Under the "civil contingencies bill", which has wide support and will probably be passed ministers get to pass legislation without parliament.
There must be "an emergency", but what or even which country it's in isn't defined. Any minister, who in his judgement thinks the country is in "crisis" can, by himself without recourse to parliament, pass any law he so wishes which is immediately enacted as though by Royal Prerogative.
Essentially, any of them can write any law they wish, and it's law the moment they put their pen down.
I'm less convinced of good intentions and lack of need to worry when they're writing things like that.
Hundreds of "cloned" cars are flooding into London to dodge the congestion charge, insiders claimed today.
Criminals are saving thousands of pounds by avoiding the £5 charge - as well as speeding, bus lane, and parking fines - by driving vehicles with number plates illegally copied from innocent motorists' cars.
The plates are copied from identical look-alike vehicles of the same make, model and colour.
So many are at large that Capita officials have been told not to issue fines to certain vehicles filmed dodging the charge, insiders say.
The "blacklist" was ordered after law-abiding motorists received the fines instead of the criminals.
A senior Capita source says 300-500 cloned vehicles were regularly spotted in the zone.
The crisis "blew up" after a senior TfL official received a fine even though he had not driven in London on the day of the offence, it is claimed.
Many other motorists have contacted the Standard after receiving incorrect fines, including AA worker Sarah Grayling, who received a fine believed to have been run up by a cloned car despite the fact that she was working in Witham, Essex.
The insider at Capita said: "We are now having to take certain cloned cars off the system to prevent more wrong fines going out. TfL knows where and when these cars enter the zone but so far little seems to have been done."
Capita runs the congestion charging system, and uses the DVLA database. An audit of the DVLA database showed nearly 10% of its records are incorrect.
Capita just uses them anyway. Not owning a car, never mind the one they're billing you for is not enough excuse for them not to send round bailiffs and seize property. There's no judge involved, just a company who is paid PER COLLECTED FINE.
There's nothing wrong with a system like this, per se, as long as everyone understands how shaky the foundations are. But everyone seems to imagine the "numberplate -> address" mapping works. It's known to be wrong in over 5% of cases. Another 5% of cars simply aren't in the database...
I don't think it matters either way -- the database is for "prevention of terrorism"
I suspect any attempt to request data from it by defence teams to prove an alibi would be met by a cold smile.
And of course, even in that case, all it would prove is that your car was not at the murder scene. Nice double standard isn't it? Car seen speeding; you were speeding. Car seen not at the murder site; you could still have been there.
Yes, this is what I'm expecting -- speeding tickets for "doing 10000 mph in a 30mph zone" being issued.
There is a new bill which removes your need to have a court hearing for speeding tickets. If you decline the fixed penalty option (which is an admission of guilty) you'll go onto the next stage which is automatic conviction. From there you either pay the fine or your numberplate is tagged for stopping to arrest you at the next manned checkpoint.
Actually they do ask. And it's stormingly annoying.
I got crashed into; the only real damage was the rear numberplate was shattered.
But since we were on holiday, and I'd foolishly not taken a huge pile of legal papers with me, I couldn't buy a replacement... They'd only accept the V5 as proof. Guess which document you aren't supposed to carry in the vehicle?
So technically, I'm driving around in an unroadworthy vehicle. That's now an offence for which the car can be seized and destroyed without anything annoying like a "court hearing" to get in the way.
Legit people can't buy numberplates without being inconvenienced, but I bet you buying fake plates is no harder than it ever was.
"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
Sadly, just shutting up in the UK is, effectively, an admission of guilt. And the duty lawyers are a bit of a lottery...
My grandmother keeps sending money off to people like this (the ones that send paper mail - she doesn't have a computer). We (the family) have tried all sorts of things. We can't get the mail redirected so my aunt can filter it first because the post office insists on proof of ID... She keeps ordering new chequebooks whenever one goes "missing"...
And she's not even batty enough that we can get a power of attourney to run this stuff. She's fine, she tells us and social services. And some days she is. Other days, she'll put slippers in the fridge and milk in the wardrobe.
And the worst of it is that having responded to some of this stuff, she's getting more and more and more of it, now being a "live target".
And this is kind of why we need social protection for the "gullible".
Hmm. Be aware that some of the anti-choice groups are against "morning after" pills on the basis that are, effectively, an abortion method.
They don't even consider a viable foetus to be the starting point of a right to life -- a fertilised egg counts in their view.
I'm going to go with this viewpoint; maybe women applying for an abortion should have to renounce any Christianity they hold. That way, the atheists get to have abortions without qualm and it's an individual decision as to which is more important for the applicant in the case of the rest of them.
I doubt the church will agree because it's not keen on popularity contests it stands any chance of loosing...
It's not that they wheel the carts off to take their shopping home. Its that they then don't TAKE THEM BACK.
The area where I work had this problem; the scrote housing down the road had shopping trolleys lying about on street corners where they'd simply been discarded, having finished being useful. They'd get wrecked, dragging into the canal, littered about on the industrial estate...
You have to understand just what animals some people are, and how little concern they have for anyone or anything outside what they want to understand why supermarkets do this. They have absolutely no regard for the expensive involved for the shop or the inconvenience for customers for whom there are no longer enough trolleys.
They won't even push them back the next time they go, because it's uphill and now they let go of the trolley, it's not even "not their problem" anymore. It's not even in their environment.
So Asda bought a whole new fleet of shopping trolleys along with the wheel locks and little red "don't cross" lines.
Net effect is that at least most of the trolleys are abandoned at the red lines now... although we STILL find them in the industrial estate, lying wrecked where they were abandoned because they'd made it down the hill that far before getting bored of dragging something with one locked wheel...
The trolleys are, actually, quite expensive. The stores cannot afford to go around giving away a "disposable" 200 pound trolley with every tenth purchase of a bag of potatoes.
Think of it as a tragedy of the commons thing - some people are such mindless thugs, they can't be trusted to borrow and return a shopping trolley and they've wrecked it for everyone else.
Actually, even if you rush off and buy an off the shelf company and a rename (for a hundred quid say). You still can't open a business account.
*I* own such a company, I use it, it trades, it files tax returns.... and the palaver I have to go through to open accounts and things is bonkers.
(Instead I have to turn up with massive piles of other documents.)
Because I don't have a passport. And in Britain, to open a company bank account, all the company officers have to turn up in person and present their passports.
So suddenly, you've got to get a fake passport as well.
And, bear in mind, you also have to somehow change the address of the company at companies house -- otherwise the trick of sending the mail to a duff address doesn't work; given the companies registration number it's trivial to find the registered address.
Absolutely: I used to work for an image processing software company and we did in fact have software that takes the blurriness out of images. Only microscopy images, but family photos are only a heavy bit of number crunching away.
Actually, when interviewing, I tend to find the people who have moved around a lot are much more flexible, more widely read and have richer experience.
In the UK there's a tendency for some people to go round lots of companies doing 12 months at each and some people sit at the same desk and have 1 years experience several times over.
Hiring people who've seen lots of ways of doing things and lots of corporate environments and solved lots of problems in lots of fields is great way of getting a richness of experience.
I'd forget to do things without my PDA. I need it to carry around phone numbers and shopping lists and things to do and books that I see mentioned places and would like to order when I'm next in a bookstore and things like that.
It runs my diary and stops me being double booked and beeps to tell me it's time to set off to places and it's somewhere to write down IP addresses and it generally keeps my life together...
It's searchable for when I forget where I stored something, it's backableupable by sticking it in the docking cradle, it's insured in case I lose it. It doesn't need my full attention to work it, it doesn't hang, it doesn't crash. Seriously: a handspring visor, had it 2.5 years now, never had software issues. Mind you, I've not installed much because the diary/notepad are enough to do what I need it.
And, and this is I've worked out, the killer feature:- I only own *ONE* of them. I used to find if I wrote stuff in notebooks or on bits of paper, it was always a bit of paper that was somewhere else... my life used to be run off a ton of scraps of paper and I'd end up not doing things because they weren't in a list I was currently holding... and shopping lists are only useful if you can REMEMBER TO TAKE THEM TO THE SHOPS. The visor is a uniquifier: If the appointment isn't in that diary, I won't be going to it. And it's unique enough to remember. It lives in my bag with my purse. If I forget the visor I've probably forgotten my credit cards as well...
Re:Hear (being half of "hear hear")
on
Cool Work Shirts?
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· Score: 1
I wear a suit to work. Not all the time, but I happen to think I look good in a suit. (Partly because it hides my slightly tubby tummy). The dress code is (technically) "wear clothes", but this is a bank and on the other floors its "smart casual" or "suits" so scruffy jeans and a t-shirt would mark one out in the cafe.
I certainly wear them to go to interviews or meet clients.
Possibly it's different in California, but over here (the UK), one wears suits for interviews. Always. I also have a bath and wash my hair and bother to look in the mirror while I'm putting my make-up on instead of guessing. It's part of presenting an image. Having talent as well is important, but not looking tatty helps...
Even more so if you're talking to non-IT people to whom "I am a C++ god" means nothing.
They can't easily data match between them. For one thing, NI numbers are (so it's been alleged to me) recycled, meaning >1 person per NI number in some cases, and NHS numbers are assigned if needed; meaning you can have >1 of them per person. Eg: you arrive at hospital unconscious. They'll assign you an NHS number while they sort you out so they can track you in their data system... later on when you wake up and they can contact your GP and get previous history, there's a whole load of jiggery pokery to attach all these patient episodes back together...
Most people also have a driver number and a passport number although these are optional.
You miss an important point of understanding the problem with the software industry.
We HAVE an assembly line. It's the thing that copies the CDs...
Making a million identical things is something we can do - the car assembly line is for doing that.
We can even customise them slightly. Look there's a blue car, there's a red one... look there's a computer with Windows and Word on it, there's one with Windows and VC++...
Software design is NOT like the hand-building of cars. It's like the process of designing the cars the assembly line builds. And THAT process still sucks. Look at the number of recalls of models to fix things in the design, at the number of cars that don't sell because they have quirky new features that just don't appeal.
Wanting software design to be an assembly line process without creativity is akin to saying that car design should always produce a design for a silver-grey four-door Mondeo for an assembly line to copy a lot.
The cameras discourage authorities from putting actual police in cars on the streets - because they represent much more return on investment: they're cheaper for the same conviction rate.
This is not the good thing it might seem: the cameras do not catch: tailgaters, drunk drivers, drugged drivers, people who are on the phone while driving, people whos cars are unroadworthy, people who have all their brake lights out...
Slashdot Mirror
Under the "civil contingencies bill", which has wide support and will probably be passed ministers get to pass legislation without parliament.
There must be "an emergency", but what or even which country it's in isn't defined. Any minister, who in his judgement thinks the country is in "crisis" can, by himself without recourse to parliament, pass any law he so wishes which is immediately enacted as though by Royal Prerogative.
Essentially, any of them can write any law they wish, and it's law the moment they put their pen down.
I'm less convinced of good intentions and lack of need to worry when they're writing things like that.
With the neat quirk that any system being used for "prevention of terrorism" is exempt...
It happens. A lot:
London Evening Standard, 8 August 2003
Hundreds of "cloned" cars are flooding into London to dodge the congestion charge, insiders claimed today.
Criminals are saving thousands of pounds by avoiding the £5 charge - as well as speeding, bus lane, and parking fines - by driving vehicles with number plates illegally copied from innocent motorists' cars.
The plates are copied from identical look-alike vehicles of the same make, model and colour.
So many are at large that Capita officials have been told not to issue fines to certain vehicles filmed dodging the charge, insiders say.
The "blacklist" was ordered after law-abiding motorists received the fines instead of the criminals.
A senior Capita source says 300-500 cloned vehicles were regularly spotted in the zone.
The crisis "blew up" after a senior TfL official received a fine even though he had not driven in London on the day of the offence, it is claimed.
Many other motorists have contacted the Standard after receiving incorrect fines, including AA worker Sarah Grayling, who received a fine believed to have been run up by a cloned car despite the fact that she was working in Witham, Essex.
The insider at Capita said: "We are now having to take certain cloned cars off the system to prevent more wrong fines going out. TfL knows where and when these cars enter the zone but so far little seems to have been done."
You don't get to go to court for a lot of these.
Capita runs the congestion charging system, and uses the DVLA database. An audit of the DVLA database showed nearly 10% of its records are incorrect.
Capita just uses them anyway. Not owning a car, never mind the one they're billing you for is not enough excuse for them not to send round bailiffs and seize property. There's no judge involved, just a company who is paid PER COLLECTED FINE.
There's nothing wrong with a system like this, per se, as long as everyone understands how shaky the foundations are. But everyone seems to imagine the "numberplate -> address" mapping works. It's known to be wrong in over 5% of cases. Another 5% of cars simply aren't in the database...
I don't think it matters either way -- the database is for "prevention of terrorism"
I suspect any attempt to request data from it by defence teams to prove an alibi would be met by a cold smile.
And of course, even in that case, all it would prove is that your car was not at the murder scene. Nice double standard isn't it? Car seen speeding; you were speeding. Car seen not at the murder site; you could still have been there.
Yes, this is what I'm expecting -- speeding tickets for "doing 10000 mph in a 30mph zone" being issued.
There is a new bill which removes your need to have a court hearing for speeding tickets. If you decline the fixed penalty option (which is an admission of guilty) you'll go onto the next stage which is automatic conviction. From there you either pay the fine or your numberplate is tagged for stopping to arrest you at the next manned checkpoint.
Actually they do ask. And it's stormingly annoying.
I got crashed into; the only real damage was the rear numberplate was shattered.
But since we were on holiday, and I'd foolishly not taken a huge pile of legal papers with me, I couldn't buy a replacement... They'd only accept the V5 as proof. Guess which document you aren't supposed to carry in the vehicle?
So technically, I'm driving around in an unroadworthy vehicle. That's now an offence for which the car can be seized and destroyed without anything annoying like a "court hearing" to get in the way.
Legit people can't buy numberplates without being inconvenienced, but I bet you buying fake plates is no harder than it ever was.
"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
Sadly, just shutting up in the UK is, effectively, an admission of guilt. And the duty lawyers are a bit of a lottery...
Actually this one is perfectly possible using existing C++ and some template jiggery-pokery.
I've used it for recursive serialisation in the past.
Now, a "build by name" that doesn't need a seperate "registration" scheme to log class names in and out of would be nice.
If you forget your passphrase, and cannot prove you haven't got it, you get locked up until you remember it.
You don't get a trial. You don't get a lawyer. And in fact it's an offence to tell ANYONE you've been served with a request for the key.
Nice, huh?
My grandmother keeps sending money off to people like this (the ones that send paper mail - she doesn't have a computer). We (the family) have tried all sorts of things. We can't get the mail redirected so my aunt can filter it first because the post office insists on proof of ID... She keeps ordering new chequebooks whenever one goes "missing"...
And she's not even batty enough that we can get a power of attourney to run this stuff. She's fine, she tells us and social services. And some days she is. Other days, she'll put slippers in the fridge and milk in the wardrobe.
And the worst of it is that having responded to some of this stuff, she's getting more and more and more of it, now being a "live target".
And this is kind of why we need social protection for the "gullible".
Hmm. Be aware that some of the anti-choice groups are against "morning after" pills on the basis that are, effectively, an abortion method.
They don't even consider a viable foetus to be the starting point of a right to life -- a fertilised egg counts in their view.
I'm going to go with this viewpoint; maybe women applying for an abortion should have to renounce any Christianity they hold. That way, the atheists get to have abortions without qualm and it's an individual decision as to which is more important for the applicant in the case of the rest of them.
I doubt the church will agree because it's not keen on popularity contests it stands any chance of loosing...
It's not that they wheel the carts off to take their shopping home. Its that they then don't TAKE THEM BACK.
The area where I work had this problem; the scrote housing down the road had shopping trolleys lying about on street corners where they'd simply been discarded, having finished being useful. They'd get wrecked, dragging into the canal, littered about on the industrial estate...
You have to understand just what animals some people are, and how little concern they have for anyone or anything outside what they want to understand why supermarkets do this. They have absolutely no regard for the expensive involved for the shop or the inconvenience for customers for whom there are no longer enough trolleys.
They won't even push them back the next time they go, because it's uphill and now they let go of the trolley, it's not even "not their problem" anymore. It's not even in their environment.
So Asda bought a whole new fleet of shopping trolleys along with the wheel locks and little red "don't cross" lines.
Net effect is that at least most of the trolleys are abandoned at the red lines now... although we STILL find them in the industrial estate, lying wrecked where they were abandoned because they'd made it down the hill that far before getting bored of dragging something with one locked wheel...
The trolleys are, actually, quite expensive. The stores cannot afford to go around giving away a "disposable" 200 pound trolley with every tenth purchase of a bag of potatoes.
Think of it as a tragedy of the commons thing - some people are such mindless thugs, they can't be trusted to borrow and return a shopping trolley and they've wrecked it for everyone else.
Actually, even if you rush off and buy an off the shelf company and a rename (for a hundred quid say). You still can't open a business account.
*I* own such a company, I use it, it trades, it files tax returns.... and the palaver I have to go through to open accounts and things is bonkers.
(Instead I have to turn up with massive piles of other documents.)
Because I don't have a passport. And in Britain, to open a company bank account, all the company officers have to turn up in person and present their passports.
So suddenly, you've got to get a fake passport as well.
And, bear in mind, you also have to somehow change the address of the company at companies house -- otherwise the trick of sending the mail to a duff address doesn't work; given the companies registration number it's trivial to find the registered address.
.mib files are usually to do with describing network devices to SNMP servers.
I've always been kind of fond of the show "Dweebs", which features a company of... erm... software engineers during the .com era.
Sadly it was cancelled so there aren't that many episodes, but it's kind of humourous and plays off the stereotypes well.
Absolutely: I used to work for an image processing software company and we did in fact have software that takes the blurriness out of images. Only microscopy images, but family photos are only a heavy bit of number crunching away.
I still have games designs that I wrote in late 80s lying around, just in case I ever run out of ideas.
I did have my A-Level maths notes (89-91) until I moved house a year ago and decided they were something I really, really didn't need to drag around.
I don't think it's *that* uncommon.
Actually, when interviewing, I tend to find the people who have moved around a lot are much more flexible, more widely read and have richer experience.
In the UK there's a tendency for some people to go round lots of companies doing 12 months at each and some people sit at the same desk and have 1 years experience several times over.
Hiring people who've seen lots of ways of doing things and lots of corporate environments and solved lots of problems in lots of fields is great way of getting a richness of experience.
I'd forget to do things without my PDA. I need it to carry around phone numbers and shopping lists and things to do and books that I see mentioned places and would like to order when I'm next in a bookstore and things like that.
It runs my diary and stops me being double booked and beeps to tell me it's time to set off to places and it's somewhere to write down IP addresses and it generally keeps my life together...
It's searchable for when I forget where I stored something, it's backableupable by sticking it in the docking cradle, it's insured in case I lose it. It doesn't need my full attention to work it, it doesn't hang, it doesn't crash. Seriously: a handspring visor, had it 2.5 years now, never had software issues. Mind you, I've not installed much because the diary/notepad are enough to do what I need it.
And, and this is I've worked out, the killer feature:- I only own *ONE* of them. I used to find if I wrote stuff in notebooks or on bits of paper, it was always a bit of paper that was somewhere else... my life used to be run off a ton of scraps of paper and I'd end up not doing things because they weren't in a list I was currently holding... and shopping lists are only useful if you can REMEMBER TO TAKE THEM TO THE SHOPS. The visor is a uniquifier: If the appointment isn't in that diary, I won't be going to it. And it's unique enough to remember. It lives in my bag with my purse. If I forget the visor I've probably forgotten my credit cards as well...
I wear a suit to work. Not all the time, but I happen to think I look good in a suit. (Partly because it hides my slightly tubby tummy). The dress code is (technically) "wear clothes", but this is a bank and on the other floors its "smart casual" or "suits" so scruffy jeans and a t-shirt would mark one out in the cafe.
I certainly wear them to go to interviews or meet clients.
Possibly it's different in California, but over here (the UK), one wears suits for interviews. Always. I also have a bath and wash my hair and bother to look in the mirror while I'm putting my make-up on instead of guessing. It's part of presenting an image. Having talent as well is important, but not looking tatty helps...
Even more so if you're talking to non-IT people to whom "I am a C++ god" means nothing.
They can't easily data match between them. For one thing, NI numbers are (so it's been alleged to me) recycled, meaning >1 person per NI number in some cases, and NHS numbers are assigned if needed; meaning you can have >1 of them per person. Eg: you arrive at hospital unconscious. They'll assign you an NHS number while they sort you out so they can track you in their data system... later on when you wake up and they can contact your GP and get previous history, there's a whole load of jiggery pokery to attach all these patient episodes back together...
Most people also have a driver number and a passport number although these are optional.
You miss an important point of understanding the problem with the software industry.
We HAVE an assembly line. It's the thing that copies the CDs...
Making a million identical things is something we can do - the car assembly line is for doing that.
We can even customise them slightly. Look there's a blue car, there's a red one... look there's a computer with Windows and Word on it, there's one with Windows and VC++...
Software design is NOT like the hand-building of cars. It's like the process of designing the cars the assembly line builds. And THAT process still sucks. Look at the number of recalls of models to fix things in the design, at the number of cars that don't sell because they have quirky new features that just don't appeal.
Wanting software design to be an assembly line process without creativity is akin to saying that car design should always produce a design for a silver-grey four-door Mondeo for an assembly line to copy a lot.
Yes.
The cameras discourage authorities from putting actual police in cars on the streets - because they represent much more return on investment: they're cheaper for the same conviction rate.
This is not the good thing it might seem: the cameras do not catch: tailgaters, drunk drivers, drugged drivers, people who are on the phone while driving, people whos cars are unroadworthy, people who have all their brake lights out...
Cameras catch speeders. Police catch dangerous drivers.
Hmm it's not going to put those angle brackets in there is it?
"basic_string OPEN_ANGLE DOT STAR CLOSE_ANGLE"...