I still think the reason I lost that interview is I embarrassed my interviewer. They were migrating a Windows-based platform to Linux, yet I couldn't for the life of me see why. It can't have been to save licensing costs, those had already been paid for. Unlikely to be because the platform was obsolete, it was only about 18 months old. Unlikely to be security, this was long after Microsoft had audited IIS and made it substantially more secure; if there were any issues it'd be with the application rather than the web server.
So - coming from a background where having a rough idea of business purpose is generally considered a Good Thing - I asked what the business reason for this was. You could see him thinking "shit.. that's a damn good question, I don't know the answer and I'm in charge of the team that's setting up the servers to make it happen!"
I've interviewed at Nokia for a job in a team that was doing services; one of the questions was "how do you feel working in a company where projects get chopped and changed and people moved around very regularly?".
Reading between the lines, I suspect what was meant was "This huge company used to have a dominant position. They've been losing dominance for years, which is a bit of a problem if you're trying to keep shareholders happy , and as a result management have been panicking - they'll come up with an idea, get a team on it then drop it like a hot potato 6 months later in order to chase the Next Big Thing.
Remember what your email was like before effective spam filtering?
To my mind, it would appear that setting up a website which is susceptible to the same problem as email regarding spam is not a good thing. Inevitably, that means some sort of filtering - whether it's natural filtering effected by charging everyone for the privilege of selling their items or some sort of algorithm looking for spam and automatically discarding it.
I have discovered a remarkably effective solution to annoying phone menus.
I can type up a reasonably professional looking letter in about 5-8 minutes. 10 if it's a complicated issue. It takes me another 3-4 minutes to walk to the letterbox and 3-4 minutes to walk back.
While I am doing this, I do not have to sit listening to Greensleeves played by a six year old with a stylophone.
IOW, I can get a letter written, printed, stamped and posted in less time than I'm likely to spend on hold with many of these organisations with complicated phone systems. And with considerably fewer grey hairs.
It's unusual to have to deal with something so urgently that it can't wait a few days, and most companies will put a reasonably smart team on to answering letters - frequently people with more pull, certainly people who are more likely to give you an intelligent answer or route your letter to someone who can. Email doesn't seem to have the same effect.
I can't quite believe I'm saying this in these days where we can send enormous quantities of information to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds, but letter writing is the way forward.
Having known many engineers and "inventors" in my lifetime, including some who sought protection through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, not a single one of them ever received in royalties any money more than the legal costs they spent trying to get the patent in the first place, assuming they got anything at all in the first place
That's not a problem with the patents system, that's a problem with the entire legal system - it's set up to provide a framework in which disputes can be fairly settled, and in some cases (particularly intellectual property law) to essentially invent disputes and a means of settling them in order to benefit society.
That's the theory, at any rate. And on the face of it, it sounds perfectly reasonable.
The problem is that the system is utterly byzantine and for most people to have a hope of negotiating through it they have to spend a fortune on hiring experts. So much so that for many, the system is very intimidating. Things like small claims courts go some way to alleviating this, but (depending on where you live) they generally have very tight limits on what you can do through them.
Thing is, I don't think the system as a whole recognises this - or if it does, it doesn't recognise it as being a problem.
I don't own an IT company but I wouldn't want to work with this guy. Very childish.
I do, though it's only me at the moment. And I agree, he lost any hope of being employed in IT again the moment he installed a keylogger.
Hacking in inherently unprovable unless you actively bug a persons house and computer and can show he manned the keyboard and can be video recorded tying the things they accused him of doing. I say this because even I would be smart enough to rig a persons computer to do things in the background while he was physically at the computer.
Not really - you've got to bear in mind that in legal terms, "prove" means "beyond reasonable doubt". Not "beyond all shadow of a doubt", otherwise nobody would ever be convicted of anything.
In a case with a disgruntled IT employee, you've got means, motive and opportunity in one handy package. IANAL, but I imagine that'd be enough to subpoena any records his ISP may keep (searching for "keylogger"?) and to get a warrant to take any computer equipment he has. Even with a VPN, he's still got to ensure that powerpoint presentation never winds up either swapped out or a copy made in a temporary file locally - I suppose a remote desktop session reduces the risk associated with that but then you've got to disable swap to ensure the screen image never winds up in your swapfile.
Even if he did cover his tracks properly, if he talks to the police he's in with a very good chance of dropping himself in it.
There already is such a system in the UK, and it went through with so little fanfare that very few people know about it.
The organisation looking after it is the Internet Watch Foundation, and it deals mainly with child porn. The way the block works is that they manage a blacklist of pages on sites. When you try visiting a site on the blacklist, your browser session is invisibly proxied; when you try to download the offending file it's blocked.
What's particularly disingenuous is how the block appears to you as a customer. Most ISPs simply terminate the browser connection, leaving you assuming that there's something wrong with the site in question. There seems to be some means for ISPs choosing how the block appears, because at least one has the good manners to flash up a message explaining what's going on.
I am not an RIAA lawyer but I suspect that their argument will go like this: In order for iTunes Music Match to find the song it had to be on your disk. In order for it to be on your disk you made a copy of the song without the rights to do so.
No.
In order for it to be on my disk, I made a copy. That's all you know. How that copy came to be, you have no idea.
Will iTunes even place a note against songs that it didn't rip itself?
(In any case, I can't see the RIAA subpoenaing Apple for iCloud information. They'd seriously piss off the biggest music retailer in the world.)
Google Chrome generally does not assume that you love the application so much you want to see it covering as much of the screen as possible; Skype 5 does.
Nobody in their right mind is going to declare war on a country that owes them a fortune - if they lose, there's a good chance they'll have to write off the debt. If they win, they'll have to rebuild the country that's just been destroyed.
Perhaps UK follows something similar to the Indian model and not the US model?
Sounds like it. You place your order through the supermarket website, it is passed to your local delivery branch (which is a perfectly normal supermarket that has a few refrigerated vans) which fills the order.
If your supermarket of choice doesn't have a delivery branch within range of your address (increasingly rare), then they won't take the order.
This makes rolling out such a system very easy. The branches already had computers that connected to head office; all they need is:
Some mechanism to ensure the store is notified of incoming orders.
A number of refrigerated vans & drivers.
Someone to pick up the incoming orders and walk around the store picking items off the shelf to fill the orders.
(come on, the/. CSS doesn't put bullet points on unordered lists?!)
And your university is broadly doing the right thing. (Though it's wholly unnecessary to yank archives unless they contain executables, any self-respecting mail scanner will be able to read more-or-less any archival format).
Scanning for "known-bad" things stopped being a good idea years ago. Frankly, unless you take a very hard line to block everything even remotely risky you are more-or-less guaranteeing a lot of clean-up work dealing with exploits. Every time something gets through, your staff can look forward to several hours of clearing up the resulting mess - and that's with a relatively small organisation.
Google have the resources to effectively crowdsource much of this, and they don't have to deal with the fallout of anything that slips the net.
What you should be doing is working with the system rather than against it - and the system should be set up to make it easy for you to do this. Services like yousendit.com are a rather more satisfactory solution for most endusers than an FTP server; I daresay a university should be able to put something similar together inhouse.
This is the difference between "raw data" and "useful information".
The data protection issue comes from getting eBay to give you a list of UK-registered users and their postal addresses. But you don't really need to do that - all you need to do is look at an ebay seller in a particular location who sells a lot and cross-check that with tax records to see if it's likely to be anyone you already know about who's doing everything by the book. If you can't find anyone, you make a test purchase to find out who they are and what their address is - this could be automated quite easily.
Once they've got this, HMRC can look up to see if you're an employee of a limited company, who they are and what their line of business is. It's reasonable to deduce that when nabsltd on eBay sells a wide range of soft furnishings but works for a software development firm, it's probably not a store representing nabsltd's employer.
By now, HMRC knows:
1. Who nabsltd is. 2. Whether or not nabsltd is selling much on eBay. 3. Whether or not this income is declared on a tax return nabsltd filled in. 4. Whether or not the eBay store is an online shopfront for an above-board real business.
And all of this can be automated fairly easily.
What I'm not so sure of is how likely it is - particularly given historical government competence in commissioning such systems.
If I was of particularly cynical mind, I would say that the banks did everything legally - albeit using a rather creative interpretation of what they could get away with - and fighting in a court of law would cost a fortune with precious little guarantee of success.
Individuals making a bit of cash on the side, OTOH, probably aren't doing everything 100% legally simply because in order to work around the system you almost invariably need an accountant who knows all the little holes in tax legislation back to front and inside out. It's not cost-effective to hire such an accountant unless you're saving tax in the tens of thousands minimum.
I reckon someone in government has looked at something like spokeo and thought to themselves "Hey... if we had a system like that where we could punch someone's name in and it'd come back telling us exactly what their house is worth, how big their mortgage is, what sort of car they drive, how much income they declared, how much they sold on ebay or gumtree or whatever - we could find every last tax dodger! Even better, if we could integrate it with the system that accepts and records people's tax return, we could churn out a report at the end of each tax year telling us exactly who to target!"
This is an announcement about an idea - which means it's a long way from being reality.
There is no way this is about catching the obvious tax cheats - those who live in a great big house with a stonking great mortgage yet have an income of £20,000 per year. We already have perfectly capable tax inspectors who can deal with that. I reckon the government has decided that lots of people are providing small supplements to their income through ebay or other classified ads and are staying under the radar because the money involved simply isn't enough to drive around in a top of the line mercedes.
But multiply the lost tax revenue across everyone who the government obviously thinks is doing this and you probably have a substantial sum.
In any case, the data is out there to figure out whether or not someone is running a lucrative business on the side - very likely with reasonable accuracy (data protection issues notwithstanding). But it's just raw data, it's a long way from being useful information - to turn it into that is going to require a reasonably sophisticated IT project.
Given the government's skill at seeing IT projects through to successful completion (and I seriously doubt it's changed much since Labour were in power - fundamentally they're all the same), I really don't think this is anything to worry about.
Certainly from my own experience with my Gran, Alzheimer's progresses in a sort of time-slice fashion. Rather than forgetting bits at a time, the victim has events where - for maybe an hour or two at a time - their short-term memory essentially disappears. They can remember who you are, but they can't remember that they put a pan on the stove for dinner and it's boiled dry. In between these events, they're perfectly lucid and you'd never know there was anything wrong.
Over time, these events become more pronounced - the period of time that the person "forgets" goes from maybe the last few minutes to the last few days, months or even years. The elderly relative may forget that their sister/brother/close friend died last week, for instance, and ask when they last spoke to their sister.
Eventually it gets so bad that they forget their own children, and regress into a sort of child-like state where they forget things like bladder and bowel control.
While all this is going on, the events go on for longer - the victim goes from occasionally forgetting small things that happened ten minutes ago through to regularly forgetting things that happened a few days ago to forgetting their own grandchildren for maybe most of the day (and having the occasional moment where they seem to remember them) to needing care more-or-less full time because they can't remember control of bodily functions or feed and clothe themselves.
Their loved ones get a ringside seat watching all this going on, and it's horrific. For many people, it's a relief to finally bury relatives who had alzheimer's because they said goodbye to the person years ago.
Thing is, if you're in the early stages of the condition and you notice it yourself (and everyone who's ever had a relative with Alzheimer's has asked themselves "how aware of their condition are they?"), you are most certainly compos mentis enough to make a decision like this. The tough bit is that for most assisted suicide you need to be compos mentis enough to give consent at the actual time you end it all - which inevitably means that you have to commit suicide rather earlier than you'd like lest you deteriorate to the point where you can no longer give this consent.
Firstly, it was on the BBC. So they don't take advertiser's money.
Secondly, the BBC arguably has an obligation to raise important issues rather than pretend they don't exist.
Thirdly, the man who committed suicide must have agreed to all this. So while I concede it's a little ghoulish to film it, it is a hugely important issue and he (and his family) should be respected for having the balls to say "Not only am I ending my life in as dignified a fashion as possible, I'm prepared to bring television cameras in to raise the wider issue".
If I were in his situation, I'd do about the same thing. I'd fill out the forms to be carried out in a few months. That way if he stopped progressing he could just do whatever, but if he kept progressing he may not be lucid so they could do their thing.
Not as simple as that. AIUI, you have to be able to get there under your own steam and take the drugs (or at least ask for them to be administered) in the full understanding of what they are.
So you can't leave instructions with a relative to cart you off when you get to the point that you're lucid for maybe an hour a day. You more-or-less have to go over there earlier than you'd otherwise like.
(ICBW, mercifully it's not something I've ever had to look into in great detail).
Yet despite all that, I note that by the time import duty and VAT is accounted for (which would be the case no matter what the consumer legislation said), the days of manufacturers assuming an exchange rate of US$1 = £1 are long gone.
With unlimited money I'd expect every business to secure their systems at the maximum level, but what level can we accept that will address the likely threat without bankrupting the small business owner? Do they really need to take a step back and use self-contained credit card machines?
If my understanding of the SAQ for PCI section C-vt is correct, you may as well because the easiest way to comply is to dedicate a PC for use as the virtual terminal and put that PC on a separate network segment firewalled off from everything else.
You can put together all the fancy features you like. I don't care what they are, what is important is what the business can benefit from.
So you need to do two things:
1. Don't speak to us. Speak to the people in your company who are driving the business.
2. Stop thinking in terms of "clever things I can do with the server" and start thinking in terms of "things I can do that offer a tangible benefit to the business". 99 times out of 100, those things will fall into one of four categories:
a. Bring money in - either directly or indirectly. b. Save money. c. Reduce risk. d. Make life easier for someone else in the business.
B and C are relatively easy. A is seldom found in IT; D often requires people to change the way they work. Getting people to change the way they work is generally very difficult, so unless the benefit is so absolutely vast that even the most deluded, stuck-in-the-mud person would see huge benefits to it before you've even finished explaining your idea, you may well be wasting your time. If you have an idea that offers only small benefits but requires significant changes to how people work, forget it.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't surprise me.
I still think the reason I lost that interview is I embarrassed my interviewer. They were migrating a Windows-based platform to Linux, yet I couldn't for the life of me see why. It can't have been to save licensing costs, those had already been paid for. Unlikely to be because the platform was obsolete, it was only about 18 months old. Unlikely to be security, this was long after Microsoft had audited IIS and made it substantially more secure; if there were any issues it'd be with the application rather than the web server.
So - coming from a background where having a rough idea of business purpose is generally considered a Good Thing - I asked what the business reason for this was. You could see him thinking "shit.. that's a damn good question, I don't know the answer and I'm in charge of the team that's setting up the servers to make it happen!"
It isn't just phone development.
I've interviewed at Nokia for a job in a team that was doing services; one of the questions was "how do you feel working in a company where projects get chopped and changed and people moved around very regularly?".
Reading between the lines, I suspect what was meant was "This huge company used to have a dominant position. They've been losing dominance for years, which is a bit of a problem if you're trying to keep shareholders happy , and as a result management have been panicking - they'll come up with an idea, get a team on it then drop it like a hot potato 6 months later in order to chase the Next Big Thing.
Remember what your email was like before effective spam filtering?
To my mind, it would appear that setting up a website which is susceptible to the same problem as email regarding spam is not a good thing. Inevitably, that means some sort of filtering - whether it's natural filtering effected by charging everyone for the privilege of selling their items or some sort of algorithm looking for spam and automatically discarding it.
I have discovered a remarkably effective solution to annoying phone menus.
I can type up a reasonably professional looking letter in about 5-8 minutes. 10 if it's a complicated issue. It takes me another 3-4 minutes to walk to the letterbox and 3-4 minutes to walk back.
While I am doing this, I do not have to sit listening to Greensleeves played by a six year old with a stylophone.
IOW, I can get a letter written, printed, stamped and posted in less time than I'm likely to spend on hold with many of these organisations with complicated phone systems. And with considerably fewer grey hairs.
It's unusual to have to deal with something so urgently that it can't wait a few days, and most companies will put a reasonably smart team on to answering letters - frequently people with more pull, certainly people who are more likely to give you an intelligent answer or route your letter to someone who can. Email doesn't seem to have the same effect.
I can't quite believe I'm saying this in these days where we can send enormous quantities of information to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds, but letter writing is the way forward.
Having known many engineers and "inventors" in my lifetime, including some who sought protection through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, not a single one of them ever received in royalties any money more than the legal costs they spent trying to get the patent in the first place, assuming they got anything at all in the first place
That's not a problem with the patents system, that's a problem with the entire legal system - it's set up to provide a framework in which disputes can be fairly settled, and in some cases (particularly intellectual property law) to essentially invent disputes and a means of settling them in order to benefit society.
That's the theory, at any rate. And on the face of it, it sounds perfectly reasonable.
The problem is that the system is utterly byzantine and for most people to have a hope of negotiating through it they have to spend a fortune on hiring experts. So much so that for many, the system is very intimidating. Things like small claims courts go some way to alleviating this, but (depending on where you live) they generally have very tight limits on what you can do through them.
Thing is, I don't think the system as a whole recognises this - or if it does, it doesn't recognise it as being a problem.
I don't own an IT company but I wouldn't want to work with this guy. Very childish.
I do, though it's only me at the moment. And I agree, he lost any hope of being employed in IT again the moment he installed a keylogger.
Hacking in inherently unprovable unless you actively bug a persons house and computer and can show he manned the keyboard and can be video recorded tying the things they accused him of doing. I say this because even I would be smart enough to rig a persons computer to do things in the background while he was physically at the computer.
Not really - you've got to bear in mind that in legal terms, "prove" means "beyond reasonable doubt". Not "beyond all shadow of a doubt", otherwise nobody would ever be convicted of anything.
In a case with a disgruntled IT employee, you've got means, motive and opportunity in one handy package. IANAL, but I imagine that'd be enough to subpoena any records his ISP may keep (searching for "keylogger"?) and to get a warrant to take any computer equipment he has. Even with a VPN, he's still got to ensure that powerpoint presentation never winds up either swapped out or a copy made in a temporary file locally - I suppose a remote desktop session reduces the risk associated with that but then you've got to disable swap to ensure the screen image never winds up in your swapfile.
Even if he did cover his tracks properly, if he talks to the police he's in with a very good chance of dropping himself in it.
There already is such a system in the UK, and it went through with so little fanfare that very few people know about it.
The organisation looking after it is the Internet Watch Foundation, and it deals mainly with child porn. The way the block works is that they manage a blacklist of pages on sites. When you try visiting a site on the blacklist, your browser session is invisibly proxied; when you try to download the offending file it's blocked.
What's particularly disingenuous is how the block appears to you as a customer. Most ISPs simply terminate the browser connection, leaving you assuming that there's something wrong with the site in question. There seems to be some means for ISPs choosing how the block appears, because at least one has the good manners to flash up a message explaining what's going on.
I am not an RIAA lawyer but I suspect that their argument will go like this: In order for iTunes Music Match to find the song it had to be on your disk. In order for it to be on your disk you made a copy of the song without the rights to do so.
No.
In order for it to be on my disk, I made a copy. That's all you know. How that copy came to be, you have no idea.
Will iTunes even place a note against songs that it didn't rip itself?
(In any case, I can't see the RIAA subpoenaing Apple for iCloud information. They'd seriously piss off the biggest music retailer in the world.)
I was rather under the impression that possession of copyrighted works isn't the illegal bit. It's distribution that's the illegal bit.
As iCloud won't provide any evidence of distribution, I'm not sure how useful the information will be.
Google Chrome generally does not assume that you love the application so much you want to see it covering as much of the screen as possible; Skype 5 does.
Nobody in their right mind is going to declare war on a country that owes them a fortune - if they lose, there's a good chance they'll have to write off the debt. If they win, they'll have to rebuild the country that's just been destroyed.
Perhaps UK follows something similar to the Indian model and not the US model?
Sounds like it. You place your order through the supermarket website, it is passed to your local delivery branch (which is a perfectly normal supermarket that has a few refrigerated vans) which fills the order.
If your supermarket of choice doesn't have a delivery branch within range of your address (increasingly rare), then they won't take the order.
This makes rolling out such a system very easy. The branches already had computers that connected to head office; all they need is:
(come on, the /. CSS doesn't put bullet points on unordered lists?!)
And your university is broadly doing the right thing. (Though it's wholly unnecessary to yank archives unless they contain executables, any self-respecting mail scanner will be able to read more-or-less any archival format).
Scanning for "known-bad" things stopped being a good idea years ago. Frankly, unless you take a very hard line to block everything even remotely risky you are more-or-less guaranteeing a lot of clean-up work dealing with exploits. Every time something gets through, your staff can look forward to several hours of clearing up the resulting mess - and that's with a relatively small organisation.
Google have the resources to effectively crowdsource much of this, and they don't have to deal with the fallout of anything that slips the net.
What you should be doing is working with the system rather than against it - and the system should be set up to make it easy for you to do this. Services like yousendit.com are a rather more satisfactory solution for most endusers than an FTP server; I daresay a university should be able to put something similar together inhouse.
Stuff the MUA, the MTA should be stripping executables - and it should be doing so using the file signature, not the extension.
This is the difference between "raw data" and "useful information".
The data protection issue comes from getting eBay to give you a list of UK-registered users and their postal addresses. But you don't really need to do that - all you need to do is look at an ebay seller in a particular location who sells a lot and cross-check that with tax records to see if it's likely to be anyone you already know about who's doing everything by the book. If you can't find anyone, you make a test purchase to find out who they are and what their address is - this could be automated quite easily.
Once they've got this, HMRC can look up to see if you're an employee of a limited company, who they are and what their line of business is. It's reasonable to deduce that when nabsltd on eBay sells a wide range of soft furnishings but works for a software development firm, it's probably not a store representing nabsltd's employer.
By now, HMRC knows:
1. Who nabsltd is.
2. Whether or not nabsltd is selling much on eBay.
3. Whether or not this income is declared on a tax return nabsltd filled in.
4. Whether or not the eBay store is an online shopfront for an above-board real business.
And all of this can be automated fairly easily.
What I'm not so sure of is how likely it is - particularly given historical government competence in commissioning such systems.
If I was of particularly cynical mind, I would say that the banks did everything legally - albeit using a rather creative interpretation of what they could get away with - and fighting in a court of law would cost a fortune with precious little guarantee of success.
Individuals making a bit of cash on the side, OTOH, probably aren't doing everything 100% legally simply because in order to work around the system you almost invariably need an accountant who knows all the little holes in tax legislation back to front and inside out. It's not cost-effective to hire such an accountant unless you're saving tax in the tens of thousands minimum.
I reckon someone in government has looked at something like spokeo and thought to themselves "Hey... if we had a system like that where we could punch someone's name in and it'd come back telling us exactly what their house is worth, how big their mortgage is, what sort of car they drive, how much income they declared, how much they sold on ebay or gumtree or whatever - we could find every last tax dodger! Even better, if we could integrate it with the system that accepts and records people's tax return, we could churn out a report at the end of each tax year telling us exactly who to target!"
This is an announcement about an idea - which means it's a long way from being reality.
There is no way this is about catching the obvious tax cheats - those who live in a great big house with a stonking great mortgage yet have an income of £20,000 per year. We already have perfectly capable tax inspectors who can deal with that. I reckon the government has decided that lots of people are providing small supplements to their income through ebay or other classified ads and are staying under the radar because the money involved simply isn't enough to drive around in a top of the line mercedes.
But multiply the lost tax revenue across everyone who the government obviously thinks is doing this and you probably have a substantial sum.
In any case, the data is out there to figure out whether or not someone is running a lucrative business on the side - very likely with reasonable accuracy (data protection issues notwithstanding). But it's just raw data, it's a long way from being useful information - to turn it into that is going to require a reasonably sophisticated IT project.
Given the government's skill at seeing IT projects through to successful completion (and I seriously doubt it's changed much since Labour were in power - fundamentally they're all the same), I really don't think this is anything to worry about.
Depending on the form, they'd be wrong.
Certainly from my own experience with my Gran, Alzheimer's progresses in a sort of time-slice fashion. Rather than forgetting bits at a time, the victim has events where - for maybe an hour or two at a time - their short-term memory essentially disappears. They can remember who you are, but they can't remember that they put a pan on the stove for dinner and it's boiled dry. In between these events, they're perfectly lucid and you'd never know there was anything wrong.
Over time, these events become more pronounced - the period of time that the person "forgets" goes from maybe the last few minutes to the last few days, months or even years. The elderly relative may forget that their sister/brother/close friend died last week, for instance, and ask when they last spoke to their sister.
Eventually it gets so bad that they forget their own children, and regress into a sort of child-like state where they forget things like bladder and bowel control.
While all this is going on, the events go on for longer - the victim goes from occasionally forgetting small things that happened ten minutes ago through to regularly forgetting things that happened a few days ago to forgetting their own grandchildren for maybe most of the day (and having the occasional moment where they seem to remember them) to needing care more-or-less full time because they can't remember control of bodily functions or feed and clothe themselves.
Their loved ones get a ringside seat watching all this going on, and it's horrific. For many people, it's a relief to finally bury relatives who had alzheimer's because they said goodbye to the person years ago.
Thing is, if you're in the early stages of the condition and you notice it yourself (and everyone who's ever had a relative with Alzheimer's has asked themselves "how aware of their condition are they?"), you are most certainly compos mentis enough to make a decision like this. The tough bit is that for most assisted suicide you need to be compos mentis enough to give consent at the actual time you end it all - which inevitably means that you have to commit suicide rather earlier than you'd like lest you deteriorate to the point where you can no longer give this consent.
My grandmother was in the exact same position about ten years ago.
It's absolutely shitty to watch a close relative die mentally while physically they're still with you. My deepest sympathies.
Firstly, it was on the BBC. So they don't take advertiser's money.
Secondly, the BBC arguably has an obligation to raise important issues rather than pretend they don't exist.
Thirdly, the man who committed suicide must have agreed to all this. So while I concede it's a little ghoulish to film it, it is a hugely important issue and he (and his family) should be respected for having the balls to say "Not only am I ending my life in as dignified a fashion as possible, I'm prepared to bring television cameras in to raise the wider issue".
If I were in his situation, I'd do about the same thing. I'd fill out the forms to be carried out in a few months. That way if he stopped progressing he could just do whatever, but if he kept progressing he may not be lucid so they could do their thing.
Not as simple as that. AIUI, you have to be able to get there under your own steam and take the drugs (or at least ask for them to be administered) in the full understanding of what they are.
So you can't leave instructions with a relative to cart you off when you get to the point that you're lucid for maybe an hour a day. You more-or-less have to go over there earlier than you'd otherwise like.
(ICBW, mercifully it's not something I've ever had to look into in great detail).
Yet despite all that, I note that by the time import duty and VAT is accounted for (which would be the case no matter what the consumer legislation said), the days of manufacturers assuming an exchange rate of US$1 = £1 are long gone.
With unlimited money I'd expect every business to secure their systems at the maximum level, but what level can we accept that will address the likely threat without bankrupting the small business owner? Do they really need to take a step back and use self-contained credit card machines?
If my understanding of the SAQ for PCI section C-vt is correct, you may as well because the easiest way to comply is to dedicate a PC for use as the virtual terminal and put that PC on a separate network segment firewalled off from everything else.
ICBW, and I welcome any correction.
Is NTLM still in use? It's been deprecated for years - is it even enabled by default on recent versions of Windows?
And I say this as an IT guy myself.
You can put together all the fancy features you like. I don't care what they are, what is important is what the business can benefit from.
So you need to do two things:
1. Don't speak to us. Speak to the people in your company who are driving the business.
2. Stop thinking in terms of "clever things I can do with the server" and start thinking in terms of "things I can do that offer a tangible benefit to the business". 99 times out of 100, those things will fall into one of four categories:
a. Bring money in - either directly or indirectly.
b. Save money.
c. Reduce risk.
d. Make life easier for someone else in the business.
B and C are relatively easy. A is seldom found in IT; D often requires people to change the way they work. Getting people to change the way they work is generally very difficult, so unless the benefit is so absolutely vast that even the most deluded, stuck-in-the-mud person would see huge benefits to it before you've even finished explaining your idea, you may well be wasting your time. If you have an idea that offers only small benefits but requires significant changes to how people work, forget it.