial anger.

Re: We were mislead by the authorities!

(Big blast icon to indicate what would actually have happened as a result of a direct hit on the gasometer...),

Not at all. The gas/air mix wouldn't be suitable for an explosion. For proof you might want to investigate the heroes of the IRA, who made a couple of largely futile attacks against gas holders, for example in Warrington. Having failed in that they hid bombs in litter bins in Warrington town centre and killed a couple of children.

Re: I like this

"The delay bolsters my feeling that these people are serious about putting a proper value on the stocks, not just hype them up and rake in the profit."

Then you're daft. The whole point of an IPO is to raise as much money for the company (and particularly it's advisers) as possible. If you're right, and I'm wrong, then lead underwriters Goldman, Credit Suisse, and Merrill have cut the price as an act of charity to the sort of people who buy into IPO's like this (Facebook, anyone?).

If I'm right (and you're wrong) then they simply couldn't shift the stock at the mooted $15 to the major institutions, and had to back down on both price and volume.

So, your call. Wall Street: publicly spirited eco do-gooders, or rapacious thieves?

@Mike Taylor

Top of my son's christmas present list, I guess they still have something going

Not at all. Your son's savvy, he wants one of the last Blackberry's, and in a few years time it'll pay for his University fees. "Go on Grandad, tell us again how hoodies organised riots with those funny Blackberry things...."

Re: Microsoft's new hotshot marketing brainwave - Astrotheiving

You don't fool Eadon Microsoft!

Eadon Microsoft? It's an odd name, but it could explain a lot.

Couldn't you change it by deed poll (or whatever the local equivalent is where you're posting from)?

Re: STOP

In case you'd forgotten, capitalism isn't big on ethics. Look around.

That's true, but what's unethical about complying with the law to legally minimise your tax exposure? That might be against the supposed spirit of the law, but it would be no different from the many MP's who made (and continue to make) ludicrous expenses claims "because they are within the rules". Or the many MP's who undertake significant personal work commitments outside of Parliament because there's no rule that says being an MP should be a full time job (just a full time salary, full time pension, and full time pay-off if you're careless enough to not be elected next time round).

Be assured that the situation can be made worse, and the government are on that case far more so than business. The draft Finance Bill for 2013 is over a thousand pages long. How many MP's do you think have read any of it? It'll be the usual misbegotten, poorly drafted legalistic twaddle, create new loopholes, exemptions and contradictions, and the very length of it tells you that it has had no proper scrutiny and that it will be too complex.

Some people never learn. Unfortunately many of them are called MP's.

Re: Well done!

"I'd like to applaud North Korea's technical achievement"

I wouldn't. Given that they're repressing a country of 25 million people, I'd want something better than this to applaud the techncial achievement. For crying out loud, the Reg SPB put a paper aircraft into space, and how many people are they repressing and starving? Just a few sub editors who probably deserve it, I'd guess.

Re: Keen!

It's an odd way of asking for help.

Arguably it's no different to attention seeking behaviour from a child. Iran exhibits the same tendencies, as did Libya for some years (Venezuela's trying hard as well). Sometimes it is for aid, but more commonly its a misguided presumption that the US doesn't take them as seriously they deserve, a bit like a hoody picking a fight for being "disrespected".

In the UK we accept that (even as fifth/sixth largest economy on Earth) we are the Yank's poodle, and treated as such. But the Norks and the Iranians seem to entertain a rather amusing idea that they deserve a seat at the top table, and when they don't get that they start throwing the toys out of the pram.

Re: "Kwangmyongsong"?@ theodore

My favourite too. But for such a small selection to include so many gems, it makes you wonder what other stuff the Norks have got at home that didn't get included. Maybe they're like the French, and keep the good stuff for themselves?

Re: But for one reason or another...

They are especially pissed-off that English has become the world's lingua franca, and will refuse any thing being done only in English on a matter of pure reflex.

Then we must fight back. Get the OED to eliminate the term "lingua franca", and replace it with "lingua angla" or something equally silly. And while we're at it, we could paint "AAA" on the white cliffs of Dover in letters two hundred feet high.*

* Better use water colour in preparation for being stripped of our rating next year, mind you.

Re: If they won't pay tax, maybe they should pay for infrastructure

"No, actually. National Insurance is protection from sickness, unemployment and old age."

Cobblers. If they did proper accounting then the huge unfunded liabilities of the National Insurance Fund would have it shut down. At present it operates at a supposed surplus, but that's because so many benefits aren't actually funded from the NIF, but come out Government's main cash hemorrage pit, the Consolidated Fund. And the big clue to all this is the government borrow around £120 billion a year.

NI is a tax, same as any other. It all sloshes into the governments hands, they then waste and mis-spend it. Their lack of honesty and competence is the main reason that we still pretend that NI isn't tax, and that the NIF is somehow different to the Consolidated Fund.

Re: Hmm...@Chad H.

"It's a bit of stretch that noone would be employed in the UK construction industry, I doubt all building would just stop one day."

My point was that any industry that employes a workforce on low wages depends on implied subsidies like tax credits, council housing etc, and any industry that employes its workforce on low pay and intermittently (eg agriculture and construction) depend on the subsididy of welfare - otherwise the workforce starve. My language was certainly a degree of hyperbole, but I hardly think that deserves downvoting.

"I wonder how useful this database might be to our enemy in the next world war?"

None at all. Most government projects cost us peasants money, make our lives irritating in a myriad of new but tiny ways, but fail spectacularly to do what they say they will. On that basis a part-functioning DNA database would be of limited use.

No, the most useful thing to our enemies is the British government and their civil service.

Re: What they SHOULD have done

Maybe that's what they did want, but in a form.

That bit about "planting images of a burning US flag" doesn't make for amateurs necessarily, nor even the coding errors. Post Stuxnet, I would guess that both spooks and serious cyber crims are mindful that they don't want the finger of blame pointing at them, and a reasonable way of doing that is the cyber equivalent of growing a beard. But who would waste time hacking into Aramco's network just to plant that image? After all a burning US flag is probably the screen saver for half of the Saudi employees.

Where I think you're missing the trick is that they probably did not want to drive the physical price down or up, as that requires a need to invest in real oil, including non-trivial stuff like having customers, delivery terminals, cash, and such like. I'd have thought the smart cyber crim wants to disrupt the futures market, having secured a short or long position which is inherently leveraged to the expected outcome. And that disruption might be attacking Aramco's network not for the SCADA, but simply to disrupt the trading business, even if only to take the Aramco traders offline for a few days. Throw in a bit of bad SCADA code appropriated from Stuxnet or elsewhere, and world plus dog thinks this is about physical shutdown.

And of course, if that is correct, then you'd need to consider the criminal speculators as the commissioners and potential beneficiaries of the attack, but the perps would likely be a separate bunch of technical guns for hire. Obviously this imples unconstrained crims, technical skills, and money laundering, and whilst I'm inclined to suggest RBS for some cheap laughs, one would guess either fomer USSR criminality, or a country under sanctions looking to raise some much needed cash outside the sanctions ring fence.

Re: A better solution...

Same here. After all the stuff El Reg has published I'm almost disappointed that it hasn't been a disaster (and that's using it as intended as a wireless router as well).

Admittedly the PSU does whistle, but only noticeable if you stick your head within a foot of the PSU (or perhaps if you're operating a slient PC in an anechoic chamber). Still far, far less noisy than the heads seeking on a 3.5 inch hard disk, or the whirr of the fans of a desktop.

Re: US or Blighty

What's the difference? He'll end up in the US either way.

You reckon? If he comes back here they'll struggle to hold him, and he'll end up in the Ecuadorean embassy along with another unwanted guest.

Arguably that could be a good thing.

Re: Looks like the civil servants have been rumbled

"I have to agree with you; it's clear that this is not a party political agenda, but one that is being proposed / promoted by the civil servants "

Nothing new in policy being set by half wit civil servants. Energy policy remains the same mix of misguided, expensive tree hugging nonsense and shambolic chaos on proper generating assets under this lot like the last lot, even down to such cobblers as the forthcoming "Green Deal". Transport remains in the hands of numpties who persistently botch the award of rail franchises under all governments, and the nearest DfT have to a roads policy is wet dreams about introducing road pricing. The UK tax system remains a global embarassment under this and the last government. Education and health remain poorly organised money holes, drugs policy continues its epic fail, the wider criminal justice system achieves little other than to establish a sustainble ecosystem of crimes and crimefighters....

All this is possible because of the mediocrity of politicians. If only they would come up with manifestos that have one, perhaps two really big, important ideas, and a promise not to interfere in anything else, or pass any new laws.

@tkioz

You were on the right track, but then missed the turn:

Profit is a motive, but you don't think for one moment that the wifi or picocell connection is going to be gratis, do you? Maybe for the politicians and CEO's in fist class it will be, but for the rest of us peasants I'll wager a whole lot of money that we're talking about the sort of eye watering charges that you thought died out in the last century.

The airlines can't wait for the ban to go, I suspect. All they need to do is put in the picocell equivalent of a 14.4k modem (shared by all 300 passengers), lash up a pay to play wifi registration page, and arrange a premium rate on all voice calls (incoming and outgoing, just like international roaming works).

And the best thing of all for the airlines? That on longer flights passengers won't be in the jurisdiction of any telecoms regulator, and they can charge what they like.

Re: Not just technology

Start digging? More like keep digging, and keep your fingers crossed that China's infrastructure growth doesn't slow down. Otherwise it's curtains for the commodity markets, given the global capacity that's come on stream in recent years.

Re: Better bargain still...@SkippyBing

You misunderstand. The Graun does these things purely as research into the Wickedness Of Capitalism^TM. Let's face it, its profits are so dismal that there's probably no tax to dodge.

Re: But what about muh socialism? @Jolyon Smith

"In constructing your argument for a fair amount of taxation on the actual profits, using the stated EBIT margin of the company, you seem to be wilfully ignoring the fact that it's only because of the sharp practices involved in re-structuring their income that results in the low EBIT margin in the first place !!

You are wrong. The tax a company pays is not based on the reported accounts of a company, it is derived from the computation returned to the HMRC, and that is based upon the thousands of pages of tax law, not GAAP (which is the basis of the audited report and published accounts).

The EBIT number is generally far more accurate measure of a company's underlying operating profitability than "the comp". I used the EBIT number as a credible proxy for what their taxable profits ought to be, and that works because the GAAP profit feeds into their cash flow statement where you can trace it through to dividends paid, which is where the money starts to become real for anybody outside the company.

So your starting presumption that GAAP accounts are fiddled to get the tax down is nonsense.