Posts by James Micallef 2173 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
PS - to be completely fair, on the routes that I fly most frequently, Easyjet ticket price + exorbitant administration fee + exorbitant credit card fee + exorbitant baggage fee is still at least 30% less (sometimes as much as 50% less) than any other airline on the same route. Their planes are at least as modern and comfortable (usually more), and I prefer paying £10 for a decent onboard meal that I will actually enjoy than having an undisclosed amount added to the price of my ticket for the 'privilege' of being served a soggy sandwich and dry bun that I won't eat anyway.
Yes, the budget airlines are the worst offenders here. A £10 per credit card booking is surely more than the credit card company is charging the airline.
On the other hand, looking at this from a retailer's point of view, the merchant credit card fees are exorbitant. Visa / Mastercard have what is in effect a monopoly, and they charge monopolistic prices, which also need to be controlled. From a merchant's point of view, while it's not reasonable to ask for a credit card processing fee, I understand that they might refuse to accept credit card payment for trivial amounts (maybe £5 or less) where the credit card fee will effectively nix the retailer's profit margin.
So, yes, abolish the processing fee, AND also force CC companies to reduce fees (or else prosecute for monopolistic price-gouging)
So what's your point? That because Vodafone are a big company then they are justified in choosing what amount of tax to pay? (i.e. £0, which is what they claim their liability is). Do you think Vodafone employ people from the goodness of their hearts? Do they bollocks! For every employee they have whom they're paying, say, £20k, they are making at least £25-30k from that person's work, otherwise that person would not have a job.
On the other hand, I agree with you on freezing MP's assets, that's an absolutely ridiculous idea (if it was serious in the first place and not a smooth bit to trolling!!)
@AC - If Vodafone pay their tax bill as calculated by Inland Revenue (approx £6bn), then Inland Revenue get £6bn. If Inland Revenue get it's agreed-upon £1.25 bn and the remaining £4.75 bn are distributed as dividends, the Inland Revenue gets £1.25bn + x% of £4.75 bn. I don't know what the 'x' is, but sure as hell that's a lot of money not going to the Inland Revenue. And that shortfall will be taken from other taxpayers' taxes, i.e. in this case all taxpayers who are non-Vodafone shareholders are subsidising Vodafone shareholders.
It's not that the legal action would have cost £4.75 bln. The way I read it, they factored in the possibility of losing the case, in which case I guess Vodafone would have paid what Vodafone claimed was due (i.e. £0). Still, the Inland Revenue must have been not at all confident in their possibility of winning the case considering those ratios.
One more thing - in general, tax breaks and complications are added to incentivise certain behaviours, and usually they are added because it's thought they increase fairness. What happens in practice is that those who can afford to pay teh best lawyers and accountants, restructure their businesses offshore in multiple layers and tangled webs etc get most of the benefit, and the shortfall to government revenue is taken from those who have no chance of escaping, ie salaried workers who have their tax deducted at source (ie the vast majority of the middle class).
It might not seem so 'fair' on paper, but in reality it would be fairer if (a) all activity was taxed at the same rate, whether it's capital gains, employment income, dividends, whatever. (b) no loopholes, no credits, no deductions, no allowances for offshore activity, nada, and at the same time lower the rates so that it's 0% on the first £X, 15% on the next £Y and 30% on anything else. X and Y would be different for individuals and businesses, and that's as complex as it gets. If it can't be worked out by a 10-year old child, it's going to get abused.
And added bonus, it gets rid of a bunch of tax lawyers.
As the guy himself says, a loss of 1.3% is not dramatic, so losing 1 year's growth in 10 is no big deal.
I fail to see what the big deal with 'growth' is anyway, because what is really meant by 'growth' is usually increase in GDP. Big effing deal, an increase of 2% GDP will allow people to buy 2% cheap tat made in China that they do not need. I would much rather have 'flat' growth, just keeping up with inflation, while at the same time the quality of life is increasing - ie cleaner air and water, more green spaces in built-up areas, etc. Particulate pollution is an excellent reason to cut out carbon fuels (and relevant subsidies), without even the climate change reason
To come up with "Aaarrgh, terrorists" and "Will nobody think of the children". Disgusting!!
The police are NOT fighting crime with a hand tied behind their backs. They are free to get all the information they want IF THEY HAVE A WARRANT FOR IT. No reasonable suspicion = no warrant. I don't believe a word of 'limited access'. Once plod and gov agencies have full access to the raw data, how long is it before checking on a single suspects communications evolves into data-mining software constantly trawling through the whole data warehouse?
"if we hadn't been doing it, another European power would have been."
You can make exactly the same argument now. If British companies can't pay bribes in Russia, the middle East etc, then they'll lose business to the Chinese or whoever else IS ready to pay the bribes. I would say well done to Britain for putting this moral stand ahead of profiting from dubious / dodgy business practices.
Hopefully such legislation will extend gradually across the EU and other countries, until regimes requiring bribes will start to find no takers and gradually come clean. Sure, it will take decades, and in these decades some British businesses will lose contracts from dodgy countries.
The problem with Google's link to the takedown notice is that they remove the infringing link from the search engine results, and then have the explanation that links to the takedown notice. The takedown notice contains not only the complainant (who is thus open to abuse / pressure for asserting his/her rights), but also the infringing link (if the infringing material was on a third-party server ). So anyone looking for illegal downloads of copyrighted materials just clicks on the link to the takedown notice, and then copies the link he is looking for from the takedown notice. Nothing changes except infringers have one extra click to do
Users of el reg aren't a representative sample of Internet users. I suspect the vast majority have no idea of the extent they are tracked on the web, and do not care. They would never opt to not be tracked, because they don't even know the option is there. Conversely, if the default was to set do not track to on, the majority of users would also neither know or care.
Advertisers etc want this OFF by default, because no-one would turn it back on voluntarily if they knew what it really meant. However I predict that if "do not track" is turned on by default, a lot of sites such as Facebook, Google etc who depend on ad revenue will pop up a friendly reminder every so often to turn "do not track" off (or otherwise the site will not "work properly" or "give the full experience")
Switzerland has a stratospherically hig gun ownership because they have military conscription, and all the conscripts get issued with a military weapon (small semiauto or auto rifle) which they then keep at home after the service has ended. So firearm ownership is extremely high BUT (a) only a tiny amount of these are hanguns that can be easily carried about and/or concealed on the person, and (b) the arms are owned by people who have had extensive training in their use, not just any numpty who can walk into a gun shop with a wad of cash
@Kevin6 - Homicide rates everywhere else in the Western world are lesser than the US by an order of magnitude. So either (a) what you're saying about gun ownership is totally not true, and having less guns DOES reduce violence or (b) as you say, it's not the weapons it's the people, but in this case that would mean that USAians are, by an order of magnitude, more violent, psycopathic and paranoid than people from other first-world countries.
Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe you're right it IS the people, not the guns!
It's one of those cognitive bias thingies.
Handgun owners think they are safer because they own a gun "for protection", and fail to take into account that while it's so easy for them to own and carry a gun, it's also very easy for everyone else to also own and carry a gun.
They also apparently fail to take into account that old adage "shit happens", because more likely than not, the gun that they bought "for protection" will (a) be used by themselves to shoot at / kill someone they know (b) someone they know will use it to shoot at / kill them (c) accidentally shoot / kill either themselves or someone they know. The intended purpose, that of intimidating / shooting at any potential intruders or troublemakers comes way, way down on the list of ACTUAL, REAL-LIFE use of firearms purchased "for protection"
Yep, completely agree with that.
Oh, and western companies have been doing this for years. Although bribery was illegal in US, Europe etc, they would happily bribe leaders in developing countries to get business (and in some countries, bribery was the ONLY way to do business). It's only recently that western countries have extended their laws to make it illegal for a 'western'-based company to bribe someone in a completely different country. Possibly this is one reason why the corrupt developing-country (Algeria in this case but I'm sure there are others) apparitchiks turned to China to find people who WOULD pay the required bribes.
Hopefully other nations will follow suit in tightening influence-peddling and increasing transparency
They looked dodgy to me as well at first glance.... but looking at the history it makes sense. In 4 16-team cups we've had a Greece win (25% probability of a rank outsider winning), and again in 4 8-team cups we've had a Denmark win (again, 25% probability of a rank outsider winning). Typically there are about a quarter of the teams given as favourites (for me, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, France), another quarter considered 'possibles' (Italy, England, Russia, Portugal), and the remaining half being complete outsiders, so divvying up 75% probability between the top 8 teams, and 25% between the bottom 8 gets quite close to the Prof's mark.
12% might be a bit low for Spain but it's probably no more than 15% for either them or Germany
Forget about England, the way to spot that this Prof's stats are a bit dodgy is to note that the Republic of Ireland is being put down at joint-6th favourites with a 7% chance of winning, more than Italy, France and Portugal, while their correct ranking should be right about last, together with Czech, Poland and Ukraine (in fact, marginally less, I would say).
England aren't among the favourites (That's Spain, Germany and , until Saturday, Holland), but I certainly would put them among the outsiders to win (together with France, Italy and Russia). I think Italy's and France's ratings are artificially depressed by the shambles of a World Cup they had 2 years ago, otherwise the prof's stats aren't too far off.
One aspect of the model that seems pretty sound is the balance between favourites and outsiders. Bookies tend to give very short odds on the favourites and very long odds on outsiders, as the first poster noted this is more to do with more people betting on the favourites than this being the real probability. In bookie-world, the chances of the top 50% most-favoured teams would be something like 95%, with the combined total of the others being about 5%. In the Prof's model the top half of the contenders are given 71% combined, with the bottom half given 29% combined. In real life, the last few tournaments (16-team) were won by 3 teams who were among the favourites (Spain, France, Germany) = 75%, and once by a rank outsider (Greece) = 25%. Extending that back through the 8-team format, again there's 3 'favourite' wins (Netherlands, France, Germany) and one outsider (Denmark), again 75%-25%.
This: "if fertility rates remain at the rate they were at from 2005 to 2010, population projections for 2100 top off at a staggering 27 billion" is not only speculation but fairly thinly-disguised scaremongering wrapped around a huge hypothetical. Fertility rates are dropping all throughout the world, the best UN projections are for 9 billion global pop around 2050 and an eventual stabilisation around 12 billion. Sure, that's still a huge amount of people to feed, a lot of resources being used etc etc, but still less than half of the population that's being used a s a baseline here.
Yeah, not only can the data be made unavailable, but even possibly permanently lost:
"US government investigators have warned that much of the information stored on the site may be lost"
WTF is that about?? If they seized the servers, they have the data. "may be lost" = "we deleted it" (whether accidentally or purposely). That is surely a crime (destruction of evidence, for one)
How do the parties supposedly communicating from light decades apart even know about each other in the first place ?? Either they randomly found each other with random decades-apart radio signals (in which case surely we could also pick up same), or else one of the parties traveled to the other location tens of light-years distant (implying close-to-light-speed travel)
>50%?? Huh ??
I can't claim to be an expert in US tax law (who can, really?), but as far as I know, capital gains tax in the US is 15%, and I'm sure his well-paid army of accountants and lawyers will see to it that he's not paying more than that. State and local taxes are mostly sales taxes.
"Cable also announced an extension to copyright for artistic works, extending it to the author's life plus 70 years."
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is absolute horseshit! Is the purpose of copyright to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit exclusively from their creations? Or is it to allow companies to keep re-hashing the same tired old themes for 100+ years while profiting from someone else's creativity?
The term of a work should be from the date of first publication / exhibition. Firstly, using the author's death as a starting point will just allow creators to rest on their laurels after 1 big hit, and secondly, many works such as big studio films are copyrighted by a corporate entity, not a person. That corporate entity can "live" forever, so does it get an infinite copyright term??
Secondly, 70 years is way too long, 20-25 years is more than enough. Does anyone know of any book, film, song etc that lay in obscurity for 20-25 years and then suddenly became a huge hit? I very much doubt that any such exist. Artists and creators can make plenty of money in 20-25 years, and if they want more royalties after that, they can create some new stuff.
A FREE market doesn't depend on perfect availability of information, but a FAIR market does depend exactly on that. Adam Smith's notion of a market that automatically finds the most efficient way of doing things is build on the idea of open information.
In practice market are less efficient than they could be because people some people with more knowledge than others use that knowledge to profit from others' ignorance. In some cases it's the fault of uninformed consumers that they didn't bother to find information that's publically available, in others it's the people having access to private information who profit from this to the detriment of people who could never have known that information because it wasn't public (aka insider trading)
In that case the 90% who knew it was overpriced are true idiots if they bought it hoping to sell on to even bigger idiots later on. If they were quite certain that the stock would drop from the initial valuation they should have sold it short.
I also thought that FB shares weren't worth the IPO price, but even then I wasn't THAT sure that I would bet a few $k on it... and I especially didn't think they would tank so fast so soon (actually the fact that they did tank so fast so soon shows that not a lot of people really believed the hype)
In many cases there's no practical purpose for changing anything, it's all cost and zero or minimum benefit. For example why go through the effort of (a) changing every single road speed limit sign in the US from miles to km (b) changing all US-made vehicle speedometers to show km/h, considering there are probably a huge number of US-made cars that have speedos only in mph and not in km/h (c) getting people used to the new system, especially since an old "50" will become a new "80", ie there will be a tendency for people to overspeed considerably if they misinterpret the sign.
The result will be a spike in speed-related accidents for a few years, which will gradually return to baseline (ie no improvement over pre-change that can be attributed to the change). It will be the same for volumes and weights of groceries etc. where there is a huge volume of things to be measured, and the measure only really matters within the US.
The only things that would benefit conversion to SI units are units used internationally, on a relatively small scale, and calculation-intensive metrics that would benefit having things divide neatly into tens and thousands rather than twelfths and sixteenths. So things like the space program, civil aviation, heavy industrial engineering
"consensus amongst countries in the region were to change the name"
I gather that the arabian countries already call it the 'arabian gulf' in arabic and the Iranians call it the 'persian gulf' in Farsi. The question is, why should English speakers change from the centuries-old usage of "Persian Gulf"?
Iran is basically throwing a hissy fit over nothing but it's still stupid of Google to not write "Persian Gulf" at least on their English-Language maps
Hmmm, curious. A search on maps.google.com.ar for "las malvinas" doesn't identify the falklands, but instead returns a list of possible options, the top one of which is "Islas Falkland (Islas Malvinas)"
A search for "Golfo Pérsico" returns a red marker slap in the middle of the Persian Gulf, but with no label, so same as the English-language version.
Oh, and maps.google.fr can locate "la manche", but it's very clearly labelled "English Channel". I await President Hollande's official protest to Google... or he might decide to simply invade, last I heard, the UK had a shortage of carrier planes :)
F-18, F35 B, C or Z, whatever... Both the UK gov and the article's author seem to be missing a very basic point. Who the hell is Britain going to war with in the foreseeable future that will require the use of an aircraft carrier anyway?? Britain is physically dead centre of NATO with the US on the Atlantic side, and all her European allies to the East and South. China, N Korea and Iran are half way around the world. Russia is reachable by land-based aircraft from all of Europe that's closer to it than the UK, and an aircraft carrier couldn't operate in the Arctic anyway.
So what's the aircraft carrier for?? War with a minor African country? Another Falklands?? The real reason is delusions of grandeur from an admittedly glorious past, and the need to feed the military-industrial beast
"*may show a mechanism* is not the same thing as actually having a mechanism based on physics that can be plugged into models."
Perfectly right, that's the beauty of models. I'm not expecting that the existing models all just be revised with the newly proposed feedback mechanisms for solar forcing, especially if this feedback mechanism isn't even properly understood.... but I WOULD expect someone to update a model with a few possible different variants of the newly described mechanism, run them all in parallel with the current model and see which of the the updated models is most accurate, and whether any of the updated models are more accurate than the current model.
"And most relevant scientists agree that the A part is significant so most AGW sceptics are most probably wrong"
Yes... but the models that these scientists use as the basis for considering the A in AGW to be significant all minimise the effect of solar output, while this new study may show a mechanism by which even a small change in solar output could have larger climate effects. So the existing models should be updated with the new data.
Personally I think that most of the warming in the last century is human caused, but I can't look past the fact that pretty much 100% of the heat energy on Earth comes from the sun, so it's naive to believe that 100% of the change is coming from human factors and 0% from the sun, just as it is naive to believe the opposite. Updating the models will allow us to get a better handle on what the balance is. (and by the way, the article mentions dramatic temperature changes over short time periods, does not mention specifics. Is it half a degree, 1 degree, 5 degrees? Over how many years? I bet they would be in the research paper so why not put them in the article?)
One last VERY IMPORTANT thing - CONTROL. We have no control over solar output, at best we can (very roughly) predict possible future patterns based on past cycles. We CAN control CO2 emissions. And whether the planet is accelerating it's warming or turning to cooling, planet-wide energy usage will still accelerate, and the amount of fossil fuels is still finite. SO LETS START BUILDING MORE NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS, NOW!
Volume moves as cube of radius, so double volume means radius at a factor of cube root of 2, approx 1.25 times Earth's, and surface gravity is proportional to mass (8 X) over teh square of radius (approx 1.5). So yes, right second time, 5g is about right.
And 'super-earth' (used here) or 'Earth-like' (seen elsewhere to describe for example Gliese system planets) to describe a planet?? In my book, 'super-earth' means like earth, but larger, and 'Earth-like' means 'Earth-like'.
For 'Earth-Like' I would expect at least a solid surface, a temperature range close to that seen on earth (maybe -50 to 50 C), surface gravity from 0.5-2G . So this doesn't even fit the most basic criteria. After all, I wouldn't call Venus 'Earth-like'
Emotions don't give a damn about statistics. If the number of people run over by computer-driven cars (per car-mile driven) is less than 10% the number of people run over by human-driven cars, there will still be an outcry, because people being run over by human-driven cars is a current, known, issue, while being run over by a computer-driven car is something new.
One of human's deepest emotional responses is (unfortunately) anger followed by desire for revenge (in modern society thinly disguised as 'justice'). If I run someone over, or I crash and my passenger dies, I can go to jail for manslaughter. Who goes to jail when a google-car kills someone? The programmer? They don't send my driving instructor to jail if I screw up (granted it's not an exact analogy) Also, there are whole teams of programmers on this thing. What about the project managers? Top executives at Google? (Yeah, right!).
I think the only way it would be solved is if the owner has ultimate responsibility (same as I would be legally responsible if my hypothetical dog hypothetically attacks someone). But then again, what if the 'owner' of the vehicle is a cab company or a trucking company??
This is ultimately not just about cars, what are the legal implication of (semi-)autonomous, independent actors that behave in a conscious manner but do not possess what we would define as consciousness??
@John G Imrie
Thanks for the clarification, my impression from the article was that Google had copied teh source code. If Google only copied the method signatures and implemented their own code underneath, then I think this is OK. The spec is public (at least in the sense that every function is discoverable from documentation and/or trial and error).
"Now it's down to a Judge."... and if he decides in Oracle's favour he's going to upset a whole lot of applecarts
A computer language is fundamentally a collection of mathematical functions and therefore should not be patentable, however the actual implementation of a language i.e. a compiler / interpreter, development environment, APIs etc are actual bits of implemented code and are therefore covered by copyright. Documentation is obviously covered by copyright.
If Google had built their own compiler / interpreter, development environment, APIs etc based on Java syntax but with their own code, In my book that would have been OK. If (as it seems indeed happened) they copied the code wholesale from Sun's implementation, they violated the copyright.
Why is it so difficult to sort this out?
Besides the fact that FB doesn't have anything close to a revenue stream that would justify such a valuation, I would never put money in a company with the bastardised share structure set up in FB, Google (and quite a few new tech companies it seems ) where investors put in their money to get second-class non-voting shares and complete control of the company rests with the founders even after outside parties have poured in literally billions of their money.
With banks and financial institutions, shareholders have recently started to push back against the mega salaries and bonuses given to top management. They can do so because their investment carries voting power with it.
A whole huge industry exists to publish and distribute content, and this industry soaks up the vast majority of the money made in music, film, books etc, with only a small amount going to the original artists/authors. With the arrival of the internet, 80% of this industry is now obsolete, but still wants to act as a gatekeeper and take it's cut. They claim to be acting in the interests of artists/authors, but mostly are acting in their own interests. Consumers can see and recognise this, hence many people have no problem with downloading content instead of buying it.
Unfortunately the artists/authors are caught in the crossfire here, because even though their cut of an official sale is quite small, that's still a cut, and they still get zero from a download, so artists/authors still lose out and downloaders are still ripping artists/authors off.
What's needed is a realistaion on the part of both artists and consumers that they are both being screwed by the middlemen and that they need to work together against the incumbent middlemen. I think there still needs to be some sort of middlemen to organise and promote content, but using the internet, they can do this job a lot more efficiently and cheaply, thus making it possible for consumers to have cheaper content AND for artists to make more money. iTunes is a prime example that this is possible. My vision of the future is a dozen services technically like iTunes but without the walled garden and competing with each other to get the best deals for consumers.
This: "Personally I want those rights to serve the goal of supporting the creator, not become a plaything of speculation, trade, legal fights, and so on"
is one of the most sensible things ever written on the subject. I would even go beyond "creator's life or 20 years, whichever is longer" , and just say "20 years, irrespective of creator's lifespan". If the creator dies young, his/her children/family can still be supported for a time span, if the creator lives a long life, he/she can't live on their laurels for a couple of early hits. Taking lifespan out of the equation also removes complications regarding corporations... for example if Disney produce an animated movie that is the work of thousands of people, the people working on it are typically paid a flat rate +bonuses for their work and have no rights on the final work, which rests with the company. Since legally, corporations have some of the rights of persons, a "lifelong" right on anything created by a corporation (eg movie studio) would in effect be a perpetual copyright.
I think legally it would also be a bugger to make copyrights inheritable but not sellable. So no problem, allow them to be bought and sold (maybe the creator wants to get a lump sum now instead of in bits over 20 years). As long as copyright expires in 20 years, no problem. I would also add a provision that every DRM system will have inbuilt a copyright expiration date. Tech companies can do all sorts of fancy things in DRM to suit copyright holders, so it's certainly technically possible.
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