281–290 of 317 posts
This doesn't seem correct: The problem is it’s not an easy dataset to get hold of, as it cost a lot of money. This is because the data has to be licensed from Royal Mail ... It seems to be talking about the National Statistics Postcode Lookup UK, which is officially published here: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/7ec10db7-c8f4-4a40-8d82-8921... It's been there from at least 2017, which is when I first came across it.…
That's not the https://www.poweredbypaf.com/product/paf/
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Yeah, but Irish posties mean you don't actually need them. You can just put stuff like this on the envelopes: Your man Henderson That boy with the glasses who is doing a PhD up here at Queen's in Belfast. Buncrana Co. Donegal Ireland https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33581277
> Irish posties mean you don't actually need them I worked as a postie for a few weeks as a Christmas job when I was at Uni a looong time ago. My GF used to write to me regularly (yes, writing letters was a thing back then), we came up a nice scheme: instead of using my actual address she wrote to a made-up non-existant address but with a valid postcode ("501 Any Street, Town, AB1 1AB" on a street with only a dozen h…
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Australia is similar, howeve, irrespective of how perfect your national addressing standards are, companies ingesting this data providing any sort of to-the-premise service still have to mash and clean and dissect it to fit whatever legacy system they are running. I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manuall…
So many Australian sites use some data source that has an old name for the building I'm in, and sites are so convinced their address databases are right that I can't do anything about it! Mildly frustrating
Our current building is one of those 56-66 style buildings. Different service use a different number (e.g. postal is 56, gas is 58). We've had a few cases where our address doesn't match so the system rejects us. And when I vote I have to read which number they have upside down!
> The upshot of the research then, is that building an accurate database is really hard. OS concludes that it would have to check the 4.2m bad addresses manually to make its PAF-less database a viable dataset that would actually be useful. The secret to the Royal Mail's success with the PAF, and the reason why only the Royal Mail can maintain the PAF, is that the Royal Mail has people walking and driving to all those…
Maybe they can use the TV detector vans used for TV license enforcement to collect the data, if they're already surveilling every single building in the country on a daily basis!
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Just to be clear: UK Parliament is sovereign. If it passes a law forcibly legalising it, the privatised Royal Mail can sue the government but would need to find an international treaty obligation to win. Even then, if Parliament flagged it and said "we're ignoring this treaty in this case" then the courts are bound to the law, not treaty obligations. If it has knock-on impacts in other areas, it's hard to say, but th…
International courts - especially US ones - have de facto overrides on UK sovereignty in many domains. If Royal Mail put the asset into a US subsidiary then US courts must protect it. Regardless of what the UK domestic authorities say, very few entities would be willing to risk violating US copyright laws.
Inside the UK, if a law explicitly counteracts, say, an international treaty, the British courts MUST find in favour of British law.
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Just to be clear: UK Parliament is sovereign. If it passes a law forcibly legalising it, the privatised Royal Mail can sue the government but would need to find an international treaty obligation to win. Even then, if Parliament flagged it and said "we're ignoring this treaty in this case" then the courts are bound to the law, not treaty obligations. If it has knock-on impacts in other areas, it's hard to say, but th…
Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR covers exactly this, so the Supreme Court (and ECtHR if it came to that) would probably find in favour of Royal Mail if this were to be done without compensation.
As I point out, this isn’t “free” because it can invite consequences from other parties. But that’s a different domain to law.
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International courts - especially US ones - have de facto overrides on UK sovereignty in many domains. If Royal Mail put the asset into a US subsidiary then US courts must protect it. Regardless of what the UK domestic authorities say, very few entities would be willing to risk violating US copyright laws.
They can try to protect it but anything inside the UK is subject to UK law and no other law. As I said, there may be practical concerns (read, consequences) for a course of action but this is separate to the domain of law. Inside the UK, if a law explicitly counteracts, say, an international treaty, the British courts MUST find in favour of British law.
This is true in theory but not in practice. If you’ve been sanctioned by the US then you won’t by able to get a bank account in the UK. Even if you’ve not violated any UK law.
The Americans can give a British bank an ultimatum between dealing in US dollars and dealing with a particular individual. Every bank will always choose the former.
Similarly anything with US assets is subject to the US court system any its interpretation of copyright. Naturally this means US companies need to obey its rules.
But also given the reach of copyright law, so do foreign companies that interact with US ones. Visa, Mastercard, Google, FedEx, and Stripe can’t do business with someone who openly violates US copyright.
So perhaps a local council using self hosted services could use nationalised data but that’s about it.
It blows my mind how many public services have been privatized in the UK. It just feels like they're selling off the shoes they're standing in. When their railways got privatized, the service didn't improve, the price just ballooned. Even in the states, the USPS has resisted privatization this far. For the love of god I hope it continues to. Protect our boys n girls in blue and tell your congressman you want postal b…
Yup. The Post Office, the railways, the water system , for heavens' sake! The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised => efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive thi…
The Post Office (shops, services, government forms, etc.) is still fully government-owned. It's the Royal Mail (delivery) that was privatised. They used to be the same company but split in two before Royal Mail was privatised.
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No. The Post Office is not a private company, it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder. It was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation in 1969. It was then changed to a public limited company in 2000. Furthermore: - Post Office Ltd owns and runs Post Office Counters Ltd which runs the post office branches. This is the company that uses Horizon (since 1999) - Royal…
> it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder. ...isn't that PR China's business-model: state-capitalism?
The rest of the UK government is capitalism on stilts, and is forever outsourcing everything to the private sector. There was a scandal when the outsourcing firm Carillion went bankrupt - we learned that the cleaners in Parliament were under four layers of subcontracting - i.e. four sets of middlemen taking a cut between the government paying for cleaning Parliament and the people who actually do the cleaning. One of those middlemen was Carillion, which had just paid £79m of dividends to investors and then collapsed with £7000m in liabilities and £29m cash. That's because capitalism is perfectly efficient, and it's not just a bunch of crooks cooking the books to appear to be perfectly efficient, right?
At least the Uk has the the defence that postcodes are 60 years old and that the legacy cruft that comes with that is part of life. Meanwhile Ireland introduced Éircodes less than 10 years ago, chose an opaque format that uses a central database that you have to pay for access to for anything more than a handful of lookups, only covers homes (so you can’t give an eircode of a park, or a walk). It’s pretty much what y…