Re: If they win?

Agreed. Cameron seems to have a penchant for crapping on previously core Tory voters (eg child benefit changes, upcoming pension/NI changes, raising student fees whilst gioving billions away in foreign aid, etc etc).

However, looking at the Coalition economic policy, it's interesting to see what is happening. The Conservatives know that public spending is out of control and needs to be slashed. They would like to do this, but won't, on the basis that will send them back to the dark ages because they believe voters are too stpuid to understand the appalling mess of Britain's public finances and will blame them. So there's some token "cuts", with an expectation that kicking the can down the road in this way will mean that the next government inherits a yet bigger national debt and a yet more urgent need to slash spending.

In the highly unlikely event that the Tories win, they claim a mandate and do the deed; if Labour win then they'll have run out of time, and Milliband will be forced to cut at least £50 billion from public spending (and even that level of cuts probably means his chancellor would still be borrowing £150m every single day to fritter on "public services"). This looks like recklessness by the Tories, banking on the expectation that the Labour party will have lost its reckless borrow and spend mantra.

Re: more proof

"MS know they are in trouble, but dont have any real way to fix it"

I think that's harsh, even unfair. For all their faults, MS are trying to evolve towards a post PC world, where there are multiple input modes - touch, voice, keyboards, mice, and Kinect style controllers, and where the centrality of monolithic PC's is diluted by laptops, tablets, and phones.

W8 is admittedly a rather unsatisfactory compromise as issued, and if they only offered an easy "in the box" ability to switch between touch + app, and traditional desktop mode, then things might have been a bit better (for myself I'm happy with the Classic Shell add on). But for all the IT-types round here who whine about it, you have to wonder what happened to the days when IT was about enabling new technologies, and dragging the enterprise into the future? To judge by the love for XP, your average corporate IT function is desperate to stay in 2001.

The users are revolting (more so than usual) with a probably mythical head of steam for BYOD, but even though that's overplayed, where's the noise coming from? Probably a reaction of opinion forming users to the stick in the muds of IT trying to foist brick like Thinkpads, XP, and Blackberries onto users who have seen better, and want it.

So who is the real problem here? IT pros who can't keep up with the times, or Microsoft for having the temerity to try and evolve a bit?

Re: 24 seems conservative

No problem, chuck up some more. The taxpayer's pocket is bottomless, so the inherent waste doesn't matter.

Re: Where will they be tested?

If the Israelis can stop that itchy trigger finger then Iran would pass for a testing range in a nearly suitable timescale.

But your suggestion that "current wars are winding down" seems to ignore the palpable delight of polticians and military everywhere that AQ in Africa are now The Threat Of Tomorrow (tm). Renowned British simpleton David Cameron has announced that this not-yet-started war will last thirty years (although what military assets he thinks he'll contribute to this new and exciting party, who knows). I'm sure some US military types are hankering to go back and bomb the dung out of Mogadishu, and there's a whole host of other poor, sub-Saharan African countries just waiting to be bombed.

Re: Risky

Not at all. As a developing nation this is expected and tolerated. So there's a whole host of sectors (in fact, most sectors) where foreign companies are either explicitly banned, intentionally hindered through regulation, or simply held down by duties on imports.

I used to work for a law firm, and neither we nor international competitors could get a look in to the Indian legal market. More recently I see Tesco et al have been told "clear off, you're not wanted here", and car imports had a 60% duty added for many years. None of this has hindered India's services growth very much that I can see.

Re: Indeed..

"But it won't happen - why? Because the senior management only look at the single figure of cost "

Actually, there's another reason, and that is information asymmetry between the two sides of the make or buy debate. Typically the marketing budget is around 4% of turnover for a large company. In the UK tech sector, outsourcing is worth around £50bn a year, and that means that the vendors spend around £2bn a year on marketing and promoting outsourced solutions. Then there's the useless, useless parasites of the management consulting firms (a market around £7bn a year), who promote outsourcing on the basis that they hope to pick up implementation or advisory contracts, and often dress up their marketing as "research". All told there's probably around £2.5bn spent in the UK pushing what a wonderful, risk free opportunity outsourcing and offshoring are. Now what's the marketing budget of the in house tech function, and how much clout will it have in the boardroom?

So the directors will be on the receiving end of a never ending stream of smooth talking salesmen, pushing the idea that the in house function is slow, expensive, ineffective, and that their product is fast, cheap, and generally brilliant. The CIO can try and fight that flood of nonsense, but what's the chances he'll either try, or succeed, when the CFO believes the guff Arsenture publish, or the CEO has been captured by the Bollox Consulting Group? These people turn up with powerpoint slides showing how much cheaper each employee is in some sweaty crack of the planet, and with "research" in which the CEO's peers (supposedly) all admit that their priority is offshoring to capture wage arbitrage. So the drip-drip-drip is "Everybody else is doing this, and you'll be left behind if you don't, we can help you avoid looking stupid. But if you don't do as we say, everybody will laugh at you".

In IT we refer to this as a social engineering attack.

@Thorne

So you lose your diginity? That's like the first time ever, presumably?

Looking on the bright side, it could only ever happen once, and then you'd be free to wear the loon-specs every day without embarassment.

Re: Set your targets low enough@ Pete 2

"The government collects over half a TREEELLION pounds in tax every year. So the odd "bil" will neither make much difference, nor be difficult to squeeze out of the system without to much complaint."

There's reason to believe that they could get as much as £5bn extra if they weren't as useless at enforcing existing rules, so it's a bit poor if they're targeting a mere £1bn. But as you say, that's not much. The context, however, is not the circa £580bn of tax receipts, but rather the £120bn that they spend above that, and the accumulated £1.1 trillion of public sector debt (debt interest is now greater than the entire defence budget). Week after week we hear people whining about austerity and government cuts, but in essence there haven't been any, and cust proposed are insignificant (and ill planned).

There are only three choices open to the UK:

1. Tax rises of 20% all round to raise at least £120bn. So that's 5% extra on everybody's income tax rate, another 20p per litre of fuel, 20% higher council tax, 4% extra on VAT and corporation tax, 3% extra on employer's NI.

2. Stop spending the £120bn we don't have. Personally I'm all for this, but nobody in government can comprehend a world in which they stop spending my money.

3. Inflate our debt away and keep spending ("the Italian Solution"). This in practice amounts to stealing from savers and subsidising debtors, and has a lot of bad effects, although popular with many who think they are winners. It also doesn't really form a long term solution, particularly for a country that depends on imported goods.

None of those look very tasty recipes, and nor do composite solutions (like a 7% increase in taxes, a £40bn cut in public spending, and running high (6-8%) inflation for five years). Even at the end of five years, this unpleasant recipe still means that we would still have the better part of £1 trillion of public debt that the pols have amassed on our behalf, and our balance of trade would be a major problem, because imports would be far more expensive (circa 15-20%) due to the exchange rate impacts of the inflation.

Re: Stereotyping

" In a sense, the war was a huge experiment to prove that Germans were not superior, and Russians were not inferior."

No, it was an experiment to prove that Germans were superior. But the experiment did not confirm the hypothesis.

Re: third?

I could argue that I meant Silicon Valley and New York jointly, because they're only 2,900 miles apart. But instead I'll just upvoted you for the pedantry that is core to Commentard values.

Re: @JaitcH

"So before sounding off about the Chinese, go ask your MP who authorised these spy cameras"

Why waste the price of stamp, when ten minutes Googling will establish that the scheme was backed from the very beginnning (2002) by Nu-Labour with Blunkett as Home Secretary overseeing the Home Office's patronage of Project Spectrum and the subsequent Project Laser, that were the building blocks of ACPO's current system. Following Blunkett we had a string of additional NuLab mediocrities (Charles Clark, John Reid, Jacqui "Expenses" Smith, Alan Johnson) who enthusiastically endorsed increased surveillance, and made the funding available. ID cards were the next step, and will undoubtedly be back on the agenda after the next election, along with further tweaks to give more power to the communications interception programme.

Broadly speaking that's correct. Not as simple as a single formula, but there's a whole range of reasons why tech companies generally get better share prices in the US. In particular you've got NASDAQ, which is in practice a dedicated tech market place, unlike AIM, LSE or Euronext. So the potential investors know something about the market and what they want to invest in, and are more eperienced with new tech listings. In Europe, new tech listings are still viewed as dodgy, new-fangled, highly risk things. Subjectively it does seem to me that the European IT sector is rather littered with gravestones of unsuccessful companies, but as I don't have access to the tools I can't compare the failure rate of US versus European IT outfits.

London is recognised as a global technology investment hub, second only to Silicon Valley and New York, but there's a big gulf between those two and London, and a smaller gap between London and other centres such as Toronto and Tel Aviv.

The comments in the article about AIM's lack of liquidity (ie insufficient active investors) are accurate, as are the criticisms of LSE as being too costly and too complex to list on. There's a further element that the investors in the London markets are generally speaking more risk averse than the investors in US equity markets, which also contributes to lower share prices for tech companies.

Re: Only in Cameron's Britain

"Elsewhere wind farms make money for investors AND reduce electricity costs."

No they fucking don't. The continental power markets that have gone or are going big on renewables feature exactly the same subsidy nonsense that DECC are indulging themselves in. Result, renewable operators get rich, customers get poorer. Spain's already had to start reigning in the ridiculous subsidies paid to solar plant operators. Germany will see subsidies to renewable operators reaching €19.3 billion during 2013 (that's for the year, not cumulative), rising to €24bn by 2016. In the US my employers make a packet from wind farm subsidies. It's the same anywhere in the world, wind farms increase costs considerably because they are expensive, they don't last, they distort SMP markets, and they suffer from low and highly variable load factors.

Incidentally, the existing arrangements were designed under the reign of Saint Tony of Blair and his government of NuLab fuckwits, so no use trying to blame the present shower of piss, useless though they are.

Do come back when you've got something useful to contribute.

Re: PFI - Epic fail

"We import nuclear power and export wind power."

Yes. So German consumers pay to subsidies "must run" wind power, then sold internationally at low wholesale prices to neighbouring countries. None of my business if Germans wish to subsidise French, Swiss and Austrian electricity users. And Poland have just installed limiters on the power connectors with Germany, because German wind exports have been destabilising their grid. Hardly looking like a success to me (and I work for a German power company).

"2012 the installed and operational wind turbines in germany produced more power than our ancient and unreliable nuclear reactors."

Not much use at peak load times. Take RWE's figures for 8 February 2012. German demand was running at a touch around 90GW. Due to generous subsidies there's 150GW of capacity... unfortunately on still winter days the circa 50GW of wind and solar are outputting virtually nothing. One or two thermal plants were offline, but were offset by the 5GW of balancing capacity of the TSOs, and net export balance was a lowly 2GW. Reserve capacity was down to 2GW (say a single large CCGT station).

That's not a success, that was complete bloody madness, risking systemic failure of the power supply for huge areas of the largest economy in Europe, and potentially cascading into other countries. And all because some German knobs are obsessed with renewables. if that's how you lot wish to run a power grid, feel free, it's unlikely to impact me. But I can't see that you'll be any more popular in the rest of Europe if you plunge your neighbours into darkness because of incompetent planning.

Re: Who knew?

Minister made madness.

No. Dismal, dim, ineffectual, cowardly, dishonest, and traitorous our ministers may be, but they didn't make this policy. The policy was originated by DECC under the last government, and has continued under the present government, as has the shambolic mess of energy policy at large.

Some fools think we live in a democracy. But we don't. Many think we live in a plutocracy where a ruling elite run the game purely for their own benefit. But we don't. Huge swathes of financial, energy, transport, and legal infrastructure are ruled unchallenged by the unaccounable numpties of the civil service.

You live in a numptocracy, and there is no escape.

Re: Let the madness begin!!!@Phil O'Sophical

"It's another instance of some naïve bright spark thinking up a cunning plan to get private investors to finance infrastructure, without having the wit to realise that the more complex you make the scheme, the easier it will be for the not-so-naïve investors to find loopholes. This sort of scheme wil only ever attract subsidy farmers."

Not quite. The article isn't absolutely clear, but this isn't PFI, because the government never intended to own the asset, directly or indirectly (other than for their dead flesh, control freak approach to the electricity industry as a whole).

The origins of this mess are that OFGEM (plus DECC & govt) decided in their wisdom that when building offshore wind, the land connection was an expense that could usefully be shared, and in the civil servant's mind this scheme was to reduce the overall cost, and encourage sharing of the land connections by wind farm constructors. To ensure that there was no dog in the manger attitudes, the wind farm operators are specifcially NOT allowed to build and own their own grid connection to shore. So OFGEM and DECC came up with the bizarre concept of offshore transmission system operators, complete with their own micro-regulatory environment, and as a result it has sucked in scumbucket City investment firms who know a laughably profitable deal when they see one. Your suggestion of "let a private company build and lease it to the wind farm operator" is essentially how the scheme now operates, and that's exactly what doesn't work, because there's neither effective competition, nor the wind farm operator's interest in seeing the job done in house at the lowest cost.

OFGEM could have made it work better in one of two simple ways: One, make National Grid responsible for all the offshore transmission connections, as they are on land. Or two, make the wind farm builders pay for, construct and own the transmission link as far as the shore.

But then again, when did either DECC or OFGEM do anything well, or simply? You're right that these schemes aren't viable, full stop. The only way wind farms can operate is a whole range of subsidies, both direct financial ones, tax ones, "carbon" ones, and in particular "must run" status in the merit order.

Re: Yup, and in other news, water is wet

"2 off shore farms in Denmark, at Horns Rev and Nysted work out at €1.68m per MW, with all costs"

Woohoo, bargain for tree huggers. The rest of us might balk at paying €1.68m/MW (£1.4m) when a state of the art gas CCGT works out at £0.27m per MW. And that figure you've quoted isn't with all costs included. That's for power generated about 30% of the time, and on the coldest 100 days of the year the load factor will typically be even lower at around 6%.

So your "all costs included" needs some form of continuously available standby that you haven't factored in, unless you're proposing "African dictatorship" reliability from the power grid. DECC have followed your thinking for the past ten years, but are now on the cusp of annoucing "electricity market reforms" that will further increase electricity costs, because their idiot-inspired wind farms are wrecking the long established system marginal pricing model. So now we'll need to subsidise CCGT and coal plants in order that they remain on line, in addition to the ludicrous subsidies being paid for crappy, ineffectual renewables.

Re: 22 Languages?

" the solution is to require *vendors* in India to include a brochure with each purchase?"

That depends on what the problem you want to solve is. If the problem is that insufficient regulatory claptrap paperwork is being printed, shipped, and thrown away unread, then you've got a viable solution.

If the problem the Indian government want to solve is user IT security, then they'll have to come up with a better approach. And there's some easy things they could do, like mandate in law that manufacturers have a responsibility for fixing security problems, and that (as shipped) all products must have automatic updating which is fully enabled. Mandate sensible rules for password setting for consumer facing businesses, minimum standards (eg 2FA) for on line banking. Mandate ISPs and phone companies to promote best practice (not really expecting them to do much, but enabling the government to punish the real security stragglers as an incentive to the rest). Mandate routine ISP blocking of malware destination sites, and automatically disconnect devices that are showing signs of malware activity (on the basis that if your average PC user's device is part of a botnet, then their ISP is far more likely to know than the user).

And make service providers of all kinds (from ISPs, phone companies, Facebook, banks) responsible from making users aware of security threats, particularly those that don't have a major tech aspect (eg social engineering attacks).

Re: Mens watches are jewelery

"Would anyone who agrees with the statement that the watch "epitomizes prestige and is seen as an extension of the user’s personality and lifestyle/fashion sophistication" kindly step into the nearest meat grinder? "

Quality, sir, quality!

Re: Mens watches are jewelery@<jbc>

"A proper watch is a symbol of ..."

..vanity, bad taste, affectation, and excessive disposable income. Or so I've come to learn from the adverts in publications like the FT's revolting "How to spend it" magazine.

Look at all those w@nky watches sold for the price of a small car, promoted through adverts featuring handsome smiling pilots, or jet fighters doing aerobatics. Or "diving" watches sold to people who wouldn't even know which way to unscrew a SCUBA valve. Total s***, as are most of the people wearing 'em.

Fair enough to those people with proper, real mechanical watches from a company with pedigree that don't have all that bling. I'd quite like a Piaget myself, but as a pauper I have to settle for a Seiko 5 (at least it ticks and doesn't have a battery).

Re: The right evidence?@Wzrd1

"An interesting comment, as I've rode within said "not airworthy" aircraft in Afghanistan"

I wasn't making that claim - if you're going to comment here, then do try and make sure that you are aware of the background:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubacc/247/9780215526663.pdf

And from that report's summary:: "We examined the procurement of these eight helicopters in our report on Battlefield Helicopters and considered it to be one of the worst examples of equipment procurement that we had ever seen"

Re: The right evidence?@Matt Bryant

" FAIL! The MoD has never launched any wars,"

Shorthand, my simple-witted son, shorthand. The MoD are consulted by the pols, and had they declared that they couldn't fight the war, and that they'd go public about the kit if one were launched, then the pols would have had to have slunk off and found something different to do. I do apologise to other readers for having to spell out the fucking obvious for Matt.

For anybody that stands up in that way, it will cost them their job, but that's the price of doing the right thing. Knob ends like you won't understand that concept. But instead all the well paid senior military and snivel servants at the MoD pretend publicly that all is well, privately counsel that the kit is "sub optimal" and keep accruing the pension. Who pays the price? Only the grunts who die for lack of helicopters, or in the laughably inappropriate snatch landrovers. Or aboard the MR2 that went down over 'stan.

And, as usual you're spouting shit about what you think I believe or I do with your silly, childish little comment "voted for by numpties like you", since I haven't voted for any politician in a national election for a decade now, because that offers legitimacy to the twerps.

But instead of your usual whiney sniping from the sidelines, why not give us the benefit of your deep expertise and wisdom in this field?

Re: The right evidence?

" there may be some gaps in capability"

Some gaps? The MoD are the same people that launched two separate wars of choice without sufficient equipment (helos, surveillance, fast air, personal protection, armoured ground mobiles), and even had stuff they'd specified, paid for and had delivery of, but they had then certified as not airworthy (the Chinook mk3). There's the whole sorry saga of MoD incompetence over Nimrod (AEW3, refuelling on MR2s, and MRA4), they failed to order a proper attack jet to replace the ageing Tornado, so that they're now sellotaping bombs onto aircraft designed as fighter jets (but they don't have enough trained crews fotr them anyway....

I could go on, and on, and on, but the point is MoD are grossly and persistently incompetent. They wouldn't have a clue about cybersecurity.

Re: SUCH a first world "problem"

Don't be too complacent. We may be exporting jobs to the developing world, but that's not all we're exporting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_India

Can we claim IP rights on over-eating, and charge India royalties? Maybe £2 per morbidly obeast per year, which would mean an extra £130m a year. The Yanks should pay as well, 'cos they're just a bunch of rebellious colonials, but being wealthier I think $200 per obeast would be fair, and that would earn about £10 billion quid year. And it would be prior art to invalidate Apple's "rounded corners" patent. I'll show you rounded corners!

Re: Hahaha quality

And I though I was a fattist.

Re: Surgery. Bugger that!@Lae Ming

"I am nicely ahead of schedule to get from mildly-obese to overweight by my birthday in late Feb."

Good on yer mate!

Re: Give people another reason to eat even more

Composting of the slurry is all very well. What if they open the valve and draw gas, not oil?

Would you recommend flaring, in order to reduce the GHG impact of the methane? Would the HSE recommend personal flaring? And would there be any shame for pie munchers in being seen with a ten foot high, bright orange flame coming from between their shirt buttons? Pubs and workplaces might have to ask people to go outside with the smokers to flare off.

An alternative would be to have a low pressure container for waste gas, enabling the user to bottle the magic, and release it conveniently and on demand. There might even be a market to sell it to pranksters and those who aren't keen on complying with GASP (generally accepted social practice).

Re: Web fads and video games@Some Beggar

"The "Digital, Creative & Information Services" sector generated 4.5% of GVA in 2012 "

But of that, I doubt that more than 0.1% was games and frippery. Most of it will have been bog standard IT work - Northgate IS, HP's UK services, Crapita, etc.

And the problem is that our shallow, inept government are pushing that (guessed) 0.1%, not even the remaining 4.4%. There's a governmental obsession with pushing "higher value" jobs, which invariably ignores the need for a balanced economy. The millions of people currently unemployed, generally speaking, aren't looking for jobs in Shoreditch as top games designers, or technical architecture directors. Instead, they want mid market white or blue collar jobs, or they are after basic clerical or manual roles, and other than the job creation scheme of the Civil Service and local government, there's nothing done for these people.

Re: Overheard conversation@Silverburn

"Oh the hypocracy"

Go on then, I'm interested: What's a hypocracy?