I think most extradition treaties are intended so that a country can get back one of its own citizens who have committed a crime in their home country and then fled to the other. I believe that the US at least usually insists on clauses in its extradition treaties that specifically exclude it from having to give up any of its own citizens that have committed a crime in the other country.
And the specific cases we're talking about here are electronic downloads, as plenty of posters have pointed out, customs duty and VAT are of course levied on items physically shipped from the outside the EU into the union. I still can't see what sanctions the EU could hope to apply to an overseas etailer with no presence in the union.
It'd be as if I buy lots of CDs next time I'm in the US, worth more than my customs allowance, and try to bring them back without declaring them. Sure I run the risk of being stopped by Customs, but if I'm not and Customs later find out it's not as if they could prosecute the US record shop for not collecting the VAT for them at the time of purchase.
But if the vendor is outside the EU, has no presence in the EU, and has no plans to have a presence in the EU, they can tell HM Customs and Excise to go play with the traffic.
I suppose if they were in a country that has aspirations to join the EU, they might want to play safe, but I somehow can't see places like the US ever wanting to join the EU, or the EU wanting to let them in.
Whilst postcodes will be used for the post office to get the letter to the local delivery office, it's still a postie on foot that actually has to locate the physical address and put the letter through the letter box. Now, I'm sure that any postie whose been working on the same route for a few weeks/months gets to know which postcodes are on their route and which addresses they correspond to, but anyone starting out on a particular route is still going to need streetnames and building numbers to find addresses.
Where we used to live, our address was (slightly obfuscated, 'cos the actual street we lived in is uniquely named in the UK and I wouldn't want the people living there now to get mail from random/.ers 8-) "18 Istanbul Road". But round the back of our road was a block of flats called "Hillside", which was *also* postally in "Istanbul Road" but had it's own number sequence, but different postcodes. Even so we could always tell when a new postie had started on our route as we'd start getting mail for "18 Hillside, Istanbul Road", so clearly the difference in postcodes wasn't enough to stop us getting the wrong mail.
Don't recall seeing anything like that on recent mail from the US (my other half is American) but I wonder how the USPS deals with British postcodes that are in the format AB1 2CD
Re:French using out dated technology, Film at 11!
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
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· Score: 1
It might still be majority (55%) owned by the French govt, but it's been a publicily listed corporation since 1996 and its shares are traded on the Paris stock market, so no I don't think it's part of the French govt anymore.
Re:French using out dated technology, Film at 11!
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And IIRC, the making pots of money part was an added extra to Minitel. The reason why France Telecom (then part of the French govt) introduced it was that they worked out it would be cheaper to set up the service and *give* a terminal to all subscribers and then make them do their directory enquiries for free through it than print phone books for the whole population.
A bit of imagination that British business and the British govt just don't seem to have any more.
I want a language that doesn't just force the use of comments in code, it forces one's cow-orkers to ACTUALLY FSCKING READ THE FSCKING COMMENTS before working on the file.
This was a few years ago, back in 1999,so may well have changed (probably got stupider). Here in the UK we still don't need to show ID when checking in for domestic flights (a couple of airlines require it since 9/11, but it's not required by the government). However when me and my girlfriend flew from Cardiff to Belfast in June 1999, after having gone through the gate, before boarding the plane we had to show our boarding passes to a plain-clothes policeman who wrote down our names. No doubt this was because of the ongoing unpleasantnesses in Northern Ireland, and the police were taking it seriously enough that when the guy in front of us objected he was pulled from the line and eventually was last onto the plane bearing a very pissed-off expression.
The thing is though, is that the *only* ID they asked for was the boarding passes, with no corroboration that the names on them were our real names. Presumably the South Wales Police have come to an understanding with the IRA and UVF who've agreed that their guys would never dream of buying airline tickets cash and supplying a false name, or with a fake/stolen card.
The Information Commissioner is the person to raise this with first, rather than your MP, even if she is a minister (or the cynical would say, especially if she is a minister...)
Try the JET programme
on
Jobs in Japan?
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· Score: 3, Informative
The Japanese govt runs the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) programme which places foreigners in teaching and "Coordinator for International Relations" posts with Japanese universities, schools and organisations for a year. Salary, travel and accommodation is all arranged by the programme. My gf used to work for the company that ran it in the UK, and many of her colleagues had been on it and all loved it.
What, are you going to give them your bank account details so that when they recover the money they can return it?!?
Gosh! What a brilliant idea, yes of course I'll do that. Funnily enough, this one didn't ask for any of *my* details, just those of the other 419 spammers. I dare say if I was stupid enough to reply to it, I'd get a follow-up saying that they'd recovered my stolen money and all they need is my bank a/c details to repay it.
You actually read your "spam"?
Occasionally yes, for amusement purposes. The 419s can be quite funny with the idiosyncratic African English they're written in.
London UK: At every tubs stop and about half the bus stops there's a sign saying when the next bus/train will get there. I'm not sure how the bus one works (maybe just pulling it off a schedule, as it's never very accurate)
I believe that the buses carry transponders that are read at points along the route. I agree that it's never accutate. I pass a bus stop on Piccadilly on my way into work which has one of the displays, and I make it a little game to compare which buses it says are coming against the ones that actually pass. The display has *never* been right in the two years I've been passing it.
but the train one is generally bang-on
Only if the rest of the world used the special 100-second minutes that London Transport seems to use! And on the Victoria line it's never reliable to use the platform indicators as a guide to where the trains are terminating. I always check the front of the train and, northbound especially, it often doesn't match the indicator.
Today I got an email supposedly from the Federal Presidency of Nigeria, apologising for all the 419s I've been receiving and asking for full details of the senders and the organisations they claimed to be defrauding.
I really don't think it's genuinely from the Nigerian gov, although it was posted from an IP address (195.166.233.102) RIPE says is allocated to a Nigerian ISP, rather than being routed through some open relay in Asia. However, I'm finding it hard to work out what the scam is. Spam quality control to see which addresses apply is the most likely reason I guess.
Now British Plugs are such a PITA, you have to find where the thing plugs in, grip by the plastic, and pull, HARD. Not cool if the appliance is melting your place down...
That's probably why nearly all UK sockets have an on-off switch too.
Doesn't matter if you're just running an electric razor, the plug is capable of supplying enough juice for an arc-welder.
Er, nope. In the UK we have special 110v round-pin sockets for shavers. The only time I ever shocked myself by accidentally touching a pin on unplugging was with a shaver socket, which is why I'm alive to write this.
Great! Any information as to what steered them in that direction?
A quick furtle about the BBC site finds this article about Safeway UK following ASDA's lead and quotes ASDA as saying only a tiny percentage of their surveyed customers wanted one. Personally, I do have a another chain's loyalty card but only because they offered Air Miles on it.
Certainly supermarkets here don't do the dual pricing with-card discounted vs without-card more expensive thing I've seen in the US. Maybe our consumer protection laws would deem that misleading. Instead the usual way to get a discount is that when you've accrued a certain number of points you get a voucher with a nominal monetary value that you can offset against your next purchase.
or maybe it was a figment of my deranged imagination.
Read Kuensel
on
The Last Place
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you want a glimpse of Bhutan, read their national newspaper Kuensel on the web. It's in English and it gives a fascinating insight into a country that's still trying to take on the modern world on its own terms.
NI numbers are (so it's been alleged to me) recycled, meaning >1 person per NI number in some cases
I'd not heard that before myself, though I'm sure it must happen occasionally. but I'd've thought the two-letter + six digit + one letter number space of the NI number would mean that shouldn't have to happen. IIRC the last letter is some sort of category identifier recording sex and marital status, but I might be wrong.
I have heard that there are supposedly far more active (i.e. issued and the person it belongs to not being recorded as dead) NI numbers than there are people in the UK, which suggests benefit or tax fraud on a grand scale. I think I read somewhere that the same is true of the US, more SSNs in circulation than people.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most extradition treaties are intended so that a country can get back one of its own citizens who have committed a crime in their home country and then fled to the other. I believe that the US at least usually insists on clauses in its extradition treaties that specifically exclude it from having to give up any of its own citizens that have committed a crime in the other country.
And the specific cases we're talking about here are electronic downloads, as plenty of posters have pointed out, customs duty and VAT are of course levied on items physically shipped from the outside the EU into the union. I still can't see what sanctions the EU could hope to apply to an overseas etailer with no presence in the union.
It'd be as if I buy lots of CDs next time I'm in the US, worth more than my customs allowance, and try to bring them back without declaring them. Sure I run the risk of being stopped by Customs, but if I'm not and Customs later find out it's not as if they could prosecute the US record shop for not collecting the VAT for them at the time of purchase.
But if the vendor is outside the EU, has no presence in the EU, and has no plans to have a presence in the EU, they can tell HM Customs and Excise to go play with the traffic.
I suppose if they were in a country that has aspirations to join the EU, they might want to play safe, but I somehow can't see places like the US ever wanting to join the EU, or the EU wanting to let them in.
Whilst postcodes will be used for the post office to get the letter to the local delivery office, it's still a postie on foot that actually has to locate the physical address and put the letter through the letter box. Now, I'm sure that any postie whose been working on the same route for a few weeks/months gets to know which postcodes are on their route and which addresses they correspond to, but anyone starting out on a particular route is still going to need streetnames and building numbers to find addresses.
/.ers 8-) "18 Istanbul Road". But round the back of our road was a block of flats called "Hillside", which was *also* postally in "Istanbul Road" but had it's own number sequence, but different postcodes. Even so we could always tell when a new postie had started on our route as we'd start getting mail for "18 Hillside, Istanbul Road", so clearly the difference in postcodes wasn't enough to stop us getting the wrong mail.
Where we used to live, our address was (slightly obfuscated, 'cos the actual street we lived in is uniquely named in the UK and I wouldn't want the people living there now to get mail from random
Don't recall seeing anything like that on recent mail from the US (my other half is American) but I wonder how the USPS deals with British postcodes that are in the format AB1 2CD
It might still be majority (55%) owned by the French govt, but it's been a publicily listed corporation since 1996 and its shares are traded on the Paris stock market, so no I don't think it's part of the French govt anymore.
And IIRC, the making pots of money part was an added extra to Minitel. The reason why France Telecom (then part of the French govt) introduced it was that they worked out it would be cheaper to set up the service and *give* a terminal to all subscribers and then make them do their directory enquiries for free through it than print phone books for the whole population.
A bit of imagination that British business and the British govt just don't seem to have any more.
I want a language that doesn't just force the use of comments in code, it forces one's cow-orkers to ACTUALLY FSCKING READ THE FSCKING COMMENTS before working on the file.
Grr.
This was a few years ago, back in 1999,so may well have changed (probably got stupider). Here in the UK we still don't need to show ID when checking in for domestic flights (a couple of airlines require it since 9/11, but it's not required by the government). However when me and my girlfriend flew from Cardiff to Belfast in June 1999, after having gone through the gate, before boarding the plane we had to show our boarding passes to a plain-clothes policeman who wrote down our names. No doubt this was because of the ongoing unpleasantnesses in Northern Ireland, and the police were taking it seriously enough that when the guy in front of us objected he was pulled from the line and eventually was last onto the plane bearing a very pissed-off expression.
The thing is though, is that the *only* ID they asked for was the boarding passes, with no corroboration that the names on them were our real names. Presumably the South Wales Police have come to an understanding with the IRA and UVF who've agreed that their guys would never dream of buying airline tickets cash and supplying a false name, or with a fake/stolen card.
We give in, you win. Here, here's the large commercial aircraft industry. Please take care of it, we don't want it anymore.
Well, the NatWest ATM on Piccadilly that ate my card a few weeks back was running Win2K, as I found out when it crashed and rebooted...
Now that we have Phoenix, I mean...
If there is life on Venus, it's going to be very difficult to get any future plans to terraform the planet past the environmentalists.
The Information Commissioner is the person to raise this with first, rather than your MP, even if she is a minister (or the cynical would say, especially if she is a minister...)
The Japanese govt runs the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) programme which places foreigners in teaching and "Coordinator for International Relations" posts with Japanese universities, schools and organisations for a year. Salary, travel and accommodation is all arranged by the programme. My gf used to work for the company that ran it in the UK, and many of her colleagues had been on it and all loved it.
What, are you going to give them your bank account details so that when they recover the money they can return it?!?
Gosh! What a brilliant idea, yes of course I'll do that. Funnily enough, this one didn't ask for any of *my* details, just those of the other 419 spammers. I dare say if I was stupid enough to reply to it, I'd get a follow-up saying that they'd recovered my stolen money and all they need is my bank a/c details to repay it.
You actually read your "spam"?
Occasionally yes, for amusement purposes. The 419s can be quite funny with the idiosyncratic African English they're written in.
London UK: At every tubs stop and about half the bus stops there's a sign saying when the next bus/train will get there. I'm not sure how the bus one works (maybe just pulling it off a schedule, as it's never very accurate)
I believe that the buses carry transponders that are read at points along the route. I agree that it's never accutate. I pass a bus stop on Piccadilly on my way into work which has one of the displays, and I make it a little game to compare which buses it says are coming against the ones that actually pass. The display has *never* been right in the two years I've been passing it.
but the train one is generally bang-on
Only if the rest of the world used the special 100-second minutes that London Transport seems to use! And on the Victoria line it's never reliable to use the platform indicators as a guide to where the trains are terminating. I always check the front of the train and, northbound especially, it often doesn't match the indicator.
Today I got an email supposedly from the Federal Presidency of Nigeria, apologising for all the 419s I've been receiving and asking for full details of the senders and the organisations they claimed to be defrauding.
I really don't think it's genuinely from the Nigerian gov, although it was posted from an IP address (195.166.233.102) RIPE says is allocated to a Nigerian ISP, rather than being routed through some open relay in Asia. However, I'm finding it hard to work out what the scam is. Spam quality control to see which addresses apply is the most likely reason I guess.
Now British Plugs are such a PITA, you have to find where the thing plugs in, grip by the plastic, and pull, HARD. Not cool if the appliance is melting your place down...
That's probably why nearly all UK sockets have an on-off switch too.
Doesn't matter if you're just running an electric razor, the plug is capable of supplying enough juice for an arc-welder.
Er, nope. In the UK we have special 110v round-pin sockets for shavers. The only time I ever shocked myself by accidentally touching a pin on unplugging was with a shaver socket, which is why I'm alive to write this.
Maybe it is, but by God, Venice is worth it, even if it buys a few more years. If you haven't been there, go.
Great! Any information as to what steered them in that direction?
A quick furtle about the BBC site finds this article about Safeway UK following ASDA's lead and quotes ASDA as saying only a tiny percentage of their surveyed customers wanted one. Personally, I do have a another chain's loyalty card but only because they offered Air Miles on it.
Certainly supermarkets here don't do the dual pricing with-card discounted vs without-card more expensive thing I've seen in the US. Maybe our consumer protection laws would deem that misleading. Instead the usual way to get a discount is that when you've accrued a certain number of points you get a voucher with a nominal monetary value that you can offset against your next purchase.
ASDA, which is owned by Walmart, is one of the UK chains that have abandoned loyalty card schemes, saying customers prefer low prices to gimmicks.
I don't think the sort of data collection and matching mentioned in the head article would be legal in the EU. The US needs Data Protection laws!
OK, it used to use Slash, or so I recall.
or maybe it was a figment of my deranged imagination.
If you want a glimpse of Bhutan, read their national newspaper Kuensel on the web. It's in English and it gives a fascinating insight into a country that's still trying to take on the modern world on its own terms.
And it uses Slash.
NI numbers are (so it's been alleged to me) recycled, meaning >1 person per NI number in some cases
I'd not heard that before myself, though I'm sure it must happen occasionally. but I'd've thought the two-letter + six digit + one letter number space of the NI number would mean that shouldn't have to happen. IIRC the last letter is some sort of category identifier recording sex and marital status, but I might be wrong.
I have heard that there are supposedly far more active (i.e. issued and the person it belongs to not being recorded as dead) NI numbers than there are people in the UK, which suggests benefit or tax fraud on a grand scale. I think I read somewhere that the same is true of the US, more SSNs in circulation than people.