Posts by Martin Gregorie

Re: The most expensive conspiracy theory in history

Rubbish. Are you really too blind to see that the shadow on the left foreground isn't in-line with the flagpole and clearly ends to the left of its foot, and so is nothing to do with the flag or its flagpole.

All the Apollo photos are here: go to http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html and click on "Apollo 11" in the group below the "Apollo Image Gallery" boxed header.

The photo heading the El Reg article is AS11-40-5875 on that web page - go and look at it at a decent resolution. If you look carefully enough you can see that the very narrow shadow of the flagpole goes past Aldrin's right side and extends off the right edge of the photo - its quite hard to see but its there.

The obvious shadow on the left of the picture is cast by the solar wind experiment that Aldrin had just set up. Photo AS11-40-5872 shows him setting it up.

The photo that makes all this clear is a frame from a 16mm movie camera that was left running in the LM - photo AP11FR11, which shows:

• Aldrin saluting the flag
• the flag and its shadow alongside him
• the shadow of the solar wind experiment to the right of Aldrin and the flag, half obscured by a thruster that also appears black because its in the LM shadow
• Armstrong a few metres away taking photo AS11-40-5875

Re: Not that difficult...

This is the obvious one to buy a license for - provided that it scales well (Estonia's population is only 1.3 million) - because its up and running. The NZ one is worth a look too, for the same reason and with the same caveat (4.8M population).

The problem, though, is how to get either system installed and running in the UK without letting the Home Office, GDS, Crapita etc. terminally fuck it up.

Re: Back when men were men...

.... but safety was not nearly as secondary a consideration in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs as it was for the Shuttle, where only the first launch, with just the two pilots on board, had a proper escape system - ejector seats. These were removed for all subsequent flights. Read Mike Malone's "Riding Rockets" for the full story.

Re: "The router went dark"

I don't remember Finangle having anything to do with the sort of event masterminded by Murphy or Sod.

Finangle invented the small, variable constant used by chemistry and physics undergrads to make the result of a lab experiment match the required result.

The problem is often due to 'economies' made by the cable provider. Client orders dual cables in separate ducts. Cable provider's beancounters change this to dual cables in the same duct because "its the same connectivity but 50% cheaper, so PROFIT". Never mind that they've just negated the reason for requiring dual cables. Pricks.

Or they use existing ducting because it has room in it, which can lead to very non-intuitive routing and expose a link to unexpected hazards. Example: in the early '80s I was working for the BBC in offices at Cavendish Square, programing their mainframes which were near the Goldhawk Road railway station, just west of Shepherds Bush, and had the cable cut by a digger in Acton - on the far side of Shepherd's Bush from Cavendish Square.

Re: A Couple of Questions

Never mind the TLAs - what about the companies selling these devices. Why aren't they and the NIH required to certificate the equipment as secure before it goes on sale and the vendors mandated to recall and fix or replace equipment as faults are found?

Virtually all the security warnings about this sort of equipment have been for Medtronic kit, so I wonder why. Is it because Medtronic is so big it dominates the market, or is it because everybody else cares about safety and security and they don't?

Re: How high?

Anything being flown indoors is exempt.

Apart from that, there's a general requirement not to fly remotely controlled models or drones further away than you can see them well enough to control them accurately or above 400 feet AGL. Thats naked eye or with spectacles: using binoculars etc. for extended range is forbidden.

You can also fly models or drones using a video camera on the aircraft that drives a headset or screen for the pilot in charge (PIC). This is known as First Person View (FPV). Flying this way requires an observer, alongside the PIC, who is observing the whole flight using unaided vision (apart from glases): his job is to watch for potential collisions etc because the field of view of a PIC using FPV is typically quite limited and is restricted to straight ahead of the aircraft: IOW it is inadequate for monitoring nearby traffic, which is why the observer is required.

Re: Make or Break

HP calculators were, and still are, gems even if they're unsupported now.

I have an HP 21 that I bought in 1976 that's still in daily use, though I've had to chop its battery holder open to fit new rechargeables more than once, moving from NiCd to NiMH and now hybrids.

I also have an HP28S, bought in 1990, that's in perfect nick and runs for years at a time on a set of three LR1 alkalines.

I agree with what people have said about their laser printers (I have a modern Laserjet M402dne that I'm very pleased with) and would add that their pen plotters also 'just worked' - and still would if you could find new pens for them.

Re: Shoot foot, then head

A very similar scenario was played out in the 50s and 60s when the US put a total trade embargo on China when it entered the Korean War. That embargo was in place from 1950 to 1972 and had two main effects:

• it vastly strengthened Chinese science, engineering and manufacturing capabilities
• it fostered the Sino-Soviet split
• More here:

  https://www.jstor.org/stable/44288827?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

..but its the first result that's important here.

I first heard about this when I was a student in 1966 or 1967, when one of our lecturers visited China to a chorus of abuse from local politicians and journos. On his return he gave a talk about his trip to the science faculty.

His main discovery was that the embargo had strengthened Chinese science by forcing them to be self-reliant and that, because they could no longer buy machine tools, scientific instruments and reagents from the West, they created industries to make all this stuff themselves: it was a case of doing that or doing without. I remember him saying that all the older equipment in laboratories tended to carry West German brand names but all the new kit was Chinese-made and was as good as anything in our own labs.

I think its fair to say that this provided the industrial and scientific base that the current Chinese export industry is built on, with the Sino-Soviet split having a similar effect on their space, nuclear and aviation industries.

If there is a message in this for Trump, its that his current tariff war is more likely to strengthen China than to weaken it. American industry is likely to find itself short of everything they've offshored production for while the US consumer pays for the increased tariffs with higher retail prices. IOW, a tariff is only beneficial to the state imposing it if the goods it covers are NOT imported from the targetted sources.

Re: Far Side of the Moon

If the space junk, including Musk's twelve thousand LEO comsats, is dense enough to force astronomers to move their telescopes to the lunar farside, then its very likely to be dense enough to make further launches of any other satellites, let alone support equipment and astronauts extremely dangerous or even impossible.

I notice Musk isn't saying a lot about how he intends to clean up space below his unilaterally chosen orbital altitude. With the enormous number of satellites he intends to put up there, this requires better than 99% certainty that dead satellites can be deorbited safely and on schedule and that none of them will collide with each other or with other orbiting objects.

Re: Die Geeks.

Some of us had access back then.

I first worked for a small ICL service bureau in Wellington, NZ, first as junior programmer, later becoming a systems analyst and George 3 sysadmin in a small team - never more than 8-10 of us plus operators. If there was a rush job it was quite common for one of us to be given the computer room keys to go in Saturday morning, power up the 1903, do what needed to be done, power it off again and lock up afterwards. Very scary the first time I did it.

Re: airport security

I once had a similar discussion with security because as carry-on I had a carrier bag containing a disassembled model plane with a 0.8cc motor on it. They thought the motor[*] was a gun. Never mind that the motor was only 60mm long and 50mm from top of cylinder to bottom of crank case, it was obviously a goddam handgun despite its ungunlike shape - or that wingtips and tail were sticking out of the bag.

* Cox TeeDee 051 on the front of a 1/2A competition model for those who know about models

Re: Food Standards Agency...!?

It looks even worse if you have some idea of the ranks and headcounts of the Civil Service grades that list shows as having full snooping rights.

IOW, its so all-encompassing that it would be far simpler to list the Departments (if any) and Civil Service grades that AREN'T allowed to stick their noses into other people's business.

Re: Grit

@Chris G

I saw the film when it came out and was immensely disapointed with it.

I remember a scene where Chuck Yeager rode a horse round the Bell X-1 while it, not tied down, stood on the desert completely alone and unattended with about three feet of flame coming out its backside: the horse just stood there and calmly watched it - *thats* certainly a realistic scene. Not.

Instead, you'd be much better served by reading the book, which is excellent.

There's a set of three books that, read in sequence give a really good, warts and all description of the US space effort from Yeager through Mercury and Gemini to the Apollo moon landings. In order, they are:

- "The Right Stuff" Tom Woolf (up to the end of Mercury)

- "Carrying the Fire" Mike Collins (Gemini and Apollo up to Apollo 11)

- "Moonwalker" Charlie and Dotty Duke (Apollo 16 by a moon walker)

And, as an add-on, there's "Riding Rockets" by Mike Mullane, a Shuttle mission speciallist who flew three missions on them and isn't shy about dealing with their dangers and design shortcomings.

Re: It could also...

Humph!

Every camera I've owned, regardless of whether it used film or digital technology, has recorded images that are wider than they're tall, i.e. landscape mode, when held normally.

This makes it obvious that you don't own a camera and, instead, are mistaking a phone for one.

Re: Spoofed ID

There's no difference between local, VOIP or international calls. In all cases the telco that supports your landline or mobile number knows exactly who you are, regardless of any spoofing you may try or whether you withhold your number. They have to know precisely who is making the call so they can bill the caller for every call.

Its a little more complex for international calls: the chain of telcos who carry your call to its destination know the exact route it took because they all collect a portion of the call's cost.

As for every service - follow the money. The telcos don't know why a call is being made, wanted or unwanted, legal or not, but they always know who to charge for making it.

Re: Proper Certification

30 seconds can be a lifetime at low altitudes

Exactly so, and given that both Tandem and Stratus had fully redundant* fault tolerant systems working reliably in the mid '80s, having 30 second outages in current avionic control systems sounds outrageous.

[*] Fault tolerant Tandem systems duplicated every fault-tolerant process, one copy active and the other being a backup on a different CPU whose status (program counter and data) was refreshed each time an externally visible event occurred, so the runtime delay if the backup process became prime (and another backup was spawned) would be measured in tens of milliseconds. Stratus fault recovery was even faster because both copies of fault-tolerant processes were active and running in lockstep: if a fault occurred the failing hardware was simply turned off before bad data reached the system bus and meanwhile the brother process carried on without a pause.

Re: Whens

"look busy and pretend to do something". - FIFY

Re: HPE deja vu

Certainly sounds like using an on-site rented mainframe as it used to be done, complete with engineers on site or visiting, system support on call, etc.

If this catches on it may revive IBM's fortunes since this is how they used to operate. This assumes, of course, that they haven't yet fired all their old-timers - the ones who understand how that type of customer support should work.

Re: I can't understand the fuss over CA

In that case, let me explain:

FB is just a money-grubbing business that, after some time, discovered that other biznizzes would pay loadsa dosh for what their users said about themselves and their friends. At that point it went "Wowie Zowie, lookit at all that lovely personal data: whats yours is mine and I can SELL it!". IOW, not a moral or ethic in sight, but how does that really differ except in degree from a lot of other large US corporations, e.g. IBM, Oracle and now Boeing or, for that matter, the Carnegies and Rockefellers in the late 1800s?

CA, on the other hand, seems to have deliberately set out to subvert democratic processes in a number of countries. That seems to have been one of their aims even before they got access to FB's personal data mine. The availability of this data, hoovered up under false pretenses from FB by ethically suspect academics and then sold on to CA was just an unexpected windfall: they'd have got on with their subversive activities, etc. with or without it.

So, what CA was up to was, IMO anyway, a much more serious crime than anything done by FB.

Re: Talking of paper...

Errr, I think you lost the thousands digit.

The slowest ICL 1900 printer, the 1931/1, was good for only 300 lpm, with the 1930 managing 1000 lpm and the 1933/3 ICL193 being good for 1350 lines/minute with up to 160 characters per line on 14" paper.

IIRC the 2900 used more or less the same printers, though in orange cabinets and with the paper tape loops used to set the vertical page replaced with electronic analogues.

Re: Seriously?

The manually entered bootstrap places this in the era of paper tape

Not necessarily - paper tape was earlier than that. My Universitiy's early/mid 60s Elliott 503 used paper tape for everything, - bootloader, Reserved Area Program, program binaries and data, but ICL 1900 mainframes, current from the late 60s to the late 70s, had handswitches that could be used to enter bootstraps or patch programs. Binaries were on mag tape, disk or (more rarely), cards.

The old 1902 we used in 1968 also had a single button for bootstrap entry that, when pressed, pulsed a wire threaded through the first few words of its ferrite core memory. This wrote the bootstrap into memory. Then turning the big switch to RUN was supposed to boot the system. However, the pulse entry often failed: in fact this happened so often so often that the operators had memorised the sequence of handswitch settings needed to input the bootstrap.

I arrived at the viewpoint I stated at least partly from the experience of having used an ancient compiler (Algol68R) that produced code that could do more or less exactly what I want any autonomous decison-making system to do. Forty years later I still haven't seen anything to match it: after a crash it produced a report that displayed the execution path from the start, not only dumping data but showing details such as which way execution had passed through conditional statements, how many times each loop had executed and why they'd exited - all cross referenced with source line numbers. In short, it took you by the hand and led you to the crash site, pointing out interesting events along the way.

A few years later, I designed a music planning system for BBC Radio 3 - a surprisingly complex job until you understand the complexity of the way orchestral musical works and the parts thereof are named and referenced. This was designed for easy use by both the dedicated music planners as well as others, e.g. producers and studio managers who might use it once a week at the most, and so it needed a decent help system that could show a user where they'd got to and what to do next. The system needed a menu structure that was 7-8 levels deep and some of the menus were tens of pages long, yet it still had to be fast and easy for the planners to use. It had just ten context-sensitive commands, designed so that they could be strung together along with user-chosen abbreviations of anything that could appear on any menu. The system had no fixed abbreviations, so a user could use any abbreviation they found easy to remember. So, we gave it a help system that could tell a user exactly where they were in the menu structure and how to get back on the track of what they were looking for. The database wasn't just a comprehensive catalogue of musical compositions, it also catalogued composers, performers and stored program details which tracked progress while programs were being made, where the recordings were stored and the broadcast history of each piece of music in each program.

So, if a compiler and its runtime environment can do what the Algol68R system could, and I was able to provide concise and readable help to the non-technical users of an application that let them search through and manipulate the content of a very complex and quite large database, I fail to see why the authors of an 'AI' system can't do the same, though of course this ability would need to be designed into it from the outset and not bolted on later as an afterthought.

Yes, I know this probably excludes most neural network systems because nobody, least of all their authors, understands how a trained network makes decisions, but think about it: would you really want such an untestable and unverifiable system making life or death decisions?

As a salutory lesson for Bounty and anybody else thinking of running a similar scam, the ICO should force Bounty to recover the data from those who they sold it to and pay back money earned from those now-reversed sales.

And, of course, the purchasers should be made to delete that data now they've got their money back.

rouge TSA agent

Why would they ever want to paint them red?

Maybe so they can recognise each other and nobody can see them blush when they mess up.

Lots of safety features are optional.

The ones you're talking about are all optional, since people can and do drive cars without them: they are not necessary for controlling the car.

However, the MCAS failure light, along with specific training on how to disable a failed/misbehaving MCAS is decidedly non-optional because it tells the pilots something they absolutely need to know on order to fly the aircraft successfully.

You want proof of that? Just recall that two airliners have now crashed because (a) the pilots had no indication that MCAS had failed due to lack of a failure indicator, (b) did not know MCAS was installed or why and (c) had not been trained to detect MCAS faults or to turn it off.

NOTE: that in all stable, licensed aircraft, if you pull the stick back the nose will initially rise and then stabilise at the new, pilot-commanded angle of attack and a slower airspeed. If the stick is pulled back still further the process will repeat until eventually the aircraft stalls, at which point the pilot is rudely awakened because either the stall warning horn sounds just before the stall occurs or (in a glider or other plane without a stall warning horn), the aircraft stalls and the nose drops sharply as a consequence of the stall.

However, as a B737MAX without a working MCAS will start to pitch up at an increasing rate as it approaches the stall and will do this without pilot input, this is an unstable behavior and is never acceptable in a licensed aircraft: those that do it will not be licensed. The MCAS was installed to prevent this behavior, but unfortunately its failure modes were not subject to sufficient testing: obviously so, or the two planes would not have crashed.

Can you think of another industry where

* companies baulk at the idea of spending an extra 0.00006% for a safety device (based on $122m cost, according to wiki).

Yes, of course - anywhere where that beancounters and MBAs make the final decisions.

Re: Loyal Wingman

Both beaten into the air by Taranis, but to be fair the missions are a bit different, Taranis being essentially a stealthy autonomous fast intruder while the Loyal Wingman appear to be subsonic F-35 escorts.

I wonder what all the Loyal Wingmen are meant to do if/when their boss F-35 goes supersonic and vanishes over the horizon. Mutiny?

Re: Willful Clueless

Your second group has an unfortunate tendency to become managers and politicians.

Nice thought, but, Skippy ran in, duffed 'im up and was away while the canopy was still flying, and it lay nice and still on a very smooth bit of cement when it was collapsed. Besides, what a fabulous place for a spot landing. Dropping onto it just had to be done.

Re: I'm planning aa marathon

I'd give "The Right Stuff" a miss and read the book if I was you. I really enjoyed that the first time round and, years later, its still good value. OTOH I was really disappointed by the film: I saw it on first release and never want to see it again - far too artsy and not nearly enough Right Stuff for my taste.

Read the book and then follow it up with Michael Collins's "Carrying The Fire".

Re: Estonia

...or take out a license on the New Zealand system which, IME works rather well, and is already an English language implementation.

On second thoughts, DON'T! The moment a working system gets into UK Civil Service hands the Not Made Here syndrome will kick in and the formerly working package would be 'modified', AKA fscked over, until it becomes HMG-certified junk. Followed by promotions and bonuses for all concerned.

Re: Use of Swear words in test / demo systems is never acceptable

He definitely had a stint in banking. I met him there several times.

Re: If it wasn't pathetic, it'd be almost funny

The Americans have done the exact same thing: introducing new and incompatible standards, just because they can, in a rather more critical area: aircraft flight conflict resolution.

The world solved this problem by extending an existing system, which uses mode C transponders, by adding an ES data packet that includes the aircraft's velocity vector to the transponder response. This allows TCAS equipment in aircraft carrying it to compare its vector with that of nearby aircraft to tell the pilot that there's a problem and how to resolve it and the transponders still work correctly with existing secondary radar systems, which simply ignore the ES data.

The Americans decided this wasn't nearly good enough and introduced UAT. UAT does more or less the same thing BUT all signals have to go through a ground station: UAT equipped aircraft do not talk to each other, only to a nearby ground station. The ground station does the conflict resolution and broadcasts avoidance information to the affected aircraft. This is is totally incompatible with the internationally used Mode C+ES and TCAS system so aircraft need to carry UAT kit as well as a Mode C+ES transponder if they want to see both systems - needed by airliners inside the USA because the FAA pushes UAT use for light aircraft rather than Mode C+ES. On top of that it uses different frequencies, provides at best only patchy coverage of the continental USA due to a lack of ground stations in parts of the country and is not used outside the USA. But US equipment manufacturers love it - of course!

Re: We need a new name for real fake news

There already is one: its called LIES.

Re: Wasn't this handled last time?

This is OTT for the "First GPS Millenium", but...

Yes, I'm well aware of who firebombed Tokyo and why. I'm also aware that some other cities, among them Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were deliberately not bombed with conventional weapons so that the strategists could get a better assessment of the destructive abilities of atomic weapons.

There's a lot about this in Richard Rhodes book "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb".

If you want to understand the scientific and political background to the Manhattan Project as well as learning about the politicians, military and scientists involved and other country's atomic weapon projects (yes, Japan had one as well), this is the book to read. Another title for it could have been "The History of Atomic Physics: 1995-1945", possibly more accurate but a lot less likely to attract readers.

Re: Watching the watchers

BBC news on Radio 4 is fairly good and regularly asks hard questions.

I just wish I could say the same about the "news" on the BBC website, which seems to be 95% dross, rather nauseous dribbling over celebs and "human interest" stories.

I can't comment about their TV news - or anybody else's TV news for that matter - because I manage very nicely, thank you, without a TV set in the house. And, no, I don't watch TV on catch-up - news or otherwise.

Re: What can you fit in 25kg...

As far as I know there are currently no military aircraft, apart from a few U-2s, that can operate at 67,000 ft., so for all practical purposes its above any other aircraft that is likely to be flying over the UK.

NOTE that, rocket planes and U-2s excluded, it seems likely that the highest flying aircraft today is Perlan 2, a pure glider, that is awaiting confirmation of a record for its flight on September 2, 2018 which reached 76,124 ft in Patagonian mountain wave off the Andes.

The story is here: http://www.perlanproject.org/blog/perlan-2-soars-above-76000-feet

and a longer film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE792Y9hyww

Re: Well, still an idiot

If they switched from .org to .com but didn't retain the .org as a redirect

They did retain yesyesyes.org. Both it and yesyesyes.com reference the same IP (in the Amazon cloud) though they use different mailservers. A (cautious) check with lynx shows the same front page from both directions - as you'd expect seeing that both point at the same IP.

Re: SS7 hacked?

Reading slightly between the lines, it appears that SS7 was introduced in the early-mid 70s to prevent phone phreaking and the resulting loss of telco revenue.

SS7 doesn't map onto the OSI comms model very well and security seems not to have been a priority - as if its designers thought "its digital, so attacking it is well beyond the capability of the phreakers". Besides, originally SS7 protocols were only used for inter-exchange communication and so never reached an end-user phone.

Then time moved on, mobile phones were invented and these adopted SS7 signalling because it was there, 'just worked' and SS7 capabilities were needed to manage tasks such as handing on calls from one cell to the next. So now SS7 messages do reach end-user kit, which makes them both interesting and much more accessible to phreakers and other black hats.

The main changes since then seem to be that other data handling services, such as SMS message, 2FA authentication, etc., have been layered onto SS7, which, at a guess, is still an unencrypted channel.

So, given this history, it shouldn't be a surprise that miscreants are now targeting SS7 for nefarious purposes such as syphoning off any security data that it might be carrying. This was always bound to happen and the only surprise is that its taken so long.

Re: Still useless...?

Are there, maybe, disks that dd can't clone?

...haven't seen one, and its MUCH faster than Clonezilla and easier to use, too.

Couple of years back I put a 128GB Sandisk SSD in an old Lenovo R61i when its 120GB hard drive died, installed Fedora from a CD. Booted up, pulled in my stuff from a backup. No problem. Still going like a train.

Bootnote: I'd wanted to install another hard drive, but R61i electronics can't handle a disk bigger than 250GB and it was already impossible to buy a replacement HDD that small, hence the 128GB SSD.