Posts by Dave 15 2136 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2010
This is about ensuring that no one can criticize the government without being caught. May even eventually be used as an excuse to reinstate the ID card scheme (another tax on being here).
Frankly come the glorious day we should put all these politicians on a one way rocket to the sun.
Sounds like my code when I get a pointer wrong....
But in honesty given our propensity for buggering up software so comprehensively won't this computer still perform slower than my 8086 when windows 12 or linux 15 or whatever is installed? After all this computer has a multicore upteen gigabyte processor, an incredibly fast massive bank of memory and a high speed low latency disk and takes 10 minutes to become even vaguely usable in the morning.
One thing I can guarantee is that Mr UK prof will get ZERO funding from government or bans while Mr Germany, Mr America etc. will get billions from the UK government to do the development ABROAD.
And the people of the UK are busy funding this with aid programs, while we have no defences at all (our army couldn't fill Wembley, they haven't the ammunition to defend it, we have no Navy (no aircraft carriers so nothing we have dare venture beyond the range of the half a dozen planes the RAF still have), and the RAF planes are incapable of making it beyond the coast before dropping from the sky with no fuel. Add to this the accountants have removed all missiles and bullets (cost too much) and the whole MOD is a pathetic waste of space.
I think any change to the contract between you and IBM needs to be agreed from BOTH sides, thus if you don't agree then just saying bugger off is actually not an option for them. They would at the least need to find a justified way of making you redundant. If this extends to a significant number of people then they need to deal with a consultation period as well. If they fail to provide an acceptable solution then perhaps open to constructive dismissal.
Certainly 2k wouldn't cover the solicitors costs for any move, never mind removal or similar expenses.
When a company I worked for moved everyone to Cambridge from a town 40 miles away they had to provide relocation or in some cases compensation - while still keeping the people on.
My suspicion is that this indicates IBM is broke and looking to offload people, hopefully others will realise this and the share prices will descend further.
Certainly never...
Step 7 notice a lack of skilled people
Step 8 train some
What I fail to comprehend about IBM here is what is apparent in many other companies.
It is perfectly impossible for me to control my Bangalore remote team from Newmarket, it is only possible to control my Bangalore remote team from Cambridge... 30 miles an hour in the morning away.
If and only if the entire team is co-located does co-location offer any form of help, and in most companies this is just not the case. Offices all over eastern europe and asia where previous accountants thought things were cheaper with nominal input from a small office in the UK or USA.
What this is all about is trust and control. If managers were good they could motivate, then actually it wouldnt matter if the employee was in a palace, an office, their home or a slum they would achieve the desired outcome.
The cost to the company of office space, heating, coffee etc etc etc and not to mention the earth when no public transport is normally provided and the employees nerves (and safety) when negotiating hours of ceaseless traffic jams is outrageous. Offices are basically the modern dark satanic mills.
My MP will pen a very polite letter back telling me not to bother my fuzzy head as it is clearly all in a very deserving cause and nothing to worry about...... I know this because he does this every time and then goes off and votes as he is told by his best buddy the chief whip who makes sure he climbs another well paid step up the greasy pole.
Ah yes, freely available elsewhere... well don't forget the government already has rules to let it close down access to those dangerous child abusing terrorist websites that Jonny Foreigner uses to spread this untrue information (just the same as China has the rules). And just in case you find a clever way around it they will know from the spying. Don't think about bringing in printed material.. .we have customs channels back in proper operation after this bizarre EU thing
Giving away billions to a country with a nuclear program, nuclear submarines (more than we can afford), space programs etc..... to save them from poverty?
If you want to give something away then give them some BRITISH goods and services. If they don't want a Landrover then we don't send it, we certainly should NOT be sending them a cheque to spend on a BMW or Toyota... Our civil service and politicians seem to be hell bent on spending our money, or giving it away to the direct detriment of the workers of this country.
If the police drove Rover cars, or the councils drove Leyland vans or the army had Bedford lorries there would be 3 companies still going. If the NHS computer system had been developed here maybe we might even still have a software industry instead of a shell around outsource companies spending out money in China, India and eastern Europe.
As a tax payer I am sick to death of paying tax so that the politicians and civil servants can buy foreign and cause me to pay even more tax to support and police those in this country who should be working (about 30% of the working age population are NOT working). Worse is the perfect storm, because 30% of the working age population are idle the tax is taken from a far lower wage than it would be if we had near 100% working.
The only reason the government doesn't worry about discontent, instability and war here is because the police state has sufficient in its arsenal to ensure no one can get together enough to start it.
Can just ask our Chinese friends to fund it, run it and profit from it.
I wonder, is at least part of this rush of very secretive legislation, the clamp down on the internet, the clamp down on journalists, the stopping anyone telling anyone anything just something that the Chinese have extracted in return for expensive electricity?
Pointless in this country
First, the electorate are basically just to thick. The VAST majority of the people I know vote for the same parties ignoring any aspect of the behaviour of the party, the MP, the realities of their actions or the party historically most beneficial to their current circumstances. My mum voted for the local Conservative because Milibands suit didn't fit (yes, really) and a vote for anyone else was 'wasted' because they never get in.
Second, even if you do get a substantial portion of the votes over all the two main parties and the boundary commission have stacked it against anyone breaking in (1 seat for ukip compared to the % of the vote says a huge amount). And of course this is the system that project fear mk 1 managed to persuade people to vote for.
Frankly the country is doomed because the current bunch of self serving liars have it sewn up because the stupid idiots who could change it are too damned lazy to even think of doing so
Of course if someone had been intelligent ten we could have bought the Hermes back from India, stuck the catapults and arresting gear back on her and flown proper jets off her (not these fat bloated F35vstoll monstrosities) as we did before converting her to Harriers. If the idiot hadn't scrapped Ark Royal, Lusty an Invincible we could have had more aircraft carriers carrying more planes for a fraction of the cost.
I don't know if the Harrier ever actually vectored to avoid being shot down, I doubt it, from my recollection of Falklands the Harriers were winning far too well to be in danger of being shot down.
Who ran the red flag exercise? Lockheed for a guess. I watched a report from Australia where 95% of the F35s failed to return from missions against reasonable modern opposition (like the Russian SU planes). Indeed they appear to fail fairly basically against existing American planes as well.
True the Harrier is old but frankly I would like to see our government doing the reverse of its last move, buy all the Harriers it sent to America and all these usmc ones at a knock down price, put them on the carriers, build a couple more small carriers and go ... at least we have something to sail around in.
And yes, agree with the comments about missiles and saturation of the ships defences... but more ships is more targets is a slightly better chance for an individual ship to survive....
Perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction. The Royal Navy did at one time make sure that America was on its list of potential enemies. And they should be. They ripped off the UK in two world wars last century (see the war diaries of David Lloyd George for ww1, look at the amount we paid in gold, then overseas bases, companies (like Courtaulds) and finally in massive debt for the kit we needed to keep America 'free'). Compare to the Russians who expended millions of their people in both wars and didn't charge us for it (true we did send them some supplies... )
Then look at the aggressive posture, sure Russia might have taken Crimea... and no one stood up to that so who knows what next. But the Americans have taken half of the gulf and oil producing areas, and are meddling in others. The Americans have over 50% of ALL the worlds naval forces... thats for defence???
What about the clouds...
Yup, mostly run by American companies and of course not just your emails but ALL your corporate data, your designs, your documentation, your code, your everything is available to the Americans... and I wouldn't put it past their government to share it to make sure you are outbid in that contract or you find competition has stolen a march on you...
er...
Am I forced to go to work.... no, but it certainly makes paying the bills easier
Am I forced to drink tea... no but its nicer than coffee
The facts are that in modern life there are somethings that may not be forced on you but certainly are so beneficial that they are near a necessity.
By removing my access to my account they are worse than encrypting my files they are removing my access to the data, contacts, contact information and friends on that account, just as bad in many respects.
Then it does demand payment, it demands payment in the form of more data than I want to give. Why should I give MS and therefore the NSA etc. personal information? It is damned hard to set up one of the new accounts without doing so.
One thing I didn't notice here, when I swap my account does it keep contacts, conversations, data etc from my old account on my new one so it is painless (well apart from the setting up of the new account, the remembering that you now need a different account, updating CVs and everything else that points to the account etc etc etc etc etc etc)
What they really mean is 'the nsa cant spy on you without the update'.
My biggest worry is that they will make skype as shit as skype for business (lync in the old days), that app regularly crashes, regularly loses voice, cant cope in anything but massive network infrastructure and is a crock.
The only plan is to open up our eyes and realise there are other people out there who might be willing to buy some stuff we make and sell it to them.
We could also decide that the police need to buy British built police cars and that politicians need to drive British built cars, the army need to have British built lorries (even if that means setting up a new factory), the tax man needs to run British written software on British computers etc etc etc. If we just halted the governments spending on overseas products (including the spending done via overseas aid which is cash everyone else uses to buy from our competitors) and we spent that money internally we would have full employment, no room for the new factories needed and strong industries able to compete world wide.
The Germans do it, the French do it, the Italians do it... Trump is doing it... Spend UK tax payers money in the UK and stop spending it in Munich.
The EU and the single market are tied together, leave the EU and you leave the single market, if people didn't know that then blame the remain campaign for not spelling it out. In theory there is an option to rejoin single market only but that is not realistic.
Any deal that puts Britain first is a good one, but given our civil service would sell the country to the devil if they could the chance of that is zero. We will end up with the same situation as now, no continental country imports anything of ours and our government falls over itself to buy foreign instead of British for everything it possible can.
When I consider the number of times other countries have voted against something the EU wants in a referendum only to be forced to hold a second referendum after a few months my prediction is that May will trigger article 50, there will be some negotiations, they will come back with the worst possible situation for the UK (we will pay a fortune and have to obey all EU regs to trade but have no say in anything as an outsider... oh, situation as it is now...) or they will claim that the EU will reform a couple of things (they won't) and by staying we will have a say (as we dont now we wont then) and offer it as referendum number 2 ... go out on the basis of the negotiation or stay in... and hey presto the EU will win, we will stay in, we will get less than no say (as we now have no teeth at all) and the fees will carry on rising massively leading to even more new taxes and higher VAT...
Just a prediction
Thats only MPs. Teachers get even more, the rest of somewhat less... except for those who SHOULD be building the police cars, fire engines, army lorries, army uniforms, airforce planes, navy engines, navy planes, steel for the ships, aluminium for the planes, council lorries, council vans, heads of states cars (yes you Scottish bitch we noticed you use a swedish car so you dont need to buy anything from the English), writing the tax software, building our missiles, writing the airtraffic software etc etc etc those people are unemployed and get 52 weeks paid leave a year.
BTW just in case no one else is here from Forest Heath District Council (Conservative btw...)
A few years ago it was decided by the council that car parking charges would be imposed in Newmarket
The people of Newmarket and the traders all objected
The council offered a referendum
The council then stated they would ignore the referendum
The council then set it up but failed to tell anyone in FHDC area when and where
The local paper was tipped off by a council employee and published a very late special edition to let people know
The referendum was held over the whole district, not just the town affected (so including the tax payers who in theory benefit from the income from the parking charges)
The result was 97% against the charges
Newmarket now has car parks with charges imposed, double yellow lines on streets that never needed any before, expensive residents parking permits and a pretty near empty town centre.
However, for the politicians nothing actually changed, the people still put the same councillors back in power that ignored them.
The majority of MPs were voted into their position on a smaller % of the eligible voters in their area. And one of my all time biggest gripes is that MPs do what they are told by their whips rather than what their constituents want (my MP is a horrendous culprit here, a disaster as an MP). We were offered a chance to change it but project fear mk1 saw that off with lies and bull.
And Sturgeon is an outright nutter and even more antiEnglish than most of her fellow countrymen, she even gets driven round in a Volvo because above everything else it isn't made by us unspeakables south of the border.
However you cut it though, the people spoke and the result in parliament HAD to be to obey the people. Anything else would have been a disaster.
Excuse me... the referendum was held. The people voted. The MPs are supposed to represent the people so the vote in parliament might have been mandated by a bizarre bunch of clowns but actually the vote in parliament HAD to pass in order to recognise the vote from the people. The people voted OUT so OUT is the correct behaviour. The idea that somehow we can decide something as a nation and some small number of people in parliament could over turn it would create a democratic crisis which could even grow to a civil war (we had one before when one guy decided to ignore the will of parliament ... even though that one was even less representative than the current one).
Now you may or may not like the decision of your countrymen, you have three choices... one: grab a TARDIS and go back and do some sensible arguing for your cause (don't use threats that are easily countered but real facts), two: put up with it, make the most of it, see the opportunity, three: emigrate to europe where other countries are staying in (at least for the time being).
I thought that most architectures forced applications to ask about a password, they didn't get passwords to the app side to do strcmps
At some point there is no stopping the fact that a password will be typed by a user and that if you have enough data on what is happening you can find out if the login was a success. If you can link the password to the success you have it.
However that is relatively easy to solve. My bank in fact is the one I use because their security is better than most. For my account I have a password and a passnumber. When I want access the computer asks for 2 letters (e.g. letter 3 and letter 6), and then 2 numbers (e.g. number 1 and number 4). It then uses this for a yes no answer. Thus if you are listening you get the info for the session I have started, but nothing more. Next time it will ask for different letters and different numbers. You could listen for a long time and work it out but that would require patience and depend on my frequency of access.
I HATE website that set their own arbitrary rules about password length, whether it has to have different cases, numbers, special characters and the rest. Frankly stop telling me about my passwords, if I choose something less safe it is probably because I dont care about what I have on this particular account.
Then of course reuse, of course we reuse, how the hell else are we going to be able to access the 10, 15, 20 different password protected accounts? Most browsers even store the passwords on request so it doesn't really matter if they are different or the same because once the browser is compromised they are all lost.
Most corporations even recognise there is a problem, I have one logon that accesses all the corporate sites etc. and is passed round by the system when I update it.
BTW, why does the register want me to create an account with a password... frankly there is no point in it, same with the bbc, times, telegraph and all the rest. Even if you think it ties me to my comment that is not really sure, there are several dozen people with exactly my name in the world
The problem with lawyers is the impacts they have. Even if they dont win they cost people a heap load of money (and yes, tax payers end up paying a stack for then... guess who paid to be told the MPs could ignore the will of the people... )
Then there are little things like...
Took my son to a model railway, he was too short to see, but when put on the plinth that had been built so that children could see (was a plinth that I had used when I was a child) I was told it was no longer allowed for health and safety reasons (re people sue when they hurt their ankle).
Stopped in one shop an joked about getting a cuppa when there was one being given to the assistant, couldn't in case I spilt it and sued them.
The list of stupidities goes on and on, all created by lawyers.
Come the glorious day they will be up against the wall with the politicians, scumbags the lot of them
Yeah, put that way it sounds reasonable. Are there stats to show how many people have been killed because of sex acts in the car, compared to say those killed by police practicing chasing people, or maybe for your example burglars killed attempting to break and enter unoccupied businesses?
True lots of things are dangerous and could lead to loss of life, doesn't mean we have to try and legislate or ban everything from existence. Being born leads to death... always.
Because someone says they have something doesn't mean they do. If there were indeed these weapons then where the hell did they disappear to? I can't really imagine the gun toting Americans being the least bit shy about parading the successful capture for everyone to see while reinforcing just how just the invasion was can you?
No, it was an invasion, it was driven either by desire to control an oil producer or by the desire to control the currency used in oil dealing depending on your point of view. It was backed by an idiot war crimes guilty toady in number 10 who should be hanging in a gibbet now.
The issue now of course is that having removed the dictator we failed to sort out the power vacuum left and we have a mess. If only we had stayed clear of Libya as well then we might see that situation would have resolved itself as well, but no, some idiot had to interfere. Given the long history tends to suggest that America funded, trained and armed these people in the first place perhaps its just tough poop.
Welcome to modern journalism. Once there would have been a presentation of facts. Now it is all just opinion and usually very biased towards what is wanted.
Best to accept this (it is universal... cnn, bbc, theregister... everyone) and treat all these articles for what they are... joke material
Remember the tsr2, cancelled for an American plane that would be in service earlier...but the yank plane turned up decades late. Not sure how the timescale conclusion had ever been reached, the tsr2 was already in the air when it was cancelled,the jigs available etc. all that was worrying was a bit of wobble on the undercarriage which could hardly have taken more than a couple of weeks to fix.
tsr2 was also capable of carrying more, faster and as manourverably as the eurofighter ... 50 years earlier.
TBH Foxes killing chickens is not such a massively common thing, and if you hadn't slaughtered all the rabbits would probably be even less common
As for badgers, 30k cattle a year that would be slaughtered anyway is a small proportion of the herd, not to mention that most of the cross infections are caused moving the damned cattle around.
Do I want a countryside which is clinically clean of any wildlife just in case some farmer somewhere thinks this damned wildlife (or hedgerows, trees, streams etc etc etc ) reduces the subsidies and profit he makes by tuppence happeny.
I think the EU were trying to do away with some of the nastier practices you see in places like China where slaughtering in as nasty a way as possible has been refined to an art form.
Unfortunately as we have seen in numerous places these slaughter houses tend to develop there own unpleasant ways of slaughter (hammers and the like) mainly I suspect because those who kill a new animal every couple of seconds really stop noticing or caring (and I did work slaughtering turkeys at one point so yes, after a while they are just another...)
The thing that is most disturbing in Europe is the way certain other countries treat their animals. In the UK you frequently see pigs outside wandering around, in Germany, a country renowned for eating pork you do not, the pigs here are intensively reared in unbelievable poor conditions in concrete pens where they are literally unable to even turn.
I eat meat, especially love the pork crackling, but even though I eat the stuff I don't believe it is right to make the animals suffer
Problem with that. First you still have the issue of checking the tax but more important you wont be as cheap as the guy from Bangalore and you won't get the juicy contracts Craptia et al gets because you don't have 20 years experience in f****g up (sorry doing) similar contracts.
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