Posts by Tom Wood 549 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2008
Um, that is (similar to) VAT. Starbucks, Amazon and Google all collect VAT and do pay it to the government. Note it's a tax on the value added, not the whole of the sale, otherwise anything that is bought and resold (e.g. by a wholesaler) would get very expensive very quickly.
The argument here is about corporation tax i.e. a tax on corporate profits.
Our laws are one thing. There are a lot of unwritten rules too.
It's like lots of things in life - they're better if everyone plays by the spirit of the law as well as the letter of it. Making some attempt to be reasonable counts for a lot.
Google, Starbucks, Amazon et al are like a greedy person who spends hours grazing at an all-you-can-eat buffet, then walks out with bulging pockets full of food. Yes, they maybe didn't break any rules, but they are certainly not being a good sport about it.
I quite like the idea of shaming companies into being reasonable - and consumers voting with their feet. With Starbucks it is easy, as coffee shops are everywhere and all provide similar products for similar prices; sadly Google and Amazon both sport "one of a kind" status which limits your ability to go elsewhere without detriment to yourself (poorer search results than Google; more expensive and reduced choice than Amazon).
I don't know about iOS, but for Android you can buy a satnav app like CoPilot for a few quid, which has offline mapping.
I have used this in the US several times, with mobile data turned off, and it functions OK. Didn't even occur to me that A-GPS may not work with data off - I presume it functioned OK as a standalone GPS. Maybe it took a few seconds to get a fix but provided you switch the GPS on a minute or so before you start the car you're OK (no worse than a stand-alone TomTom etc).
PR types come up with pitch for "viral" ad, write script, select actress, get approvals etc ahead of time.
They just wait for a suitable facebook post to "respond" to, and when it comes along, kick all the wheels in motion - fill in the guy's name in the script and shoot the ad.
Of course a conspiracy theorist might say they just paid this guy to write his comments so they could run the ad.
In my experience Netgear make ace network kit. As someone else commented the fact they make this SuperHub and that is not very good is somewhat surprising.
Their "business" kit in metal boxes is superb, but even the consumer stuff I've tried has worked flawlessly.
"been woefully inadequate to do the task it was bought for."
- is that the fault of the product, or the person who bought it? Netgear publish detailed specs on their website and their stuff tends to do what it says it will.
It's not even a "parking charge notice". (That is a term chosen only because it's confusingly similar to "Penalty Charge Notice" which is what the police give you).
It's a demand for payment, which may or may not be legally valid depending on any contract you are deemed to have entered into with the car park operator.
But similarly, no risk of paying for more hours than were necessary because you weren't sure how long you actually needed.
The same is true of the "pay on exit" type car park where you get a paper ticket from the machine on your way in.
Much better generally than "pay and display".
I've been generally very happy with the Desire HD over the past 18 months. It certainly seems more usable than my girlfriend's new Galaxy SIII (though maybe it's just a case of preferring what you are used to).
My contract's up in March, please HTC release a worthy replacement to the Desire HD by then and I'm yours!
Maybe not as applicable to taxi companies, but radio is used by e.g. security teams in event venues because as well as the one-to-many reception, you're not as limited by phone network signal and capacity etc. Radio nets using battery-powered radios will keep going even in a power cut etc - important considerations in security/safety applications.
I renumber the SD channels 1, 3 and 4 to 991, 993 and 994 and move BBC One HD, ITV 1 HD and Channel 4 HD to 1, 3 and 4 respectively. Also move BBC HD to 999 so it appears next to BBC One in the EPG.
I guess it wou;n't be possible in the current standards to have the HD channels automatically replace SD versions where both are available?
(This is a Toshiba Regza TV that supports renumbering).
Pay-by-bonk, I've used (once), with my Barclaycard card, and it worked OK.
But why on earth would I want to pay by bonking my phone, which needs apps/stickers/extra hardware and lets Google or whoever else sneaks an app onto my phone snoop on transactions, when cards work OK.
I'm always going to carry three things in my pockets: keys, wallet, phone. I don't want my phone to become my wallet (I'm always going to need somewhere to put cash, identity cards, scraps of paper, postage stamps, receipts etc so I need a wallet anyway) and I certainly don't want it to become my keys.
The £50m loss is just that, a £50m loss on the entire contract. Not a £50m reduction in contract value.
Any money they get for the staff they do provide will be wiped out by the extra costs they have to pay for the armed services, police etc they are having to rope in.
Hence why its share price has fallen so much.
By "comms data" they mean "Joe Bloggs sent a message to John Smith at (date/time)". The sort of thing equivalent to checking telephone records to see that number x called number y.
This is different from intercepting the content of the communication (the equivalent of tapping the phone call).
Banks only care that the content of the messages are private, not that the details of the communications are private.
If, as the author asserts, BMI is a largely useless measurement (which I am inclined to agree with) then you can't also say "being skinny is much more unhealthy than being fat".
Firstly, body weight is NOT necessarily linked that closely to "fatness" (which is partly why BMI is a crap metric). You can be skinny and also have a fairly high percentage of body fat; you can also be heavy and have a low or normal percentage of body fat (e.g. many athletes). Further, two skinny people with the same % body fat could still have different health levels - one may exercise regularly, the other not; one may smoke, the other not, etc. The same applies to people at the other end of the BMI scale.
So yes, BMI is a fairly useless measure. And therefore the conclusion in the headline isn't really accurate.
doesn't look like Cabin (http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Cabin)
Looks very like the Transport font used on roadsigns. Which is great on roadsigns (which is what it was designed for) but is not so good for paragraphs of text on a web page. It makes the whole thing look a little like a book designed for toddlers.
Other than that, the layout looks nice.
It is quite daft, the whole "don't mention the Olympics unless you're a sponsor" thing, and has led to a whole new set of euphemisms.
There's dozens of adverts referring to "the Games". The most obtuse I've come across is the radio advert asking you to give blood before "this summer's big event".
No it doesn't - have you ever used Paypal? They charge the retailer a fee, which the retailer normally absorbs/incorporates into their list price. The gov't isn't saying that banks and card payment providers can't charge a fee to retailers, rather that the retailer can't pass a surcharge to the customer which is any less than the amount the card payment provider charges the retailer...
can program competently in several different languages, and is not afraid to learn another (and can quickly do so).
Of course a GCSE level course isn't going to teach kids that much depth, but it's still important to realse the distinction between "learning the basics of how to program in <insert language>" and "learning the basics of how to develop software". If they are taught the *reasons* for why they are doing what they are doing, rather than simply being allowed to bash together chunks of code until they have something that seems to work, then they will find it much easier to adapt to other languages in the future.
Lots of ovens (maybe only electric ones) have time switches, the expectation being you put your tea in the oven and time it to come on at the appropriate moment for it to be perfectly cooked at the time you get home.
Unless you put something inappropriate in the oven it's perfectly safe.
I'm currently roaming in the US with my UK T-mobile phone.
My phone has selected T-mobile US as the network.
Calls still cost me £1.20 a minute to make or receive. Yikes!
I know this is less of a concern for the EU but they could still regulate EU networks somehow.
Is not "interactive" crap that you can tweet along to.
It's decent, well-made, well-scripted drama; interesting, exciting and well-presented documentary (about things of actual interest rather than Channel 4 freak shows); actual in-depth current affairs rather than soundbytes and shouting; and so on. Proper telly - like what we used to have before it was diluted with channels full of nothing.
Interestingly the Americans at least find the budgets for decent drama, even if their first-run viewing figures are less than the typical episode of Corrie in the UK...
Maybe there is a plan and they are "working towards it each release".
Back in the real world, some of us want an OS we can use day in, day out without too many problems. Ubuntu pre-Unity was great. Since Unity it's been much less great. Maybe they do have a grand plan and it'll be wonderful eventually but why should we endure so much pain in the meantime? Using an OS shouldn't feel like you're driving through miles of 40mph contraflows on a motorway while they do maintenance work.
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