Re: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The BBC Model B I used at school had a 640x256 screen
2530 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2009
The number of people in work has risen by more than unemployment has fallen. The number of people in work is at a record high. The number of people who are unemployed nowhere near record lows, it is a little bit lower than at the worst point of the recession. There's two reasons for that. Firstly the working population has increased due to immigration, and secondly, people who were previously claiming disability benefits have been declared as fit for work by ATOS, so they are now classified as unemployed.
People will not lend at a negative interest rate, because they would be better off keeping the money under the mattress. Conversely they would be very happy to borrow at a negative interest rate, just pocket the negative interest as free money, and keep the rest under the mattress until repayment date.
You are not comparing like with like. If I send $1000 by Western Union it will cost me £667.54, which works out at a charge of 8.2%.
Yes, sending bitcoin will be free, however I need to buy bitcoin with British Pounds, and the recipient needs to sell them for Dollars. At current rates, I would need to send 1.25 Bitcoins to enable the recipient to convert them into $1000, and that would cost me £659.03. A little cheaper, yes, but a lot more hassle. It works out at a total charge of 6.8%. Paypal charge a 3% currency conversion fee + 0.5% cross border fee + 3.4% debit card fee, so 6.9% in total. Sending money via a currency broker can cost as little as 1% in charges, much cheaper than Bitcoin.
The USPTO is certainly one of the problems, but not the only one.
We have patent trolls that write to companies telling them they are violating one of their patents, but won't tell them which one. They ask for a licence to cover all the patents in their portfolio, and if the company asks for more details about the patent they are allegedly violating, then the demand increases.
In many cases, the company isn't violating any of the troll's patents, but it costs more to fight them than it does to pay the licence fee, so basically they are engaging in blackmail.
Probably to solve this problem, the USA needs to move to a loser pay system for court cases like what happens in the rest of the world.
"for example, calls from telecoms or energy companies advising on better deals or tariffs potentially save consumers money"
No they do not. The calls from such companies invariably end up with you spending more money than you did before, as the prosecutions from OFGEM have shown.
Also, fines are not good enough as they are not acting as a deterrent. We need prison sentences and criminal asset recovery as well.
Most of the Chernobyl and Fukushima victims are still alive and in good health. However they have been evacuated from their homes and they are never going to return. Is that not something that should be taken into consideration.
Also, a very big problem with nuclear is the amount of expenditure required on the plant after it reaches the end of its useful life. That isn't something we can rely on the private sector to do. Why would they spend money on something that doesn't bring in sales revenue? The great civilisations of 200 years ago aren't always the great civilisations of today. Some of them are now war zones, or have been at some time in the last 200 years. So we can't rely on the government to do it either.
http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/pages/corporate-tax-rates-table.aspx
"The corporate tax rate is 40%. The marginal federal corporate income tax rate on the highest income bracket of corporations (currently USD 18,333,333 and above) is 35%. State and local governments may also impose income taxes ranging from 0% to 12%, the top marginal rates averaging approximately 7.5%. A corporation may deduct its state and local income tax expense when computing its federal taxable income, generally resulting in a net effective rate of approximately 40%. The effective rate may vary significantly depending on the locality in which a corporation conducts business. The United States also has a parallel alternative minimum tax (AMT) system, which is generally characterized by a lower tax rate (20%) but a broader tax base."
So, 40% up to $18,333,333; 35% on anything above that. State income tax is extra, and can be claimed as an expense against your Federal tax bill. In Delaware, the State income tax is zero, and that is where 90% of larger US businesses are based.
The expenses you can claim against your income are more generous than in the UK, so you will be paying 40% or 35% of a smaller number, however, you will most of the time pay more tax in the US than in the UK.
22" TV - £130 - http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd-blu-ray/televisions/small-screen-tvs-up-to-32/logik-l22fed13-22-led-tv-with-built-in-dvd-player-20374552-pdt.html
Mini fridge - £100 - http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances/refrigeration/wine-cooling-mini-refrigeration/husky-el202-budweiser-mini-fridge-red-13828284-pdt.html
Home cinema system - £110 http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd-blu-ray/dvd-blu-ray-home-cinema/home-cinema-systems/sony-davtz140-cek-5-1-dvd-home-cinema-system-12716783-pdt.html
Then you just need to find some sort of drawer unit, £200 at most.
You don't have to get the ones I linked to from Currys. Other suppliers exist and some of them are cheaper. But still you are looking at a maximum of £540.
Everyone knows that you can't have a lowercase word as a password anymore, it must be mixed case and numbers. But that is easy, instead of having "password" as your password, you now have "Password1".
I do something very similar for sites where I do not care if someone manages to break in and find my password.
For the Surface Pro or Surface Pro 2, anything that works on Windows 8.1 works on it. Maybe there are a few things that need more memory, a bigger hard drive or a better graphics card, but other than that, you have an Intel i5 PC with 4 or 8GB of RAM, intel graphics, and whatever sized SSD hard drive you choose. Anything that works on that spec PC will work on it.
There is a mini displayport socket that can be used with the appropriate adapter to connect it to a monitor. The adapters will presumably be the same ones that work with all recent Macs.
There is also a USB port that can be used to attach a keyboard and mouse, or bluetooth if you want to use wireless versions of them.
I'm going to bet that they do declare taxable profits in this country if possible.
The reason is that they have massive brought forward losses from the NTL days, and they can offset them against those and not pay any tax. That will be cheaper than paying American Corporate Income Tax.
By the way, they have always been an American owned company. It was a couple of Americans who set up National Transcommunications Ltd and started looking for opportunities to set up cable services. They found an opportunity in the UK, but not in their home country.
Obviously they don't want them to learn arithmetic any more because they they would discover that their "calucations" of "losses" arising from "piracy" are complete rubbish, saying as they assume that every "pirate" would pay full price for every single item they "pirated" if they weren't able to get a copy by the means they did obtain it, and that the money they didn't spend on their CDs and DVDs didn't get spent on anything else either.
With digital, you have to convert from analogue to digital and back to analogue, which takes time, depends on the codec, but possibly as much as a second.
With satellite, you have the time it takes for the signal to get to up to the bird and back down to the ground again, about another 0.3 seconds.
With internet, you have to buffer the stream to allow for the fact that speed can vary and packets can get lost in transit. That can add up to 30 seconds.
What I don't understand is firstly, why was the person tasked with collecting direct debits from customers allowed to make payments out of the bank account. Secondly, the only payments going out of the collections account should be to the main current account, and that should be managed by the payables department, not the receivables department.