I agree with you. It's a question of scale though.
If I have ten invoices a month from 1 supplier and 10000 invoices a month from another then I would definitely seek to improve the flow from the larger supplier, whether it is by some published standard or rolled between us and the larger supplier.
I would not try to solve both tasks with the same solution.
If my invoice load is 1 invoice each from 10000 suppliers the problem is different and I would be encouraging them to use either our system or again some published standard but be aware that they may refuse.
My point was if the companies can't do this at all if they no longer have the skills to modify the systems.
It would require to systems staff of both companies to have a ten minute chat to work out suitable format that can be emailed or uploaded to the other and then parsed into the accounting system.
I doubt this happens very much because the amount of people who have understanding or control of the systems to the extent required is limited, especially since the push to the cloud with access via api and or third parties only and simplified user interfaces which no longer required a systems team. Ie outsourcing made the process complex, inflexible and cheaper.
About 25% of the time: I log in to my Win10Pro laptop. I go to my network location in explorer to open my sharepoint files.
I get \\blahdeblah@SSL\DavWWWRoot\Docs is not accessible blah blah.
I tut and press OK.
I open internet explorer and log in to sharepoint then close sharepoint
Go back to explorer stab F5 and it lists the files.
It's something to do with renewing the credentials. This only works on IExplorer NOT edge.
So essentially you cannot use Windows Explorer to open files on sharepoint unless you occasionally log in using Internet Explorer.
It's been like that for years.
I think won win7 pro you have to use iexplorer every single time, to access sharepoint under explorer.
Why would I want to use sharepoint using the explorer (AKA filenamaneger?). So I can move folders and do bulk copies (yes it is pretty slow) easily without struggling through the mess of javascript context menu's.
I have read a lot of popular science and it often seems to gloss over a lot of issues. So I can't really comment till I've done some more reading. But the cat in the box experiment drew me to some conclusions, and raised a lot of questions.
A summary of my thoughts (which can be thought to be completely wrong by those in the know, I am in my own belief box at the moment): follow.
For something to be as big as a cat described entirely by a quantum wave form, the box must be impenetrable to everything being emitted from inside. ie the box itself must undergo no measurable transformation what ever happens inside the box. This would have to include gravity as well if any quantum gravity theory would emit information depending on the result of the first nuclear breakdown.
So if two impenetrable boxes somehow become combined lets pick another word "entangled" then the wave form to a "wave form calculator" (not an observer yet) would now need to cover both internal states of the boxes.
And you are now back with the one box scenario (though in the case in the article there are now two observers).
However there always seems to be some confusion or glossing over what an observer actually is. It could be a particle or some people even seem to suggest that it needs a conciosuness, but I think that is a bit of a stretch. I consider an observer to be anything that is instantaneously interacting with an object described by a wave form from it's point of view, as soon as it does this it has become part of the wave form from another external observer. But it now has special knowledge of the internal state of the wave form. Effectively it has "climbed in the box".
On a cosmic scale this seems to indicate that the parts of the universe that are beyond where light can travel from by now (due to expansion of the universe) are in one massive wave form, Until a single photon leaks out to give information about a past state of the wave form. The wave form collapses and a new wave form is born.
If there really is a dispute about what is in the box after two observers have measured it, then there really is something weird going on, as it would have to mean that quantum entanglement is partially broken, which would then solve the a paradox as the two boxes would appear to have but never entirely entangled themselves.
No doubt the many worlds interpretation may say that the combined boxes are from two "different worlds" so that they can give inconsistent results when individually measured.
My 2 pence worth. But I know I am wrong about a lot of the details here.
Hi tried it himself with a guy asking him questions. His maths ability went down the pan but he didn't even notice. 'i thought I was doing rather well ' he said afterwards (quoting from memory). He was very close to death and would have died (since he didn't know what was happening dispite being fully aware of what they were doing beforehand) had they not put an oxygen mask over hus face.
if you are having problems with Perl being updated when your server updates you are probably using the Perl that was installed as part of your system to run your app.
Perlbrew now makes it simple to run an independent Perl for a single user/service that only updates when you tell it to.
What you describe is no different than if your app uses a c runtime library that is over written by the system during an update.
Seeing as sysvinit was effectively banned in debian (you could use the sysvinit compatability stuff of systemd but you still got systemd on the system, some things worked cleanly and somethings didn't).
Devuan IS providing the init freedom, by allowing the choice that was removed by debian packagers.
Going forward Devuan will not package software in a way that restricts init choice. Other inits and similair supervisor software can be installed. There are two ways for Devuan to supply a systemd init package:
1) Use debians systemd packages and try to cludge them to work with all the software that is not aware of systemd. But seeing as the other software debian packages all assume systemd is present, then constant monitoring of the requirements of systemd on those packages to work properlym would need to be maintained.
2) Completely fork the debian systemd so that it can installed cleanly and removed cleanly.
Both would require a huge effort and that is not the motivation of Devuan (that motivation would be use Systemd but package and adapt it so that it can be dropped in and pulled out as a package or set of packages without disturbing all other software)..
Seeing is the initial motivation was to create a clean upgrade path without systemd (from wheezy) or side-grade path without systemd ( from Jessie). They have achieved this. Thus guaranteeing some choice of init for debian users in wheezy and jessie. A choice that can not easily be made when continuing to use debian.
How closely Devuan is able to follow debian in the future depends how tightly integrated Debian becomes with systemd going forward. That is not in Devuan's control.
If you want Debian and Systemd use Debian. IF you want debian-like system without systemd you have a choice to use Devuan. If you want something else choose something else.
It's not quite as simple as "so much for init freedom then"
But the point is you are relying on that library truely doing nothing for evermore across upgrade after upgrade, until the day comes where libsystemd0 or whatever it is called depends itself on the systemd library, boom next upgrade you have systemd.
This happened a few times during devuan developement with reports from the alpha releases (and earlier) of 'i've used devuan sources, upgraded package such and such which has nothing to do with init and ended up with systemd again'
One of these was just due to the package including a service file for systemd but not including any calls to systemd, it therefore required systemd, for that one file to be interpreted, which was not used if systemd wasn't installed, but you ended up with systemd init as a result. It is abuse of the dependancy system, and lazy compiling of the upstream sources. The talk that you could use debian with sysvinit was nonsense when people actually tried.
Sometimes the answer was simple:
A compile time switch removed the dependancy on the 'do nothing' library. That in some cases was the only change from debian package to a devuan package. No need to change or patch the source itself.
In other cases there were actual uses of systemd api that was not necessary for the software to actually run so further source changes needed to be made to convert from a debian package to a devuan package.
Other packages (gnome et al). have been so integrated with systemd that it would be huge task to unpick.
'Well tested code' is not equal to 'used a lot cause it's there code'.
Dbus was not required for iptables to function. It is the package maintainers that make the decision that it should be included, but it is an unnecessary dependancy, UNLESS you want to use dbus to access iptables. i.e. feature creap, at the package level.
I have used iptables from the command line for donkeys years (since ipchains). And it worked. I never once thought, 'I know, I want to modify my iptables by installing X and gnome and some firewall editing GUI, to save a config file in some unknown format , so that some other service daemon can read my config file at boot and then use dbus to set the iptables rules'.
I can set the rules in an init file calling the commands directly and it's done.
If you read the devuan mailing list, when the question of systemd installation gets brought up (usually in a half baked attempt to troll) the response is "if you want systemd on devuan, install debian".
If the same counter question was brought up on debian mailing lists "can I keep sysvinit on debian". The answer was some variation of "you can (but things won't work properley) you'll get systemd anyway.We voted decision made. Sysvinit is dead etc. etc. "
The truth is that as devuan developers have found, that an awful lot of the tangle of systemd dependancies in software are there for no good reason. Sometimes it is just a compile time switch, that links in systemd, and does nothing, or just changes the log output.
But the default in debian is to use the systemd dependancy. The default in devuan is to remove the dependancy.
This is getting harder because things are getting absorbed into the systemd eco-sphere.
On a mildly related note, of feature creep. I upgraded iptables due to a security issue on a slackware server. After a reboot I had no firewall, and log file piling up (seriously cramping my cps virtual hd). After a brief check iptables now includes a dependancy on dbus so wouldn't run (but being slackware installed cleanly), why? So some gawdawful gui can interact with it probably, or more likely systemd itself now that dbus is included in it. There was no detail about this in the docs or the changelog, so I e-mailed slackware security about it. My server has never and does not require dbus. But the default is to require it now.....
The Leave argument that our own court can be overruled by EU court in exchange for tariff free trade (note this is not the same as free trade) is demonstrated in this case. A large portion of the remain campaign tried to gloss over this fact and are still trying to state that it is not so. Which is fine as long as you always agree with the EU Parliament.
Your first three pioints do not indicate that "it doesn't work". Of course it doesn't work when trying to catch people who don't use the internet in those cases.
That does not mean it would not work or be of benefit to agencies once they have identified a suspect being affiliated with pre-known suspects would be able to look up the historical data and link to possible other pre-known suspects. The problem lies in guilt by association.
This. No network stack if you don't load it. No problem. Even better for hardware hacking on a pc/104 board. Get a connector to matrix board solder components. And prototype with no complications. It's a win win.
The trouble always was that some partners were more equal than others. Anyone who thought the euro was not the artificially weakened Deutsche Mark fell for the propaganda. The U.K. Has been an unwilling member BECAUSE the population were taken in under false pretences and successive pm's have signed up for more political union without a referendum, and therefore no choice, since no major party put leaving in Their manifesto. Gordon brown even snuck in the back door before signing a treaty (Lisbon) in a failed attempt to hide from the media. The first chance the public get a vote, and they vote out. Does that not tell you something?
What it tells me is that Europe was never about democracy....
But the euro has also fallen. The ftse 100 has dropped 5% yet the cac40 Dax and euro stocks have fallen more. Europe needed the uk in the club. Yet they would never accept British terms of trade such as including financial transactions within the free trade agreement. It's up to Europe to put its house in order. It's a shame that one one of the big three had to leave before the eu would do what is needed.
Which rules did the uk sign up to that they did not follow through? U.K. Law is extremely literal to the law and European regs are followed here more strictly than over the rest of Europe.
U.K. Has had doubts over the European project from the day it signed up. 43 years later they are given another choice and they choose to leave.
It is Europe who have massively benefited from uk membership. A member state leaving was always a risk. The eu bueracracy was too arrogant and is now paying the price.
Germany also benefits massively from cheap European workers. And also benefitted massively from loans it made to Southern Europe to buy back its own products. Somehow the media have managed to make it look like the uk has an open door policy but hate all immigrants. Far from the truth on both counts. However the large companies and beuracracies have been in cahoots setting up a large trading block to benefit themselves. Even people in Poland Are coming to realise that they no longer own their own infrastructure any more since it has been privatised and bought out by international companies, but since it is called investment, no one notices. They benefit from international jobs but at what cost? I'm glad we are out since the Nhs was under threat from European threats including Ttipp however it now means we have to make sure the right wing in the uk don't stuff it up on their own. We have less people to blame. Being in control means our level of responsibility has increased.
Yup. There's a genealogy site with an interactive map which moves through time describing the movements and influence of people genetically. It suggested that the earliest known genes in the British Isles where of basque or Iberian descent. That the Romans and celts although culturally significant, had relatively little effect on the gene pool. It wasn't till the Engels and Vikings invasions that had much effect on the east.
My argument is that the post I was responding to accused the previous poster of sensationalising the story. My argument is that it is the facts do not contradict the theory that US policy may have changed in light of recent comments by Trump (and others). There are many political reasons for doing this.
There may also be some evidence gathered by the secret services or others indicating that this family needed to be stopped, and there might be reasons to not declare this to protect the sources.
Questioning the reasoning is not sensationalising anything.
The facts are the facts. That is my point. Take what you like and leave the rest but don't start accusing people who ask questions and would like transparency of making a drama out of nothing.
Lets hope to god Trump has no direct influence on current border control. However there may be an indirect influence.
In the UK we have a political party called UKIP it started to do well in polls but had no MP's. The government started to mention strengthening borders and greater controls on immigration to counter the threat. It happens. UKIP only scraped 1 MP out of 6 hundred. Who can say whether the governments change of tack effected the outcome of the election, but that is politics.
UKIP's leader is Nigel Farage. He is also a nutbag.
No it's not. Policy is dictated by those in power. Those in power politically position themselves to defend or undermine opposition arguments before elections one method is to occupy the political ground before the opposition does.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you. It's a question of scale though.
If I have ten invoices a month from 1 supplier and 10000 invoices a month from another then I would definitely seek to improve the flow from the larger supplier, whether it is by some published standard or rolled between us and the larger supplier.
I would not try to solve both tasks with the same solution.
If my invoice load is 1 invoice each from 10000 suppliers the problem is different and I would be encouraging them to use either our system or again some published standard but be aware that they may refuse.
My point was if the companies can't do this at all if they no longer have the skills to modify the systems.
It would require to systems staff of both companies to have a ten minute chat to work out suitable format that can be emailed or uploaded to the other and then parsed into the accounting system.
I doubt this happens very much because the amount of people who have understanding or control of the systems to the extent required is limited, especially since the push to the cloud with access via api and or third parties only and simplified user interfaces which no longer required a systems team. Ie outsourcing made the process complex, inflexible and cheaper.
Whoops.
About 25% of the time:
I log in to my Win10Pro laptop.
I go to my network location in explorer to open my sharepoint files.
I get \\blahdeblah@SSL\DavWWWRoot\Docs is not accessible blah blah.
I tut and press OK.
I open internet explorer and log in to sharepoint then close sharepoint
Go back to explorer stab F5 and it lists the files.
It's something to do with renewing the credentials.
This only works on IExplorer NOT edge.
So essentially you cannot use Windows Explorer to open files on sharepoint unless you occasionally log in using Internet Explorer.
It's been like that for years.
I think won win7 pro you have to use iexplorer every single time, to access sharepoint under explorer.
Why would I want to use sharepoint using the explorer (AKA filenamaneger?). So I can move folders and do bulk copies (yes it is pretty slow) easily without struggling through the mess of javascript context menu's.
I have read a lot of popular science and it often seems to gloss over a lot of issues. So I can't really comment till I've done some more reading.
But the cat in the box experiment drew me to some conclusions, and raised a lot of questions.
A summary of my thoughts (which can be thought to be completely wrong by those in the know, I am in my own belief box at the moment): follow.
For something to be as big as a cat described entirely by a quantum wave form, the box must be impenetrable to everything being emitted from inside. ie the box itself must undergo no measurable transformation what ever happens inside the box. This would have to include gravity as well if any quantum gravity theory would emit information depending on the result of the first nuclear breakdown.
So if two impenetrable boxes somehow become combined lets pick another word "entangled" then the wave form to a "wave form calculator" (not an observer yet) would now need to cover both internal states of the boxes.
And you are now back with the one box scenario (though in the case in the article there are now two observers).
However there always seems to be some confusion or glossing over what an observer actually is. It could be a particle or some people even seem to suggest that it needs a conciosuness, but I think that is a bit of a stretch. I consider an observer to be anything that is instantaneously interacting with an object described by a wave form from it's point of view, as soon as it does this it has become part of the wave form from another external observer. But it now has special knowledge of the internal state of the wave form. Effectively it has "climbed in the box".
On a cosmic scale this seems to indicate that the parts of the universe that are beyond where light can travel from by now (due to expansion of the universe) are in one massive wave form, Until a single photon leaks out to give information about a past state of the wave form. The wave form collapses and a new wave form is born.
If there really is a dispute about what is in the box after two observers have measured it, then there really is something weird going on, as it would have to mean that quantum entanglement is partially broken, which would then solve the a paradox as the two boxes would appear to have but never entirely entangled themselves.
No doubt the many worlds interpretation may say that the combined boxes are from two "different worlds" so that they can give inconsistent results when individually measured.
My 2 pence worth. But I know I am wrong about a lot of the details here.
Hi tried it himself with a guy asking him questions. His maths ability went down the pan but he didn't even notice. 'i thought I was doing rather well ' he said afterwards (quoting from memory). He was very close to death and would have died (since he didn't know what was happening dispite being fully aware of what they were doing beforehand) had they not put an oxygen mask over hus face.
As is often the case your doing it wrong.
if you are having problems with Perl being updated when your server updates you are probably using the Perl that was installed as part of your system to run your app.
Perlbrew now makes it simple to run an independent Perl for a single user/service that only updates when you tell it to.
What you describe is no different than if your app uses a c runtime library that is over written by the system during an update.
Seeing as sysvinit was effectively banned in debian (you could use the sysvinit compatability stuff of systemd but you still got systemd on the system, some things worked cleanly and somethings didn't).
Devuan IS providing the init freedom, by allowing the choice that was removed by debian packagers.
Going forward Devuan will not package software in a way that restricts init choice. Other inits and similair supervisor software can be installed. There are two ways for Devuan to supply a systemd init package:
1) Use debians systemd packages and try to cludge them to work with all the software that is not aware of systemd. But seeing as the other software debian packages all assume systemd is present, then constant monitoring of the requirements of systemd on those packages to work properlym would need to be maintained.
2) Completely fork the debian systemd so that it can installed cleanly and removed cleanly.
Both would require a huge effort and that is not the motivation of Devuan (that motivation would be use Systemd but package and adapt it so that it can be dropped in and pulled out as a package or set of packages without disturbing all other software)..
Seeing is the initial motivation was to create a clean upgrade path without systemd (from wheezy) or side-grade path without systemd ( from Jessie). They have achieved this. Thus guaranteeing some choice of init for debian users in wheezy and jessie. A choice that can not easily be made when continuing to use debian.
How closely Devuan is able to follow debian in the future depends how tightly integrated Debian becomes with systemd going forward. That is not in Devuan's control.
If you want Debian and Systemd use Debian. IF you want debian-like system without systemd you have a choice to use Devuan. If you want something else choose something else.
It's not quite as simple as "so much for init freedom then"
But the point is you are relying on that library truely doing nothing for evermore across upgrade after upgrade, until the day comes where libsystemd0 or whatever it is called depends itself on the systemd library, boom next upgrade you have systemd.
This happened a few times during devuan developement with reports from the alpha releases (and earlier) of 'i've used devuan sources, upgraded package such and such which has nothing to do with init and ended up with systemd again'
One of these was just due to the package including a service file for systemd but not including any calls to systemd, it therefore required systemd, for that one file to be interpreted, which was not used if systemd wasn't installed, but you ended up with systemd init as a result. It is abuse of the dependancy system, and lazy compiling of the upstream sources. The talk that you could use debian with sysvinit was nonsense when people actually tried.
Sometimes the answer was simple:
A compile time switch removed the dependancy on the 'do nothing' library. That in some cases was the only change from debian package to a devuan package. No need to change or patch the source itself.
In other cases there were actual uses of systemd api that was not necessary for the software to actually run so further source changes needed to be made to convert from a debian package to a devuan package.
Other packages (gnome et al). have been so integrated with systemd that it would be huge task to unpick.
'Well tested code' is not equal to 'used a lot cause it's there code'.
Dbus was not required for iptables to function. It is the package maintainers that make the decision that it should be included, but it is an unnecessary dependancy, UNLESS you want to use dbus to access iptables. i.e. feature creap, at the package level.
I have used iptables from the command line for donkeys years (since ipchains). And it worked. I never once thought, 'I know, I want to modify my iptables by installing X and gnome and some firewall editing GUI, to save a config file in some unknown format , so that some other service daemon can read my config file at boot and then use dbus to set the iptables rules'.
I can set the rules in an init file calling the commands directly and it's done.
If you read the devuan mailing list, when the question of systemd installation gets brought up (usually in a half baked attempt to troll) the response is "if you want systemd on devuan, install debian".
If the same counter question was brought up on debian mailing lists "can I keep sysvinit on debian". The answer was some variation of "you can (but things won't work properley) you'll get systemd anyway.We voted decision made. Sysvinit is dead etc. etc. "
The truth is that as devuan developers have found, that an awful lot of the tangle of systemd dependancies in software are there for no good reason. Sometimes it is just a compile time switch, that links in systemd, and does nothing, or just changes the log output.
But the default in debian is to use the systemd dependancy.
The default in devuan is to remove the dependancy.
This is getting harder because things are getting absorbed into the systemd eco-sphere.
On a mildly related note, of feature creep. I upgraded iptables due to a security issue on a slackware server. After a reboot I had no firewall, and log file piling up (seriously cramping my cps virtual hd). After a brief check iptables now includes a dependancy on dbus so wouldn't run (but being slackware installed cleanly), why? So some gawdawful gui can interact with it probably, or more likely systemd itself now that dbus is included in it. There was no detail about this in the docs or the changelog, so I e-mailed slackware security about it. My server has never and does not require dbus. But the default is to require it now.....
I'm sorry. Your wrong here.
The Leave argument that our own court can be overruled by EU court in exchange for tariff free trade (note this is not the same as free trade) is demonstrated in this case.
A large portion of the remain campaign tried to gloss over this fact and are still trying to state that it is not so.
Which is fine as long as you always agree with the EU Parliament.
Your first three pioints do not indicate that "it doesn't work".
Of course it doesn't work when trying to catch people who don't use the internet in those cases.
That does not mean it would not work or be of benefit to agencies once they have identified a suspect being affiliated with pre-known suspects would be able to look up the historical data and link to possible other pre-known suspects. The problem lies in guilt by association.
I generally agree with your other points however.
How do they define "compromised"?
Windows 10?
I don't think your use cases are the same as most other consistent linux users, therefore you should have been modded irrelevant.
"Yay for privacy. We don't care about where you come from, and now you don't even have to tell anyone that you're using Debian"
but systemd reports back to those who Do care!
So everyones a winner baby!
Ducking.....
This.
No network stack if you don't load it. No problem.
Even better for hardware hacking on a pc/104 board. Get a connector to matrix board solder components. And prototype with no complications. It's a win win.
The trouble always was that some partners were more equal than others. Anyone who thought the euro was not the artificially weakened Deutsche Mark fell for the propaganda. The U.K. Has been an unwilling member BECAUSE the population were taken in under false pretences and successive pm's have signed up for more political union without a referendum, and therefore no choice, since no major party put leaving in Their manifesto. Gordon brown even snuck in the back door before signing a treaty (Lisbon) in a failed attempt to hide from the media. The first chance the public get a vote, and they vote out. Does that not tell you something?
What it tells me is that Europe was never about democracy....
But the euro has also fallen. The ftse 100 has dropped 5% yet the cac40 Dax and euro stocks have fallen more. Europe needed the uk in the club. Yet they would never accept British terms of trade such as including financial transactions within the free trade agreement. It's up to Europe to put its house in order. It's a shame that one one of the big three had to leave before the eu would do what is needed.
Which rules did the uk sign up to that they did not follow through?
U.K. Law is extremely literal to the law and European regs are followed here more strictly than over the rest of Europe.
U.K. Has had doubts over the European project from the day it signed up. 43 years later they are given another choice and they choose to leave.
It is Europe who have massively benefited from uk membership. A member state leaving was always a risk. The eu bueracracy was too arrogant and is now paying the price.
Germany also benefits massively from cheap European workers. And also benefitted massively from loans it made to Southern Europe to buy back its own products. Somehow the media have managed to make it look like the uk has an open door policy but hate all immigrants. Far from the truth on both counts. However the large companies and beuracracies have been in cahoots setting up a large trading block to benefit themselves. Even people in Poland Are coming to realise that they no longer own their own infrastructure any more since it has been privatised and bought out by international companies, but since it is called investment, no one notices. They benefit from international jobs but at what cost? I'm glad we are out since the Nhs was under threat from European threats including Ttipp however it now means we have to make sure the right wing in the uk don't stuff it up on their own. We have less people to blame. Being in control means our level of responsibility has increased.
Wrong. If it is hollow then the volume inside it increases massively whilst the skin area supporting structure increases relatively slowly.
It would probably be hollow. A space frame with a skin. A solid mountain would require too much material.
Yup. There's a genealogy site with an interactive map which moves through time describing the movements and influence of people genetically. It suggested that the earliest known genes in the British Isles where of basque or Iberian descent. That the Romans and celts although culturally significant, had relatively little effect on the gene pool. It wasn't till the Engels and Vikings invasions that had much effect on the east.
My argument is that the post I was responding to accused the previous poster of sensationalising the story. My argument is that it is the facts do not contradict the theory that US policy may have changed in light of recent comments by Trump (and others). There are many political reasons for doing this.
There may also be some evidence gathered by the secret services or others indicating that this family needed to be stopped, and there might be reasons to not declare this to protect the sources.
Questioning the reasoning is not sensationalising anything.
The facts are the facts. That is my point. Take what you like and leave the rest but don't start accusing people who ask questions and would like transparency of making a drama out of nothing.
Lets hope to god Trump has no direct influence on current border control. However there may be an indirect influence.
In the UK we have a political party called UKIP it started to do well in polls but had no MP's. The government started to mention strengthening borders and greater controls on immigration to counter the threat. It happens. UKIP only scraped 1 MP out of 6 hundred. Who can say whether the governments change of tack effected the outcome of the election, but that is politics.
UKIP's leader is Nigel Farage. He is also a nutbag.
You don't understand politics at all.
No it's not. Policy is dictated by those in power. Those in power politically position themselves to defend or undermine opposition arguments before elections one method is to occupy the political ground before the opposition does.